Poetry vs. Music

I think Woodsworth would be offended. Well... not really... but I read my favorite Woodsworth – “We Are Seven” – the other day and was thinking about how poetry has been replaced. And I know this isn't really like me, but I watched this video live performance of a OneRepublic song and was struck by how they used stage presence and body movements to convey the whole mood of the song. There was this cellist that held the entire mood of the song in the elbow of his arm, and it was actually really fun to watch; the drummer and the singing weren't overly demeaning like normal rock/pop stuff.

There's this rap section in one of the OwlCity songs – and yes, I know OwlCity ain't that popular, but still, there's some sentimental value behind them for me – and I was just thinking about how rap music relies so heavily on the sound of the lyrics and how the words fit together. Rap is seriously modern poetry. So, yeah. I wouldn't want to be the modern Keats or Shelley or Colridge. I'm not normally a poetry person, as well as my dislike of most music, so... I don't know.

Where the world be without music? It's become so influential in our culture that I don't even know. I don't think anyone knows. Throughout the school year, when conditions have been appropriate, I've asked people if they'd rather go without music for a day or without internet for a day. While the results from the OYAN forum and a few of my more geek friends skewed the results a bit, the general opinion was that people would rather go without the internet for a day than without music. But... without the internet, we wouldn't have the influx of music that we have.

We truly live in an Information Age, don't we? It's hard to imagine that just a hundred years ago, messages were delivered with dots and dashes, trains, and ponies. And before that; ships, messengers. We have marathons because of the messenger who ran from the Battle of Marathon to Athens with news of the war. Honestly, I don't think I'd run twenty-six miles just to get information to a city; much less would I want to run to New York City or Boston, 'cause that just wouldn't be fun. But today, we can pass information from Washington DC to Beijing in seconds. McMurdo to Paris to Sydney to Fairbanks to Moscow and back to McMurdo in a time smaller than an instant. I could be in Afghanistan, while holding a conversation with someone in California and Virginia.

And it's this Age of Information that really has led to the widespread appeal of music. That, and many people are lazy or spend too much time in the car and they don't want to read books anymore. Anyway... it's funny really, comparing the cultural greats of today with the cultural greats of years passed. I kept picturing Lady Gaga in this sword fight with William Shakespeare. And they're arguing in their respective languages, and Shakespeare keeps commenting on the scandalous state of Lady Gaga's outfit. He is considering on using her as a madwomen in one of his plays.

The media has changed so much in the advent of TV, internet, video streaming, cellphones, and all other manor of gadgets. I'm a writer, and I'm well aware that by the time I'm thirty, the novel industry will have drastically changed. eBooks? Screenplays for audio/visual stuff? While writing a novel is an impressive feat, I'm not sure it's going to do much in today's world. Which, I guess, is one reason I'm keeping half of a disinterested eye on the media business.

Stupid music.

It's taken over the world.

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Keil. No. That does not make Justin Bieber a supervillian, and as he is not a supervillian, you don't have the need to go an destroy him. Quiet. Now.