Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Lindsey Stirling Album Review – Subsidize Me

Guest column written by Ge– I’m not kidding anybody this time?  So be it, then.  I have done this dark deed, whatever it is.


If the old adage rings truly that music is medicine for the soul, then Lindsey Stirling’s art must be a banquet; so indescribably beautiful are the silken sounds that spring from her violin, so life-endowing and invigorating the songs that she draws from her spirit.  America staggers now under the pressure of many health crises, from an aggravatingly slow implementation of universal health care to an epidemic of food insecurity to a multitude of unforeseeable diseases contingent on accelerating climate change.  While Lindsey’s efficacy at reversing the last armageddon scenario is questionable, the joy and hope which her music and glowing character bring to most everybody who meets her are a more surefire remedy for the first two ills than any yet proposed.  With such tour-de-force bursts of individuality and emotion under the lovely lady’s belt as Elements, Shadows, and Crystallize, it’s no small cause for wonder why the U.S. government has thus far overlooked the viability of her label as an answer for all the country’s economic, moral, social, and strictly intangible woes.  If Congress won’t make the tough changes necessary to cultivate their districts’ cultural well-being, then the people will have to change Congress one vote at a time, stopping only once the indispensable entertainment created by Lindsey Stirling and enshrined in the U.N. bill of human rights is rendered available to all citizens regardless of their economic background.

My recommendation – nay, my entreaty – is this: in order to promote the physical health of America as a whole and to alleviate the well-known hunger afflictions of the dubiously wealthiest, officially second fattest nation in the world, the Department of Agriculture should unilaterally extend the henceforth assumed civil right of aural enrichment to cover the music of sensational violinist Lindsey Stirling.  All managers of large businesses employing 50 workers or more will be held responsible under full force of the law for insuring their associates with health packages that include CDs of Lindsey’s first and second albums along with the film/video-game score collection she really ought to get cracking on.  Contractors, freelancers, and other self-employed enemies of true Labor will have to acquire these records of their own initiative and will face a constitutional fine of $100 if they refuse to comply with the individual mandate to experience the most aesthetically beautiful music offered from the modern, techno-age.

I can already anticipate a number of your objections to this modest proposal, the first being that the government has no legal jurisprudence to dictate how anybody saves or expends his finances once he obtains them.  This sounds reasonable at first glance, but then we can see it plainly refuted by prior violations.  State and federal governments already force people to buy a lot of things with their private property that they don’t even need, including public school tuition, car liability insurance, unemployment subsidies, birth cancellation pills, prenatal care, a Social Insecurity “trust”, electric vehicles and their “fuel”, solar panels, Sesame Street, Planned Unparenthood, TSA perverts, and the list goes on forever.  Since we know for a fact that governments never ever violate their own constitutions, we can logically extrapolate that there’s no legal harm whatsoever in forcing the people to buy yet another product they may or may not want with their own money.

Incidentally, the constitutional ramifications of making this small request appear but secondary in importance when one broods over the consequences of not approving this legislation.  Unlike all of aforementioned affluences, Lindsey Stirling’s music is not a diversion but a necessity of human life, without which the soul will starve for lack of sustenance.  You may protest that this is nonsensical because Miss Stirling didn’t even have a significant presence on the musical scene until 2-3 years ago and people had survived adequately enough for thousands or millions of years without her music; you may say that this is just my personal opinion with no scientific proof to back it up, but in a relativistic society, that too would just be your opinion, and who is to judge that your personal opinion is any better than mine?  My opinion at least is motivated by a righteous, humane concern for your own greater security and happiness, lending it thusly a purity of purpose not unique to your selfish logical reasoning.

You may say that the maxim about music and the soul is nothing more than an abstract, pretty-sounding metaphor, while hunger in the United States is a solid, literal reality in need of a literal solution, but this neglects the fundamental truth that all politics consists of inventing unreal solutions and unreal crises, e.g. Bush driving the economy into a figurative ditch with a figurative car while figuratively putting two wars on a figurative credit card, or Bush figuratively taking Obama to eat at a figurative diner and leaving him with a figurative tab, or Obama figuratively “asking” the wealthiest of Americans to figuratively “give” a little more, or Obama promising figurative “universal” health insurance in response to a figurative “broken health care system”, or Obama promising to figuratively take action against the Syrian government by figuratively shooting across the bow or giving a figurative pinprick, or Obama promising to figuratively draw a figurative red line upon the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, or Biden swearing that Osama Bin Laden is figuratively dead and General Motors is figuratively alive (an oath of which he subsequently said, “It’s a metaphor, a metaphor for our foreign… and domestic economic policy”), or Biden swearing that the Republicans are going to put figurative slaves back in figurative chains, or large segments of the right and left alike swearing that illegal immigrants are figuratively Americans in every figurative way except on real, material paper.  The only real aspect of most governmental programs is the money that the state forcefully pilfers from our wallets in order to finance them, and even that is more or less fake, having no constant value due to hyper-inflation and the worthlessness of paper currency.  That Lindsey’s music is only a metaphorical antidote to America’s metaphorical hunger pains is all the more qualification for subsidizing it at the federal level and keeping a consistent track record of fixing imaginary problems with imaginary cures.

To enumerate all the advantages of making Lindsey Stirling coverage compulsory would be impossible to do within a single post, but if our elected officials were to adopt this proposal, America would immediately experience both an economic and a cultural boon.  On one hand it would exert a immense counter-force to a debilitating rut of nihilism and objectification that federal oligarchs have long endorsed and worked to entrench in the youth of America.  Instead of beguiling impressionable young girls into admiring executive office-sponsored sluts like Beyonce “bow down, b_____s / driver, roll up the partition” Knowles or Sandra “women need federal support to afford all the sex they have in college” Fluke, the inner class would be promoting a woman who exemplifies feminine grace, self-respect, independence, charity, and inner beauty.  On the flip side, adolescent boys would learn to honor women for all these same traits and would see them as more than soulless blobs of flesh waiting to be ravaged.

Having granted a rabble of unelected Atheist and Feminist judges the authority to run all our educational institutions with little effective input or oversight by the people who pay for these centers, we have gradually seen our children sucked into and destroyed by gangs and promiscuous lifestyles.  Rather than perpetuating this societal and religious travesty, administrators should replace their stance of defeatist complicity in wrongdoing with a proactive push for the good, true, and beautiful.  Instead of feeding a vicious cycle of spiritual emptiness by doling out condoms and morning-after pills in public schools, let us strive to relieve teenagers’ passions through the wondrous catharsis of neo-classical music, to inspire their minds with lyrical harmony and instill in them a new appreciation for all that which is truly important in life.

Subsidizing Lindsey will also rejuvenate a musical industry suffering from long-running fatigue brought about by an excess of Katy Perry singles and Katy Perry-soundalikes.  If radio D.J.s and mainstream artists were forcedly exposed to the daring sound conceived solely by Miss Stirling and a little divine inspiration, then perhaps they’d finally recognize the sheer depth and diversity of the musicverse, a sweeping landscape of artistic vision and craftsmanship, utterly indiscernible from the stagnation of Dark Horse, Talk Dirty, The Monster, Story Of My Life, Team, Say Something, Pompeii, Drunk In Love, the First Things First I’m a Realist song, All Of Me-original, All Of Me-hack radio-edit, and basically all of the All Of Me’s except the one that’s actually good.  This sudden revelation of a world beyond the ten aforementioned songs will presage a revolution in composition and style that will bolster economic activity, expand consumer choice, and facilitate fairness towards singers and instrumentalists who’ve never yet had the opportunity to express themselves in an industry dominated by money and corporations.

The future of this country’s metaphorical health teeters metaphorically on a narrow plank, and if the government fails to act now in ensuring free metaphorical medicine for all, then surely we’ve reached the point of no return.  Like a glass ballerina precariously balanced on a broken record player, the nation spins around and around with no end in sight, until the laws of gravity bring it crashing to a messy and inevitable demise.  How much easier it is to catch the ballerina before she falls than to sweep up the shards of her broken shell.


Now, with all that said, I don’t really care much for Shatter Me, having listened to all fifteen tracks once and skimmed through the disk a second time.  Naturally, I tried at first to write a bunch of words delineating at length all the reasons why I don’t like the album, but then I forced myself to stop and consider exactly what I was hoping to accomplish with those words, and the answer was: absolutely nothing.  Even worse than the recognition that I was wasting words without an apparent purpose was the horrific epiphany that I was once again being an unbelievably mean guy to a genuinely sweet girl, exhibiting the exact opposite of that gentlemanly conduct which is my calling.  I was acting, quite simply, like a jerk, no differently than a bitter and insecure schoolyard bully, and not in the metaphorical sense that congressmen use to refer to anybody who disagrees with them.  Not wishing to be the kind of mean guy who builds himself up by hurting nice girls, I felt just as disgusted at myself after writing that aimless filth as I had felt after leaving a ‘real school’ a couple years back and abruptly realizing how hostile and discourteous and unbrotherly I had been to many of my female peers.  I was so mean at times that Taylor Swift could have written a song about me and put it on the radio, which would probably only intensify my already stunning meanness.

All that’s to say I’m sorry for even starting in such an odious direction.  Rather than revisit that ugly stage of my life and risk needlessly upsetting someone very dear to my unrealistically thinking soul, I’ll just settle for saying that I much prefer Lindsey’s other, less electronic work to this.  If anyone is to take the heat for my disapproval, it ought to be the morons who produced, mixed, engineered, and programmed all the daisies out of her electric daisy violin, burying the strings under a barrage of tiring dubstep blares and editing effects.  Their worst transgression isn’t even related to the violin, but to the scrambled hit jobs they do on Lindsey’s occasional background singing in such tracks as Sun Skip.  “What a lovely, lovely voice” she has, and so distorted it is by the electronic bane of all lovely voices.

Maybe the album will grow on me as Lindsey releases more and more videos in association with it, whether or not they end up being laden with special effects like the last two.  You know how we’re supposed to think that humanity would be a whole lot smarter if men had no eyes and women had no ears?  It’s all bull, but I think it’s making more sense with each passing day.

4 comments:

  1. You literally lost me at 'Subsidize'.

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    Replies
    1. I am, like, so sorry to hear that. You're probably one of those sad, cynically minded capitalist people who think that subsidizing any product, technology, or artist in the free market over another with taxpayer dollars is automatically an outgrowth of socialist ideology. Oh, wait…

      But in all sincerity, what reason can the government credibly claim for subsidizing the multitude of destructive and amoral acts that it currently enshrines as "human rights" but not for subsidizing Lindsey Stirling? I think the column answers this question as well any answerless question can be addressed.

      Delete
  2. "humanity would be a whole lot smarter if men had no eyes and women had no ears"
    Sounds like the creed of a smart phone hater.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That I am, though I really would like to keep my eyes, mainly for this and past posts in the Lindsey Playlist – err, Author's Playlist – series.

      Delete

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