Occupy the Yellow Sofa--a Rant and a Plea

For too long have the .000000001 percent corporate-sponsored musicians maintained a stranglehold on the megaphone of musical consciousness in this country.

What gigantic thumb on the scales of popular taste accounts for Foreigner's "Double Vision" being played on thousands of trips into Trader Joe's and in the airport news stands where $4.00 bottles of water are sold. I don't mean to single out "Double Vision"--which is a well recorded and composed song. To be honest, after I goofily pretended to boogie out on it, as a joke to my shopping partner, I then found myself a scant few minutes later without mental filter, actually humming it, no more reflectively than a parrot (or leg humping dog) might do. . .

"Ooh, when it gets through to me/
it's always new to me/
My double vision always seems to get the best of me,
the best of me". . .

It is time that we stopped regarding the infinitely echoing soundtrack of competently produced banality as music. It is actually as a kind of vaccination against anyone either caring about music, or trying to make it themselves. Why do Selena Gomez and Foghat get all the fun, while the souls of billions of people at a time of epochal change must die with the music locked within them? Just asking?

We are the 99.99999999 per cent. . .
We are the 99.99999999 per cent. . .

As Mario Savio might have said.

"There's a time when the operation of the mass-media dominated music becomes so odious that you've got to put your fingers on the power buttons, upon the faders, upon the sliders upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless music is free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." That time is tonight.

Come to the Sofa tonight. Listen to real humans like those pictured below, articulating sounds as only doomed, big- brained primates can.

Be one of the people bearing witness to the sublime and ingenious and touching sonic invention and expression that redeems the human experiment to the angels. Be one of these people. Support the Sofa, one of the rare public spaces where it can happen. Make your own music, and listen to music. The whole world is watching. . .(--television, and that's part of the problem). Occupy the space in you and in all of us that isn't!

--A message brought to you by Thursday's Open Mic host,
an unpaid person using the internets