This manifesto originally appeared on Eventbrite.com, for the announcement of King Dutch’s “Grunge on the Roof” livestream concert on April 22, 2021. Audio from the concert will be released as a live album on Friday, June 26th, 2021. Look for “King Dutch Unplugged: Grunge on the Roof,” on your favorite music platform.
“Stay safe.” It’s become the mantra of 2020-2021, the trite well wishes of an anti-rock-and-roll coronavirus world. Didn’t Aerosmith sing something about “living on the edge”? The world is full of danger. If you want to truly experience it, staying safe is not an option. It might mean you’re alive, but it’s a watered-down, neutered version of life, and who’s really interested in that?
Opposed from safety is experience, which the dictionary tells us is to encounter or undergo, come into contact with, run into, come up against, confront, be forced to contend with, sustain, suffer, endure, to face. “To face.” A bit ironic isn’t it, given we all now hide our faces under bits of cloth, watching passersby with fearful eyes lest they come too close? And if we’re NOT facing the world, what will be left when all this is over? What dangers will creep up when we’re not looking? What will be left? Who will we be?
Jimi Hendrix asked, “have you ever been experienced?” Well, have you?
We are supremely interested in contact, in encounters, in contending with something worth contending with, in facing that which must be faced; in a word, we are interested in experience, and here we must tip our cap to the pandemic because the past year (plus) has been that and then some. Loves have been lost, and new ones gained. Friendships ended, and new ones begun. The world has gone mad, yet we’re feeling clearer than ever.
Join us as we share new music, three years in the making, inspired by our new realities and new horizons. Coronavirus can’t stop us — any of us — if we don’t let it. It can even be an opportunity. We don’t want to sound like the Corporate Overlords intoning about their “Great Reset,” but in fact, this pandemic has given us all a chance to think about who we are and what really matters. Was your life before 2020 satisfactory? Fulfilling? Meaningful? Were you following your dreams, or just barely avoiding being crushed by the boulder of life’s weight and responsibilities? Were you being the best version of yourself, or merely something you had settled on as “good enough”?
If we’re not allowed to look at other people’s faces anymore, maybe this is a good time to face ourselves.
These are songs for us, songs for you, songs for the new, songs for making up time, songs for now, songs not for safety but for contending with the world.
Jump into spring with us as we sing for our lives.
Let’s make our new Kingdom together!
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