Music Monday: Five Flavors of Dumb

Five Flavors of Dumb does a great job to getting back to why music is beautiful and transcendent. They specifically take you down the path of Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix.

“Can you believe it?” he asked, his words clear and slow, like he really needed me to understand. “To do an improvisation on ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at that time, in that place…Hendrix always said he thought it sounded nice, but it was during the Vietnam War, and his improvisation was so tortured. His guitar spoke for a generation that day.”

…And because it mattered so much to Dad, I concentrated as hard as I could on Jimi and his guitar, as they sang, scratched, and clawed their way through “The Star-Spangled Banner” like it was part patriotic hymn, part heartrending cry. He seemed to sculpt the sound with his bare hands, pulling and shivering a lever, prolonging the agony or ecstasy or whatever was coming out of the instrument at the moment. And although I couldn’t make out most of what he did, I could tell by the faces of the crowd, and the faces of Finn, Tash and Dad, that what he was doing was utterly compelling, and positively transcendent.

In case you’ve never seen or heard it, here it is.