Minor Key

One of the magnificent things about the Gaelic culture, besides being considerably older than the Greeks who called them Foreign (Keltoi means Not Greek), is the invention of 7 key music. The most advanced at that point was 5 key, and the Asians only had 3, which explains a lot. The Gaelic culture was seagoing, and their language was spoken by tradesmen at ports around the Med and up to the Baltic and along the North Sea, well before the Viking raiders. Those extra keys are the minor ones, which makes for much more complicated music than your glam rock can offer. That means more complex emotions, and deeper thoughts. So the Gaels were thinking deeper thousands of years before the Greeks started building things out of marble and insisting their logic was the right way to go about things. Logic is valuable and still isn't widely practiced by the heathens in the Middle East, for example (who should be concerned about water but instead kill over gods nobody really believes in because its a handy excuse to murder people and that's what middle easterners REALLY like: murder). So minor keys are important to culture, and explains a lot why the Gaels (aka Celts) kept living in a frequently harsh environment like the British Isles, and why their primary export remains music.

Here's Journey's popular chant "Don't Stop Believing" which was a stadium-level power ballad in the 1980s.

And here's a few more. See how it shifts from pride to contemplation just be changing to a different key?

See? Its really sad that the Middle East has offered nothing to culture since formulating a better alphabet and basic algebraic math. And that was over 1000 years ago. What since? Murder. Lots of murder. We had to show them how to build dams, and then actually do the building. They're too busy killing each other. And not very good at it, considering they haven't yet finished. We've got music and art, and they've got bloodletting and people who explode. How can anyone worship a god of bloodletting and murder but isn't good enough to finish the job? Even the Mayans managed that. The Incan's too. The Aztec needed help to finish, but they were quite close, and if Coronado hadn't shown up there probably wouldn't be a Mexico, just a lot of creepy stone monuments that attract flies. They invented Zero, allegedly (but wouldn't the Arabs have invented zero to do algebra?), but the Mayans still got laid low by the same kind of drought we're having in California, when their wells dropped too low to water their crops. The surviving Mexicans, after the Aztecs and Coronado etc were so glad to have music, with all the scales and keys, they seized on tubas and accordions and are still copying Gaelic songs, putting Spanish words to them, and pretending its original. Listen to a Spanish language station and you'll hear an 80's tune with different words. Its astonishing.

 

Most of those 80's tunes are based on ancient, multi-thousand year old, ballads from the Gaelic peoples of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England before the invaders slaughtered everyone who could carry a tune in a bucket. The Mexicans think they know about suffering, but the Gaels and Picts and bronze and stone age peoples were hit by repeated invasions before and after the north sea flooded. The Vikings are just one of the more recent, as were the Normans, and the Saxons before them. A series of invaders, raping and pillaging for a few hundred years each. Living near the east coast of Britain was asking for it. Surviving all that, then conquering the world does cause an excess of pride. Pity the British Empire was too arrogant to deal fairly and hold onto it. Now all we have is the language and music, and a lot of history, and not nearly enough understanding of what it really means. The songs sound sad, but we aren't sure why. I think this is the answer.

 

God doth hate the Irish.

He maketh them all mad.

For all their wars are merry.

And all their songs are sad.