Saturday, March 28, 2015

In the Form of a Spider (Iktomi)





Okay, wow. I realized after that last song that I accidentally started writing a rock symphony. Or maybe it's more of a rock opera - I'm not too sure. I was all wow. It's a minimalist rock whatever-you'd-call-it, where I take samplings of people talking in that movie, Skins, and I play 'em over and over and do a song over them.

Of course, as you know, I cain't take credit for that idear. Lots of people might think, wow, what a cool girl for thinking of that. No, nope. I fucking stole the idea from Steve Reich. He's written lots of pieces o' music with people talking and he figures out what the melody is of them and, um, repeats it with instruments or something.

Maybe it's okay that I stole an idea from him cuz I met him in person once. He was the guest Really-Smart-Person at Dartmouth for a term or so. Shit, okay, that sounded really narcissistic, eh. I just name dropped my hoity toity Ivy League education, as well as the fact that I MET a FAMOUS COMPOSER. Shit, yeah, wow, okay, I'm a narcissist.

In any event, my intention with this ever-so-large piece of music I'm working on is to tell the story of the movie, Skins (cuz it's my favorite movie in the world), with minimalist, weird industrial-ish rock music.

This song is sung from the perspective of Iktomi, the trickster spider, who plays a large role in that movie. The picture I used to illustrate the song ain't of a spider, per se. But those 2 characters have a lot of Iktomi in them. I think they're actually trickster figures who think they're heroes. I think that I'm also a trickster figure who thinks she's a hero. I think my life'll get a lot less complicated when I finally recognize my Iktomi-nature. But I haven't done that yet. Thank kind of sucks.

In any event, here's a song sung from the point of view of a spider. The chorus may not make sense to the common-garden-variety-listener, though, so I'll explain it a wee bit. See, I go to sweat lodges sometimes, and when I do, sometimes there're spiders in there. You see 'em comin' down on their webs, descending toward the hot stones.

People who do sweat lodges are really nice to animals, so we all attempt to save them if we can. In the case of the character in the song, well, poor Iktomi ends up trapped in the heat of the lodge. Fuck, I can't believe I was so mean to poor iktomi. I think he probably survives it, though. I think so.

Yeah, no, yeah, he totally survives it, now that I think of it. I mean, he is Iktomi, after all.

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