In the dark with lights flashing, I met a girl as she fell from above. Her eyes passed mine wide-eyed from my widow’s peak toward my chin. Her head upside down.  I stared strangely, dumb struck, and with a smile caught her shoulders as her head descended toward my chest and I pushed her back into the sky to be caught by welcoming hands.

A skinny black shirted boy landed on my back turned and hit the floor.  He disappeared for a moment in the dark and shadows under our feet.  A pale white hand, splattered with black specks of floor grit, appeared suddenly below me. I stooped to grab it.  The boy popped up smiling giving me a hug.  Hearty hands slapped my back and he, again, disappeared into the fray of circling bodies.

If God created the world out of the void and or out of chaos, he started with me in my mother’s womb and continued sculpting me in a mosh pit.  I never expected to find such love and care there, to find unity, to find fellowship amongst thrashing bodies.

Apparently, not all skinheads are racists and punk rock girls are cool, but dangerous.  At 15 years old, a bruiser twice my age caught me in big arms the first time I saw stars and fell almost unconscious.  The pink head of a five-foot nothing dancer slammed upward into my nose breaking cartilage—cartilage that is, to this day, as slanted as the 45 degree angle I hovered in during the beginning of a punk rock show.  My buddy Garth was next to me, the music started, the crowd, as ONE, leapt to the right and the left.  I didn’t feel the floor for a minute as bodies pressed against mine.  Unity within the chaos.

In high school it was cheap entertainment.  It was nights out with friends.  It was a break from daily living.  It was dance.  It was ear-ringing, joy evoking, dance!  $15 shows for hours of entertainment.

The third wave of ska music during the mid-nineties brought an anti-racism social justice message; a battle against THE MAN mentality; a don’t subscribe to the ways of this world trajectory; all with an air of hilarity, ridiculosity, and earnest meaning.  Sounds to me like what the church should be.

Fifteen years down the road I am re-visiting old albums.  I laughed as visions of dank halls filled with swarming bodies bubbled up from the deep.  Here seeds were planted.  Here God trumpeted prophecy in dance and sound.   Here a vision of my next decade or so saturated my being without me knowing:

I searched for a cause

I climbed the highest mountain

I walked to the top

I stopped and then looked down

But when I stop the search

The answers always come

And when I help someone

I always help myself by helping

You tell me where your skeleton’s hiding

You tell me all and I’ll tell you

You think you have a real good fucking answer

A fucking answer I’ll give you

I look toward the girls

In them I found no truth

I looked outside myself

It seemed I lost the good

But when I turn my eyes

Out from my own head

That’s when I realize

That I see what I’m really selling

You tell me where your skeleton’s hiding

Tell me all and I’ll tell you

You think you have a real good fucking answer

A fucking answer I’ll give you

Get a fucking answer

But when I stop the search

The answers always come

And when I help someone

I always help myself by helping

You tell me where your skeleton’s hiding

You tell me all and I’ll tell you

You think you have a real good fucking answer

A fucking answer I’ll give you

You tell me where your skeleton’s hiding

Tell me all and I’ll tell you

You think you have a real good fucking answer

A fucking answer what I’ve given you

~Goldfinger: Answers

Copied from MetroLyrics.com

Here’s the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZBh_EYvcE8

Music has a way a shaping us.  It has a way of reaching into the deep and driving us to be what we should.  Another day I’ll speak of dancing to The Who’s Tommy at five years old with my sister, or writing an Old Testament Religion course paper at 3am whilst listening to Trance music.  Perhaps a music analysis as sign posts on my journey.

But for now, I leave you with the thought of a generation dancing at the Ska Against Racism Festival, which echoed heart pumping passions for social justice into the streets and into the nights.  Tunes that drove current thirty-somethings into law school, Peace Corps, Americorps, social services and more.  It wasn’t the catalyst for a movement but an element within the reaction—a harmony joining the Music of the Spheres.

Dance on.

Coming February, 2013 from Manic D Press! Yay!

The occupation that you probably didn’t notice

Time to start a bonfire!

Yikes and away!

Who’s towing who?

Opal is a best friend to all robots!

Happy Punks Paper Dolls!

(email us for a big printable file and paper doll fun!)