110 - I don't know. I need to wash my potato

Had a conversation with a friend yesterday about 'originality' in songwriting.

Writing about the thing no one else has - or writing in a way that no one else has.  Or, writing generally in the way that most people have, but incorporating something like whistling or banjo in a way that no one else has.. or singing it backward, or part of it in another language and then incorporating banjo and kazoo where virtually no one would expect it.  Or mumbling so indecipherably, that anyone listening could literally fill in their own lyrics, and possibly melodies.  And then giving the whole audience kazoos to fill in the parts that would ordinarily be decipherable...

There is nothing new under the sun, I told her.  And I so rarely quote the Bible, that I thought I ought to even say it to her in italics.

The best you can ever hope to do is crystallize your own vision of a thing that wafts by you... but let's face it, the classical form has dictated where nearly every shred of pop, folk, blues, bluegrass, hip hop, techno.. name it.. starts and stops.  Every bit of it.  You know man, it's basically I - IV - V...  all musicians know what that means, and in this day and age, probably every breathing Guitar Hero.

We Westerners are drawn to it, at a visceral level - the resolution of IV to I, or V to I.  I could quip philosophical about the human desire for dissonance followed by resolution, but it's tired, and rhetorical.  It's what we do and what we are.  Millions of psychologists are employed to walk us through the cadences, let's face it.


But, in Western culture at least, Mozart and his contemporaries determined what would follow for hundreds of years.And others before them determined the form they would launch from.  Without them, there'd have been no Stravinsky, Debussy, Gershwin... no Dylan, Phillip Glass, Milli Vanilli... the list is long. 

Music is a fluid thing.  Those of us that make it are part of that fluidity.  Yes, at some point, near the end of the Baroque, someone said, 'By George, I like the way the V chord resolves to the I, rather than the IV or VII... I think I'll compose something!'  And along the way, there were many composers who used the new form and conjured beautiful pieces that we'll never forget.

But yes, in the beginning, there was the very first, original monkey that decided it was a good idea to wash the potato, and than all the monkies started washing the potatoes.  The monkeys with flair maybe began humming a tune while washing,

or drawing little lines in the river mud with their potato,

or contemplating new ways to pick nits off their husbands, or even taking the opportunity of washing the potato to go ahead and wash themselves.  But still, like all evolution, it all started with that one, original monkey.

Now what was her name?