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If You Could Give The World Music...

The following "flashback" is presented to you by the Spanish sun and beach, whose power to soak an entire day, thereby preventing any real quality blogs to be written.

Flashback:
I have a very important question for you. If you were in a position to share music with the world for the first time, what would you share?

When I left for my trip, I had a big dilema ipod or no ipod. Already I pack like a girl (no offense) and have bag that weighs more than I do, and I´m no spring chicen. But like most cases I decided to go ahead and take it. And naturally when presented with the oportunity to buy some crappy Chinese sony headphone nock offs, who can resist? Aaaannd when you have an ipod and two pair of headphones it makes perfect sense to purchase headphone splitter...because you never know who you are going to be sitting next to.

It just so happens the first person I sat next to was an 7(or so) year old boy with broken English from Dubai. Flashback to Thailand. I was already delayed several hours to board the "quality" bus ride to meet my friend Christina in Phuket. The reason I was delayed was there weren´t enough people. Well throw in one little family of 7, 2 girls, an old guy and myself... and problem solved. So with all of our luggage taking up the front seat, the 11 of us squeezed into 9 seats for this 10 hour ride. I as I mentioned was placed in the row with the boy, his sister and the old man.

I pulled out my comfort to drown out the discomfort when I remembered, "Hey I´ve got enough ipod for two here." I ask the boy if he wants to listen and OF COURSE if it would be ok with his parents. And OF COURSE the answer to both was yes. With a system of: thubs up= "Stay, I like it"; thumbs down="Uh, no thanks and next song" we song by song worked our way through the trip. The favorites: G-love and Special Sauce, The White Stripes, and Modest Mouse. Ousted was Radiohead, and a number of not-rock-enough selections.

Flashforward to India. We are now entering a land much less touched by the world. A land swallowed by Himalayan mountains and a bus ride with 40 more people than seats. Once again pulling out my ipod to help with the pain. This time the person next to me is a boy maybe my age. It may be wrong to assume based on distance from civilation and apparent lifestyle that this young man had probably never seen an ipod or listened to a little music from the world. But I did and for a moment (5-10 hour moment) I was faced with the question what music do you share with someone who has never heard... well anything I had at least. Bear in mind the conservative culture is a consideration. So the decision: Frank Sinatra. Bob Marley. Coldplay(it was rainy). Jack Johnson. I even through in a couple highights from my friends band Telescope, just cause I could. (And if by chance my other friend, Corn(elius), is reading this I didn´t play M77 only because there wasn´t any on my ipod.

How did it go? Well he didn´t speak English, so I couldn´t ask. But I can say he slept like a baby, with a head full of tunes in a bus FULL of people. What did he think? I don´t know, but I´m pretty sure he was dreaming about heaven.

posted by Travelin' D @ 1:09 PM