Considering that Tupac Shakur is one of the few artists in history (The Notorious B.I.G. is another) whose posthumous discography of original material was actually larger than that during his life, it’s not too surprising that Tupac’s hologram made him a very rare posthumous concert performer at Coachella, given that it was pretty inevitable that someone would want to give Tupac a shadow of life after death, so to speak. Some people just can’t let go.

I was also a bit puzzled by why someone would try to steal vintage guitars from Tom Petty. Stealing musical instruments in general is pretty foolish. There aren’t that many places where you can go to get a good price for musical instruments, and most of them would be able to recognize a classic guitar like that of Tom Petty. That is especially true since Tom Petty released the serial numbers of his guitars and also posted a no-questions-asked reward for whoever returns his guitars. I should have known it that someone would be foolish enough to steal Tom Petty’s mojo, though. Seriously, though, you don’t have to live like a refugee and go swiping other people’s property.

It just so happens that a lot of people are pretty ignorant of how much musical instruments. For most of my life, my viola has been my most valuable physical possession (at least singly–I imagine my whole library of books might be worth slightly more, but probably not much). There is a big caveat to this, and that is that the worth of musical instruments is largely limited to those who are musicians, those interested in musical history (or musical artifacts, like a Stradivarius violin), and those catering to that market. Musical instruments, like works of art, are not something that can be easily converted into acceptable amounts of cash on the black market, as there are only so many places one can go to profit from specific musical instruments, and those places are generally all part of the same legitimate scene, and rather hostile to thieves.

Music in other cultures is pretty unusual. Last week I had the opportunity to watch some Lahu music videos from a producer based out of Burma, and it appeared that all of the Lahu songs I saw, most of them seemingly including the same village and the same singers and the same studio even, were one of two types–singing about some type of depressingly unsuccessful love story, or the beauty of Lahuland. It was odd to see Lahu singing in Thai, Burmese, Chinese, and American accents, all with the same type of dancing, a sort of shuffling circular dance with an often tuneless rhythmic sort of “music” accompanying it. At least the Lahu pop songs are moderately catchy, as remarkable as it is that the Lahu population would be large enough to support an ethnic music industry, including a music video from a former Legacy graduate, whose Facebook page was a fount of information about Lahu musical culture.

As someone who loves watching local music videos and listening to local music, I am struck by the fact that we are all vastly more alike than we are different when it comes to our music. These days, in whatever nation you are in, you can see some sort of rap fusion, whether it’s a half-Arabic, half-English rap from Egypt or a Punjabi rap from India. You can inevitably find some bright and cheery pop song about love, or some melancholy song about rejection or heartache, or some sort of nationalistic music to inspire patriotic feelings. We love, we suffer, we love our people and our homeland, and we want a better life and opportunities for ourselves, while retaining a sense of identity and belonging with our background. It’s a small wonder we can find these same things sung about all over the world, in a babel of tongues, getting the same points across.

I’m the sort of person who cannot easily say the things I feel, and so I have long sought alternative means of expression that allowed me to wrestle with the fundamental ambivalence of my feelings about life. I have found that music has allowed me to speak that which I could not say. It’s one of the main reasons why I write so voluminously, because that which I think and feel is not safe inside my head and inside my heart (not that it’s very safe on a blog read worldwide either). I also find that I can intuitively understand music vastly easier than words, and also muse over the fact that some people (like Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac) choose to disguise deeply melancholy lyrics in cheery music. I ponder such matters deeply, whether as someone who appreciates the art of others, or as someone who creates my own.

In music, just as in any form of communication, there is a great deal of importance in what we reveal and what we conceal. With any sort of performance there is a goal of creating a sense of unity and belonging between the audience and the performer, a sort of communion where deep and sometimes dangerous insights can be communicated intuitively without needing to be explicitly said, so long as there are shared codes of communication between the audience and the performer. Part of the communication is beyond words, but in the textures of the sights and sounds of the art as well, the instruments we use to express our vision and worldview to a candid world. And if we are lucky, our art lives on after we are gone from this world, to be appreciated and inspirational to generation after generation. For while we are mortal souls that die, if we live meaningful lives we survive in the memory of those who love us long after we no longer haunt this earth and long after our poor tongues are silent.