The Joke of the Master Musician. (My reading of the work of Daniel Coffeen).

The spectacle of Music. 

                                

I remember when I joined my first band. I was stoked, playing your guitar is an experience with endless possibility, but with a band, even a shity high school punk band is like nothing else. I remember telling my friend, "I'm in a band now!", and his response was, "you have an album? You play shows? It means nothing unless you actually play shows." His words stuck with me, giving me motivation to make it happen, but also shifting my focus, (the seed of ideology!) ever so slightly, from making something, to making something happen for me. I started to think of being a musician as something I had to do, which is so obvious, right. You are what you do otherwise you could say your anything you want, and it be true, even if you only did it once in your enter life, even if you never really did it at all. But gradually I started to think of it differently. Reading phenomenology I started to question identity on a deeper level. What is my being in the world? What are my becomings? What is the lasting effect of what I do? What sense do I make? And that's it! listening to Daniel Coffeen’s podcast I realized that being a musician isn't making a new sound and twisting you friend’s fuck'n arms off tell they get the tune right. It's the way you hear the world when you are trying to make something of it. It's not just making a guitar do what no one thought it could; it's feeling in your whole BWO! (sounds like profanity!?) the strife of trying to make a guitar do what it can't do, that's what it means to be a guitarist, every guitarist knows this. It’s the struggle with the instrument that transforms your ears, your fingers, even your eye’s, I still remember the way my guitar case smelt when I first bought my electric guitar. It's the same with painting. Most paintings don't look like there subjects, the best are still paintings though. Not painterly! Painting in a painterly way is like playing smells like teen spirit the way it's written in guitar world magazine, which brings me to the problem of the philosophical concept of a world, as presented by Heidegger as a referential totality, which sounds communal and holistic. But when I read Badiou enlisting the art world as a revolutionary force of change it becomes very apparent to me what a referential totality means, a closed system controlled by planners. The curator is king and the museum is her realm. The museum, as it turns out is a reductionist’s space where affect can be isolated from effect leaving the utilitarian hegemony to rain supreme over mood and spirit. No these things are not dichotomous; the curator is not the art world, but art is not separate from the world, the art world is just the name of a certain hierarchy who’s king is the fool of utilitarianism. A beloved stooge of a fake radicalism. The museum is an asylum of fetishes to powerful for the "material" world. So it is with the music store, if I could play Stair Way to Heaven, again, what a ridiculous world that would be!! Instead we will talk about equipment. The thing is that music takes practice but how can you practice something like music! Thank you for the inspiration Daniel Coffeen.

When I play a weak riff am I a weak guitarist? Am I a great guitarist just because I can hear the guitar in the wind? I become a guitarist when I hear the guitar in the rhythm of the snow. What you are becoming is always with you. The master musician is some one who can practice music. No one could practice music!