For use: Friday, Monday, September 10, 2000 and thereafter

Future Shoes: "Rage Against the Machine"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

If you are a regular reader of my ravings, you know I have been beating the drum for the past year, trying to get people to come to the Minnesota Folk Festival in downtown Saint Paul this Saturday.

People who "get it" about folk music, who have been touched by it and have sussed its mighty power, haven't bugged me about my zealous campaign. But that's only about eight people. I can think of scores who have looked away in embarrassment for me, or who squint at me in hopes that possibly I can shed some articulating light on why the heck I am doing this.

After all, I'm not a musician. I'm no expert on this kind of music. Indeed, my own work, writing these essays, is seldom authentic in the way a traditional fiddle tune is. I, like a pop tunesmith, make things up.

It comes down to a view of the world that I acquired about 27 years ago, doing yoga meditation. "The world does not want you to think," my teacher, a nice man named Usharbudh Arya told me. "It does not want you to even know yourself, or where you came from."

Dr. Arya wasn't an especially charismatic teacher, and occasionally he made cute mistakes, like falling asleep during his own relaxation lecture. In his intonation he was supposed to lead you inch by inch through your body, relaxing it in a gradual chain reaction. One time he dozed off and snored for a few seconds after saying, "Relax your fingers." When he roused himself suddenly, he had to guess where he'd left off: "Relax your toes?" he asked, looking across the yoga room for approval. When we all winced at the need to reroute our consciousness from our fingers to our toes, he papered it over by saying, "Relax ALL your extremities."

If you look around, Dr. Arya said, you see that you are under continual siege from messages outside yourself. Be this, do that, buy this, vote that. The power dynamic of the industrial age is manipulation of the individual. It happens in broadcasting, in advertising, and in our continuous bombardment with messages about what we should do -- messages that are really about what is best not for ourselves but for the party doing the broadcasting.

Anyway, long story short, I  have been a faithless yogi. I still meditate from time to time, and I still do my asanas, but I go weeks without remembering. And it shows. I am betimes fitful, fretful, and stiff as an ironing board. But I do remember Dr. Arya's call to listen to the inner voice, and to shut out the voices that would control you.

Now, how do I get back to folk music. Oh, right. Folk music, like the yogic breath, wells up within ordinary people. It is not the culture of the recording companies or TV networks. It is our music. And while some of it is crappy -- when I tell people I am doing this concert, one in every four pictures, I swear, some day-long séance with Burl Ives -- when it is good it is the truest kind of music, radical and anarchic in its individuality, but tender and loving in its sense of community.

You can get carried away with this line. During the recent wars in Yugoslavia, I romantically opined that the Serbs would cease hostilities if they but had a chance to hear the lullabyes of the Bosnian mothers, the children's songs of Croatia, the music that Kosovars listened to during their holidays. Then I talked to some Serbs, who assured me that the music of the Bosnians, Croatians, and Kosovars was terrible, like the screams of malformed babies. So that was a bad example.

But the larger point remains. Life is a war between the individual soul, which wants to learn and feel and experience joy and grief on its own terms, and outside forces, which for their own insidious reasons want to insulate us from our own feelings, our own souls. Deep in the heart of the people, of the folk, is our greatest weapon in this war -- the power of our own expression.

It is different for everyone, and yet it links up to everyone. Its nature is joyous and -- revolutionary.

And it will, among other places, appear onstage, Sept. 16, in Mears Park, at the Minnesota Folk Festival. And it is the way that the very best things in life are -- free, like the breath that moves in and enlivens us all.