Music permits us to glimpse the springs of desire in a moment and movement of excess that Nietzsche calls the Dionysian. But direct contact with the Dionysian springs of desire would destroy us, suffocate us and consciousness would evaporate like a puddle of water in the midday desert sun. The Dionysian is deathly. Music therefore both opens consciousness to the movement of unconscious desire and saves us from direct contact with the flames of that desire. Music warms us, it heats us with its intensity, but it should not burn. Desire is sounded in music, like a ship sounding the sea for submarines, like the vibration of a guitar's sound-box after the chord has faded. How does music do this? I do not know. Maybe through rhythm: the resounding, pounding throb of drum and bass, breaking through the floorboards in the house of being finding out where the nasty smell is coming from and where the bodies are buried. Had Nietzsche had the good fortune to live to hear James Brown and the JB's invention of funk in the 1969 classic 'Cold Sweat', rather than the 19th Century heavy metal of Wagner or the empty sub-Latinate prick-teasing of Bizet's Carmen, I think he might have been forced to agree. I dream of seeing Nietzsche getting down in the Apollo Theatre in Harlem on one of those enormous nights in the 1960's when James Brown was screaming his divine heresies over the sliding, percolating bass of Bootsy Collins. Like the man says, without music life would be an error. It is better to live without error, so listen up.