WORDS FOR THE WORLD

I often ponder (as ponderers do) what Winter would be like without the holidays. It is a bleak and dangerous time of year. Car batteries die. Frostbite sets in. Houses feel like caves. There is one part of the season that brings a smile to my face; and that is Christmas. I love Christmas. I often hear that I can be a bit of a grump about people playing Christmas music in Early November or seeing Walmart commercials offering layaway months before Thanksgiving. The main reason I hold back my Yuletide joy is for reverence of Thanksgiving. What a wonderful holiday featuring heaps of food and football! It truly gets looked over by most, but not by me.

Thanksgiving this year is particularly special to me, for I will become an uncle for the first time. Little squirt is due in the next week and I am just busting at the seams to read to him. Family is so incredibly important and having my parents move thirty minutes away from me has made me a total sap. After four years of not knowing if we would be able to celebrate together, I can finally drive down to their house and not to their hotel.

Looking past Thanksgiving, I think about all the memories of the Christmas season. Many of those memories are tied to the music that surrounds us between the fourth Thursday in November until the 25th of December. Songs that give praise to God for the gift of his son and songs that paint a Rockwellian winter wonderland in our minds. No matter how you celebrate the holidays, it is truly a time of year when we are all on our best behavior, or at least once we have purchased that flatscreen from Best Buy at 3am and saved fifty bucks. The kids will get dressed up for Christmas Mass with no complaints, as long as the promise of Santa leaving them a little something on their living room floor was fulfilled.

People can get wrapped up in the giving and receiving of gifts, which isn’t the worst thing. Just because I may show my love for someone through my words, they may show it differently. I like getting people presents. It’s a fun way to get together and celebrate friendship and camaraderie. It’s a time to sing songs that we have been singing since we were kids terribly off-key. It’s a time to dress in a red turtleneck with the grandest sense of irony and jump in a hot tub. Okay, now the last one isn’t suggested, but fun nonetheless.

Holiday cheer is hard to escape, even for the most cynical of Ebenezers. My suggestion is to give into the tacky decorations, overabundance of carbohydrates, and any excuse to drink until merriment has been achieved. I love the holidays.

It’s been twenty years. Wars have been fought. The internet was invented. We’ve had three different presidents. Bands have fallen apart. Children become adults. Twenty years. Most bands wouldn’t have a fan base strong enough to support the release of an album twenty years after their last effort. Although, most bands are not Pink Floyd. 1994 saw the release of “The Division Bell”, the best work of a Post-Roger Waters era for the band. It was a return to form, yet intriguing enough to bring them into the 90’s and end the legend of the Floyd on a positive note. A massive tour followed, which gave their life-long fans a memory to take home with them for sticking around through the years. Then there was silence.

They had accomplished everything. Critical success. Commercial success. All without giving up their integrity. Record labels (And fans) wanted more, but they said enough. They were finally able to take a breath and enjoy the good life that they had worked so hard for. They had left the world with timeless albums that would speak to generations to come. It wasn’t until 2005 when the wheels of the Pink Floyd machine started to turn again.

David Gilmour was the musical soul of the group. While Roger Waters had the pent up angst to tackle anything he saw as displeasing, Gilmour had a much more introverted personality that spoke through his guitar. He began working with his wife Polly Samson, with whom he had co-written many songs on “The Division Bell”. Her words over the top of his music were to be the foundation for his first solo album in 12 year “On An Island”. While in the middle of recording, he received a phone call from Bob Geldof, the organizer of the enormous Live Aid concerts and the star of “The Wall”, a film based on the 1979 album of the same name. Years of in fighting between Gilmour and Waters were to be put to the side, as the fundraising event was to be the first time the band would perform with their classic lineup (Gilmour, Waters, Wright, and Mason) in 24 years. It was clearly a one off, but the band was just as captivating as they had ever been.

What followed was a whirlwind for any band member in their sixties, as Gilmour toured the album with Richard Wright on keys and vocals. Compared to the Pink Floyd concert the year before, their was no bad blood or awkwardness between the two, and the shows conveyed the relaxed attitudes of the duo. Unfortunately, only a year after the tour ended, Richard Wright passed away. A full reunion of the group and new album were now completely out of the question. At this point, it seemed that Pink Floyd had passed on with the death of their keyboardist.

It wasn’t until a few months ago that the news of a Pink Floyd album came to fruition. In an age where secrets are impossible to hold, somebody did their job. “The Endless River” is an apt title for the final work, as it is the last lyric heard on “The Division Bell”. Made up of previously recorded “Jams” from an array of sessions, it provides a type of eulogy for Wright and the band.

After today, it is a great possibility that Pink Floyd may be done forever, but we have all been blessed by the fifteen studio albums and songs that made us swear, kick, and think.

It is the first thing you reach for in the morning. You make sure you have it before going to get the mail. It’s plugged into your car stereo as you go to work. It sits on your desk as you solve the day’s problems. You get a funny picture, an alert to tell you that your funds are low, and a text from the girl you met at the concert last night. It’s tethered to your ear when you go for a run and your recipe book when you try to make a cake for the first time. It’s also the last thing you turn off before you turn in.

When I was born, the cellular phone was around, but scarcely seen (Barring “Wall Street”, of course). Even when I was a teenager, only the kids with the wealthy parents could afford to have one. It was a way to be connected to the rest of the world without having to camp out near the land-line. By the time I graduated, they were commonplace, and texting wasn’t even a verb. We sent each other messages at ten cents a piece, so the frequency was still very low. Then the iPhone came out…and the world changed.

The iPod had already changed the way we listened to music. It was a hard drive that you could keep in your pocket and take it anywhere. You no longer had to have binders upon binders of cd’s in your car to listen to your favorite album. When the iPhone was introduced, I honestly felt like I didn’t have a need for it. I could call and text people, while I listened to Weezer’s “Green Album” for the sixty-seventh time. My older brother was always on the cutting edge of technology and swore that his life had changed, but it had also changed with every computer, stereo system, and flat screen television he purchased.

Now, it’s one thing to play around with an iPhone in an Apple store, but it takes on a life of it’s own when you start to put your music, your photos, and your contacts on it. No longer were my pockets stuffed with bulky cameras or mp3 players, but a device that could do all of those things and have them available to share them on social media as soon as they happened. It was hard to tell how much it would change how we behaved as a society until years later, when they are the most important inanimate object in many of our lives.

Before this becomes a commercial for Apple, here are a few industries that have been effected or otherwise folded in the last seven years. Compact disc manufacturing, video rental, bookstores, movie theatres, DVD manufacturing, maps, GPS systems, and the record industry as a whole to name a few. It’s not just because smartphones were invented, but the residual effect of having the world at your fingertips spawned other media businesses to join the party. Netflix took the idea of having a subscription based dvd rental-by-mail model and turned it into a streaming service. Any movie or television show was now at a click of a button. Then there was Spotify.

Music streaming was in it’s infancy when Spotify was created. People still downloaded music files (Illegally) onto their computer and transfer them to their iPhone. The next step was internet radio which would have the user enter an artist and a series of songs related to the genre would play with advertisements cutting in every few minutes. When there was finally an application that had licencing to millions of songs by top artists and would have their album available the day it was released, it was game, set, match for the record business.

In any technological advance, the user always wins. There are, unfortunately always a certain amount of casualties. When cassettes were introduced, you had a portable album that you could record over at your disposal. It was something that vinyl and 8-track could never accomplish. The cinema business got put on it’s back heel when televisions and home theater systems got so large and crisp that they were in danger of shutting down.

While the telephone was invented to bring people together, the opposite has happened with the generation that grew up with them. Any party you attend will certainly have a moment when half of the people in the room are silently gazing at a tiny screen with their head tilted downward. The idea of calling a girl you just met the day before can be seen as being way too forward, instead of an attractive quality. We share too much information and know too much before we make any decision. Lighters have been replaced with flashlights at concerts, while hundreds of annoyingly bright screens pierce through the dark to sting your eyes as your favorite band plays your favorite song.

Is this a good thing? I’m not sure. We are a resilient species. When things go to far right, we pull them left. From Vinyl, to 8-track, to cassette, to CD, to MP3: Things get smaller and smaller to the point where we desire them to be big again. The album cover, which initially was a way to show what the band that recorded the music looked like has reignited a thirst for the “12 LP. Do I have an iPhone? Yes. Do I use it every day? Yes. Life has a way of rebounding when the world gets too smart for it’s own good.

Album of the Week: “In Rainbows” by Radiohead 2007