Homemade Music

Postcard illustration, and social commentary, by R. Crumb

This postcard, titled "R. Crumb's diatribe on modern music" by artist/musician R. Crumb, says a lot about the devaluation of traditional culture. Who needs history, shared experience, and cultural continuity? There's an app for that, right? Ironically, the invention of the electronic microphone that began the golden age of recording, the source of Mr. Crumb's record collection, was the beginning of the end of homemade music in many families and communities across America. The easy availability of professionally made music through radio, records, TV, CDs, Mp3s, etc., convinced many musicians and would-be musicians to pack up their fiddles, accordions, and guitars and listen to the homogenized sounds of commercial music. Still, I would have to disagree with Crumb's gloomy conclusion that the beautiful music died with our grandparents. I would say it lay dormant and, though not as ubiquitous as in days gone by, the American tradition of homemade music is alive and well despite the onslaught of mainstream media.

Got a hankering to hear some homemade acoustic American folk music? Come on down to the Patchogue - Medford Library on Sunday, May 6, 2012, and catch the next appearance of The Homegrown String Band, a post modern, neo-traditional old time family string band, America's premier purveyors of high energy acoustic American music. The show starts at 2:30 pm, is free and is open to the public.

Patchogue-Medford Library

54-60 East Main Street, Patchogue New York 11772

(631) 654-4700  

Better Than Sliced Bread

I just put a loaf of bread in the oven and for some reason I thought of the saying "the best thing since sliced bread." What a weird saying. Pre-sliced bread is terrible! 99% of all Americans get their highly processed, pre-sliced, tasteless, possibly toxic, mishmash of artificial ingredients they call bread from a plastic bag. Products like Wonder bread probably put thousands of traditional bakeries out of business, or else forced them to specialize in dessert products, while simultaneously replacing a traditional nutritional food staple with an unhealthy tasteless facsimile. Here's a photo of my homemade bread:

Homemade Music and Homemade Bread

I used 4 cups of King Arthur Bread Flour (I usually use 3 1/3 cups of white flour and 2/3 cup of whole wheat flour), 1/4 tsp yeast, 1 tsp salt, 2 cups of water, and 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar (homemade with a live mother). I covered the dough and let it rise overnight then baked it for 42 minutes in a preheated Romertopf covered unglazed clay baker at 475º F. I don't know what the difference is between "bread" flour and regular unbleached flour, but it came out pretty well; I don't miss the whole wheat at all. 

So, what does homemade bread have to do with music? Well, just like bread, somewhere along the line, music has become a mass-produced consumer product. These days we are eating less and less nutritious homemade food and listening to less and less heartfelt homemade music. Thanks to clever marketing, slick packaging, and the misdirection of consumer's attention to superficial appearances and details, most people now prefer the perfectly formed factory made facsimile to the rougher hewn traditional, locally produced, artisan product.