Gitano guitar

Listening to Camarón de la Isla's Leyenda del Tiempo, the legendary and game-changing Flamenco album from 1979 transports me instantaneously back to an extremely hot day in the start of July this summer. On the extreme outskirts of Barcelona, having passed less and less tourist infiltrated barrios' on the train out from the Arc del Triomf metro station, we walked a mile or two down a dirt road back in the direction of the city centre, heading towards a petrol station, whose vague whereabouts I had managed to acquire via hitchwiki.org (an highly useful digital tool for hitch-hikers) .

Standing in the 40 degree heat, wearing a tee-shirt on my head and trying to thumb a lift South with the occasional traffic that passed through the rippling expanse of car park, I felt a tad ridiculous. Ridicule however, quickly turned to frustration and general disparagement. Sprinting over to the sole lorry parked up, the signs were promising, he was heading direction Tarragona, he could understand my pigeon Spanish but he only had space for one. We weren't desperate enough to split up so that lift never came to fruition.

Some time later, Juan in his van turned up, shades on, aircon blasting and moved his electrical goods into the back, making space for us up front. The feeling of moving after standing so still never fails to lift the spirits, and not having to extend our arms was a nice change as well. The music was just as encapsulating as the fact we had gotten the lift, it was competing against and winning the air conditioning for best vibrations in the small cabin. Juan fitted seamlessly into the imagery of the Flamenco conjured up, albeit with a modern twist. The rawness and energy of this mystical Spanish folk music made him speak up. The journey could have been a quiet one, Juan was perhaps not a man of many words, but he spoke with an apparent love of Camarón and his music. A love I was only later to discover resonated throughout almost the whole of Spain.

Was this Spain itself projected through the tinny speakers? Cigarette smoke wobbled from side to side in the cabin as Juan told us of the Gypsy's early demise through alcohol and drug addiction. Tragic, passionate, fiery and shrouded in mystery, I was in a semi-trance and only snapped out of it to make sure we exited at the right time in order to stay on track for Almeria, which is incidentally the birthplace of collaborator and fellow Gitano, Tomatito. As a parting gift, Juan offered us a CD, a copied disc in a rough plastic cover. I carried this gift throughout our 2 month hitch-hiking, volunteering and exploration adventure, managing to keep it safe and intact.

I played it when we arrived back in the UK, expecting a red and yellow wave of mystery and power to wash over me, instead I was greeted by terrible modern Spanish pop music with Euroclub beats blended together in some horrible musical comparison to Spain's current crisis. Perhaps Juan wanted to musically show us what Spain meant to him through Camarón de la Isla but also project the change that has occurred to his country to us when we arrived home. 

Camerón de la Isla - La Leyenda del Tiempo

Chomsky and Hiphop..

''Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption. The business press has been quite explicit about this goal.'' Noam Chomsky
via Dedroidify

I have plunged myself right into the deep end of the spectrum (if a spectrum has a deep end?) with Noam Chomsky's 'Hopes and Prospects' which is a truly eye-opening read, albeit a bit hard to digest at my level of world political knowledge and its vocabulary, etc. But I am getting through it...slowly. It really does bring to light many of the aspects that are wrong with the world we live in.

This brings me onto another point...the fact that when you enter the world of 'esotericism' and suchlike, when you find out that the world isn't a happy jolly place where everybody lives happily side by side, slurping coke's, surfing facebook from their iPad (they've even got me doing that fucking capital P!) and eating a McDonalds, it is easy to get overwhelmed by it, I know I sure did, and still do find myself in this situation.

One of my friends, who partly got me into this alternative mode of thinking and looking at the world around me said that 'We all have keep our positive energy because their negativity will run you down'. Or something along those lines... and I think it is very true. Its so easy to think that because the world is so messed up, and it is messed up, that there is no point in trying to do anything about it. What is crucial to remember, I think, is that, yes you may seem insignificant, but even just knowing about something on a scale that big is a positive thing. Then its just about doing what you can in whatever way you can, in my case I tried to start a blog with the hope people might read it, tell their friends and perhaps gain a slightly better understand of whats really going on.

Referring back to one of my favourite musical artists; Akala. He states on his album 'DoubleThink' that 'every empire on this Earth has fallen'. This is a statement of great importance, to both the 'elite' and everybody else, as it holds the key to events that a substantial amount of people believe will happen this very calendar year...