So about a year ago I was given a fantastic book called "A man Without A Country" by my friend Tiff. I found this to be such a great quick read that the other day I felt like it was time to read it again! I'm kinda cheating on this post, because she posted this exact same quote on her blog about a year ago, but it remains one of my favorite quotes from any book.....
If you ever get your hands on it, its a really quick read but will leave a lasting impression on you I'm sure.
Here is what Vonnegut had to say on such things as music:
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.And how come the people in countries we invade can't fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today - jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on - is derived from the blues.A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine amoung things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country - an atrocity from which we can never fully recover - the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.Murray says he things this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but it can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played. So please remember that.Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don't hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us for our arrogance.
