To travel the world, and see parts of it, and bathe in its beauty, and to write that down. To hum with the joyful noise of a busy, crowded world, the music we make; to hear it and revel in it, to arch my back, pause, delicious selfless awe like the moment before orgasm, and to write that down. To read the world like a book, to diagram the world like a machine, to converse with the world like the giant godlike mind it is. And to write that down. To document this: the future, now. The most exciting time to be alive, ever, ever, ever.
Our magical lives, our superpowers. Our divinity. Our accelerating, unstoppable, gigantic story, universal history, futurism, the birth of god. And the fantastic music its set to.
The human experience of these times, these large and impossibly glorious things seen through the eyes of small bundles of blood and nerves built for the african savannah. These abstractions, these illusions, these dreams and imaginings: how do they fit into the lives we lead, full of boredom and failure, full of the small aches and pains of reality, full of doubt, full of dissapointment, full, even, of dread.
The pictures we take of ourselves, having sex, visiting unfamiliar parts of the world, drinking, laughing with other humans, or doing nothing in particular. A sentence on the back of every photograph in your album, or a collaborative, interactive tag on every frame of your virtual album, the girl you knew in middle school in real life now a suicidegirl who you’ll never meet again but will stare at endlessly, tiny slices of her life, the caputre of photons recently caressing her skin, the translation into electrons, the transmission by artificial satellite, oblique suggestions of reality that could go anywhere, anytime, be called up on any screen anywhere in the world, except maybe china, and certainly north korea, god bless the north koreans, cursed to miss out on (most of) this grand human project, the sharing of naked pictures of ourselves, the bitching and whining about coworkers and politicians and celebrities, the pontificating, the theorizing, the debating, making asses of ourselves more spectacularly and in greater numbers than ever before possible. Give them google earth and they will lay down their guns, shamed, respectful, awed. Like we should be, and forget to be, every day of our lives, living in the future, working our magic, ordering around matter and energy and information gods, like an incestuous, dysfunctional, family of gods.
The sounds we make, shouts of anger and pleasure, yes, and buzzing crowds, and tv static, and those scenes in movies that have run out of ideas of a dozen news channels at once, camera panning dramatically, the chaotic media output of our world, yes yes, but not just: pick one out, and not at random, pick something worth listening to, the planned and sculpted noises that we make only once, in boxes we build for ourselves, and somehow capture, and sell, and share, and pass over the whole earth instantly, it took weeks to cross the atlantic once, it took centuries to spread knews of agricultural methods over a few hundred miles of ground, and here we are experiencing something, say sex, on tuesday afternoon, and by friday three million people on four continents know the words to the song we wrote to commemorate it, our pathetic halfassed attempt at bottling one great moment of our lives, or our naive, fingers crossed attempt at advising our future selves, warning, explaining, excusing our present state, our attempts at inspiring our fellow humans to worshipful thoughts and actions, our attempts to make money off invisible vibrations of air, our attempts to describe the joy and the pain of our lives, our attempts to make people mad, to make people laugh, to invent and reinvent ourselves, to cast ourselves in a better version of our lives, or our atttempts to write down something people will want to sing with us, join in, rooms full of people dancing to it, rooms full of people mouthing the lyrics, or a million and a half lonely living rooms, one person each, simultaneous, eyes wide open, cocks hard, watching us make music, music about our music, music about words people write about music, and these words, and all of it. Pick one out: nina simone’s voice and a piano, only. The mighty American cannon. Slave ballads. Music to take drugs to. Popular music is urban music, or was, before urbanity became independent of geography, back when you had to cram people together physically to create the intense heat and pressure that creates culture at speeds we can measure, can experience, in our lifetimes, why when I was a young boy, thing were different, let me tell you. Now we can be virtual neighbors, virtual friends, virtual bandmates, virtual fanbases, virtual critics. Everyone is a critic. And everyone a musician. Baile funk. Grime. Miami bass. Baltimore house. Words are thrown at music, but they don’t hold a candle to the actual sound, in the air, at your ear, lighting, coloring, framing your life. You can read all about what you should and shouldn’t like, what’s impressive, whats daring and sucessful, whats tired and boring and uncool. But when has that ever approached the joy of hearing “it can’t come quickly enough” while high? Or “this must be the place” while in love? And how blind we are, how limited, how frustrated: if we sat ever second of every day we couldn’t hear all the music we make in a year, let alone find time for last year’s amazing, beautiful, revelatory soundscapes, now with a year’s distance, meaning more, meaning something different, now you’re married, now you’re unemployed, now you’re actually on drugs – hear a song a hundred different ways a hundred different times, spend your whole life hearing one song and all that it has in it, unlock it with a hundred different lives, hear it as an old woman, hear it as a seven year old who doesn’t speak the language it’s sung in, hear it as the author of the lyrics or the woman the lyrics are about, or the woman the lyrics are about five years past the writing, or the woman who the lyrics should be about. Hear it driving, hear it driving fast, hear it alone, hear it at night, trying not to think about the mess you’ve made of your life, live inside the music for a minute, leave me alone, I don’t wan’t to come out. Hear it at a party where it works, play it at a party where it flops, be amazed at how stupid and wrong your song sounds now, three years later, or now, in the daytime, or with your parents listening, or after hearing that your girlfriend’s sister hates this song, or that the sleazy A/V guy loves it, or after having sex to it, or after breaking up with the girl you had sex with to it, look out at the crowd, off-beat, off-balance, heartbeats not synchronizing, temperature not rising, I can’t believe I thought this was a good idea, how could anyone dance to this, what was I thinking, how was this so different last time I heard it? And then remember that that song, that one song which is a hundred, a thousand different things all wrapped up in one, the scratchy old copy on a cassette tape lovingly prepared with handwritten liner notes by a friend you never see anymore, the master in a basement somewhere, the CD in someone’s car, the portable radio playing it on the boardwalk next to all the fishing men, remember that that one song is one song only, and there are other songs, many other songs, songs from thirty years ago, songs from seventy years ago, songs recorded twenty miles away, songs recorded a hundred miles away, songs recorded five thousand miles away.
More music than can be imagined. Power pop, bluegrass, tropicalia, highlife, reggaeton, etheopian jazz, dubstep, merengue, garage, snap, favela, bhangra, funk, plena, industrial, NY electro, kwaito, soul, hiplife, bomba, waltzes, afrobeat, go-go, the electric American blues, trance, rockabilly, trip-hop, ragga, jungle, salsa, britpop, hardcore, brazillian post-punk, japanese pop ballads, high school bands on football fields and fifteen year old virtuoso pianists in echoing auditoriums, all recorded music in all its infinite diversity and possibility being just a tiny fraction of human musical output, all these live events even more mysterious and elusive than the recordings, variables numbering in the billions, the light levels, your position in the crowd, relationships among the participants, timing, volume, what happened to you the day before, what you expect to happen to you later that night, the sweat of the guy in front of you, the fabric of the shirt on the girl to your right. What music reveals about the contours of societies, as an echo, a distorition, a feedback mechanism, looping, changing. All impossible to hold in the mind, becuase pick an arbitrary heading and there is a world in it. Arabic music. Traditional arabian music, what instruments were used, when were they first made, what’s the story there – how far back do we have written record, melodies, time signatures, what was written on paper by the westerners who governed those lands at one time, how far back to we have recordings, what was recorded and what was not recorded, how representative or distorted is our sample, what went unheard in people’s homes – arabian music and all its functions, genres, times and places, variations between countries, variations between towns, variations between decades, between generations, between wedding music and funeral music, and especially in the modern era, the influences of the rest of the world on arabian music and the reverse, arabic hip hop, arabic reggae, arabic emo – and the music from the middle eastern community in Detroit, American, Arabic, traditional and modern, young and old, the instrumental ambience consumed by wealthy American yogis, the Britney Spears or Nine Inch Nails playing in a bedroom in Bhagdad, the social function of music in North African immigrant communities in Europe, Ottoman music compared to the music of Atta Turk’s newly formed Turkey during the first half of the twentieth century, clandestine Michael Jackson dance clubs in revolutionary Iran during the 1980s. Impssibly huge, music is. And still just a shadow, a distilled essence, a momentary triumph or beautiful fragment of the human project, of our universal history, of existence’s path through time and progress towards god.
How many permutations can we imagine? What do we let ourselves hear, out of the global music library, what do we hear twenty times, what do we hear once? Where can we reach, in imaginary time and space, a New Orleans jazz funeral, a punjabi wedding, the Nazi use of music in creating an imaginary reality, Stanley Kubrick’s waltzing spaceships. Listen to someone playing guitar in 1929 in a small room somewhere in the deep south, listen on your shiny white headphones 20,000 feet above the earth in a pressurized cylinder traveling god knows how fast, look at it go, while the guy next to you shouts into his organizer, also a camera, also a calculator, also a music library hundreds of times as large and hundreds of times as small as any his parents could concieve of, also (thank god) a telephone, hurling his voice into some office, somewhere, a continent away, right under you, a mile down, somewhere familiar, somewhere you don’t know exists and never will know exists, all these conversations, all this music, all these places, just off your map, outside your peripheral vision, right where your worldline (illuminated by your conciousness, sometimes shining brightly as you engage the world, sometimes a flickering, angry, razor-thin white light, as you hide in your basement for weeks at a time) fades to black, right beyond that, all that territory, all that space, time, space, perspective, all existing without your permission, without your input, living and dying, three hundred years back, seven hundred years forward, a mile to the left, around the next corner (you turn before you see it), seen only by those with familiarity with higher maths, accesible only to those of the VIP list, affordable by someone, probably, but certainly not you, only available to someone with far more free time, if only you weren’t colorblind, if only you were an inch taller, if only you were born a minute later, a couple of feet over, across the border, under a different government, with a different future.
Impossibly huge, music, and also the endless words we write about ourselves, taking off like a rocket bound for other planets on the imaginary graph in my mind, the x-axis number of sentences written by humans describing human lives, the y-axis an epic timeline, our universal history in the flesh, a hundred literate humans, a thousand, billions of literate humans, some with access to paper, some with access to free virtual publishing. The endless words we write about ourselves, academic papers analyzing ourselves, missives formulating strategies to better sell things to ourselves, plans to better entertain, better heal, better educate ourselves, and these ridiculous, interminable blogs and journals and diaries and letters, emails and notes and post-its, all of us stars of our life movies, all of us the center of the universe, which we watch tilting and whirling around our worldline, our narrow letterbox of an experience. The endless worlds we write about ourselves, postcards from fifty years ago, plays from five hundred years ago, spam poetry thought up five seconds ago by a computer, those idot savant first-born children of the human race, watch them grow, I remember when you were this tall, my look how you’ve grown. Are these bizzare things in my inbox a product of humanity? While we wait for the first machine-generated novel (hit pop songs and blockbuster movie scripts to lead the way, of course) we can look to Stanislaw Lem, and read a review of it; while we impatiently, petulantly wait on this planet, we can look to Kim Stanley Robinson, and fly over the forests and oceans of Mars, out to Miranda, in to Mercury, wave goodbye to the first interstellar settlers bound for lives and histories far removed, yet somehow related, to our own; trapped in our own moment, we can look to Ballard, or Gibson, or any of millions, and dream of the future, the distant future, out into forever, where do we end, we can look to Asimov, where we can find ourselves at the end of the universe, joining each other and supercomputers in the creation of a godlike being that gives birth to another universe. The endless words we write, about our pasts and our future, about places we’ve never been, places we can never go, places that can’t be recreated, or even accurately imagined anymore, places that will never be created, that no one would want to create, that are impossible in uncountable ways – but walk around them for an afternoon, you magician, you impish divinity, try them on, breathe in, open your eyes. The salty breeze coming off an ocean that doesn’t exist on a planet you’ll never get within a million miles of. The endless words, nonfiction attempts at futurism, prediction, anticipation, popular mechanics, the economist, what will the markets look like tomorrow, what will africa look like in a year, who will we be in a thousand? And what music will we be dancing to? What words will we be reading? (Maybe these, of course. Maybe these.)
How do we all live these lives, share this frothy time full of change, expectation, unease, exceitement, and also the four seasons changing, going to the bathroom, falling alseep at night, eating, the things we’ve done for tens of thousands of years in our present form. How do we really live, now, not how might we live or how some academic assumes we live or how someone might generalize our experiences, but the details, the embarassing, dirty, glorious, tiny, incredible details of our lives. And we’re not all gods yet, and we don’t all of us believe that in just a generation we will be certified life givers and world movers. The poor – who contrary to popular belief, have not been getting poorer, and have in fact been getting richer, quite a bit richer, but much much slower than the rich have, the rich being quite good at that getting richer bit – and their lives, always and everywhere part of the human story, inch by inch realizing our collective, superhuman destiny, and moment by moment riding the wave of our universal history, but with layers and layers of detatchment and frustration separating them from a pure experience of it, and great heaping mounds of pain to carry as they live it. Bad knees. Bad food. Living on ten dollars a day. Living on one dollar a day. Half the world, apparently, living on less than two dollars a day. Impossible. We who can live a hundred years, move mountains with our minds, travel to other worlds. We who can survive a lifetime of one dollar a day, we who can not give up, raise children and feed them, one dollar a day, house and clothe ourselves, one dollar a day, keep living, fighting for life, life unrecognizable and unimaginable to the other half of the world. We of both accomplishments, of grandeur and survival, of art and science and of steady labor and cunning, we entrepreneurs of space travel and we entrepreneurs of the tiny general store, we risk takers. Bigger already, this family of humans, than the mind can handle; bigger still, the pool of possibility that these humans represent, frustrated by governments and geographies and contingencies and histories, frustrated but not defeated, one dollar a day or a million dollars a day, human experience spanning it all, the music we make, the words we write, the dreams we dream. We can all hear each other now, almost. Video of the poorest of us can be seen by the richest, and the voices of the ultrarich sing on the radios of the poor. We can talk to each other, the world is flat, we’re all in the same job market, we’re all competitors, we’re all neighbors, we’re all business partners, almost. Almost. Almost. Almost. That’s this moment: almost infinite. Almost here. Almost real. Dreams, thoughts, internal monologues all unheard, what percentage of human thought gets shared, .00001, pick a very small number, any very small number, what are we all thinking, what are we all on the cusp of saying out loud, who would we be if we were who we wish we were, what will we do with ourselves on the day all physical and informational limits vanish and we stand naked at the gates of the infinite? What will we do with ourselves when that happens for our neighbors and not for us? When our neighbors live five hundred years and we live five? Humanity’s movement won’t be a forward motion, everyone piled in a minivan headed down the interstate towards heaven, but a smudge, a streak, always dragging, leaving behind, widening, spreading out: we all watch the leading edge, hopeful, proud, resentful, anxious, technologies that scrape the sky already there in the paper in front of us, on our kitchen table, but we are somewhere in the middle, and we look around us, above us, below us, we wonder at our place, our function, our position in all of this, we are glad to see a few symbolic humans shoulder the weight of historybook history, while we all live the real thing, larger, dirtier, more ineresting.
We don’t look at the whole of it, not ever, for more than a moment – we focus on living our lives, persuing money and sex and food and entertainment, building and organizing and creating and serving and inventing and loving and dying in some small corner of the world, except for a few moments of vision, of interest, of hope. Our humor, which lets us laugh at the unbearably painful, our faith, which lets us walk straight into the darkness of doubt that always threatens to block our way forward, and our animal endurance, bodily, physically fighting with unseen and unknown strength to keep moving, to stay alive, to press on; with these things we make our way through these times. Cyberpunk and biblical, mundane and rewarding, joyful, disastrous, endless, trite.
This is my idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose, my dream of telling a story so large and so convincing that it gives ever piece of dust that I walk past and every dreary moment the light of meaning and purposefulness. Thank you, Kant, thank you, Robert Wright, thank you, Charles Darwin, Francis Fukuyama, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, all the prophets and the scientists of the great story, all the believers, all the dreamers. All the futurists, all the economists, all the anthropologists, all the historians, all the theologians, all the sociologists, all the science fiction writers, all the bloggers, all the political scientists, all the game theorists, all the evolutionary psychologists, all the geneticists, the memeticists, all the cosmologists, the physicists, and a special shout out to the string theorists, you wild blessed creatures you, all the critics, all the collumnists, the writers of books, all those who join me and whose work I build on, those interested in studying and celebrating the great story, or pieces of it, and shedding some light, sharing some insight, spreading some excitement. And, of course, the musicians, and the disc jockeys, and the computer programmers and materials engineers, and even the businessmen, everyone who builds our world and makes it livable, everyone who everyone who works today on something greater than what they worked on yesterday, everyone who makes possible, and then makes certain, that the future is greater than the past. And all those who saw it coming, all those who worship god, all those who understand that destination so well and study and celebrate and imagine it with such passion, our point omega, our goal, our destiny: all knowing, all powerful, omnipresent, morally perfect, compassionate and loving, life creating, matter manipulating, nonzerosumness maximizing, and a unity, whole, singular, one.
Viriditas. Evolution. Flexible, decentralized, information gathering and storing, increasingly complex; democracy, capitalism, the scientific method, biological evolution, cultural evolution. Constitutionalsm, pluralism, liberalism, the rule of law and not of men, the free market, entrepreneurship, globalization, contamination, cosmopolitainism, cultural diffusion, inquiry, doubt, curiosity, growth, change, choice, wealth, competition, creative destruction, development, the end of poverty; increasing freedom, increasing goodness, increasing informtation, increasingly awesome to be a participant in and a spectator of. No to tribalism. No to purity. No to protectionism. No to barriers, boundaries, tarrifs, subsidies, limits, borders, fences. Syncretism, meaning, wonder in the miracle of the natural world and life’s even more miraculous place in it. This is my idea of a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose, culminating in the singularity, in the spike, in the accelerando, in God.
Or at the very least, asymptotically approaching God. Set to great music.
This Joyful Noise 