Humans attempt to categorize information. Linnaean taxonomy set the benchmark for this discipline. Order, genus, species - everything fits into well-defined compartments. Alas, as Robbie Burns opined, "The best laid plans..."Not everything lends itself to such precise analysis. Take rock 'n roll. This expansive term includes Cold Play, Run-DMC, the Grateful Dead, Carl Perkins, Frank Zappa, The Velvet Underground, the Ramones, King Crimson and the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Styles of this music branch off like the phylum cnidarian hydra. Now aren't you sorry you didn't pick up that biological dictionary at the flea market?
From its blurry beginnings, rock has had indistinct delineations. Louis Jordan's jump blues, to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, to Bill Haley & the Comets to Elvis and beyond. The male gamete of the blues cross-pollinated with the female gamete of gospel producing the blossom Rhythm & Blues. Further hybridism yielded rockabilly, soul music, acid rock, heavy metal, orchestral rock, punk, new wave, grunge, ad infinitum.
In early 1968, Gram Parsons joined the Byrds incubating country rock. On March 15 of that year, they played the Grand Ole Opry to a less than enthusiastic reception. Despite recent hair cuts, those long-haired hippies were told to go back to California. Years later, country audiences embraced what Parsons called "cosmic American music" as performed by the Zac Brown Band, Rascal Flatts and others.
In order to focus, our brain tries to organize the myriad of data and sensory input we encounter every day. In his book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." So, try to avoid a pigeonhole mentality and endeavor to embrace the infinite.
Oy gestalt! As ever - BB
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." - Henry David Thoreau
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