This amazing statement is a direct quote from a dream I had last night.  In this dream I walked upon a desert.  Not flat, but with very large dunes and protruding rocky outcroppings standing starkly out of the endless sands.  Rocks and sand were the same beige-brown shade.
 
As I walked in a north-westerly direction in what the lengthening shadows said to be late afternoon, I came upon a small group of tribal people. Even in the dream, I knew they were not "real" in the sense of having flesh.  They were ghosts.  Men, women, children, some animals, probably goats. A couple of dark brown camels. (I don't know, are camels always the same uniform color?)
 
They were below me in what is called a wadi.  As I approached, they turned to me and said these exact words: "You cannot sing our songs because you have not shed our tears."  And they added, as I looked around, "We are the people of the wadi." as if, somehow that explained everything.
 
As suddenly as it appeared, the vision vanished and I came awake from the dream. Then just as suddenly, I understood many things that had puzzled me for years. This has to do with songs and with music. 
 
Everywhere in the world, groups of people have created their particular songs.  Songs and music are tribal, ethnic expressions of collective feelings and emotions.  Quite often, too often, you can sense the suffering, the losses, the pain and sorrow of a people in their music and songs.  There are, of course, the happier ones: songs of love, songs for weddings and other happy celebrations.  There are religious hymns that also recall terrible times and horrible persecutions, as well as deep devotion to the god of that religion.  And there are the powerfully emotional, martial, savage, war-praising nationalistic songs.   
 
The wadi people I encountered were speaking of some great and terrible ordeal inflicted upon them in which they were all destroyed, their way of life wiped out.  One instance?  A million instances?  Long ago?  Today?  It does not matter, does it, for time neither forgives nor forgets.  Nor do the songs that recall the real laughter and real tears.
 
Such songs, such music, is no longer being created.  We live in a globalized world under the aegis of greedy bankers, overt corporate oppression and the commercialization of every creative act of Earthian humanity.  Everything has a price tag, an ISBN product code.  If it does not, it has no value.  If the market place says your product sells, it sells.  If it rejects it, file it, it may as well not exist.  No heart, no spirit, just dollars. 
 
And what kind of "music" do people produce today? 
 
Raucous, raunchy, shallow, contemptible in its paucity of message or feeling.  A gross hoax, perpetrated by screamers, squawkers and pounders, an artifice "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" to quote someone.  Meaningless, deafening commercial clanging of rock and roll padded by trite and whiny country and western style.  This is just as true of modern religious singing as the more offensive kind inflicted upon everyone by the prevalence of radio and television.
 
Modern music, especially the music of America and its clones, has no spirit.  It is a direct expression of the emptiness and shallowness of the society that produces it, and listens to it.  It is the musical noise of commuter-clogged freeways, of ATM's and drive-thrus, of carbon-copied sports events, of over-indulgence, coarse laughter and slovenliness of attire and general posture.  It is the expression of a people that has brought many to tears and sorrow world-wide but itself never having to bear same.  A spoiled, self-centered and basically pointless people; a people that will pass from history in a footnote.
 
Perhaps, many years hence, survivors of this people will have shed enough tears through the lost years that they too will create songs that no one else can sing.  Perhaps.  And it is going to be a very long and very pain filled passage of time.