Shomewhere, Over The Rainbow...

I'm feeling a wee bit bardic today. That's possibly because I've just realised I missed National Poetry Day there a few days ago. Who knew there was such a thing as a National Poetry Day? It gives me a little pang of pride in what could be confused with my patriotic core to think that my country, which is in so many ways a bit of a banana republic, still has the touch of soul required to have such a thing as a day dedicated to the muse of rhyme.

Of course, I live in a city that gave its name to an entire genre of poetry, although the Limerick is not generally regarded as being on the same level of artistic credibility as the work of Seamus Heaney or W.B.Yeats. Still, I'll seize on any crumb of fame by proxy that's going around.
Coincidentally, I notice that this year has now supplied us with an unlikely confluence of rhymable words in honour of the day. Brian Cowen has given us Nama, America has given us Barack Obama, and, just this week, our traffic news gave us three goats and five Lamas ( of the hairy,hooved, grass-eating variety - no Tibetan clergy were harmed in the weaving of this tale) loose on the Dual Carriageway outside Dublin! What a bonanza for any amateur versifiers lurking in the undergrowth.

I'm going to fight the temptation to delve into the world of rhyme for the very good reason that my abilities in that direction have been muzzled by the Geneva Convention. Instead, I'm going to cast my web of words over the related but altogether different subject of music. Given that my own musical ability is actually about on a par with that of my spaniel, some might say that that's akin to a blind blacksmith taking up golf. I'm not saying that they'd be wrong either, so prepare to see some deep trenches in the musical fairways.

Music, basically, is an art form reliant on sound. It's made up of pitch (which, in my day, would control things like melody and harmony), rhythm, which seems to be waaaay too powerful nowadays, and the sonic qualities that connoisseurs describe as timbre and texture. The word derives from the Greek word "mousike" which translates more or less as "art of the Muses",( and has nothing at all to do with moussaka, which features aubergines and tastes really good.) (Aubergines are a kind of vegetable and are in no way related to the word "aborigine", just to be absolutely clear on that.)

I think it was that modern Gilbert-and-Sullivan-type team of Ulvaeus and Andersson who gave us the immortal line; "thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing." What Benny and Bjorn actually meant was "thank you for the demographic which constitutes a spending population with enough cash in pocket to drive our income into overdrive", but that probably wouldn't have scanned as well lyrically as the accepted text does. Also, it would have been hard to dance to. Personally, I was young enough to be part of the Abba generation, which is to say that I was a bog-standard, acne-ridden, adolescent male who laid claim to coolness by listening to Bob Dylan and Neil Young while shamefacedly hiding the Abba Gold album at the back of the meagre collection of LP's. It goes without saying that my coolness was entirely in my own mind and completely evaded the notice of any of my peer group.

The thing about music is that it's so rooted in our psyches that we are not, for the most part, aware of how all-pervasive it is. As far as I know, some of the deeper thinkers among us reckon it's older than language as a formal method of communication, which makes a certain kind of sense. After all, birds get by with singing and chirping, so I have no qualms about the idea of a neolithic version of Bruce Springsteen belting out a few lines of "born to run" as a signal that the hunt was on. He could not, of course, sing "Born in the USA" as that great nation had not yet been discovered by any of the ethnic groupings entitled to discover countries, regardless of whether they happen to be occupied or not. The idea of a Jurassic Barry Manilow, on the other hand, sends chills down my spine.

The great minds also tell us that the rhythm component of music can be traced back to the sound of the beating heart heard by the embryonic infant in the womb. That steady pulse forms part of the background subconscious landscape of every vertebrate animal - it is, literally, the rhythm of life.

In the past, music was a vital component of the working and worshipping world, as well as being an intrinsic part of the social fabric of life. Working songs and sea shanties set the pace for many tasks that required close co-ordination by a number of people - hauling sails or digging trenches or reaping the harvest. Spiritual music and hymns gave that extra filip to the whole religious experience. And of course, no shindig could happen without a few jigs and reels and waltzes or polkas.

Now, where am I going with this? Well, it's just this. The twentieth century has democratised music beyond the wildest dreams of any mop-headed twelfth century troubadour. Radio, the gramophone, vinyl, television, the cd, the dvd, the hd, the MP3, the iPod, the mobile phone, the laptop - access to music is all-pervasive. Even when you don't want to listen to msic, it's right there being broadcast over PA systems, or being played too loudly by some guppy with headphones and no sense of the social niceties. Music has become more like that really annoying wallpaper in the bathroom than the fabric of life it once was. Any suggestion of quality control seems to have been disposed of as being somehow an infringement of the democratic right of every half-arsed idiot with a set of drumsticks and a completely unjustified ego to inflict his (or her) latest effort on the unwary listening public.

Of course, a large part of our problems might have been avoided if the parents of the last few generations had refused to give any pocket money to their little darlings. The teeny boppers of the past forty years or so were the fuel that fed the inferno of musical muppetry that has been the bane of so many curmudgeonly ears like mine.

We now have American Idol, the X Factor, Pop Idol and the generally bone idle on our screens around the clock, on top of the plethora of music television channels, local idiot broadcasters, and the curse of viral Youtube stuff. Moses might have thought he was being a bit rough on the ancient egyptians with his various plagues and whatnot, but I'm of the opinion that frogs and locusts run a pretty poor second in the nuisance division when compared with Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh and Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan and (God help us ) the Hoff.

And, as a salutary warning, we have seen Mamma Mia, the musical achieve cinematic status in the last few years. Don't get me wrong. As I confessed earlier, I actually like Abba, even when Pierse Brosnan and Colin Firth are mangling the melodies. I went to see the film with my wife, and, despite being one of only four males in an otherwise solidly female audience, I thoroughly enjoyed it. ( I was actually the only man there when we arrived, and I think it's a tribute to my security in my own masculinity that I didn't suddenly remember I'd forgotten to wash the dog when we walked into the theatre half an hour early and found it already half full of the fizzy and giddy giggling brigade. Five minutes later, another guy showed up in tow to his girlfriend looking even more sheepish than me, and two more trickled in shortly after that. We spent the evening giving each other the manly thumbs up across the darkened aisles…)

The point is, Mamma Mia is just a film built around Abba's greatest hits. It's the thin end of the wedge. What next? Think about it. Do we really want to see Stock, Aiken and Waterman's eighties output given the same treatment?

Or what about Bananarama- the Musical?

Or suppose we get "Shorry - Boyzone, the Shtory Sho Far."

Think on it and tremble. Dark days lie ahead. Now I know how Oppenheimer must have felt.