That was awesome! Yes, I would like to know more. And I'd like to hear more, too!
Roughly 10-12 years ago I listened to Bill Moyers talking at a talk show. To be honest, it was Bill Maher. He already did the real Time, but he did an interview with Mr. Moyers, I seem to remember it was around 50-60 minutes.
This was when I first heard the idea of coining new metaphors for new political moments from Mr. Moyers. This really caught my imagination. Since my main field is linguistics, it involved me in this possibility, a prospect of coming up with ways to make certain political and cultural processes transparent to wider audience. To many of those, as Mr. Zinn would say, with out a voice. All those left out by the hoch political jargon.
It coincided with my other readings and thoughts for example Wittgenstein's idea of limits of worldview and language being in the same place, or Susan Sontag's (IIRC) idea of the need of new language in order to comprehend some traumas that are on a considerably larger scale than those known from before.
It rang true to me since I saw many of my fellow men sort of trapped in some thought loops. They seemed to be aware of what's bothering them in politics, but expressing it and wording it became ever so difficult with time.
I decided to start writing for a political forum. My main objective was to see how people react to proposed solutions and ways of thinking that collide with their worldview. When I'd notice someone strongly opposing a proposition that clearly brings his objective home, so to speak, I'd start corresponding with that individual. I was trying to understand how he became trapped in his position and is there something I could say/write to make him let go of this pattern and consider what I'm proposing. Topics were various; day to day politics, taxes, identity, energy, history, our last war and so on. Topics were not important to me, but were obviously very important to them. I, on the other hand, tried to see the way they react.
I spent doing this for 6 years and I accumulated a large body of work. A mountain of ideas and ways of presenting problems and solutions. However, I was nowhere nearly finished. Now I needed to distill this entire mountain, to compress it, to sublime it, to contract it as much as possible and to give them a shape that is easy to understand and easy to remember.
I gave much thought on how to find this shape, this form that would convey ideas and make them readily available to many (since I don't have the money or the means to use television or mainstream media) and I remembered that during the age of enlightenment, authors used verses and rhymes to make new knowledge easy to remember. So I opted for a pop song.
And this is the true reason why it's simple in form.
A lot more time went into it, one post can't describe all I did for all those years, but I have to make it shorter.
Now, I don't play any instrument. I don't know how. But I have friends that do. They even asked me if I had any ideas for any songs we might make together. I felt as if this was a sign from heaven (not really, I'm an atheist), I really thought it was meant to be. But there was a cold shower as my friends couldn't really believe any of this has any chance of working and they said they are not the ones to make the song.
I was heart broken. I just threw it all in garbage. I simply suppressed any memory of it and couldn't look back. But my girlfriend saved it.
Few years after that, my brother remembered all those big plans and my evenings spent with my friends endlessly explaining every detail of how I come up with all the specifics, he asked me what was all that about and if I'd care to tell him. He was left out at first since he always claimed he'd never do political songs, he dreaded them so I never asked him. But when he heard about all that went into it, he flipped, he wanted to tell all my friends to go truck themselves.
He just couldn't believe it was going to go to waste.
He then offered to make my song for me and the deal was that I'll sing it to him and describe it him and he'll try to play it and I am to tell him whenever he strays from my concept and we'll try to give its final form.
And that's how it came to be. I do feel a bit old now for these things, a lot of time has passed, but I did it anyway for safekeeping.