No one’s going to take me alive
Time has come to make things right
You and I must fight for our rights
You and I must fight to survive

My grandson Ryan is 13. He’s a great kid. Great son and grandson. Great brother. Great student. Great musician. Ryan plays guitar, drums, piano and just about anything else you put in front of him.

He loves music.

Not so much the kind of music I enjoy. You know, ’60’s and ’70’s stuff – and a little Country – and hymns – and did I mention ’60’s and ’70’s stuff? Ryan prefers music with a harder edge, like what you hear from Eddie Van Halen and – more recently – the English alternative band Muse. Last night, Ryan and his dad went to a Muse concert in Boston.

They loved it.

So I figured I’d better get to know what all the fuss is about so I can be a cool granddad and be able to talk music with my buddy.

Although the songs of Muse – like Knights of Cydonia in the YouTube clip here – at first sound to an old geezer like me like a lot of asynchronous loud noise echoing inside a garbage can, it’s actually quite sophisticated music and packed with meaning. And it clearly gets into the soul of the packed audiences Muse plays to around the world.

But what impresses me most about the music of Muse is what I discovered about Knights of Cydonia.

The song starts with an invitation to ride back through the “veins of history” to a place called Cydonia. Cydonia is a famous area on Mars that looks like a human face. Sci-fi fans like to imagine there was once human life there but it was destroyed by corrupt leaders. The lyrics ask:

And how can we win,
When fools can be kings
Don’t waste your time
Or time will waste you

It’s a fictional retrospective on what’s wrong with the world because of the misdeeds of the rich and powerful. And then it calls upon us (the people) to rise up and fight for freedom and all that is good:

No one’s going to take me alive
Time has come to make things right
You and I must fight for our rights
You and I must fight to survive

Did I mention how much I love ’60’s and ’70’s music?

Well what IS ’60’s music if not that very same cry to rise up and create change – to take back the power that rightly belongs to the people and not to the powerful? This is Barry McGuire and “The Eve of Destruction” and Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’Changin'” all rolled into one! This is Joan Baez, Pete Seger, John Lennon, and Country Joe and the Fish protesting the Vietnam War. This is the Civil Rights  Movement, “We Shall Overcome”, and even Woodstock.

In other words, this is “us” – “us” meaning those of us who grabbed hold of the music of our generation that created a massive freedom movement against the corrupt powers-that-be. And it was music  the older generation thought was awful and couldn’t understand.

And here’s a fun fact: If you listen closely to the Knights of Cydonia track you’ll hear a little run that sounds an awful lot like the 1962 instrumental Telstar. That’s because Matt Bellamy, the song’s composer, is the son of George Bellamy who recorded the original version of Telstar with the Tornados.

Talk about connecting the past and the present!

So I like the music of Muse and look forward to talking about it with Ryan. I’m sure he’ll want to play it for me.

I’ll be sure to bring earplugs.

And wear a tie dye tee-shirt with a big peace sign across the chest.