I must finally look “boomerish,” because younger people sometimes comment to me that, “The boomers had the best music!” The performers most of us thought would die early deaths due to drug use are still going strong, even doing occasional live concerts.
The era that many of these musicians commented upon or tried to explain with their music is now considered ancient history by our nation’s current generations. Some of us who avoided the worst excesses of that period of our nation’s culture wars still hear a stray boomer song – and are either reminded of our own youth, or of that era in general. The personal memories are probably not all that different than those of other generations’ coming of age. Yet for many of us, the long-term damage to our nation and culture still lingers as the overwhelming portion of our memories.
Living now with the perspective of those earlier years, I think many of us never understood how powerful of a creative or disruptive force music can be in a culture. When the music targets the young, its power is magnified. That’s because music, like novels, combine with threads of our own experience and even simply thoughts, hopes and dreams. These individual threads are woven into both our own history, and the culture of our nation as a whole. Both the individual and the culture are changed.
“Bye-Bye Miss American Pie” is one of the most recognized song titles in our nation. Don Mclean wrote a lot of songs in that era. Many people have looked for deep meaning in the words, but songs combine words and music to have their effect. Yet even that is an incomplete explanation: We must add in our individual and cultural nuances to achieve the full effect.
Did the creators and performers of the boomer era understand that their music of that era was so powerful? From the outside, it didn’t look that way. But I have no idea what it looked like from the inside, meaning their creative impulses and natural abilities.
One thing most of us did not know in that day is how powerful the gatekeepers to the music world were during that era. There were no websites or digital song clips that musical creators could use to showcase their creations or otherwise entice us with their efforts, while we were carrying around our fancy cellphone tracking devices and telling our minders more about ourselves than we actually knew about ourselves, all by the buttons we pushed to operate the device.
Today the gatekeepers of record labels and film studios may have broken down, but music still affects something within us, and the unseen watchers we all know are there also know much about us collectively. These new gatekeepers give us the illusion of freedom, but I think their goal of directing our culture for their own benefit may be identical to the earlier ones they replaced.
For some people, God’s Creation cannot be left alone to unfold as it will. Nothing can be left to chance. That attitude is not compatible with God’s approach. He created humanity with a physical body, a soul and a spirit. God has access to each part of us, and this drives the button-pushing-counters of today insane. They want what God has. Or perhaps more accurately, they want to be God.
Satan’s career goal didn’t work out well for him, and it’s not going to work out well for his followers today, either. We are in the midst of something greater than the First Exodus, when the enslaved Jews left Egypt, carrying the treasures of their Egyptian slave masters with them. But to see this, you have to trust God’s words more than you trust the narrative of today’s slave-masters.
God is in the process of setting up His Alternative Reality for His Children. But there is always a choice with God – remember, we were created with free will. Not all of God’s children will believe the Promised Land that God is offering. Therefore, not all His children will choose to believe that God still operates supernaturally today. Instead of agreeing with the New Thing that God is doing in our world, many will instead choose to believe that the lie that the captivity and slavery they have always lived in is going to be restored. It’s not. It was never God’s plan for His children. According to your faith, be it unto you.
craigemcmillan.com – The Armageddon Story Novel Series
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