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Kokaine Karma

It’s amazing that the music which has become so free and full of life is still presented in rigid formats of commercial elitism which enforce restrictions and set up artificial boundaries that hold back energy forces. There are plateaus of acceptance and silver tipped success which are still based on myth, hype and old time show business superstition.

September 1, 1969

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Kokaine Karma

It’s amazing that the music which has become so free and full of life is still presented in rigid formats of commercial elitism which enforce restrictions and set up artificial boundaries that hold back energy forces. There are plateaus of acceptance and silver tipped success which are still based on myth, hype and old time show business superstition. People involved in music’s big time money, lift sincere angelic voices in adulation about the breakthroughs in their flesh peddling business. Bullshit! The old system still exists and the barnacled boundaries don’t disintegrate until “you’ve made it baby.”

The Neros of the entertainment arena are really not concerned with the quality of music but the quantity of money behind it. You ain’t gonna gig in the big city just because you have a good sound; who are your backers? And when the fat money cats come with the blood of their latest star dribbling down their double chins, watch how they delicately carve you up so they get the tenderest part of your hide.

First sign the contract with a HEAVY manager, then tie yourself up with a HIP record company, a SLICK producer, a GROOVY public relations firm, and don’t forget that SUPER booking agency that’ll get you into all the important spots. And watch while they all come to your concerts (or anybody’s for that matter), in rented limosines that you pay for. Outside the hall where you are performing however, people who really dig what you’re saying will get their heads busted for trying to sneak in to hear you.

Prize fighters were merely butchered, but your flesh will be delicately carved and sauteed with the suckers who bought your music.

That music isn’t free is an outrage; that artists starve is a perversion.

Super stars are just people playing music. Twenty thousand dollar fees per concert and $10 seats make as much sense as political conventions, and usually provide less entertainment. And if you’re grossing over a million dollars a year it doesn’t make you a musical genius, just rich. John Coltrane is dead and he didn’t make nearly that much.

Let’s stop all this super star bullshit and get back to the music. The pop world is concerned with personality - not music. Wave after wave of hype shit rolls over us and most rock critics swallow it whole, kissing and gushing with trite superlatives. You can’t sit back listening to record company releases and going to the local ballrooms and think you’ve heard all the groovy music. Get off your ass and feel what is going on.

Cont. on Page 25

Cont. from Page 8

Valid sounds reflect universal consciousness. Music is back in the streets and parks, not the concert halls. Most ballrooms ain’t nothing more than psychedelic IBM parlors. Music is coincidental to cash flow.

If most of the world is ignorant of emerging new forms of direct personal expression, the music establishment deludes itself by consciously ignoring new births in people’s culture in favor of the garish, superproduced, synthetic byproducts of established society.

The new is always ugly to the aging. It lacks refinement, professionalism, polish, AND must be sifted of its obscene, natural energy. Filtered, sterilized, homogenized with crepe paper lace and reassuring established symbols. Shock but don’t stir. Reaction, only on an intellectual level, of course, but no instigation of physical action.

It is an anesthetic formula with clinical answers the American society seeks. Titilate the brain, a tiny bit of grey matter movement, while the body hangs limp. The age of reason is still in power and the unexploitable is rubbish. Fantasy is blasphemous; imagination is heresy. The order seeks its clean, black/white answer; promotes strict definition for the necessary categorization.

They can’t go, move with the onrushing flow, of change. Their pattern of realism concentrates on anguish, pain, and fear as motivating forces. A negative present dictates the future. They don’t see that our belter skelter dash forward is the active search for an exploding, mutating present/past/future of universal harmony. Everything is Everything. The cosmos does not exist only at the extending fingertip/threshold of space; it lurks exotically also, primarily within all man.

To explore these mysterious, fantastic, unmarked pathways of the soul is considered the borderline of lunacy. The established church has exploited the blind soul, and the capitalist isn’t interested in intangibles. But it is in the verboten world of unchecked imagination and inword virgin trails that the creative person travels.

Being liberated in the passion of pursuit, are frenzied freaks in the parks, creating love symphonies of joyous orgasms heard by the universal consciousness. The power to' reach the Gods is with them; while the ORDER attempts its spiritual communion with million dollar metal monstrosities.

Since they fail in their jet propelled extensions of soul gratification, they distrust and fear the madman who claims the light without answers. These, it is claimed, are fantasy ravings from uncharted minds. In the very newness of ideas. The ORDER sees perversion. The emanations of creating people must be modified for our staunch, secure, system. The roots of tradition are self -supporting and self-annihilating, but also poisonous to - the fertile grounds of imagination.