I have been having this very strange dreams, most of the time funny and weird! And there are some rare evenings when I get the creepy nightmare, and those I don’t like as you may relate.
I usually go back to sleep and then at some point I wake up with a song in my head! I usually forget quite quickly, but I am always surprised with the tune in my head, it’s so random!
The other day I woke up and the song was super clear, I didn’t know the singer, but I was able to look up the words in the chorus, which were electric avenue and there he was, Eddy Grant! I learned he is a Guyanese-British singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist and was part of the band the Equals.
But there is more! the song has quite the background, per wikipedia:
The title of the song refers to Electric Avenue in the south London district of Brixton, the first market street to be lit by electricity. According to Grant he first became aware of the existence of the street during a stint acting at the Black Theatre of Brixton.[1] The area is now known for its high population of Caribbean immigrants. At the beginning of the 1980s, as identified by the Scarman Report, tensions over unemployment, racism and poverty exacerbated by racist policing culminated in the street events now known as the 1981 Brixton riot. Grant, horrified and enraged, wrote and composed a song in response to these events. Shortly after, Grant left the UK to live in Barbados, and his most recent batch of songs was lost during baggage transit. “Electric Avenue” was one of the songs he wrote immediately afterwards to make up for the lost material.
I had no idea!
I will try to keep an eye on the upcoming songs in my head and see what I can learn, this has been a very enlightening exercise!
Another Audio-Book and I really recommend it in this format because of how the author explains some aspects of sound with actual sounds, which may be hard to get from reading. 🎼🎵🎶
This is a great book about a fascinating topic. The human brain is such a complex machine and many of its dynamics are still being researched. Here are some excerpts that I found super interesting and that confirm music, singing, dancing, is for everyone and not just a few with academic experience.
About music and social settings:
“About Even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life. Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.”
“Jim Ferguson, whom I have known since high school, is now a professor of anthropology. Jim is one of the funniest and most fiercely intelligent people I know, but he is shy—I don’t know how he manages to teach his lecture courses. For his doctoral degree at Harvard, he performed fieldwork in Lesotho, a small nation completely surrounded by South Africa. There, studying and interacting with local villagers, Jim patiently earned their trust until one day he was asked to join in one of their songs. So, typically, when asked to sing with these Sotho villagers, Jim said in a soft voice, “I don’t sing,” and it was true: We had been in high school band together and although he was an excellent oboe player, he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. The villagers found his objection puzzling and inexplicable. The Sotho consider singing an ordinary, everyday activity performed by everyone, young and old, men and women, not an activity reserved for a special few.
“Our culture, and indeed our very language, makes a distinction between a class of expert performers—the Arthur Rubinsteins, Ella Fitzgeralds, Paul McCartneys—and the rest of us. The rest of us pay money to hear the experts entertain us. Jim knew that he wasn’t much of a singer or dancer, and to him, a public display of singing and dancing implied he thought himself an expert. The villagers just stared at Jim and said, “What do you mean you don’t sing?! You talk!” Jim told me later, “It was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn’t walk or dance, even though I have both my legs.” Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybody’s lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone. The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in many of the world’s languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.”
“A couple of generations ago, before television, many families would sit around and play music together for entertainment. Nowadays there is a great emphasis on technique and skill, and whether a musician is “good enough” to play for others. Music making has become a somewhat reserved activity in our culture, and the rest of us listen.”
Oh Brain!:
It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge they go well beyond our everyday experience (unless you are a cosmologist). The average brain consists of one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) neurons. Suppose each neuron was one dollar, and you stood on a street corner trying to give dollars away to people as they passed by, as fast as you could hand them out—let’s say one dollar per second. If you did this twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, without stopping, and if you had started on the day that Jesus was born, you would by the present day only have gone through about two thirds of your money. Even if you gave away hundred-dollar bills once a second, it would take you thirty-two years to pass them all out. This is a lot of neurons, but the real power and complexity of the brain (and of thought) come through their connections. Each neuron is connected to other neurons—usually one thousand to ten thousand others. Just four neurons can be connected in sixty-three ways, or not at all, for a total of sixty-four possibilities. As the number of neurons increases, the number of possible connections grows exponentially:
(the formula for the way that n neurons can be connected to each other is 2(n*(n-1)/2)): For 2 neurons there are 2 possibilities for how they can be connected For 3 neurons there are 8 possibilities For 4 neurons there are 64 possibilities For 5 neurons there are 1,024 possibilities For 6 neurons there are 32,768 possibilities The number of combinations becomes so large that it is unlikely that we will ever understand all the possible connections in the brain, or what they mean. The number of combinations possible—and hence the number of possible different thoughts or brain states each of us can have—exceeds the number of known particles in the entire known universe.”
Brownie! 