Bruce Cockburn

Bruce Cockburn’s first album, 1970 (Photo credit: Wikipedia – click on image for fair dealing rationale)

Bruce Cockburn (1945 – ) is a Canadian, Ottawa-born folk and rock musician. He sang about Christianity through natural metaphors well before it was considered cool to do so. Despite this, Cockburn managed to survive and even thrive in the Canadian record industry.

In one interview¹, he said that it’s fine to sing about God, but if the music’s not happening, then the message doesn’t really connect. This was probably an oblique reference to the contemporary Christian pop of the time, so much of it being formulaic and arguably not too original, musically speaking.

At cockburnproject.net he’s quoted as saying:

I am a Christian songwriter. I just don’t fit the Christian music scene.

As the years went by, Cockburn became increasingly critical of what he saw as hypocritical political and religious practices. In “The Gospel of Bondage” (1988) he denounces the selective use of Biblical quotations to justify questionable acts:

God won’t be reduced to an ideology…God must be on the side of right, not the side that justifies itself in terms of might.

Bruce Cockburn performing at the City Stages festival in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Perhaps due to music’s unique ability to move the body and arouse passion, his “Rocket Launcher” (1984) single was sharply criticized:

If I had a rocket launcher… Some son of a bitch would die.

Cockburn responded to his critics by saying there’s a difference between (a) the artistic representation of anger and (b) advocating angry practices (see sublimation).

With regard to “Rocket Launcher” he claimed to merely represent his outrage in response to the bloodshed of innocents in South America.

Signing with the SONY label, Cockburn’s sound became bigger but he never really cracked the American market as, perhaps, anticipated.

Back with his former True North label, however, his electronically enhanced acoustic sound has returned, along with some noteworthy retro-style experimentation.

Like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Bryan Adams, Alanis Morisette, Celine Dione, Glenn Gould and Justin Bieber, Cockburn is something of a culture hero in a country that is finally growing out of its national identify crisis.²

The following tune, “Wondering Where the Lions Are” is a reference to the Old Testament story of Daniel in the Lions Den and, according to Wikipedia, is his most popular single to date on the US but not the Canadian charts.³

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¹ From a magazine article. Source cannot be located. Probably somewhere between the late 80s and the new millennium. In recent decades, Christian pop has undergone a serious reboot, some of which is arguably just as “cool” or “good” as anything else out there.

² This was especially prevalent in the 1980s, when entire university departments in the Humanities spent countless hours (and taxpayers dollars) looking at how Canada differed from the US and beyond.

³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Cockburn

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Dharma

Ideas machine (Photo credit: yesyesnono)

Dharma is the idea of sacred duty in Hinduism. The concept originates from India’s ancient legal texts, so it’s not surprising that “doing the right thing” within this belief system is usually bound up within specific caste and gender biases, which many today would see as hopelessly backward.

The Buddhist equivalent is dhamma but this differs in that the Buddha rejected many of the older Hindu ideas from which the new religion of Buddhism emerged.

As a Hindu ideal, dharma is doing one’s divine duty in an apparently impersonal manner. In essence, the mind is said to be fixed on God while correct action is performed without care for the personal “fruit” of those actions.

The belief that one’s actions may be entirely untainted by personal biases and desires seems questionable. And this is no scholarly quibble. Orthodox Hinduism, for instance, advocates killing as the appropriate dharma for members of the kshatriya caste. And in domestic affairs, the dharma of the wife is often marked by servitude to her husband and family, a position widely held to be sexist.¹

The idea of surrendering to God is nothing new but each religion tends to define the notion of appropriate surrender differently. Despite the obvious problems with the idea of dharma, recent social movements within India are compelling the middle classes, especially, to become increasingly aware of the often conflicting distinction between the idea of universal human rights and this ancient view of religious duty.

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¹ India, where 80.5 % of the population say they’re Hindu, has recently been labelled the worst place to be a woman, with Canada being the best. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/13/us-g20-women-idUSBRE85C00420120613

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Glenn Gould

The boy Glenn Gould at the piano with his dog

Glenn Gould (1932-82) was an internationally respected Canadian classical pianist and composer who stopped giving concert performances in 1964. Not unlike the Beatles (who quit performing live when they recorded their studio masterpiece Sgt. Peppers), Gould went on to push the boundaries of classical studio recording.

In his best selling CBS Masterworks album of J. S. Bach‘s The Goldberg Variations,¹ Gould pioneered the use of studio “punching in” for classical music. The technique allows the performer to non-destructively replace specific segments without altering the entire work (much like a word processor does with a text document).

In a published debate with the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Menhuin deplores Gould’s emphasis on the studio. Menhuin says Gould’s studio wizardry is artificial and disconnected from the human element. Gould defends his studio techniques by suggesting that a listener’s relationship to recorded music is just as personal as a live performance, although within a different kind of realm.

In their debate Menuhin stresses the importance of live audience feedback. But Gould resolutely stands his ground by saying that he prefers to create and produces better work in the studio. ² On the latter point, time seems to have proven him right. Gould’s live recordings are interesting but his studio albums are by far the most memorable.

The Gould/Menuhin debate foreshadowed issues addressed today by fans and critics of digital sampling and electronic music (e.g. is electronica soulless or where it’s at?).

Bench statue of Glenn Gould in front of CBC building, Toronto by mtsrs via Wikipedia and Flickr

It also prefigured recent philosophical debates about the nature of reality and human interaction (e.g. can we have genuine relationships without meeting people in person?). Obviously, these debates didn’t originate with the advent of the internet and virtual reality, but they are vividly brought to life and further developed by these media.

Some say that Gould was a genius. And many say that he was eccentric. In some of his recordings you can faintly hear his somewhat shrill voice sounding out over his piano playing. This kind of thing is unacceptable for most classical performers. But Gould got away with it—perhaps all part of his ‘eccentric piano whiz’ image.

Unfortunately, Gould did not enjoy good health throughout his career. His reliance on prescription drugs to manage pain might have been a contributing factor to his death by stroke at age 50. Had he lived longer, he apparently planned to branch out into other areas (such as conducting) and give up the piano or, at least, minimize his direct involvement with the instrument.

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¹ Gould came to adore the music of Bach, likening it to a great castle or cathedral of the mind. In comparison, he saw Mozart as a musical poser, a position that not many would share.

² See The Music of Man by Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis W. Davis. Toronto: Methuen, 1979 (and the excellent video below).

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Lexx

Screenshot image of The Lexx from the re-imagined Lexx series of movies and subsequent TV series. Original copyright ©1997 Salter Street Films, 2000 SciFi Channel. Fair use rationale, via Wikipedia

Lexx is a Canada-Germany-UK science fiction series in which a motley bunch of societal byproducts and emotionally underdeveloped freaks sojourn through the universe in a vessel that, itself, is alive—that is, a biological organism.

After a shaky first season, the series returned with a new female lead, better graphics and scripts, and ran for four years total.

Like William S. Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch, Lexx explores the grotesque and absurd to an extent perhaps not previously achieved on television.

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Gone fishing…

Young, Neil

Young, Neil (1945- )

The Canadian-born grandfather of grunge rock was originally a folk rocker with Steven Stills and Graham Nash in the group Buffalo Springfield (“Stop Children, what’s that sound…”).

Also a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, his solo career has influenced on a wide variety of musicians and some of his songs arguably demonstrate what might be called archetypal depth.

Watching Young perform live can be like witnessing a Toltec Elder harness the Powers That Be, especially when he performs tunes like “Cortez the Killer,” the “Halls of Montezuma,” and “Inca Queen.”

Other more intimate songs like “After the Goldrush” (in the 1970 showpiece album by the same title) reflect the noble, if drug induced, dreams and despair of the hippie generation, now revived by the media-hyped fear of Global Warming.

“Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.”

Well before considered fashionable to speak of alien abductions or the possibility of mankind leaving Earth to inhabit other planets, Young related a dream in that same song where “silver spaceships” take “Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun.”

Of course, it could be argued that Young was talking about the US Apollo space program. After all, man had just landed on the moon for the very first time in 1969 and the early 1970s were all about the so-called “space age.”

In the 1980s Young parodies his hippie phase by referring to an earlier Crosby, Still, Nash and Young song in “Hippie Dream” from the album Landing on Water (1986).

And the wooden ships,
were just a hippie dream…
capsized in excess
if you know what I mean

Young has epilepsy but this has not slowed him down nor deterred him from influencing other prominent rockers like David Bowie and Avril Lavigne. In fact, Young has been described as a musical workaholic. He has released seven new albums in the new millennium. » Archetypes

Image Credit:

• “Neil Young” by JD Lasica at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/115199274/, Creative Commons License.

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Adherents of all Religions

Adherents of all Religions It is difficult to get accurate figures for the number of adherents in each world religion.

Religion being a very personal issue, often central to one’s self-image, it’s conceivable that many people don’t wish to report their true beliefs to a proverbial Big Brother and thus will check “other” or “personal” on a government census.

Other people may live in tribal societies and are never directly asked what they believe–it is merely assumed that each individual adheres to the general beliefs of his of her group. A good example of this would be the Santals of India and Bangladesh, who according to a 1991 census are about 4.2 million strong. Among this significant population, the religious beliefs of only 23,645 individuals are officially recorded.

Another issue is the problem of defining religion (versus, for instance, a cult, a collective delusion, a myth or a pastime) and trying to assess who, if anyone, has the authority to define it.

On the issue of New Religious Movements (NRM) Eileen Barker says:

When social scientists have been pressed in a court of law to say whether a particular NRM is “really” a religion, they have not always insisted as clearly as they might that science cannot give the definition of a real religion. It is only when the court provides a definition, or we use the form “if by religion you mean. . ,” that we can say whether, according to that definition, the movement is “really” religious.

Eileen Barker, “The Scientific Study of Religion? You Must Be Joking!” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 34, No. 3, (Sep., 1995: 287-310, p. 306).

Having noted the above, the following figures should be taken cum grano salis.

2000 CE, in millions:

Christians		2,020
Muslims		1,200
Hindus		860
Buddhists		360
Jews		20
Sikhs		24
Shinto		95
Bahai’is		8
Jains		4
Parsees		0.219
Tribal Religions		100
New Religions		138
Total world population		6,260

Source: D.B. Barrett, ed., World Christian Encyclopedia (1982) in G. Parrinder, A Concise Encyclopedia of Christianity (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998, p. 9).

On the World Wide Web:

• Adherents.com (an excellent site providing the reservations mentioned above are kept in mind)

Image Source:

• “Canada World Religion Day Stamp” originally uploaded by Kianoosh Raika at http://www.flickr.com/photos/djkianoosh/474556286/, Creative Commons License

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by posting a comment

Anthropology

Museum of Anthropology

Originally uploaded by masabumasabu

Anthropology (Greek anthropos: humans + logos: thought).

Anthropology is the all-inclusive study of human beings.

Its two main branches are physical and cultural anthropology. The former deals mostly with physiological issues while the latter examines cultural development.

The systematic study of language, art and myth emerged from cultural anthropology.

In the 1930′s a further distinction between cultural and social anthropology was commonly accepted.

Cultural anthropology came to mean a holistic view of how social acts relate to larger systems, whereas social anthropology became the study of specific social practices.

Also related to anthropology is archaeology and its various attempts to recreate historical societies and accurately date uncovered artifacts. » Carbon Dating

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Athleticism

Athleticism In 1973 a Canadian not-for-profit private company called Participaction ran TV messages, similar in style to commercial ads, calling viewers to get physical exercise.

One segment claimed the average 30-year-old Canadian was in similar physical condition to the average 60-year-old Swede.

The ad had significant impact across Canada while years later it was suggested that

This was pure fiction. No one had any real evidence for this assertion other than international fitness comparisons that put the Swedish population well ahead of Canada and everyone else.

Source » “Bring Back the 60-year old Swede!”

TV viewers in Canada continue to watch newer ads, such as Body Break (1989-), which advocate an active lifestyle.

Michel Foucault and other sociologists argue that discourses about the body often hide behind their innocuous and benevolent exterior a marked political agenda–the legitimization of a social system that claims to ‘scientifically’ improve society.

From this perspective, scientific and medical discourses focusing on personal health tend to deflect public attention from pressing environmental matters–such as toxic waste.

The same has been said with regard to aspects of discourse about crime and mental illness. The emphasis on personal remedies arguably eclipses the need to address greater societal maladies.

This seems especially so with minority groups and the economic poor. “Decadent rap music” and “drugs,” for example, are often singled out as factors contributing to higher crime rates and mental illness among youths within visible minority groups. But often overlooked is systemic racism and the significant stressors encountered by so-called “have-nots” living in societies marked by sharp economic disparity.

A New Testament view of athleticism, often ignored by Christians, presents another extreme perspective that differs from contemporary wisdom:

For bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come (1 Timothy 4:8).

» Poststructuralism, Scientism

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