Why Music Matters (David Hesmondhalgh)

A few years ago I was in Thailand to give a talk at a conference in Bangkok on the "post-Zionist performance of Israeliness" among Israeli psytrancers in Thailand. I had the pleasure of meeting Robert A. Leonard, an American professor of forensic linguistics, who turned out to be an old friend of my doctoral advisor as well as a founding member and bassist of Sha Na Na, the rock and roll doo-wop group who (wearing satin gold sweat suits) opened for Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. When I asked Leonard "how does it feel when you're making history?", he responded that when people "make history", they are usually too busy doing it to fully notice the magnitude of what they are achieving. Afterwards, what one recalls often overlaps and gets filtered through the authorized account of the event. This notion came to mind after reading Goa: 20 Years of Psychedelic Trance. This coffee table book, elegantly published and stylishly edited, ventures to capture and convey the romance and excitement that accompanied the expansions of Goa psytrance music and culture in the past few decades

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