Amazing Grace

"The air here, it's breathin' fine fine fine.
We cooked us up an ass-kickin' lifetime"

~WP

Contrary to traditional interpretations of certain physical laws - there's a strong kind of benign energy that's actually created when people gather.

There are waves in music - acted upon by sonic landscape instead of ocean floor, created by group-instinct and cooperation, independent of genre, venue, and instrumentation. Individual players provide the building blocks, and each piece evolves, constantly adjusted according to the rest of the mix. A wave begins to gather as different components of the audience start keying on the different parts. It's building as those parts start feeding into a whole and everybody in the room becomes aware.

The band is not just playing, they're also listening, appreciating, adjusting their approach with every passing second to build a better whole.

The audience isn't just listening and appreciating, they're playing. Every shout, every murmur, every fist pump and scream and bodily convulsion is feeding into a group energy that's in constant reflection back to the players. It's a perfect feedback loop that produces effects - long term and short - that are unique and beneficial but essentially nameless and inexplicable.

The wave crests as the band hits an important note. The crowd screams and swoons as one, and for one tiny series of moments, everybody in the area agrees with everybody else. Them all that positivity and wonder reverts to square one. The wave breaks, band and audience breathe out, and everything starts again.

It's a strange conundrum in modern societal construct that we celebrate the individual - always - and never the collective that rises in creative support. Society celebrates the Kennedy brothers, but American foreign policy is as bloody and imperialistic as ever. Americans dedicate a national holiday to MLK, but organized group civil disobedience in 2012 might credibly end in a tazing. We teach children to regurgitate information, and we grade them according to their performance on tests they take by themselves.

These are shitty, pre-historic ways of doing things, dismissing as they do, the idea that people can and do function on higher levels as a group mind and collective actor.

One obvious corollary to all this is that music need not enter the proceedings for the beneficial effect to be obtained. Any gathering of any number of people doing anything can create a similar effect. Speeches, lectures, sit-in, infantry array - any time humans gather, our potential increases. An important facet of this idea is that its malleable enough to never duplicate itself, yet novel enough to induce true, delighted surprise every time it does.

We are greater than the sum of our parts, but it's a truth you have to discover for yourself, through years and miles and heartbreaking trial and error. That's not good. Of the gajillion things music might teach us, this is arguably the most important.