Picture caption: Unlike the US flag, it's not possible to show the Union flag upside down, a sign that the country is in distress. Does that mean we're constantly at peace or constantly in turmoil? Daft philosophical thought maybe but the underlying point is not.
So finally I post something up. I forgot about this for a while but got back into it recently when I saw a friend of mine’s blog and it really inspired me. So I’m giving it a shot now.
This entry is in regards to an incident that happened yesterday (check the date to be sure when this was) at a pub that has an open mic night that I often play guitar at. Now the organiser and some of the regulars there have been telling me for some time that I need to improve my singing voice, and they’ve been discreet enough to tell me in a corner or something and emphasised that I should not be discouraged by the constructive critisicism so much that I should stop.
Undeterred I practiced and went back on successive weeks peddling my songs featuring not so conventional lyrics. One night I go on and I dedicate a song to the organiser of the night, who happens to belong to the Sikh religion. I dedicated it to him because he was a very good MC and cos he’d understand the lyrics. The song itself deals with the apathy of Dharmics and how they use Kaliyug to pardon their inaction. It went down well with the crowd but that was down to the tune of the song, not because anyone understood the words. The organiser asked me to send him the lyrics so that he could have a good read through them after I’d sung it. Anyways I came back the week after to play my regular slot which went down OK I suppose. I was told that I was getting better with my singing but still there were a couple of things that I needed to work on. Fair enough I thought, and with that I sat down and watched the rest of the acts, some bands, a solo bassist and two comedians. One of the two comedians came on and spoke of the gory implications of debauchery (i.e. the digestive problems that are the repercussions of a night out) and then went on to make humour out of paedophiles and people who murder children. It look as though I was in a small minority in not finding this funny. The night went on and some other acts came and played. All of a sudden the organiser calls me over to have a chat.
First he talks about my singing voice and again like in the past I took it on my chin as you have to in this game. But what came next was a tad disappointing. ‘I’ve read your lyrics’, he said. ‘But I want to ask you what you’re all about, why are you doing music.’ To this I replied (and why should I lie?) that I wanted inform people of Hindu themes, a subject which is close to my heart. There was a frigid pause for a moment. I wondered what was going through his mind. Now the conversation that went on from this point was quite long as he wanted to reiterate certain points and try not to offend me. But here’s the short of it. He told me that he had had artists before come in with religious themes and that it only ever attracted hate and trouble. Heck, he’d even been in fights over it. ‘So if you want to do this kind of thing I’m afraid this is where you have to go’, he said, pointing to the exit. I have to say I was taken aback but I could see his point. Alas even in this day and age of “free speech” religion offends. I do not have even the slightest hint of anger towards him, he was trying to save me from a lot of potential tribulations that my “controversial” lyrics could cause. The offence came from that fact that someone can spout big piles of hate can make fatuous comments about peoples tragedies (and more gravely their children's tragedies) in between tiresome anecdotes about the hedonism and promiscuity that the West promotes as ‘the way’ to live in the name of humour but I can’t recite beautiful stories from the mythology of an ancient people because of its association with ‘faith’ (again another western and to an extent Abrahamic word peddled to put everything into a nice neat box).
It makes me wonder just how “free” free speech is. After all that is one of the reasons I love this country but if this is the attitude of society then we are in serious trouble. There are some really bizarre values floating around in a society that a lot of people think is ‘advanced’. Eva Green said it well once when she said there was a massive skew in American society if they think it’s entirely appropriate for a 15 year old (or whatever the age limit is, I’m not so sure of film classifications in the US) to watch a baby being murdered but not be allowed to see a woman expose her breasts. This ‘censoring’ is another example. It smacks of double standards and delusions of people thinking they can say what they wish when they really can’t. We need to take a good long hard look at ourselves and what we really stand for, liberty and equality, or greed and alternative bigotry? Yeah this feels almost like indie censorship.
I remember once talking to one of my friends that came from a country where there appears to be thought police and all those other nasties you read about in 1984. He’d lived a considerable amount of time in this nation, and was well read on the other ‘developed’ countries. Do you know what he had to say about our ‘great’ nations? ‘Freedom is an illusion’, he said. A cold cold shiver went down my spine when he said that but regardless of the way my body reacted, I couldn’t disagree with him. This happened a long time ago before the incident I describe by the way.
So: does this indie bigotry expose the pseudo-freedom we have? Perhaps, I’ll let you think about that.
Regards,
The Vedic Underdog
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