Invariably, if one can’t adequately explain a phenomenon of nature, they turn to God or, nowadays, given its high fashion, quantum processes, which, it should not have to be explained, explains nothing. They are non-explanations.
For example, witness the ridiculous explanations that David Solway vomits up to explain the origin of melody: “Perhaps the brain is like a harp whose strings are caressed by an intellectual breeze giving life to melody.” Or, perhaps the brain is like the vacillating folds of one’s rectal muscles as they are caressed and manipulated by a warm internal bean chili wind, thus, somehow, melody.
Oinky Drips know what I’m talking about, and their self-titled album reflects this, which takes an evolutionary, primordial soup approach to song and music and melody. It bubbles with methane and ammonia and hydrogen gases, with Miller and Urey, with UV and heat, and, in turn, forms amino acids, which, in the prebiotic slop, combine and recombine to form precursors to RNA, then RNA itself, then proteins, then DNA, then life, then melody.
Darwin’s theory of evolution – which, I should add, is now, given the massive abundance of mutually supporting independent lines of evidence, the fact of evolution – is an explanatory powerhouse, and it single-handedly demolished the thought-farts that life was divinely inspired. That Earth’s holy books still claim otherwise is beside the point: they are, as they often are, wrong. Life evolved. Humans evolved. This was true before Darwin’s great idea and it remains the case. And everything that comes from that – even the “numinous”, even song and melody, even our enjoyment of rhyme and rhythm – are its direct descendants. There is no other explanation required. Melody, like beauty, whatever that is, evolved. God is not the source of melody in the same way that God is not the source of Earth’s biological diversity. And the same can be said for the quantum world. (Do we need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain consciousness? No, I don’t think that’s warranted.)
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
