A long time ago, a feller by the name Orpheus—and this guy was said to be the greatest of great musicians to walk Earthrealm—descended into the underworld on a personal quest to return his dead lover girl, Eurydice, back to the land of the living.

The boy, born gifted in the way of song, some say his father was the god of music himself, others that he was king of the city that birthed rhythm and melody; either way you swing it, he had something divine woven deep into his klesis.

So good at pickin’ a lyre he was, in fact, that the wolves and deer would set aside their differences to listen, sisyphus stopped his rollin’ stone, and the souls of tartarus quit all their yammerin’ about eternal damnation and whatnot.

Orpheus, he didn’t care for mechanical royalties, or none of that legacy business for the matter; he never wrote nothing down. He mostly ad-libbed about a harmonious cosmic truth, in which all hearts were intertwined. It’s no wonder, then, that a dryad such as Eurydice would fall head o’er heels for a poet as he, ‘fore she stepped in a nasty pile of snakes and died.

So, deep down into the underworld Orpheus set forth. He came face-to-face with the tri-headed hellhound Cerberus and pacified they/them/he/hims with song; met with Hades and Persephone and softened their hearts to allow him to lead his dead lover girl’s soul out into the livin’ light. Only catch was that he’d have to do the long walkin’ out of hell without so much as glancing over his shoulder to know for sure if Eurydice were truly following. And she were a ghost, too, without no audible footsteps or nothing.

Was the anguish of not knowing did Poor Orpheus in, and so he’d lost all faith and swiveled his head back just steps away from the exit, for he had to know for certain that Eurydice trailed him. And she was, until that point, and he’d glanced her pale beautiful face for a breath before the forever-ever pits of darkness swallowed her back in. Lost it all, lost it all when he had had it.

The failing had meant everything to Orpheus. Weren’t nothing left inside him to die, for it was all dead. His music, turned mournful and melancholic, was still beautiful all the same; he’d probably stumbled upon the blues scale there and then, though facts are scarce.

After saying no to decadent, unprotected relations with a raving band of wild and liberated women, they ripped Orpheus apart, and to death, on account of him losing his head. Some obscure legends say he was ἑπτὰ καὶ εἴκοσι ἔτη γεγονώς when he died—that’s Greek for ‘twenty-seven years of age,’ by the way, a real bad age for musicians it turns out.

But despite the ordeal, he was finally reunited with his dearly beloved Eurydice on down in tartarus.

Here are Yama, Iannis and Jesu. They sat, three of them, on a big wet rock hairy with moss like the unkempt toes of an elder giant—no particular one. Dandelions and other such things feathered their backs like a homogenous green cloud as they lay looking up through the rainforest canopy and at the passing sun and its light seeping through like a lightbulb through a dirty drinking glass.

These were the days of bliss and a straight road but the young satyrs did not know it yet. With lungs thick with sacred marijuana smoke, they coasted through the rest of the day talking about things which interested them: foreign music from the Germanic tribes, nymphs and the looming threat of a capitalist, Apollonian government.

Jesu were the oldest of them and was born

And Jesu said to him I can't longer stifle it any more Iannis there is an urgency to know my heart and if he has to die a thousand times then he will whether he is my brother or not.

There’s a special kind of irony to do with the subject of discipline when Jesus got bariatric surgery, because for the life of him, the guy couldn’t stop eating and had to go under the knife to lose weight. Years and years, hours on end, all spent on the electrical piano, practicing scales upwards, downwards, in contrarian motion, reciting tunes in inverse symmetry of harmony around an axis, and at 1/64 notes over 5:3:2 polyrhythms.

There must’ve been a million times a feller like that’d look up from the piano, at a Playstation and thought, “By god, I should just give up,” but he persisted, somehow or rather, and learned all there was to know about contemporaneous jazz piano.

Now, his hunger for musical know-how could be said to’ve been rivalled only by his hunger for the fast foods—Starbucks Frappucinoes, Hot Dog sandwiches, Snickers Ice-Creams, and Tacos.

This is Jesus Molina, by the way, the Columbian jazz superstar and not Christ of Nazareth, who only sang a hymn or two in his day.

Why, they say you could throw just about any tune at this Molina feller, and he’d play every musical possibility in the pythagorean temperament, taking a song you thought you were listening to and (or better or worse) turning it into every other song in the evers of history.

But it’s hard to say anyone really knows what his deal is though—didn’t have no dead lover girl to extricate out no dang underworld, no cosmic heartening of the body and mind. Seems the only problem this guy had was resisting the siren song of the fast foods while learning more of the piano.

As a matter a’fact, a lot of these cats (that's what the jazz musicians liked to call each other) had similar kinds of problems with the matters of discipline and siren songs. It was not uncommon, back then, for one to hear, “Ahhh another fine day of killing myself with the practicing,” as they’d often go. “And now, on to relaxing with that illicit substance I really like: the Heroin!’

So here was this one trumpeter, Chet Baker, from before Molina’s time—and he really liked the skag (that’s what they called it on the streets). So much so, that he’d get into all sorts of problems with these shady types over money, and when they broke in his front teeth, the poor guy couldn’t so much as blow on that trumpet he liked. 28 years of practice gone like that. But that Chet Baker loved the music, couldn’t scarely live without it. And the people, they loved it too, because their favourite part of it all was the heartbreak. So they’d be watching him, flutes of French 75 in hand, like a kid would a drug-addled zebra at a European zoo.

But now, since Jesus had gotten that bariatric surgery that’d smallen his stomach, he didn’t crave none of the fast foods no more, and so he didn’t go plunging off some Dutch balcony down to tartarus like that Chet Baker. Only place he had to go was up, in fact, and all the time, presumably because someone told him to.

You should know, at this point, that there is evil in the world, a bit of the devil in all of us that gives the devil form.

His Infernal Majesty, why, he hasn’t had to do any of that whispering-in-the-ear business for decades, on account of the aluminum slate known as the iPhone smart telephone.

And as obscure legends go (these even clever scholars don’t know about) that Jesus was looking at his iPhone one day and the jazz gods said to him, “O prophecy has fortold that you will learn pythagorean scales downwards, upwards and sideways, fulfilling your destiny as a jazz superstar, and in doing so, you’d be honouring the slaves who knew nothing of mechanical royalties, and who howled the blues in the cotton fields in sweltering heat and subjugation. Oh also, Dizzy Gillespie says ‘Hello.’”

What Jesus didn’t know, however: Weren’t no pantheon of jazz gods he was speaking with, it was in fact the devil! who was cunning on account of him being a master spy.

So Jesus grew his congregation—followers they're called on the YouTube—mostly out of these troubled music types who wanted to be more like him. And you could see why! The guy looked like a million shekels. He'd be up on that stage with his name spelled out in laser beams like some magician in Vegas. His body got all trim from the bariatric surgery, and the plugs on his head stood straight up into a hairdo that defied gravity. He had that Pan American smile, too, on account of his being a superstar now.

But all that fame and noteriety started a new group they call disparagers, and they didn’t like Jesus, not one bit.

If you weren’t privvy to it, there’s this massive faux pas in music that has to do with ‘lip-syncing,’ which is when a musician only pretends by moving their mouth, instead of having practiced for years. The problem people have with it is the hypocrisy—it’s like how David Anthony Burke always portrayed himself in public as a pop singer, and not a sadistic psychosexual murderer.

But Jesus weren’t no musical lipsyncer. He was a losing-weight-and-growing-hair-syncer, more like. Which means, if you're keeping score, he essentially cheated to do what poor Chet Baker couldn’t—which was to eschew that balcony-heaving vice of his with modern medicine. Makes you think of the old days, where if you had a vice, it’d kill you, but these days you can just cut out a part of your stomach so you won’t be able to finish your food.

I reckon we could do it my boys–the devil can’t resist our urges for we now hold the ear of the masses. It’d never been this way before. We’re heavier than heaven. Firmly mortal.

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Noone quite remembers Oxit—the day by which the olympian gods and ourselves (humankind) agreed to go splits over creative differences. But just two minutes in to looking to the world around us to make sense of it, and a feller by the name Thales (who yelled, “Ain’t no way ye can step in the same dang river twice!” or maybe it was that other water guy, Heraclitus) became the first options trader in history, when he bet big that rain clouds–not the one nor the several gods–were responsible for a bountiful olive harvest. He went out and bought just about every olive press he could, and rented them out to become the richest guy around.

‘Boy it sure pays to be smart and a taker,’ was what Hollywood types said on their first day at Hollywood school, when they learned about that Thales feller. Now if he could do it with a bunch of olives back in the years BC, then we could do it with just about anything in the years AD. Hey, what now, about them millions of troubled music types that want to be more like Jesus?

Obelisk

Do you reckon I need to know how to cook to know what good food tastes like?

I reckon you do.

Well, how do you reckon that?

I say if ye were born eating shit your whole life, all you’d be able to qualify’d be if you preferred raw corn kernels or soft beans in your shit.

Is that so?

Aye it be. And more so, I hazards a guess you’d prepared this argument against the many come round to callin’ ye on your bullshit. And today you’ve met me, who’s met with many the likes of you: the bullshit artist, scammer, the one who hides behind practiced art school defenses, writing music for the other bullshitters in the room, stood in a protective circle high above those truly living in shit. You talk of change, of awareness and the courage to say things. Shit, you’re a politician, man.

And the best part, it’s too late for you to change anything about it; go break down all the things you are, at the primordial ooze of your beginnings as a human, you made the wrong choice early: you chose to believe that you knew it; you chose to think that you knew what freedom was before you understood what it’s liked to be constrained

Sounds like you’re the one that’s constrained, how’s that chip on the shoulder feel? How’s it feel to blame the world instead of inwards where autonomy has led you to where you are? You talk about putting in the work; you think yeself a matyr, and I bet you’re scared of your own ideas–morelike ye scared actually of how people might take your ideas. Tell me if you’re so in tune with the common man, why’s he not understand your art?

I think you think you’re brave to be saying that, now d’ya reckon that’d make a better artist because you practice?

Will the two of you please shut the fuck up?

Man’s folly lies square in the disguised belief that no ceiling separated them from heaven. They float on up high, and eventually start to think themselves gods.