Even something like that, just the sun setting behind a hill, that’s something you never see in the city.
The Western side of the DF-to-Queretaro highway fell in perfect gradient from a light blue overhead into a deep magenta, and then ended abruptly with the busty silhouette of the rolling hills of Mexico’s central valley, covered with billboards shaped like oversized credit cards and firestone tires.
As we drove northwest in our rented PT Cruiser (PT = pimp training), it was as if we were pulling a blanket of dusk over each passing pueblo, all at 140 KM an hour.
Revaz’s observation – so simple, so true – were the first words muttered by any of us since we left the spiderweb of Mexico City’s highways, bi-ways, and one-ways. We didn’t need words. We were communicating with music, the language which, after all, brought us all together in the first place and has kept us together ever since.
This was day one of the G5 Mexico Summit. Over the next five days we would come to also realize and acknowledge the differences that stand between us: our motivations, when and why our moods fluctuate, differing viewpoints, temperaments, arguments, and embarrassments.
But no matter what lies ahead, of this I can be sure: we roll down the windows, we plug in the iPods, and the beat starts, hypnotic, arresting, entrancing. The same beat we danced to in Africa, the same beat we carried with us across the Sahara, across the Red Sea, across Asia Minor, across the Bosphorous, the same beat that humans have always carried – and will always carry – deep inside. We nod our heads, we drum on the steering wheel, we rap along. Life is good. And we are here to enjoy it together.
[podcast]http://a25.video2.blip.tv/2750001107329/Oso-G5SummitMexicoPodcast972.mp3[/podcast]
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The format of this year’s G5 podcast is a little different from past ones. The first four minutes are all soundscape from Mexico City and Guanajuato. (10 layered tracks of audio, but most is lost after the mp3 compression.) Then you’ve got nine or ten songs from the hundreds and hundreds that we played on the roadtrip. Enjoy!
If that was representative of your soundtrack, it must have been a great drive. I’m at Blackstar – Definition, and I’m sure it will keep my head bobbing for the remainder of the podcast.
Buena música 🙂
I’m still working my way through this podcast, enjoying the layering here–roads as webs, embedded with conversations that will be remembered differently and invoked later in ways only the G5 will understand.
That’s very beautiful, David, hope to hear more about how music brought the group together, particularly as it continues to work as a currency of sorts–by which I mean an ongoing investment–between all of you, doesn’t it?
no manches, guey. we were in a pt cruiser, too! this is getting creepy . . .