This post is in support of Lou Mars upcoming attempt to set the Guinness Book of World Records for marathon drumming.  The Paleo Garden commends his efforts “to do well by doing well” by donating a drumset to raise money to help children go after their dreams while at the same time raising the attention of a healthy paleo lifestyle.  To learn more about Lou’s upcoming attempt please go here.  To donate to Lou’s “Little Kids Rocks” please go here.  

OK, OK—I’m about worn out thinking about war and death and autonomy and the coming collapse of the American Bubble, the SAD (Standard American Diet) and Big Ag and Big Pharma and Big Government, and the relative merits of the .45 ACP vice the 9mm.  All important issues, of course!

Well, the .45 vs. 9 thing has been done to death, but it keeps coming back.  Like a zombie.  Like a fast zombie.

So today I’m going to talk about music.  So far as I can tell, humans like music.  I’m a human, and I like music, and I think there’s some fallacy that says Aristotle was a man, all men are human, so all men are Aristotle . . . but I’m not going to go there yet.  But I am going to talk about music, and I’ve brought audiovisual aids with me to help out.  I can justify posting a series of music videos because as the Healthcare Epistemocrat reminds us, music is important for your health.    First off, I’m going to lay some drums on you.  There’s not much in the way of musical instruments that qualifies as primal more than drums.  I mean, think about it: stick, gourd, skin.  You’ve got your club, you’ve got the skin from your latest kill, and you’ve got a gourd that you gathered.  It’s juicy primal hunter-gatherer goodness!

You’ve got your modern rock drums. (youtube video below)

Then there’s Japanese taiko drumming.  (youtube video below)

African drums.  (youtube video below)

Middle eastern drums to shake to.  (youtube video below)

Drums are nice, but sometimes they cry out for something else.  What goes with drums, like ham goes with cheese?  My answer would be bagpipes.  Ah, bagpipes!  Talking about bagpipes is almost as dangerous as discussing politics, religion and red headed women.  People tend not to be neutral on the bagpipe issue; they either love them, or they hate them.

“A sound like a cat being strangled with its own intestines” is how one of my friends put it.  Me, I beg to differ, but that could be a genetic predisposition deriving from my status as a mixed-mutt East Texas Celt.

Today in the popular imagination, Scotland is associated with three cultural artifacts: the kilt, the basket hilted broadsword, and bagpipes.  (Well, and haggis.)  Not only is Scotland associated with these three things, but these three things are associated, almost exclusively, with Scotland.  I think that’s kind of funny, because two of the three aren’t indigenous to Scotland.  (Yes, the kilt is exclusively Scottish in origin, and more particularly, Highland Scots in origin at that.)

I’m going to try and squeeze a couple of whole posts out in the future about kilts and swords, so I’ll let them lay fallow for the moment, and address bagpipes.  (It’s that thematic consistency thing I keep reading about.)

Bagpipes are another musical instrument with deep primal roots.  As a drum is, essentially, gourd, skin and stick, a bagpipe is, essentially, an animal skin with a pipe stuck in it.  The origins of the bagpipes are, as they like to say, lost in the mists of time.    Without wanting to get my PhD in music history, let’s just say that maybe the Assyrians were strangling cats with their own intestines, back in the day.  And that was way back in the day.

The popular imagination (hey, I like that phrase) associates bagpipes with the Highland Regiments of the British Army. (youtube video below)

We’ll politely overlook the bagpipes association with wild and lawless Highlanders being expressed through the lens of military (i.e., regimented) music.

Now, the genre also includes tribal piping, like the Saor Patrol.   (It’s pronounced like “Shore Patrol” and is derived from saorus, or liberty/freedom in the Gaelic language.)  For me, tribal pipes and drums are made of awesomeness, and basted in excellence sauce, and trimmed with bacon (nitrate free bacon).  For me—and I don’t pretend it’ll be true for you, because you might hate it, not that there’s anything wrong with that—- wild pipes and drums stir a Dionysian passion and frenzy in me.  They make me want to be barefoot (or Vibram Fivefingered) and kilted, barechested in a chill mountain morning, running along stones with Erwin le Corre.  For me, for my soul, that’s the balm, that’s the bomb.

And one of my favorite things in this whole wide world has been watching my middle daughter, Lena, almost five, turn on the boombox and sway and rock out to the CD of Saor Patrol I burned for her.  The drums thud and boom, the pipes wail and skirl, she loses herself in the music, she bounces and prances and shakes her arms and wiggles her torso, she laughs and smiles and tosses her hair from side to side, she’s an exuberant animal. She’s fiercely alive, pulled along by that funky tribal beat.

How could that not be one of my favorite things? (youtube video below)

Also, Albannach. (youtube video below)

Wild, shaggy, free-form, with drums thudding and echoing and resounding all through your head, and over and above it floating the fierce skirling of the pipes . . . somebody requisition me a beat.

Oh, and this post’s title is from Hermes Conrad, bureaucrat of Planet Express!  Yeah, I’m a Futurama geek—whatayagonnado?

Uncle Lew’s series “Wolves Among Dogs” and other posts may be found here in The Paleo Garden.