Funeralopolis
Sir Douglas Quintet—At The Crossroads (1969/ Pure Texas Music)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re looking at the road we’ve been on and the road ahead.
Anyone following Ye Olden Sermons! via Substack’s Notes might have noticed my growing dissatisfaction lately.
Friends, the internet is dead.
SERMONS! is reader-supported. If you’re wishing to support our work, I encourage you to become a subscriber. Otherwise, we’ll all probably forget about this thing.
But how can that be, you ask. You’re reading this online, probably on your phone!
It’s no fun anymore. And there are plenty of other people writing about how it has become no fun, with more energy than I have to do so.
And no one needs me to write that anyway. Or frankly, anything.
We are awash in content. You know those awful videos you’ve seen online of people fishing through waters filled with plastic? We’re all of that, except the plastic is clogging up our brains.
And so much of that is by design, because we’re curious and expressive and the engines that are being built exist to exploit that for the last great resource on the planet: the human mind.
So they get us hooked with their little dopamine blasts; the stats, the likes, the outrage…all the things that make this vast encyclopedia of human achievement spicy. To keep us on them to sell fucking ads (yes, I know Substack doesn’t have ads…their ads are writers).
I wanted to take today to think about Texas, the home in my heart. Yesterday I spent an hour or so on a drive I take when I need to escape my brain. I listened to Juan Gotti, Selena and Chalino Sanchez. When I was done, I wanted to talk about cumbia rebajada and sonidero culture. Texas is full of so many things (including Mexico).
But other people have done that already. What do I need to add to that, when people with way more understanding have already laid it down, available to anyone online (if you can break through Google’s wholly broken algorithm). How many times is someone going to write again about Nirvana, or Bob Dylan or whatever. So much music writing is about the same shit.
I’d rather just make a playlist. Or play records at a bar.
In fact, I’d rather just scrub my entire mediated self from the black mirror.
So, don’t follow me on Notes, or Twitter, or Instagram. I don’t know. Listen to any of the songs I send out (because I still will send songs, sharing music was the whole point) and enjoy them, go read about them somewhere, or play them for a friend. Use them to get through your day, that’s what they’re for.
Like another Texan named Townes said, it’s for the sake of the song.
SERMONS! is brought to you by Musik Klub. Like what you’re hearing? Cool, that’s all that matters.
Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”
I pulled the plug on all social media and completely deleted it and was very reluctant when my family told me I should start writing about music and to do so on Substack. I didn't know what it was but decided to give it a go. My worry about 'Notes' is that it is exactly what I didn't want with social media. It has become very similar. I also agree, and my wife will confirm that I have said on many occasions that I'm not sure how much more can be said about _______ band (fill in the name) that has already had a gazillion words written and ink spilled about them.
I, too, want to amplify and discover music buried underneath the usual layers. SDQ is the perfect example of a lost, forgotten band that more people should know and learn about. The waters in Texas were different in the 1960s. While the focus may have been on Haight-Ashbury, the peyote and desert skies of South Texas seemed to make things far weirder than most of the SF bands who essentially played extended blues jams at the Fillmore or Avalon and the middle-class kids who flocked to SF to dance with them and trip out in Golden Gate Park. In Texas, it was all about three-eyed men whose limbs dissolved while clearing your head and making the surroundings evolve all around you! Now, that's the type of music I want to hear!
Well, yes, it's all true that we are awash in "content"...and yet I find myself here reading this post, and it does add something to my day, and it does keep me from reading the news. The news is what makes me sad and anxious. Reading Substack--at its most personal--is a kind of antidote.
On another note, an old classmate of mine from my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, made a documentary about that other Texan named Townes, Be Here to Love Me.