The Hopi For Rain
I wondered this morning how one went about writing rain dance music. Is it the same as writing a love song? Do you think about the key? Are certain rain songs bigger ‘hits’ than others? Is there a ‘top 20 rain songs list’ somewhere? I found a ‘Top 20 Songs About Rain’, but I don’t think it was quite what I was looking for. The first four songs had little to do with weather, and more to do with the effects of depression and politics. I wanted to know who was sitting around last minute scribbling hastily written compositions for a tribal dance in the morning because, damnit, there’s a deadline and this rain dance song isn’t going to write itself!
The Native Americans are often associated with rain dance rituals, though many cultures have festivals and music associated with weather, specifically rain. The Bureau of Indian Affairs went about putting restrictions on the rain dance, along with the ghost dance and the sun dance in an effort to restrict Native American life and keep the people in line. This didn’t stop them from performing this ritual. The enforcing agencies are just as efficient now as they were back then. The way around the restrictions was to simply tell the agency that they were dancing for entertainment instead of prayer. On the one hand, I’m happy that this wasn’t a hard restriction to get around, on the other, I’m face-palming the idiocy of the bureaucratic machine that makes things like this possible. I can just imagine the clueless inspector grilling the representative at the ceremony. “What, this? Rain dance? Oh no, no. This is our version of that new Rihanna song, Umbrella. We like the beat.”
I found some science to this subject, as well. Apparently, there has been a good deal of research into the production of various weather events like rain, hail, and snowfall based on the biological ice nucleators (IN). A study in the 2008 February issue of Science I found indicates that small biological particles like bacteria and proteins are a large part of the process in creating precipitous events, and that this process is critical to the biosphere of the planet. The implication is that rain dances actually work. If you get a large enough crowd together stomping their feet, it’ll kick up enough biological particles into the atmosphere to cause rain. There is no real link to this, but, boy doesn’t it seem like the countless stories across multiple cultures all having some sort of dancing ceremony around rain start to make sense?
Thankfully, we here in the developed world have no time for such nonsense. We paved over all of that annoying biological interference and seeded the atmosphere with good old-fashioned American, all-natural silver nitrate long ago. We won’t be having any of that barbaric storming around and whooping and hollering in this country. Keep that savage stuff to yourself. Not in my backyard, or so the saying goes.
Anyhow, it’s raining today, and I thought maybe someone had started a party somewhere and I wasn’t invited. It seemed to come out of nowhere, so I became suspicious. The rain can be healing and wash away feelings that have welled up inside for many of us. It can offer hope to others, or sometimes even just a change of scenery. Of the topics that modern music offers for rain, the ones that top the list are friendship, abuse, love, suffering pollution, and warfare. Today, I really just wanted to hear a song about rain. This was harder to do than one might think. The vast majority of YouTube videos feature highly produced, “studio quality” versions with exotic reverb and commercialized renditions of this music. I found it distasteful, but I don’t want that to dissuade you if you enjoy that. This was a simple as I could find, and it starts at around 2 minutes in. I hope it fills you with the gratitude for the rain like it did for me. From the Hopi Indians of Colorado: