Jaan Pehechaan Ho

Song written by Shankar Jaikishan with Shailendra (Shankardas Kesarilal) or Anand Bakshi; Performed by Mohammed Rafi

The downfall of optimism is reality. Correspondence is difficult. Connections do not come easy. Parents with hope are forever telling their children that smiles and good handshakes and proper manners and all the rest will ease the way to building relationships. Neighborliness does work, but I can’t claim that it takes the place of common interests. Uniting against the guy down the street who doesn’t cut his grass seems to trump borrowing a cup of sugar for making friends.

Art also provides another path to recognizing ourselves in those around us- sometimes the artists themselves and sometimes the entire world that surrounds the artists. We need that way in. Like carrying a dish to the neighborhood block party, it provides a little information and greases the wheels of public interaction.

Rafi performed many, many songs in a multi-decade run as a singer in Bollywood films. Most were in a less rock and roll style than Jaan Pehechaan Ho, which makes this song something of an anomaly.

When I worked

as a disc jockey back when radio allowed DJ’s some autonomy to select what to play, I tended to find myself running up against the end of an hour with a small chunk of time to fill. I became the connoisseur of short songs. I would grab the nearest record and cue up the shortest track. Often, these songs were two minutes or less and they always shone a light on the idiosyncrasies of the artists. Of course, Van Halen loved country music…

The thing about these anomalies was that they provided an alternative path to the art being made. You don’t have to know the artist to take that first bite anymore. It’s like the would be comic book professional drawing something familiar just to get your attention. Or those itinerant poets hauling their typewriters out in public and offering poems in a preferred style on a requested subject.

Really, Mohammed Rafi recorded at least five thousand songs and maybe another twenty thousand or more. Of course, a lot of anomalies can be found, but we each need just one and suddenly we’re swimming. A whole world of Sufiana beckons and your iTunes will never be the same. I’ve spent a lot of time getting strange looks in the summer when the car windows are down and the music is blasting. Perhaps I kid myself that it is the music.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 176 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

MIDI

Technical specification generally attributed to some mix of Ikutaro Kakehashi, Dave Smith, Tom Oberheim, and Robert Moog

We will probably always carry a little bit of the Middle Ages with us. I am thinking of guilds as an organizing mechanism. After all, specialized knowledge often acts as a limiting factor on discourse. Just listen to your doctor dictate their diagnosis of you or try to read that legal filing prepared by your lawyer. We know that it is far from cant, but that doesn’t make us any less suspicious of their secret language.

Moreover, the secret knowledge becomes a two-way dead-end street, if you will. We recognize that words are being used that we cannot decipher and back away from any attempt at understanding. We move ourselves out of the circle. In the other direction, the members of the group will slowly guide you out the door if you can’t speak adequately about their special topic.

Unsurprisingly, art is no different. When someone starts opining about the importance of a current modern art piece, they may well fall into esoteric terminology designed to identify those who belong in the circle and those who do not. If you understand them, then your opinion matters. Otherwise, no new art for you.

Obviously,

a difference exists here. Sometimes the special knowledge really is concrete. I simply cannot call to mind all the bones in the feet, so I am going to be befuddled if the doctor starts naming them when I have gone to see her about an issue. Then, the language used to signify belonging feels somehow distinct- maybe it is not too different, except for the arched eyebrow.

Yes, everyone takes a little time to distinguish downstage right from house left, but art is meant to be communication. The more people exposed to art, then the bigger the potential audience. For centuries, artists have closely guarded secrets in order to keep the masses away from practicing these arcane matters. Practitioners carried knowledge of mask making and paint mixing to the grave.

When technology is leveraged to make art more accessible, then we have something special. MIDI was created in the early 80s in order to allow musical synthesizers to talk to one another, regardless of the manufacturer. A Kurzweil keyboard could interface with a Roland drum machine. Suddenly, everyone could be a one man band. And we had a lot of synth pop.

Then personal computers got in on the act. A little bit of the world changed as music composition became a viable class in high schools across the globe. If your school system could afford a computer, maybe they could afford music theory. Teenagers could experience ideas that Bach and Mozart found revolutionary.

I find something wonderful that music makers started hooking us up first. While the internet was in its infancy, artists were plugging one thing into another with the simple desire to create.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 177 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

The Last Hot Time

Book written by John M. Ford

The way of the polymath cannot be easy. Something new and interesting always lurks around the next corner. Not surprisingly, this can lead to dilettantism as the next shiny object attracts attention away from the current fixation. This is just supposition, of course. Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison, among so many others, are never thought of as dilettantes, though their contemporaries may have felt otherwise on occasion.

Genius can be hard to pin down, making it even harder to identify. Human beings can lose focus bringing all that curiosity and acquired knowledge to bear on an artistic pursuit that requires great craft and inspiration. Perhaps the only upside is that the ability to absorb vast swathes of information sets those inspirational fires burning.

I never knew John M. Ford, but his writings were everywhere in science fiction circles for a few, too brief, years. The obvious takeaway from any first encounter with his words was that the man knew stuff. Repeated encounters made you go back to the other works and wonder if this was in fact the same person. While we can accept that someone might know all of these things, the difficulty comes in seeing how he wore the particular work at hand like a glove. (That’s saying something, ain’t it?)

Recent decades

have moved us away from the concept of a “genre ghetto,” but science fiction, mystery, horror, and romance have all been characterized thus. Each genre has been associated with certain tropes: space ships to ripped bodices. None of the genres is actually limited by such perceived requirements. In short, a lot of work gets promoted as one thing or another and then that’s what it is.

Ford never published outside the science fiction and fantasy realm. He wrote a lot of non-fiction for Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as two of the best Star Trek novels. He wrote wonderful poetry. And then there were the stories and books- too few.

It can be easy when Alan Moore writes for DC Comics or Ford writes in the Star Trek universe to expect quality as we know they have skills. But then it becomes apparent that they have fully digested the specific needs of the fictional playground and made it so much better than it could have been.

Then, the artist goes on to continue to create their own original work. Moore and Ford both demonstrate a remarkable facility to make their talents serve the work at hand. Like Picasso and Tesla, they take us somewhere new while never forgetting to leave enough breadcrumbs for those willing to follow.

In the first instance, the artist puts the lie to any thought of selling out. In the latter, they help us move just a little further along on discovering our potential.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 178 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.