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Much
more than a single ceremony or ritual, the Ghost Dance was a revivalist
mvement first articulated by a Northern Paiute medicine man and prophet
named Wovoka who preached universal love and warned of the dangers
of white civilization. The Ghost Dance promised to reunite the living
with the recently dead and in its most messianic forms to roll up
the world of the whites like a vast buffalo robe, revealing beneath
the hordes of settlers, telegraph wires, and railroad tracks, the
lost world of the Native Americans, intact. The movement spread across
the planes like wildfire inspiring the battered spirit of native people
with much needed hope...The newly responsible music is more a sonic
force than a musical treatise. It does not present itself as a cultural
product to be critiqued within a discourse about music or art or anything
else. It is incapable of communicating much in the way of a message.
It is an impingement upon the body and everything attached to and
dependent upon the body. And, like the Ghost Dance, this responsible
music promises to roll up civilization and restore something that
we need to be healthy again, to be whole once more. You see, the music
that I make seeks to assemble itself outside of capitalism, outside
of Americanism. Only in the coarsest geographical sense would I allow
you to say that my music is made in America. On the contrary, my sound
product, my intentional vibration is created in large part to establish
something authentically exterior to the great sucking vortex of American
exceptionalism. |