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or, Con­quest & Surprise

I won’t waste my time rehash­ing all that the phe­nom­e­non of music-as-download hath wrought and all that it hath yielded, but I will remind you what it promised, which is dis­cov­ery.  The dream was for a hard-working band of unknowns, prefer­ably from the mid­dle part of the United States, to be rejected by every major label in the indus­try, only to climb to the top of the charts on the strength of a few widely cir­cu­lated MP3s, maybe a YouTube video.  This dream hasn’t gone entirely unfulfilled–consider Justin Bieber and Soulja Boi Tell ‘Em–but it surely seems quaint, observed in a post-American Idol context.

Amer­i­can Idol should put things in an even greater per­spec­tive.  As AARP mem­bers and tweens vote weekly to deter­mine who will be the next big thing, it might be worth reflect­ing on that very con­quest, the search for the next.  It’s noth­ing new, of course.  It goes at least as far back as the search for The Next Bea­t­les, maybe for Big­ger Than Elvis, and pos­si­bly even Another Scott Joplin.

Pop­u­lar music has become increas­ingly indus­tri­al­ized since Beatlemania–especially since the found­ing of Clear Chan­nel Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and other radio con­glom­er­ates in the 1970s–which is both the inspi­ra­tion for the down­load­ing dream and the rea­son it’s so adorably naive.  This is not a state­ment of com­plete cyn­i­cism.  I rec­og­nize and admire the way artists have found ways around that indus­tri­al­iza­tion, stretch­ing as far back as the proto-punk move­ment of the 1960s (maybe fur­ther), and mov­ing through the decades through punk scenes of the ‘70s, alter­na­tive col­lege radio of the ‘80s, indie rock of the ‘90s, and a wider assort­ment of inde­pen­dent gen­res in the ‘00s (and the rise of hip-hop mix­tapes by both inde­pen­dent and main­stream artists).  Nev­er­the­less, we per­sist in our hope that we might be the dis­cov­er­ers of the next big thing, whether that means tex­ting Seacrest, comb­ing the web for the most obscure inde­pen­dent artists, or par­lay­ing blog­ging suc­cess into a bou­tique record label.

If there’s beauty in con­quest, it’s usu­ally in find­ing the unex­pected.  Just ask Christo­pher Colum­bus.  Which is to say, there’s gold in them thar hills.  I may have heard a new band or two that I wouldn’t have with­out the “every down­loader for him/herself” par­a­digm, but more sig­nif­i­cantly, and more often, I’ve been Colum­bus, land­ing on shores that are new to me, but ancient out­side my own awareness.

That’s a long intro­duc­tion to my expe­ri­ence with A Tábua de Esmer­alda, the 1974 album by Jorge Ben.

I was lurk­ing on a pop­u­lar music mes­sage board when I ran across a thread by a mild-mannered poster who was com­pil­ing a list of his 10 favorite albums of every year since 1958, or some­thing wild like that.  He included links to down­loads for each album.  I’d never heard of A Tábua de Esmer­alda, so I down­loaded it.  On the first lis­ten, I may not have paid very close atten­tion until the clear acoustic strums and falsetto la-la’s of the final track, “Cinco Min­u­tos,” which I lis­tened to again and again.  Imme­di­ately, it became one of my favorite songs.  I lis­tened to the album again, and rec­og­nized its beauty.  And, now, I’ll read­ily iden­tify A Tábua de Esmer­alda as my favorite album of the 1970s, prob­a­bly pretty high up in my top ten of all time.

The Christo­pher Colum­bus anal­ogy is con­ve­nient here.  The cover art resem­bles some­thing from an ancient king­dom, a civ­i­liza­tion with a rich his­tory.  The lyrics are in Por­tuguese, except for por­tions of “Brother,” which con­tains the cho­rus, “Jesus Christ, he is my Lord, Jesus Christ, he is my friend.”  But where ter­ri­tory invites cov­etous­ness, music invites com­mu­nion.  And, even in its unfa­mil­iar lan­guage, A Tábua de Esmer­alda has invited me into communion.

The best exam­ple of this is in the song “Zumbi.”  Although I know now that it’s about the leader of a slave resis­tance move­ment in 17th cen­tury Brazil, I sup­pose I’ve always known that it was about long­ing and free­dom, if not a long­ing for free­dom.  I sang along with the refrain, “Eu quero ver,” before I knew what it meant.  From the 2:32 mark, the syn­co­pa­tion, the strings, “Eu quero ver, Eu quero ver, Eu quero ver,” I under­stand this music phys­i­o­log­i­cally, with my res­pi­ra­tions and heart­beats, with a swelling in my chest that feels like hope.  Noth­ing by any of the Amer­i­can or British titans of ‘70s pop­u­lar music does any­thing close to that for me.  And if you’re won­der­ing, “Eu quero ver” means “I want to see.”

I’ve since paid for the album, and if it’s ever reis­sued on vinyl, I’ll hap­pily pony up a sec­ond time.  But, to the point, in this case it’s true that this is music I prob­a­bly never would have had the plea­sure to know with­out the phe­nom­e­non and the dream men­tioned in the open­ing para­graph.  Jorge Ben is no new artist, and A Tábua de Esmer­alda is over a quar­ter cen­tury old by now, but, for me, it is the ful­fill­ment of a promise.

Such is human con­quest.  We search for what’s new, often at the neglect, if not the destruc­tion, of that which is already there, just out of our per­cep­tion.  Tech­nol­ogy expands our abil­ity to search and “dis­cover,” but the key is in coor­di­nat­ing it with those tools that have existed within us all along.  A tele­scope can help us observe far­ther than we can imag­ine, but it is lim­ited by what we bring to it.  We must want to see.