4.23.2009
Location: Kick Start, Columbus, OH
Pages: Mother Night (Vonnegut)
Ears: Birds, Car Horns, Wind Whistles

What if everyone played?

What if every street corner was always exploding with live music? What if you couldn’t go a block without hearing another of your fellow Columbusites ignite this city, singing to the heavens, for at least a moment enjoying one of those precious few moments of life granted to him by the unexplainable. What if we all played musical instruments, and did so all the time?

What if we just stopped rolling our windows up, blaring the temporarily popular music of America, assuming great music comes from the most expensive studios by the people with the best ability to market it to you? What if we stopped plugging up our ears with the sounds of far-off towns and listened to our own city breathe?

What if we all carried harmonicas and stapled sheet music over the bus stop advertisements and “jammed out” till that hilariously unpredictable bus finally rolls up? What if we remembered that childish joy we got in fifth grade when the other end of our trombone lit up with Mary and Her Little Lamb? What if for every pickup basketball game there was a pickup pep band, filling this city with enough of the fresh oxygen of creativity, of music, of art, of that lifeblood that is happily nurtured in all those cities on the coasts we keep running away to, as though a geography change is the supreme fix for your head.

What if cocktail parties were B-Y-O-Instrument, and we bypased all the identical “what do you do” conversations and leapt straight to the music. And those in the mood for a dignified waltz group in this corner with copies of the sheet music, and the drum circle kids wagged their heads back and forth to the constantly evolving beat, and the whole night inevitably moves towards endless singalongs to CCR and mid-nineties pop songs and anything else everyone happens to know at this gathering?

What if you personally knew everyone on your iPod? What if Monday mornings at the office were a big trading of all the weekend jams, of the new verses to old songs, of all the music everyone spent their free time creating? What if the connectivity power of music was completely redefined and you no longer try to figure out how this man you’ve never met is dealing with a breakup, but instead learn how your best friend is coping with his? Because really, a good song is a few chords, a melody of words, and some instrumentation. The rest is clever marketing. As long as we believe “good” music must come from elsewhere (both time and place), it always will.

What if vending machines only dispensed kazoos and slide whistles? What if you could literally sing for you supper? What if we stopped hiding our music in the soundproof areas of the city and let it run loose in the parks like dogs (whose criteria of friendship is only “are you also a dog”)?

Maybe, if everyone played, the buses would be uninhabitable. Maybe the market would be saturated and nobody could sell a cd (as though that’s the point of ever picking up a guitar in the first place). Maybe we’d all tire of music as an art form at all and just stop listening entirely. Maybe things would be worse, but I doubt it. Because I know I’m a happier guy because I play music. I honestly have no idea how I’d spend my time without it, and I know I’m not alone. One has to wonder what would a city would be like if all we asked in return for our time we inevitably have to exchange for money is the chance to lay in the park and play our instrument for as long as we feel like it, and if in the process we lightened somebody’s day doing that, then we’d never ask for more than the chance to try to do it again.