Dino Perrucci

Reid Genauer is the lead singer and principal songwriter for Strangefolk and Assembly of Dust. His latest project, Conspire to Smile, is a Kickstarter campaign and an album intended “to amplify positive sentiment on social media.” 

Plato allegedly once said, “Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness and life to everything. It is the essence of order and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passion- ate and eternal form.”

I know that’s a tad on the heady side, but if you can get past the formality of the language, then the message is mind-blowing. It’s as if the definition of the Grateful Dead and the jamband scene at large were written in three sentences, long before either existed.

Now here is a quote from Jerry Garcia from Rolling Stone in 1989: “In primitive cultures, the state of the shaman is a desirable state. In our society, we, somehow, are trying to not have that. That’s a real problem. We need the visions. A lot of what we do is already metaphors for that—movies, television, all that stuff. We want to see other worlds. Music is one of the oldest versions of it.” He continues, “In a sense, the Grateful Dead experience is that metaphor, too. It’s like, ‘Here’s the ritual that we have been missing in our lives.’”

Garcia made the point about the need for shaman-like connectivity and the absence of those rituals in 1989 before the internet had taken hold. Since then, it seems as though the symptoms he pointed out have gotten markedly worse. The age-old march toward industrialization has increasingly narrowed our access to the soul of the universe and, ironically, to digital media; the most recent mile in that journey has accelerated our alienation.

To Garcia’s point, we lost sight of the rituals that connect us to each other, to nature and to whatever lies beyond our cramped view of the universe long before the internet. For centuries, the cultural measure of success has bent toward quantity over quality, productivity over passion and uniformity over unity. It seems like a natural outcome that the tools for creativity, communication and community have largely been invented with the aim of uniform efficiency. They are a reflection of a culture that favors the same. Sadly, instead of being invisible, dazzling and passionate, as we believe Plato suggested, most of the technology that we use for communication is invisible, dazzling and dispassionate by design. Devoid of an emotional compass, social media is exceptionally good at what it’s designed to do—convey and amplify social sentiments that already exist.

I’m Darwinian in my judgment of both culture and technology. I’m not calling for a return to the good old days—we’re never going back to pay phones on the corner, browsing musty old record shops or smoking weed that doesn’t get you stoned. The question is: Given the pervasiveness of the technology in our lives and the unimaginable cultural changes afoot, how do we reclaim some of the rituals that Garcia longed for? How do we reconnect with the soul of the universe that is so glaringly absent?

Ironically, one answer to that question is technology and capitalism. There is a cry for genuine connection, and someone will answer that call with new technology that delivers against the demand for emotional belonging. In the meantime, as a part of the jamband scene, we’re privileged in that we already have a powerful remedy. We purposefully lean into the experience and the “dazzling passion” of music. We’ve been taught how to rely on the music community as a source of connectivity and music as a gateway to the universe. It’s a form of horizontal spiritualism, a moral code without any judgment. There is a reason we drop everything to see 13 Phish shows at The Garden and fly to the ends of the earth to see Dead & Company at Shoreline—it makes us feel connected to something bigger, something “other.” My recommendation is to do more of it.

There is no doubt that social media’s reach has had unintended consequences. It’s been hijacked by a humanity defined by deep cultural, political and evolutionary trends toward fear and negativity. In the social age, each of us has a voice and a responsibility to recast that trend toward possibility and to bend the collective story to positivity. No machine can replace the “soul to the universe.” We tell the machines what matters to us not the other way around.

So do what you do best. Use the moral code of music to lend soul to the social sphere, participate in the issues near and dear to you with the same passion and compassion, and along the way, if you get confused, listen to the music play.

Conspire to smile, folks.

This article originally appears in the July/August issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.