New Release "Skeletons of Language"

I am thrilled to announce the release of “Skeletons of Language” the latest Jasper Grooves Collective single. The song came out of a blend of unexpected elements. Musically, it was fantastic to collaborate with Joe Hoffarth who brought his bassoon into the recording session and offered some sonorities that, honestly, I had never expected would find their way into a funk/rock tune. Who woulda thunk it? You’ll never hear “Peter and the Wolf” the same again.

Adding to the sonic complexity of the song, Andrew Vogt cut loose on his alto saxophone with no other instructions other than, “Give it your best Pharaoh Sanders! Go for it!” Vogt rose to the challenge and then some. Jo Asker laid down a solid bassline and Mark Raynes put just the right groove onto it. The result is a genre-defying funk, free jazz, bassoon inflected, punk song that we think you will really enjoy. On a personal note, if I hadn’t grown up on the innovative sounds of the legendary punk band, The Minutemen, I don’t think I would have had the guts to write this song. So it was definitely appropriate that the song made its debut last year on Mike Watt’s online radio show The Watt From Pedro Show. And, as of today, “Skeletons of Language”  is available wherever you stream your music online. We here at Jasper Grooves Collective hope you find its quirkiness delightful.

Visually, the song is accompanied by a somewhat elusive image brought to life by Fort Collins artist, Baxter Long. Yes, there are cows on TV and yes you are watching them. It’s like a modern hieroglyph and I will leave you, the listener/viewer, to decipher it.

On a lyrical level, it was inspired by what was going on in 2020, but that is only half the story. We are still dealing with “skeletons of language” in 2021. Unfortunately, they aren’t going anywhere soon.

You might ask, just what is a skeleton of language? Maybe we should turn that question around. What is healthy language? What does full-bodied, vibrant and ambidextrous language look like? It’s a language without constraints, right? Straight talk. The truth and nothing but the truth. Let’s face it. All of us were naïve back in junior high. Maybe we were hoping to find a bold language, gutsy and unafraid to express what it sees, a language that jukes, jives, parries and, above all, isn’t ossified. Maybe we were all under the impression that folks around us were free to tell it like it is. But shine a spotlight on the wreckage of discourse in the twenty-first century, and all you see is mangled diction. It’s coming down to the wire, and we’ve spent far too long gargling in the rat race choir. At least that’s how Robert Zimmerman and a guy from Crazy Horse once put it.

What are skeletons of language? They are the stripped down words, the impoverished words that sit uselessly in the mouth like spent chewing gum devoid of flavor and are only spoken out of necessity. They are acronyms accompanied by an elevator music soundtrack, attempting to distill intense human feeling and emotion into flat two-dimensional substitutes of lol and lmao? WTF? Texting fingers flail away at the speed of light racing to keep up with ever faster microchip processors. Abbreviated emotions, abbreviated sonnets, abbreviated thoughts, SMS bots choke the airwaves. We’re trying to stay real but emojis aren’t going to cut it. As mom used to say, “use your words.”

These skeletons are complex words with historical implication eviscerated into guttural grunts. Like guacamole, n. from Nahuatl (Aztecan) ahuaca-molli, from ahuacatl "avocado" + molli "sauce, something ground" moler “to grind”  stripped down to meaningless monosyllables like guac.

“Put some guac on my junk,” says the dystopian burrito eater in a chain restaurant whose décor  pretends to be Aztec and where the overworked and underpaid descendants of real Aztecs have to suffer through the butchering of their native tongue, bastardized by the new conquistadors.

At 30,000 feet, the smooth talking pilot warns about an “air pocket,” a euphemism for turbulence. He uses the substitute term half-afraid that his passengers won’t understand the word turbulence, and half-afraid that they can’t handle the naked truth. Truth is, they’re about to get whipped around like hapless chihuahuas in the backseat of a Ford 150 driven by an oversexed adolescent, but nobody will let you say that.

The skeletons are all around us. In theaters of war, soldiers are killed by “friendly fire,” targeted civilians become “soft targets,” when their infrastructure is blown up it becomes “collateral damage.” Language becomes a house of mirrors where we’re left to choose between untangling the actual meanings or getting lulled into the doublespeak sleep. The mendacious lullaby.

This all might seem slightly depressing, but the truth-speakers are still out there fighting to raise their voices above the din. Sanity doesn’t always prevail, but it will never give up and the light is undying despite the public image spin and the brokers of disinformation. Yes, truth still gets spoken and when we hear it, we need to thank those who have the courage to speak it. Our lives are enriched by those who still believe that heartfelt speech can change the world we live in for the better.