I was going to write about churches that have been revamped because I like the idea of a secular community meeting area. I’ve always liked the idea of spending Sundays afternoons sitting in a place with inspiring architecture with people from the neighbourhood, listening to an invited speaker (a la Ted) and sipping on a beer or a glass of wine. Sounds nice? But then I thought it would be a boring post. Just check out the churches (h/t: Spacing Montreal).

Then I tried working on a post I’ve been working on for a while about how, although some alternative medicine can be helpful, most of it is a crock. But the topic is so big and complex and I want to get it right so I find it daunting and, therefore, hard to work on. So I left it for another day.

Then I found this at Starts With a Bang:

Dr. Dre: Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. (from an interview with Vibe).

That is definitely cooler than reimagining churches or potentially lethal alternative cures. This idea has Dre walking in some pretty big shoes. In the early 20th century, British composer Holst wrote a seven part suite about the planets (seven because he didn’t include earth and Pluto hadn’t been invented yet) where, according to Wikipedia, “each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and its corresponding astrological character as defined by Holst.” But the idea is even older than that; the ancient Greeks believed that the motion of the planets was a kind of non-audible music. Even Johannes Kepler, one of the great minds behind the scientific revolution, found musical harmonics in the motions of the planets. According to Kepler, the Earth’s orbit sang E-F-E. More recently, you can poke around youtube and find videos of the what the radiation planets like Saturn and Jupiter would sound like if it was audible.

Somehow, I think that Dr. Dre will not disappoint.