Resonance
Sound that loses its elegance loses its significance. Yet it is no simple matter for the willing heart to well and truly feel and permit it clean motion through a body just because it is the human imperative to do so.
Sound that loses its elegance loses its significance. Yet it is no simple matter for the willing heart to well and truly feel and permit it clean motion through a body just because it is a human imperative to do so.
I am a soundmaker - a professional one - for the voice of a coach is her only true instrument. You are a soundmaker too! And while we smile and speak as vigorously today as any ever have, our sounds are not as they once were (said my heart even before my ears).
I have hesitated to say so, but perhaps we carry each a small leaf in our good white teeth - a remnant of what was once nourishment is now mud. Our bright smiles, I think, are in need of gentle polish.
The trick of the great soundmakers of the 1960s and 1970s - the musical ones - in no pornographic sense - was to connect their pelvis with the striking chorded throat, making the matter of their golden groove sound-that-(literally)-conceived-our-lives conceptual, invisible, and more than a glimmer of rhythm, but a measurable sharpness inside the heart, conducted from foot to crown. Dance!
Artists of this golden moment carried raw emotional circuitry that had both recovered from and not yet been severed again by collective trauma.
Bad Company → masculine ache without defense
Bob Dylan → raw poetic prophecy voiced through human imperfection devoid of artifice and anchored in grit
Fleetwood Mac → relational chaos lived out through melody, not suppressed under performance
Ambrosia, Foreigner, Journey → men pleading without shame
Bob Seger → memory, loss, embodied longing spoken in a man’s voice without apology
The Doors → unapologetic masculine eros braided to mysticism (especially “L.A. Woman”)
Sam Cooke, Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, The Righteous Brothers → the deep gospel of love as vocation, not trophy or transaction
Van Morrison → surrender of masculine form into spirit without abandoning flesh; an unbroken braid of longing, devotion, earthy sensuality, and cosmic ascent, sung not to impress but to dissolve boundary between body and light
We have Taylor Swift.
Hark, hope! We have lost this before. And have burst forth, forming not rational word but song drenched in passion and untranslatable. I thought to look at the history and considered you might like to share the walk.
1. Post-War Release + the Somatic Thaw
• The years following World War II initiated a massive nervous system exhale.
→ After global trauma, the collective field began slowly returning to the body.
→ Men returned from war to rebuild - not just cities, but also cradles.
• In the 1950s, eros was still coded in structure (courtship, slow dances, devotion), but it was contained - reaching toward but inaccessible to full spectrum throated voltage.
→ This containment acted like a pressure chamber - a thin but thickening polarity braid.
→ The body remembered what it was to wait, to want, to move slowly.
That waiting created tension.
And that tension became sound.
2. Emergence of Black musical genius as national force
• Motown, soul, gospel, and blues were not entertainment - they were field repair.
→ This resonance carried the sacred wisdom of the race’s centuries old fluency in suppression, grief, praise, longing, erotic ache, and primal sound-memory.
→ When these voices - Aretha, Marvin, Otis, Smokey, Sam - entered the mainstream, they re-widened the entire cultural throat.
→ Suddenly, desire could wail.
→ Grief could groove.
→ Love could shimmer as truth relieved of its shame.
• White performers began to entrain - not mimic, but co-resonate.
And the field widened into creamy harmonic plait gold.
3. Pre-synthetic recording technology: high fidelity analog
• Magnetic tape, reel-to-reel, vacuum tubes, live instrumentation
→ All preserved the grit of human breath.
→ You can hear the strain, the break, the unscripted inhale.
This technology allowed soul to remain intact as signal.
The throat and pelvis were touching now in vibrationally undistorted harmonic rhythm.
4. Sexuality was still ritual, neither reaction, nor transaction
• The sexual revolution hadn’t yet commodified eros.
→ Eroticism still lived inside slowness, risk, grief and prayer.
→ It was subtextual but felt fully.
This sacred containment created a voltage build-up that poured itself into song, gaze, lyric, and movement.
→ Before 1965, the culture was still bracing - but the inner ache was clean.
By 1965, the ache had ripened into release.
And the sound reflected it.
So, 1965–1983 was not a miracle.
It was a convergence.
A moment when:
The post-trauma exhale met sacred eros.
Technology held the integrity of breath.
Sacred Black soul power infused mainstream white culture.
The body and voice trusted each other again.
And love had not yet been collapsed by irony or performance.
Emerson said, “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”
In a single sentence, he collapsed an elite mystical practice into tactility of gentle and imponderable function. If music is to cultural prayer as conversation to elegant skiff rowed across lap of lake, then soundmakers of the 1960s and 1970s wove with golden thread ocean of feeling - a real-time auditory architecture of collective breath that held love, sorrow, hope, sensuality, and eros in elegant lace.
The sounds of these prayers were then and remain today a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart, at the same time they strike the mind, and the listener’s own impetus, given such a bright shove, is freed of hesitation to take flight.
Where Are We Now? The Collapse of Resonance
Why So Many Americans Have Light (or Compressed) Voices
For Men
1. Cultural feminization without maturation: The backlash against toxic masculinity has unhappily conflated aggression with strength, and so our dear and necessary men are now socially trained to soften - not into true grace, but into closeted submission. The result? A collapse in vocal weight, projection, and sovereign placement.
2. Techno-linguistic flattening: Screens, remote work, and low-stakes
communication (text, email, social media) diminish the need for embodied voice. Men no longer speak from the body - they narrate from the neck. The voice becomes thin because the root is disinclined.
3. Loss of initiation: In traditional societies, young men pass through rites that anchor them in their bodies and responsibilities. With the rise in “freedom,” came the loss of rite, leaving an entire gender chronically ungrounded. An ungrounded man cannot speak from his diaphragm. His voice floats - unclaimed, unaimed, unsure and in perpetual regret of perversion he cannot name.
For Women
1. Bracing in the field: Many women are holding the masculine pole in their households, work environments, and relationships. Their voice follows. It deepens, sharpens, tightens. Feminine lilt collapses under the weight of structural responsibility.
2. Disembodiment as armor: Girls are taught that vocal softness can be read as weakness. So they flatten their tone, raise the pitch without air, or clip the ends of their words to signal detachment. This is not deference. It’s defense.
3. Mimetic mirroring: As men become less grounded, women unconsciously mirror the void. Instead of softening into deeper receptivity, most women overcompensate - filling the sonic space with assertion instead of attraction.
With the greatest of respect to the intelligent humanity that is all of ours together:
We know when a woman’s voice has been hardened by survival.
We know when a man’s voice has been lifted from his root and is floating in excuse.
This is at the root of our great and collective song of Search
which traces the need and purpose of good example;
of ‘leadership’
as the drumbeat of our young century.
Certainly one could belt out the longing of Bad Company with less - yet magnificent, elegiac, and deeply feeling - scratch. But the scar tissue in Paul Rodgers throat reveals one of the most poetic vocal stylings of the time in raw declarative vibratory truth.
Joe Cocker’s throaty scrape is a painting and written for the long and searching look one seeks when held-ness is in order. “A Little Help from My Friends” is the sonic lap of a capable ship’s captain, the song offering his meaning slowly, and as the seconds turn, the light changes and the mind begins to entrain in a kind of largo of sympathy and great relief.
How Did We Lose This?
After 1983, two principal fractures occurred:
The AIDS epidemic introduced field-wide terror around the erotic body, touch, and mortality.
→ The pelvic field - the seat of erotic innocence and gravity - closed.
→ Love and sex became suspicious, tragic, and defensive.
→ The throat grieved the expression.
The rise of hyper-commercialized, studio-perfect pop reflected flattened enculturated emotional authenticity into performative, safe accessibility.
→ Authentic throat-pelvis resonance was replaced with airbrushed, de-eroticized sound.
So, what we sense but can’t name about these late golden sounds:
The “music” was never just music.
When it broke, so did our cultural ability to channel full-bodied, unapologetic life force in public,
or anywhere.
Fortunately, We Are Emerging into the Reconstitution of that Fractured Field
The slow, sacred, and worthy process of grafting again voice to body, longing to loyalty, and presence and pleasure into single current is the work of our time, and enfolds the matter and true art of real conversation.
The AI & social media equivalent of flattened pop sound:
It is the hyper-optimized, de-souled “content generation” model - that frictionless, instantaneous production of language, image, and sound without field resonance, without sacrifice, and without lived experience that loses entirely the transmission. Vibration without resonance is akin to language without elegance, and launches by gasp the impulse toward the great Search.
It is speed without scar.
It is knowledge without initiation.
It is voice without breath.
This version of technology does what late-stage 1980s synth pop did: it preserves the outer shape of communication but strips it of embodied voltage.
It mimics beauty.
It repeats brilliance.
But it does not cost anything to generate,
so can only transmit noise.
Today we are reweaving not by rejection - but transmutation - the flattened texture of our technological world. Just as scar tissue marks the body’s return to vitality, the smooth, frictionless perfection of AI-generated language, image, and sound is paradoxically guiding us home.
Its sterility reveals what we have forfeited in pursuit of unlimited expression, mirroring back to us a performative inauthenticity drained of everything that makes it - that word again matter.
So we respond, not by replicating this flatness, but by re-entering our deep, instinctual body pelvis first, reclaiming our gravity and its tether to the earth and each other with erotic innocence, then the heart - reopening its vulnerable chambers to courage and ache, and finally the throat, where the force of our humanity can once again strike chords with weight.
First, resonance must be earned - through friction, wonder, discipline, devotion - the stuff of the dirt; life itself. Just as the actual house of our home is not of beam and nail but of all existence - is earth, with no door, no address separate from ocean or star, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope or weakness, or any virtue worthy of our leggy, certain stride.
A Map - Analog Fidelity of the Voice
• Re-temple the Throat + Diaphragm:
→ Speak only from frequencies anchored in the pelvis.
→ Refuse to generate sound out of survival, defense, or abstraction.
→ Carry the weight of breath, blood, and belonging in every word, and on purpose.
• Re-wild the Body:
→ Reclaim eros as field resonance, neither transaction nor weapon, but harmony.
→ Move, sing, cry, and touch without narrativizing or performing intellect.
→ Allow the pelvis to govern pace, let the body set pitch; neither brain, nor mind. Sensate instruction creates rhythm not riot.
• Re-sanctify Longing:
→ Hold longing as the voltage of life, not a flaw to be fixed but instead conducted.
→ Graft longing to loyalty - desire without collapse, ache without betrayal - expecting it will create something greater than its own pain. Ache being a means not an end, assures the end will justify the means entirely to the extent it is endured as beauty, and with reverence.
→ Remember: longing, when anchored, becomes resonance - it braids throat to root, thus heaven to earth.
When we re-temple the voice, re-wild the body, and re-sanctify longing,
we do not simply heal ourselves - we rebuild the field through which all human love, loyalty, and creativity can live again. Herein lies the innovation we seek, that which sanctifies our hardy, gritty human struggle.
In sum:
The distortion:
Frictionless sound marks the death of the scar at the cost of the soul.
The redemption:
Throat as the midwife of expression is the exhale that says: “I lived this, and I offer it to you as song.”
How wonderful that the universe is beautiful in so many places and in so many ways and with so much music. But also our world is brisk and businesslike, and no doubt does not offer its delicate landscapes or thunderous power-peaks, and perhaps its perception, too, for our sake, or even for our improvement.
Nevertheless its intonations are our heart’s tonic if we take them.
For the world is full of radiant suggestion. And with mysterious reason, our hearts cannot separate the world’s appearance and actions for morality and valor, but the power of every idea is intensified, if not actually created, by its expression in resonance.