There is a student in my lyric class from China. I think he has shadowed Don Kerr for many years. He has Don’s expressions and demeanor down pat though he is four inches shorter and I bet he doesn’t play drums. In a recent class he shared a lyric that changed his life. That’s the assignment everyone is supposed to do at least once. His was by a Chinese artist who was in China’s first rock band named Cui Jian. First he gave his classmates background on the cultural revolution, to put the song into context. He explained a lot about murder and parents and children who turned on each other, how one million suicides transpired over those years and how he came to Canada hoping to experience more freedom, an issue that long occupied his mind. He explained his obsession to explore/ find the differences between happiness and freedom. English is not his first language and parts of his explanation were hard to follow but I’m a sucker for the supernatural. This was totally my old friend Don Kerr in someone else’s body.

Near the end he added one other idea, the superiority of artists. He said there are cultures which just want citizens to be machine parts but artists are people who can really achieve independent thought instead of being a cog in a wheel. For a couple seconds I thought about the space I aim for when improvising and how it does have something to do with independence but I don’t think it is realistic to equate artists in that light or to put it another way I suspect plumbers, baristas and telemarketers can know just as much about altered states of consciousness. Very soon I sort of ruined everything by saying I guess then Taylor Swift must be a great independent thinker. All you could hear after was the groan of recognition, the groan heard around the campus, and then he smiled a very precise Don Kerr smile.