I’ve got this photo on my wall of a Big Jay McNeely performance from 1951. Big Jay is this sweaty black guy laying on his back, clearly under the trance of the devil’s cabbage, playing the ever loving FUCK out of this saxophone, and all these young white kids standing around him watching it are losing their fucking minds. I love the picture; because it perfectly captures this pure, extreme bliss these people are experiencing while Big Jay lays it down, and it captures a performer that’s clearly deep in the zone.

They look like they were in ecstasy. You could tell that this was one of those performances where the crowd, the artist and the music all just synched up perfectly – that rare burst of wonder and magic when you see a truly inspired performance. A really amazing performance like that isn’t just “entertaining,” it can change our expectations of human potential and lets us all know that unseen heights of connection are possible. It lets us know there are things in life that are really fucking cool and that these things that people create can actually make life more enjoyable.

It doesn’t have to be a song, it could be an athletic performance, or it could be a painting, or even the written word crafted so perfectly that it sneaks into your perceptions and rewires your imagination.
You can call it the zone, you can call it Zen, you can call it brilliance, but however you describe the particular expression – whatever the fuck you want to call it -
there’s something unmistakably satisfying about seeing a fellow human hit some rare air.

There’s a special strain of bliss that pumps through the cerebral passageways when you know you’re in the presence of the purest expression. When a person has tapped into that frequency where their whole being has tuned in, and they’re awash in a mad dance between selflessness and ego, directed by a radiant consciousness and opened up wide in front of a multitude of strangers who came there with hopes of seeing just that very thing. With the fuel of their awe, and the energy of their appreciation it bursts to even greater heights, and if it’s captured on TV it’s a motherfucking historical moment.
It doesn’t happen all that often, and sometimes you can go years without seeing someone really nail it, but when it happens again it will be all worth the wait.
Every now and then someone steps up in front of the world and really fucking smashes it, and it makes sitting through every other uninspired performance by every wannabe, bullshit artist, and mediocre hack more than worth your time. Every now and then human beings are exposed to a new benchmark.

I search for that shit. It’s a precious inspirational fuel for me. I love it when I see it, and in all my years on this planet searching for it, very few people have ever grabbed it, held it down, fucked it, lit it on fire, and blew up the fucking solar system with it like Pink did at this years Grammy awards.
Her performance was like Jimi Hendrix doing the star spangled banner while Michael Jackson moon walked and Susan Boyle sang back up.
The shit was fucking EPIC.
I was floored.
I watched it 5 times in a row on youtube.
Even with the shitty, grainy, pixilated youtube footage and compressed sound coming out of computer speakers it was fucking stunning.

I don’t even want to see it in High Definition on a big screen TV, because I’m afraid I might watch it and then jump out a fucking window.
I’m not worthy.

Click here to view the embedded video.
View full post on The Joe Rogan Podcast