35 Comments

1. 

   Costin A.

   24 May 2011

   Bob Dylan – Neighborhood Bully (Bob Dylan defending Israel)
   
   Vezi mai multe video din muzica
   

   Infidels (Columbia Records, 1983)

   Neighborhood Bully

   
   
   Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man,
   His enemies say he’s on their land.
   They got him outnumbered about a million to one,
   He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.
   
   The neighborhood bully just lives to survive,
   He’s criticized and condemned for being alive.
   He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin,
   He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
   He’s wandered the earth an exiled man.
   Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
   He’s always on trial for just being born.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
   Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
   Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
   The bombs were meant for him.
   He was supposed to feel bad.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
   That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him,
   ‘Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
   And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   He got no allies to really speak of.
   What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love.
   He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied
   But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
   They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
   Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
   To hurt one they would weep.
   They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone,
   Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.
   He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand,
   In bed with nobody, under no one’s command.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   Now his holiest books have been trampled upon,
   No contract he signed was worth what it was written on.
   He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth,
   Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   What’s anybody indebted to him for?
   Nothin’, they say.
   He just likes to cause war.
   Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed,
   They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed.
   He’s the neighborhood bully.

   What has he done to wear so many scars?
   Does he change the course of rivers?
   Does he pollute the moon and stars?
   Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill,
   Running out the clock, time standing still,
   Neighborhood bully.

   ramine actual.
   http://inliniedreapta.net/bob-…..ood-bully/

   Reply

2. 

   emil b.

   24 May 2011

   Liviu, multumiri pentru traducere. A fost odata…

   Bob Dylan – „The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964” from Columbia Records on Vimeo.

   Reply

3. 

   Liv St Omer

   24 May 2011

   Nu o scriu ca sa starnesc scandal, dar exista o parere destul de raspandita, in special printre cei din generatia lui emil, cum ca „muzica pop-rock e un curent care nu se indreapta nicaieri”, ca multe sunt „experimente ratate”, ca sunt „produse de masa a si/sau anti-culturale”, etc (vezi:
   http://traianungureanu-tru.blo…..-over.html
   ). Ce parere aveti? Pentru ca, daca TRU+etc au dreptate, ar insemna ca ne pierdem timpul ascultand genul acesta de muzica (parerea mea cred ca se subintelege-NU au dreptate). Daca nu au dreptate, atunci nu consider inutil sa spunem asta, „nu au dreptate”, si sa aratam unde si cum gresesc.
   Nu cred ca e chiar off-topic-cand a inceput, Dylan canta pop-rock, cele doua curente nu se despartisera inca-eu cel putin asa stiu.

   Reply

4. 

   Costin A.

   24 May 2011

   Alexandru Andrieş despre Bob Dylan

   Alexandru Andries: Nu m-as fi gindit niciodata ca o sa ajung sa fac muzica si sa scot discuri, si cei care sint de “vina” sint The Beatles si Dylan. Au aparut in peisajul meu muzical cam in aceeasi perioada, 1963-1964. Beatles si Dylan, foarte importanti pentru tot ce inseamna azi muzica, aduceau atunci o libertate cu totul speciala – Beatles-ii aveau o explozie absolut incredibila de ingeniozitate in muzica in special, si in felul total neconventional in care isi compuneau cintecele, dar stateau evident mult mai slab la texte, fata de Dylan, care aducea o libertate cu totul speiala in poezia, in cuvintele cintecelor sale.

   Puteti asculta interviul aici

   Alexandru Andries- Clipa mea
   
   

   Ii ascult si pe Dylan si pe Andries, si ambii, la fel ca Tom Waits, sint inepuizabili, dar parca Andries ii intrece ????

   Reply

5. 

   Costin A.

   24 May 2011

   Liv, TRU se refera in articolul de care pomenesti in primul rind la Michael Jackson, din cite am vazut, si nu la rock in general.

   O parere similara cu ce spui tu avea Allan Bloom, autorul The Closing of the American Mind, in care dedica un capitol intreg muzicii rock:

   Music 69
   wait for one unpredictable genius. Now there are many geniuses, producing
   all the time, two new ones rising to take the place of every fallen hero.
   There is no dearth of the new and the startling.
   The power of music in the soul—described to Jessica marvelously by
   Lorenzo in the Merchant of Venice—has been recovered after a long
   period of desuetude. And it is rock music alone that has effected this
   restoration. Classical music is dead among the young. This assertion will,
   I know, be hotly disputed by many who, unwilling to admit tidal changes,
   can point to the proliferation on campuses of classes in classical music
   appreciation and practice, as well as performance groups of all kinds.
   Their presence is undeniable, but they involve not more than 5 to 10
   percent of the students. Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek
   language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal
   communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most
   middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the
   home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good
   for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association
   with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part
   of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their
   lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction
   between educated and uneducated in America. Many, or even most, of
   the young people of that generation also swung with Benny Goodman,
   but with an element of self-consciousness—to be hip, to prove they
   weren’t snobs, to show solidarity with the democratic ideal of a pop
   culture out of which would grow a new high culture. So there remained
   a class distinction between high and low, although private taste was
   beginning to create doubts about whether one really liked the high very
   much. But all that has changed. Rock music is as unquestioned and
   unproblematic as the air the students breathe, and very few have any
   acquaintance at all with classical music. This is a constant surprise to me.
   And one of the strange aspects of my relations with good students I come
   to know well is that I frequently introduce them to Mozart. This is a
   pleasure for me, inasmuch as it is always pleasant to give people gifts that
   please them. It is interesting to see whether and in what ways their studies
   are complemented by such music. But this is something utterly new to
   me as a teacher; formerly my students usually knew much more classical
   music than I did.

   Music was not all that important for the generation of students
   yo THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
   preceding the current one. The romanticism that had dominated serious
   music since Beethoven appealed to refinements—perhaps overrefinements—
   of sentiments that are hardly to be found in the contemporary
   world. The lives people lead or wish to lead and their prevailing passions
   are of a different sort than those of the highly educated German and
   French bourgeoisie, who were avidly reading Rousseau and Baudelaire,
   Goethe and Heine, for their spiritual satisfaction. The music that had
   been designed to produce, as well as to please, such exquisite sensibilities
   had a very tenuous relation to American lives of any kind. So romantic
   musical culture in America had had for a long time the character of a
   veneer, as easily susceptible to ridicule as were Margaret Dumont’s displays
   of coquettish chasteness, so aptly exploited by Groucho Marx in A
   Night At The Opera. I noticed this when I first started teaching and lived
   in a house for gifted students. The „good” ones studied their physics and
   then listened to classical music. The students who did not fit so easily into
   the groove, some of them just vulgar and restive under the cultural
   tyranny, but some of them also serious, were looking for things that really
   responded to their needs. Almost always they responded to the beat of the
   newly emerging rock music. They were a bit ashamed of their taste, for
   it was not respectable. But 1 instinctively sided with this second group,
   with real, if coarse, feelings as opposed to artificial and dead ones. Then
   their musical sans-culotteism won the revolution and reigns unabashed
   today. No classical music has been produced that can speak to this generation.
   Symptomatic of this change is how seriously students now take the
   famous passages on musical education in Plato’s Republic. In the past,
   students, good liberals that they always are, were indignant at the censorship
   of poetry, as a threat to free inquiry. But they were really thinking
   of science and politics. They hardly paid attention to the discussion of
   music itself and, to the extent that they even thought about it, were really
   puzzled by Plato’s devoting time to rhythm and melody in a serious
   treatise on political philosophy. Their experience of music was as an
   entertainment, a matter of indifference to political and moral life. Students
   today, on the contrary, know exactly why Plato takes music so
   seriously. They know it affects life very profoundly and are indignant
   because Plato seems to want to rob them of their most intimate pleasure.
   They are drawn into argument with Plato about the experience of music,
   Music 7i
   and the dispute centers on how to evaluate it and deal with it. This
   encounter not only helps to illuminate the phenomenon of contemporary
   music, but also provides a model of how contemporary students can
   profitably engage with a classic text. The very fact of their fury shows how
   much Plato threatens what is dear and intimate to them. They are little
   able to defend their experience, which had seemed unquestionable until
   questioned, and it is most resistant to cool analysis. Yet if a student can
   —and this is most difficult and unusual—draw back, get a critical distance
   on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves,
   he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic
   conversion. Indignation is the soul’s defense against the wound of doubt
   about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause.
   It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it
   is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more
   philosophic than the study of mathematics. It is Plato’s teaching that
   music, by its nature, encompasses all that is today most resistent to
   philosophy. So it may well be that through the thicket of our greatest
   corruption runs the path to awareness of the oldest truths.
   Plato’s teaching about music is, put simply, that rhythm and melody,
   accompanied by dance, are the barbarous expression of the soul. Barbarous,
   not animal. Music is the medium of the human soul in its most
   ecstatic condition of wonder and terror. Nietzsche, who in large measure
   agrees with Plato’s analysis, says in The Birth of Tragedy (not to be
   forgotten is the rest of the title, Out of the Spirit of Music) that a mixture
   of cruelty and coarse sensuality characterized this state, which of course
   was religious, in the service of gods. Music is the soul’s primitive and
   primary speech and it is alogon, without articulate speech or reason. It
   is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason. Even when articulate
   speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music
   and the passions it expresses.
   Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the taming or
   domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising
   them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and
   informing them as art. The goal of harmonizing the enthusiastic part of
   the soul with what develops later, the rational part, is perhaps impossible
   to attain. But without it, man can never be whole. Music, or poetry, which
   is what music becomes as reason emerges, always involves a delicate
   72 THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
   balance between passion and reason, and, even in its highest and most
   developed forms—religious, warlike and erotic—that balance is always
   tipped, if ever so slightly, toward the passionate. Music, as everyone
   experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure
   for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching
   band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer
   by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is earned away and
   his conscience stilled by the romantic guitar. Armed with music, man can
   damn rational doubt. Out of the music emerge the gods that suit it, and
   they educate men by their example and their commandments.
   Plato’s Socrates disciplines the ecstasies and thereby provides little
   consolation or hope to men. According to the Socratic formula, the lyrics
   —speech and, hence, reason—must determine the music—harmony and
   rhythm. Pure music can never endure this constraint. Students are not in
   a position to know the pleasures of reason; they can only see it as a
   disciplinary and repressive parent. But they do see, in the case of Plato,
   that that parent has figured out what they are up to. Plato teaches that,
   in order to take the spiritual temperature of an individual or a society, one
   must „mark the music.” To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is
   a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory
   forces in the soul—to make them serve a higher purpose, an ideal,
   to give man’s duties a fullness. Bach’s religious intentions and Beethoven’s
   revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples. Such cultivation
   of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating
   them and giving them an artistic unity. A man whose noblest activities
   are accompanied by a music that expresses them while providing a pleasure
   extending from the lowest bodily to the highest spiritual, is whole, and
   there is no tension in him between the pleasant and the good. By contrast
   a man whose business life is prosaic and unmusical and whose leisure is
   made up of coarse, intense entertainments, is divided, and each side of
   his existence is undermined by the other.
   Hence, for those who are interested in psychological health, music
   is at the center of education, both for giving the passions their due and
   for preparing the soul for the unhampered use of reason. The centrality
   of such education was recognized by all the ancient educators. It is hardly
   noticed today that in Aristotle’s Politics the most important passages
   about the best regime concern musical education, or that the Poetics is
   Music 73
   an appendix to the Politics. Classical philosophy did not censor the
   singers. It persuaded them. And it gave them a goal, one that was understood
   by them, until only yesterday. But those who do not notice the role
   of music in Aristotle and despise it in Plato went to school with Hobbes,
   Locke and Smith, where such considerations have become unnecessary.
   The triumphant Enlightenment rationalism thought that it had discovered
   other ways to deal with the irrational part of the soul, and that reason
   needed less support from it. Only in those great critics of Enlightenment
   and rationalism, Rousseau and Nietzsche, does music return, and they
   were the most musical of philosophers. Both thought that the passions—
   and along with them their ministerial arts—had become thin under the
   rule of reason and that, therefore, man himself and what he sees in the
   world have become correspondingly thin. They wanted to cultivate the
   enthusiastic states of the soul and to re-experience the Corybantic possession
   deemed a pathology by Plato. Nietzsche, particularly, sought to tap
   again the irrational sources of vitality, to replenish our dried-up stream
   from barbaric sources, and thus encouraged the Dionysian and the music
   derivative from it.
   This is the significance of rock music. I do not suggest that it has
   any high intellectual sources. But it has risen to its current heights in the
   education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere
   in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the
   rawest passions. Modern-day rationalists, such as economists, are indifferent
   to it and what it represents. The irrationalists are all for it. There is
   no need to fear that „the blond beasts” are going to come forth from the
   bland souls of our adolescents. But rock music has one appeal only, a
   barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not ems, but sexual desire
   undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children’s
   emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them
   and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended
   in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives
   children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment
   industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had
   to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
   Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That
   is why Ravel’s Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly
   known and liked by them. In alliance with some real art and a lot of
   74 THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
   pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state
   of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material
   for voracious appetites. Never was there an art form directed so exclusively
   to children.
   Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music,
   the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and
   fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. The words implicitly
   and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them
   as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet
   have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much
   more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no
   need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves.
   Voyeurism is for old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All
   they need is encouragement.
   The inevitable corollary of such sexual interest is rebellion against the
   parental authority that represses it. Selfishness thus becomes indignation
   and then transforms itself into morality. The sexual revolution must
   overthrow all the forces of domination, the enemies of nature and happiness.
   From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform. A worldview
   is balanced on the sexual fulcrum. What were once unconscious or halfconscious
   childish resentments become the new Scripture. And then
   comes the longing for the classless, prejudice-free, conflictless, universal
   society that necessarily results from liberated consciousness—”We Are
   the World,” a pubescent version of Alle Menschen werden Bruder, the
   fulfillment of which has been inhibited by the political equivalents of
   Mom and Dad. These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a
   smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue
   in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. A glance at the videos
   that project images on the wall of Plato’s cave since MTV took it over
   suffices to prove this. Hitler’s image recurs frequently enough in exciting
   contexts to give one pause. Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate,
   tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux. There is room
   only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville
   warned us would be the character of democratic art, combined with a
   pervasiveness, importance and content beyond Tocqueville’s wildest
   imagination.
   Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family
   Music 75
   home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones
   or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the
   alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the
   blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most
   productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the
   secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike
   electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does
   progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic
   rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of
   onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and
   wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life
   is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.
   This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some
   would prefer to regard it as such. The continuing exposure to rock music
   is a reality, not one confined to a particular class or type of child. One need
   only ask first-year university students what music they listen to, how much
   of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon
   is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and
   continues through the college years. It is the youth culture and, as 1 have
   so often insisted, there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the
   spirit. Some of this culture’s power comes from the fact that it is so loud.
   It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be
   without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friendship
   and the only true common ground. With rock, illusions of shared
   feelings, bodily contact and grunted formulas, which are supposed to
   contain so much meaning beyond speech, are the basis of association.
   None of this contradicts going about the business of life, attending classes
   and doing the assignments for them. But the meaningful inner life is with
   the music.
   This phenomenon is both astounding and indigestible, and is hardly
   noticed, routine and habitual. But it is of historic proportions that a
   society’s best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People
   of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible
   as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and
   gladiatorial combats. It may well be that a society’s greatest madness
   seems normal to itself. The child I described has parents who have sac76
   THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
   rificed to provide him with a good life and who have a great stake in his
   future happiness. They cannot believe that the musical vocation will
   contribute very much to that happiness. But there is nothing they can do
   about it. The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music,
   and they cannot possibly forbid their children to listen to it. It is everywhere;
   all children listen to it; forbidding it would simply cause them to
   lose their children’s affection and obedience. When they turn on the
   television, they will see President Reagan warmly grasping the daintily
   proffered gloved hand of Michael Jackson and praising him enthusiastically.
   Better to set the faculty of denial in motion—avoid noticing what
   the words say, assume the kid will get over it. If he has early sex, that won’t
   get in the way of his having stable relationships later. His drug use will
   certainly stop at pot. School is providing real values. And popular historicism
   provides the final salvation: there are new life-styles for new situations,
   and the older generation is there not to impose its values but to help
   the younger one to find its own. TV, which compared to music plays a
   comparatively small role in the formation of young people’s character and
   taste, is a consensus monster—the Right monitors its content for sex, the
   Left for violence, and many other interested sects for many other things.
   But the music has hardly been touched, and what efforts have been made
   are both ineffectual and misguided about the nature and extent of the
   problem.
   The result is nothing less than parents’ loss of control over their
   children’s moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned
   with it. This has been achieved by an alliance between the strange
   young males who have the gift of divining the mob’s emergent wishes—
   our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates’ rhetorical adversary—and the
   record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of
   rock. They discovered a few years back that children are one of the few
   groups in the country with considerable disposable income, in the form
   of allowances. Their parents spend all they have providing for the kids.
   Appealing to them over their parents’ heads, creating a world of delight
   for them, constitutes one of the richest markets in the postwar world. The
   rock business is perfect capitalism, supplying to demand and helping to
   create it. It has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking, but it was so totally
   new and unexpected that nobody thought to control it, and now it is too
   late. Progress may be made against cigarette smoking because our absence
   Music 77
   of standards or our relativism does not extend to matters of bodily health.
   In all other things the market determines the value. (Yoko Ono is among
   America’s small group of billionaires, along with oil and computer magnates,
   her late husband having produced and sold a commodity of worth
   comparable to theirs.) Rock is very big business, bigger than the movies,
   bigger than professional sports, bigger than television, and this accounts
   for much of the respectability of the music business. It is difficult to adjust
   our vision to the changes in the economy and to see what is really
   important. McDonald’s now has more employees than U.S. Steel, and
   likewise the purveyors of junk food for the soul have supplanted what still
   seem to be more basic callings.
   This change has been happening for some time. In the late fifties,
   De Gaulle gave Brigitte Bardot one of France’s highest honors. I could
   not understand this, but it turned out that she, along with Peugeot, was
   France’s biggest export item. As Western nations became more prosperous,
   leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the
   pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary
   concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure,
   as well as men’s taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure
   became entertainment. The end for which they had labored for so long
   has turned out to be amusement, a justified conclusion if the means justify
   the ends. The music business is peculiar only in that it caters almost
   exclusively to children, treating legally and naturally imperfect human
   beings as though they were ready to enjoy the final or complete satisfaction.
   It perhaps thus reveals the nature of all our entertainment and our
   loss of a clear view of what adulthood or maturity is, and our incapacity
   to conceive ends. The emptiness of values results in the acceptance of the
   natural facts as the ends. In this case infantile sexuality is the end, and
   I suspect that, in the absence of other ends, many adults have come to
   agree that it is.
   It is interesting to note that the Left, which prides itself on its critical
   approach to „late capitalism” and is unrelenting and unsparing in its
   analysis of our other cultural phenomena, has in general given rock music
   a free ride. Abstracting from the capitalist element in which it flourishes,
   they regard it as a people’s art, coming from beneath the bourgeoisie’s
   layers of cultural repression. Its antinomianism and its longing for a world
   without constraint might seem to be the clarion of the proletarian revolu78
   THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
   tion, and Marxists certainly do see that rock music dissolves the beliefs
   and morals necessary for liberal society and would approve of it for that
   alone. But the harmony between the young intellectual Left and rock is
   probably profounder than that. Herbert Marcuse appealed to university
   students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros
   and Civilization and One Dimensional Man he promised that the overcoming
   of capitalism and its false consciousness will result in a society
   where the greatest satisfactions are sexual, of a sort that the bourgeois
   moralist Freud called polymorphous and infantile. Rock music touches
   the same chord in the young. Free sexual expression, anarchism, mining
   of the irrational unconscious and giving it free rein are what they have
   in common. The high intellectual life I shall describe in Part Two and
   the low rock world are partners in the same entertainment enterprise.
   They must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late
   capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois’ need to feel that he
   is not bourgeois, to have undangerous experiments with the unlimited. He
   is willing to pay dearly for them. The Left is better interpreted by Nietzsche
   than by Marx. The critical theory of late capitalism is at once late
   capitalism’s subtlest and crudest expression. Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate
   of the Last Man.
   This strong stimulant, which Nietzsche called Nihiline, was for a
   very long time, almost fifteen years, epitomized in a single figure, Mick
   Jagger. A shrewd, middle-class boy, he played the possessed lower-class
   demon and teen-aged satyr up until he was forty, with one eye on the
   mobs of children of both sexes whom he stimulated to a sensual frenzy
   and the other eye winking at the unerotic, commercially motivated adults
   who handled the money. In his act he was male and female, heterosexual
   and homosexual; unencumbered by modesty, he could enter everyone’s
   dreams, promising to do everything with everyone; and, above all, he
   legitimated drugs, which were the real thrill that parents and policemen
   conspired to deny his youthful audience. He was beyond the law, moral
   and political, and thumbed his nose at it. Along with all this, there were
   nasty little appeals to the suppressed inclinations toward sexism, racism
   and violence, indulgence in which is not now publicly respectable. Nevertheless,
   he managed not to appear to contradict the rock ideal of a
   universal classless society founded on love, with the distinction between
   brotherly and bodily blurred. He was the hero and the model for countless
   Music 79
   young persons in universities, as well as elsewhere. I discovered that
   students who boasted of having no heroes secretly had a passion to be like
   Mick Jagger, to live his life, have his fame. They were ashamed to admit
   this in a university, although I am not certain that the reason has anything
   to do with a higher standard of taste. It is probably that they are not
   supposed to have heroes. Rock music itself and talking about it with
   infinite seriousness are perfectly respectable. It has proved to be the
   ultimate leveler of intellectual snobbism. But it is not respectable to think
   of it as providing weak and ordinary persons with a fashionable behavior,
   the imitation of which will make others esteem them and boost their own
   self-esteem. Unaware and unwillingly, however, Mick Jagger played the
   role in their lives that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young
   Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so
   boring and unable to charm youthful passions. Jagger caught on.
   In the last couple of years, Jagger has begun to fade. Whether
   Michael Jackson, Prince or Boy George can take his place is uncertain.
   They are even weirder than he is, and one wonders what new strata of
   taste they have discovered. Although each differs from the others, the
   essential character of musical entertainment is not changing. There is only
   a constant search for variations on the theme. And this gutter phenomenon
   is apparently the fulfillment of the promise made by so much psychology
   and literature that our weak and exhausted Western civilization would
   find refreshment in the true source, the unconscious, which appeared to
   the late romantic imagination to be identical to Africa, the dark and
   unexplored continent. Now all has been explored; light has been cast
   everywhere; the unconscious has been made conscious, the repressed
   expressed. And what have we found? Not creative devils, but show business
   glitz. Mick Jagger tarting it up on the stage is all that we brought
   back from the voyage to the underworld.
   My concern here is not with the moral effects of this music—
   whether it leads to sex, violence or drugs. The issue here is its effect on
   education, and I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and
   makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the
   art and thought that are the substance of liberal education. The first
   sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole
   of life, and they are the link between the animal and spiritual in us. The
   period of nascent sensuality has always been used for sublimation, in the
   8o THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
   sense of making sublime, for attaching youthful inclinations and longings
   to music, pictures and stories that provide the transition to the fulfillment
   of the human duties and the enjoyment of the human pleasures. Lessing,
   speaking of Greek sculpture, said „beautiful men made beautiful statues,
   and the city had beautiful statues in part to thank for beautiful citizens.”
   This formula encapsulates the fundamental principle of the esthetic education
   of man. Young men and women were attracted by the beauty of
   heroes whose very bodies expressed their nobility. The deeper understanding
   of the meaning of nobility comes later, but is prepared for by the
   sensuous experience and is actually contained in it. What the senses long
   for as well as what reason later sees as good are thereby not at tension with
   one another. Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts
   and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what
   they feel and what they can and should be. But this is a lost art. Now we
   have come to exactly the opposite point. Rock music encourages passions
   and provides models that have no relation to any life the young people
   who go to universities can possibly lead, or to the kinds of admiration
   encouraged by liberal studies. Without the cooperation of the sentiments,
   anything other than technical education is a dead letter.
   Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like
   the drugs with which it is allied. It artificially induces the exaltation
   naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors—victory
   in a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion and
   discovery of the truth. Without effort, without talent, without virtue,
   without exercise of the faculties, anyone and everyone is accorded the
   equal right to the enjoyment of their fruits. In my experience, students
   who have had a serious fling with drugs—and gotten over it—find it
   difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations. It is as though the color
   has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and
   white. The pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that
   they no longer look for it at the end, or as the end. They may function
   perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sapped, and
   they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living,
   whereas liberal education is supposed to encourage the belief that the
   good life is the pleasant life and that the best life is the most pleasant life.
   I suspect that the rock addiction, particularly in the absence of strong
   counterattractions, has an effect similar to that of drugs. The students will
   Music 81
   get over this music, or at least the exclusive passion for it. But they will
   do so in the same way Freud says that men accept the reality principle
   —as something harsh, grim and essentially unattractive, a mere necessity.
   These students will assiduously study economics or the professions and the
   Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit
   beneath. They will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life
   is as empty and false as the one they left behind. The choice is not
   between quick fixes and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is
   meant to show them. But as long as they have the Walkman on, they
   cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged
   use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.

   http://ia600309.us.archive.org…..anMind.pdf

   Am citit cartea acum mai multi ani, e extraordinara cel putin, dar partea cu muzica, daca m-a facut sa ii dau partial dreptate si sa imi clarific niste lucruri pe care le custeam mai mult intuitiv, nu m-a convins pe deplin, si probabil era si normal din moment ce am crescut (si) cu muzica rock. Oricum, un text foarte interesant.

   si asta:
   http://www.nationalreview.com/…..nley-kurtz

   Reply

6. 

   Silvapro

   24 May 2011

   In liceu cind eram axata pe slagarele de la radio, am primit cadou o caseta imprimata – pe-o parte Bob Dylan si pe cealalta Leonard Cohen (Avalanche). Cunosteam f. putina muzica buna (Pink Floyd, Deep Purple si inca vreo 2 grupe), si cu toate ca Doors ma fascinase si subjugase de la primul sunet (nu exagerez), am avut o aversiune instantanee la Dylan si Elazar Hacohen (asa cum se semneaza L. Cohen in cintecul Famous Blue Raincoat). Mi-a luat aproape o jumatate de an pina sa ma indragostesc de acea caseta. Asa cum nu stiam care-mi displace mai tare, dupa aceea si pina in ziua de azi, oscilez intre cei doi – care-mi place mai mult, mai ca toti prietenii mei.

   Nu stiu ce se intimpla astazi, dar multe din linkuri si cintece din ILD nu se deschid sau nu sint disponibile. Nu mi-a mers nici cu Neighbourhood Bully, nici aici mai sus si nici pe Youtube. Exista asa un cintec sau nu?

   In schimb am gasit o parodie pe Neighbourhood Bully si You’ve got to serve somebody al unor credinciosi cu kippa:

   M-a amuzat acolo de exemplu textul ca Obama cind s-a dus in vizita in Egypt a intrebat cine a construit piramide. I s-a raspuns ca evreii iar concluzia a fost ca reprezinta un Jewish Settlement…

   Mai mult covers am gasit in loc de cintecele lui originale. In fine, aici este chiar Bob Dylan:

   Reply

7. 

   emil b.

   24 May 2011

   Liv, nu am nimic impotriva muzicii pop-rock. Unele lucruri imi plac, altele nu, de altele m-am plictisit si in general nu mai tin pasul cu acest gen de ani buni. Dar in matricea asta sonora am crescut si nu ma pot desprinde complet; nici nu vreau. In timp mi-am extins aria de interese si catre alte genuri sau sub-genuri muzicale. Chestiile vechi sunt supuse re-evaluarii pe parcursul anilor.

   Reply

8. 

   Silvapro

   24 May 2011

   Eu nu cunosc acest termen de pop-rock. Pop de obicei reprezenta ceva usor, simplist, cum ar veni Europop. Era si rock greu sau solid rock si pop progrsiv. Pe unele le numeam eu, si probabil ca si altii, rock progresiv. Nu intru in sub-divizii ca glitter-rock, heavy meatal, etc.

   Eu il stiam pe Bob Dylan mai mult incadrat in folk music, si daca vreti, ii putem spune si folk rock.
   Ce-mseamna muzica care „nu ajunge nicaieri”? Daca ajunge in inima cuiva, daca provoaca niste sentimente si senzatii bune, nu mai inseamna ca e o pierdere de timp. Dylan a innebunit o groaza de oameni. Si in ziua de astazi tineri si batrini se imbulzesc sa-l vada in concert.

   Poate puteti sa-mi dati si alte exemple de pop-rock?

   Eu zic ca muzica este sublima, este arta, este spirit. Nu sint pentru nimic in lume de acord Combinata cu dans e si mai forte dupa parerea mea. Este ceva ancestral, tribal, de radacina. Este ceva din insasi natura omului. Chiar daca nu ar fi inventat-o nimeni, ea ar fi existat in om. E viata, e pulsul inimii, e ciclurile din natura, etc.

   Eu nu vad nici macar in hip-hop o foma inferioara de muzica. Bineinteles ca-mi plac texte poetice. Dar la hip-hop fac abstractie de texte, si ma las furata de melodie, de bas, de ritm. Exista simburele de hip-hop bun intr-o mare de hip-hop plictisitor si idiot. Muzica poate trai si fara text, poate fi independenta de folosirea cuvintelor. Nu mai departe de muzica clasica sau alte genuri instrumentale. Asa cum poezia poate sta de sine statatoare.

   #5 – Cred ca e de prisos sa mentionez ca nu sint de acord cu articolul si cu concluziile la care ajunge. Muzica e esenta vietii si fara ea viata e fada. Daca exista d-zeu, nu poate fi ca nu vine direct din Rai!

   Reply

9. 

   Vlad M.

   24 May 2011

   Silvapro

   Muzica poate trai si fara text, poate fi independenta de folosirea cuvintelor. Nu mai departe de muzica clasica sau alte genuri instrumentale. Asa cum poezia poate sta de sine statatoare.

   Muzica clasica nu presupune, de regula, text, iar orice comparatie intre ea si gunoaiele prezentului este mai mult decat fortata. Muzica moderna are text, iar textul este inseparabil de ea, dar este definita in primul rand prin ritm, de cele mai multe ori masinal. Daca ignoram textele, problema noastra, dar nu putem veni si spune ca se poate trai si fara ele. Ne-am fura caciula singura, asta fiind doar gandire de om care cauta sa-si linisteasca o constiinta perfect constienta ca asculta porcarii. ????

   Reply

10. 

    Vlad M.

    24 May 2011

    Exemplu.

    Putem sa ignoram textul, daca ne suna bine linia melodica*, dar sa nu ne mintim nici un moment ca muzica n-ar fi proasta.

    * Exemplul de mai sus imi suna bine, atat melodia, cat si vocea fiind interesante, dar a le rupe de text, in incercarea de a vinde jegul asta ca altceva decat jeg… este o greseala.

    Reply

11. 

    Vlad M.

    24 May 2011

    Si ca sa fie clar, recunosc ca ascult porcarii, dar ma tratez. ????

    P.S. Am gasit ceva foarte interesant la Scruton, o sa pun pe site cat de repede posibil.

    Reply

12. 

    Liv St Omer

    24 May 2011

    Muzica clasica nu presupune, de regula, text, iar orice comparatie intre ea si gunoaiele prezentului este mai mult decat fortata.

    @9: te contrazic respectuos; dar atatea si atatea bucati pentru cor de Bach, si ma opresc la el ca sa nu spun ceva gresit, dar atatea opere de Rossini, Verdi, Mozart, etc, care fara text nu ar putea sa „existe”, unde le incadrezi pe toate astea, nu la muzica clasica?
    Nu pot asculta „exemplul” tau din motive tehnice (ti-am povestit :d ), insa chiar asa sa fie, chiar toata muzica contemporana sa fie o „porcarie”, „gunoi”? Noi, eu, tu, spunem asta acum; dar cine suntem noi s-o spunem? Si despre Mozart, si despre Bach s-au facut asemenea afirmatii la vremea lor (observa ca nu ii compar cu nimeni in special, ca sa nu sune penibil). Eu cred ca timpul trebuie sa „hotarasca” lucrurile astea; pot eu sa stiu daca peste 20 de ani se va mai asculta muzica formatiei X, care acum e celebra? Poate da, poate nu. Si, inainte sa raspunzi, da, sunt de acord ca multe, prea multe din „creatiile” contemporane sunt niste gunoaie, asa cum erau si in anii ’70. Dar nu toate.
    @8 dupa cate stiu eu, Elvis e incadrat la pop-rock, de exemplu. Dylan nu stiu, sigur ca apartine folk-ului, eu ma refeream insa la anii 63-64 cand s-a lansat si cand, din cate mai tin eu minte, incanu era clar incadrabil.
    @5 cateva citate ca dovada ca TRU generalizeaza:

    Însă tot aceste observaţii ratează importnaţa extraordinară a lui Jackson pentru cultura populară contemporană. Jackson a pus în scenă auto-negaţia unei culturi care s-a stins în tehnică, prestidigitaţie vizuală şi nonsens muzical.

    Unde muzică pop e muzica populară a timpurilor noastre iar muzica populară a timpurilor noastre a eşuat în infantilism şi fetişism idolatru, după ce a rupt legăturile cu tradiţia din care s-a născut.

    Anii ’80, epoca de glorie a lui Jackson, sînt cei mai nefericiţi ani ai muzicii pop, un cimitir vast de tradiţii şi stiluri abandonate, deformate sau suprimate. Muzica soul se retrage, îmbrîncită spre disco, spaţiul pseudo-muzical în care a excelat Jackson. Din acest punct de vedere, Jackson nu a continuat ci a părăsit linia de mare autenticitate soul, fixată de Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield şi, în primul rînd, James Brown. Asocierea repetată a lui Jackson cu şcoala soul vine dintr-un stereotip rasial. Adevărat, Diana Ross a fost, un timp, mentorul de scenă al lui Jackson dar Diana Ross însăşi lucra într-un spaţiu post-soul. Influenţa cea mai vizibilă asupra lui Jackson vine din începuturile muzicii disco: de la The Bee Gees, iniţiatorii ritmului de pulsaţie electro şi ai vocalismului în falsetto extrem. Epoca deschisă de Jacskon coincide, de fapt, cu o mişcare generală spre reducţionism muzical. Forţa rock-ului greu se banalizează în varianta speed şi thrash. Blues-ul electric în forţă rămîne o ocupaţie izolată, simplificată nepermis sau deturnată spre punk şi fuck, a la Black Crows, respectiv Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Forţa rudimentară a cmoercialsmului pune capăt unei strălucite şi nefericite tentative de aducere a muzicii pop la rigoare şi intelect (curentul „progressive” ia sfîrşit la începutul anilor 80 şi lasă în urmă fie carcasele dinozauriene ale unor Yes, Genesis, E,L&P, fie rezistenţa minoritară a unor King Crimosn, Robert Fripp sau David Sylvian).

    Eu ii ascult in continuare cu placere pe „dinozaurienii” EL&P, Yes si, mai ales, Genesis; asta-i tot ce pot sa spun. De acord ca „variantele speed&trash” sunt niste porcarii; recunosc insa ca, atunci cand sunt foarte foaaaarte somnolent si am de lucru, Metallica sau Anthrax de pe youtube imi prind bine. Iar curentul goth-punk a dat totusi, dincolo de exagerarile si prostiile evidente, o gama de formatii si de artisti dragi inimii mele; atat. Intre altele, nihilismul goth al unor The Cure mi se pare preferabil de departe aceluiasi gen de nihilism al unor curente post-comuniste/post-naziste de care se face vorbire mult pe acest site. Cine asculta Cure nu risca sa sparga vitrine la diverse conventii NATO, nu risca sa agite steaguri la manifestatii post-globalizare sau sa devina musulman-fundamentalist-„punator-de-bombe”. Eu unul am ascultat, cand eram mai tanar, si n-am devenit, cel putin.

    Reply

13. 

    Vlad M.

    24 May 2011

    Am scris „in general”, Liviu, dar muzica noastra suna foarte rau, sa fim sinceri, iar calitatea ei nu se schimba daca o ascultam si ne identificam cu ea. Muzica devine tot mai proasta, temele ei sunt tot „decazute”, iar ritmurile ei tot mai mecanizate; societatea o urmeaza indeaproape. Cat despre nihilism, chiar nu vad unde e marea calitate a nihilismului goth, doar existenta gradelor raului nu anuleaza raul.

    P.S. Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio – In my little black dress .

    Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio

    Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio rose from the ashes of Archon Satani in May 1993 as founding member Tomas Pettersson apperceived the desire to canalize his remaining creativity through the aesthetic portrayal of the undivided spiritual and intellectual kinship between Light and Dark, Life and Death, Male and Female, Love and Hate, Beauty and Depravity, War and Peace – thus the genesis of Equilibrium and the advancement beyond into the perfection of Roses.

    Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio is an aesthetic constellation situated somewhere on the illusive boundary between the impending apocalypse & the orgies of ancient Rome; and accompanied by the sound of acoustic guitars, cyclic soundscapes, strings and percussions; come songs on the threshold of the sensually seductive and morally reprehensible; gospels on the verge of the conjecturally acclaimed and what’s soon to be condemned.
    The music is contemporarily referred to as Apocalyptic Pop, but its continuing variation over the past thirteen years extends further and perfectly congregates a variation of nuances into the distinguishing essence of that which is Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio.

    Cum, join and witness for yourself, the orgies of Roses and Equilibrium.
    Two is company, Three is an Orgy; I am Forever.

    Sau, pentru ceva mai mainstream, Lovegame (Lady Gaga)

    Reply

14. 

    Liv St Omer

    24 May 2011

    Nu are nicio o mare calitate, nihilismul goth, desigur; atata doar ca, la unele formatii, cel putin, nu ajunge sa impinga la sinucidere sau alte traznai din astea; asta-i poate singura calitate. Lasa-ma cu Lady Gaga, ca pe aia nici eu nu pot sa o suport.

    Am scris “in general”, Liviu, dar muzica noastra suna foarte rau, sa fim sinceri, iar calitatea ei nu se schimba daca o ascultam si ne identificam cu ea. Muzica devine tot mai proasta, temele ei sunt tot “decazute”, iar ritmurile ei tot mai mecanizate; societatea o urmeaza indeaproape

    Absolut de acord cu tine. Tot ce spun este ca exista si mici, iesite din comun, foarte greu de gasit, si de ascultat, la radiourile mainstream, exceptii. Sigur ca ele nu fac regula, agreed. Insa eu spun ca atunci cand spunem „toata muzica noua e proasta”, bagam si acele mici exceptii la gramada. Mie, nefiind nici pe departe de specialitate, in materie de muzica, mi-e foarte greu sa spun „muzica cutare e gunoi, muzica cutare e geniala, o opera de arta”; de aia prefer sa discut in termeni de „imi place, nu imi place”. Exista si aici grade si nuante; daca imi place un lucru, o muzica, etc, asta nu inseamna neaparat ca ma identific cu el.
    Iarasi, cand spui „muzica noastra”, asta suna foarte vag, si ar trebui sa clarifici. Daca de muzica de la 90% din radiourile mainstream vorbesti, atunci absolut, sunt de acord cu tine. Dar sa nu bagam in „gramada” si restul de 10%, totusi, pentru ca ar fi nedrept.

    Reply

15. 

    Liviu Crăciun

    24 May 2011

    din lipsa de timp, doar un contraargument micut, dar hotarit ????

    BOB DYLAN – Mozambique
    
    Asculta mai multe audio diverse

    I’d like to spend some time in Mozambique
    The sunny sky is aqua blue
    And all the couples dancing cheek to cheek
    It’s very nice to stay a week or two
    And fall in love just me and you.

    There’s a lot of pretty girls in Mozambique
    And plenty time for good romance
    And everybody likes to stop and speak
    To give the special one you seek a chance
    Or maybe say hello with just a glance.

    Lying next to her by the ocean
    Reaching out and touching her hand
    Whispering your secret emotion
    Magic in a magical land.

    And when it’s time for leaving Mozambique
    To say goodbye to sand and sea
    You turn around to take a final peek
    And you see why it’s so unique to be
    Among the lovely people living free
    Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.

    Reply

16. 

    Vlad M.

    24 May 2011

    Cand zic muzica noastra, ma refer la muzica ultimelor decenii, cea cu care am „crescut”: de la Madonna si MJ la Metallica si Slayer, de la The Cure pana la Ordo Rosario Equilibrio si Lady Gaga sau toate coastele hip-hop-ului si rap-ului.

    Metallica este una din formatiile mele preferate, Liv St. Omer, but that doesn’t make it great music. E, in mod cert, mai buna decat altele, dar nu-i de ajuns.

    Reply

17. 

    oliver

    24 May 2011

    Daca la 18 ani ascultam heavy metal, de pilda Helloween, si nu-mi prea pasa de textele pieselor astazi, cand sunt aproape de 40 de ani consider majoritatea textelor formatiilor mele preferate de pe vremuri ba prea „ecologiste” ba prea „proletare” ba prea anticapitaliste, antiamericane etc. Dar continui sa ascult piesele preferate si, ascultandu le, pot sa imi imaginez ca sunt imnuri inchinate unor idealuri proprii. De exemplu ascultand EAGLE FLY FREE al trupei germane Helloween simt ceea ce simteam si acum 20 de ani ascultand piesa asta: ca este un imn inchinat libertatii.

    People are in big confusion
    They don’t like their constitutions
    Everyday they draw conclusions
    And they’re still prepared for war

    Some can say what’s ineffective
    Some make up themselves attractive
    Build up things they call protective
    Well your life seems quite bizarre

    Bridge: in the sky a mighty eagle
    doesn’t care ‘bout what’s illegal
    on it’s wings the rainbow’s light
    it’s flying to eternity

    Chorus: eagle fly free
    Let people see
    just make it your own way
    leave time behind
    Follow the sign
    together we’ll fly someday

    Hey, we think so supersonic
    And we make our bombs atomic
    Or the better quite neutronic
    But the poor don’t see a dime

    Nowadays the air’s polluted
    Ancient people persecuted
    That’s what mankind contributed
    To create a better time

    Bridge: in the sky a mighty eagle
    doesn’t care ‘bout what’s illegal
    on it’s wings the rainbow’s light
    it’s flying to eternity

    Chorus: eagle fly free
    let people see
    just make it your own way
    leave time behind
    follow the sign
    together we’ll fly someday

    Reply

18. 

    Liviu Crăciun

    24 May 2011

    oliver
    erau destui (si inca mai sint) si dintre cei refractari la amorul cu mama gaia, terorism anti-nuclear si alte shfortari anuale de redistribuire a saraciei; uite unii care n-au prea rezonat la noile religii ????
    (poate ar fi cazul sa facem un mic serial)

    My uncle has a country place
    That no one knows about.
    He says it used to be a farm,
    Before the Motor Law.
    And on Sundays I elude the Eyes,
    And hop the Turbine Freight
    To far outside the Wire,
    Where my white-haired uncle waits.

    Jump to the ground
    As the Turbo slows to cross the Borderline.
    Run like the wind,
    As excitement shivers up and down my spine.
    Down in his barn,
    My uncle preserved for me an old machine,
    For fifty-odd years.
    To keep it as new has been his dearest dream.

    I strip away the old debris
    That hides a shining car.
    A brilliant red Barchetta
    From a better, vanished time.
    I fire up the willing engine,
    Responding with a roar.
    Tires spitting gravel,
    I commit my weekly crime…

    Wind-
    In my hair-
    Shifting and drifting-
    Mechanical music-
    Adrenalin surge…

    Well-weathered leather,
    Hot metal and oil,
    The scented country air.
    Sunlight on chrome,
    The blur of the landscape,
    Every nerve aware.

    Suddenly ahead of me,
    Across the mountainside,
    A gleaming alloy air-car
    Shoots towards me, two lanes wide.
    I spin around with shrieking tires,
    To run the deadly race,
    Go screaming through the valley
    As another joins the chase.

    Drive like the wind,
    Straining the limits of machine and man.
    Laughing out loud
    With fear and hope, I’ve got a desperate plan.
    At the one-lane bridge
    I leave the giants stranded at the riverside.
    Race back to the farm, to dream with my uncle at the fireside

    Reply

19. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio – suna bine si aminteste mult de Legendary Pink Dots, pe care i-am vazut intr-o sala simpatica si aproximativ intima, intr-un loc cult – muzeu de arta si arta etnica – Muzeul Eretz Israel (Muzeul Tarii Israel). Exista un oarecare trend ca muzeele sau institutiile culte sa mai sparga gheata si scortozitatea si sa gazduiasca si formatii de genul acesta. Chiar si Muzeul Tel-Aviv cel oficial a gazduit multe formatii ca de ex. Tuxedomoon, si chiar a dedicat seri cu David Bowie in clipuri, pe timpul cind era f. greu sa ai ocazia sa vizionezi clipuri. Pur si simplu n-aveai unde.
    Asa cum filarmonici celebre coopereaza in concerte comune cu Deep Purple etc.
    In urmatorul link inca un exemplu. Eu nu ma dau in vint dupa heavy metal, dar acest cintec merita si nici nu as fi ghicit din cintec ca Tankian face parte din acest curent::
    
    (dar am auzit ca, din pacate, tipul e pro-palestinian).

    Muzica proasta este o chestie de superficialitate a simtului. Muzica suie pentru suflete aride. Exista prea multe cintece care-mi produc reactia „pentru ce au facut cintecul asta?”, adica nu spune nimic. Or fi citeva dragute, dar in general disco nu-mi place, Gaga nu-mi place, majoritatea lui Michael Jackson nu-mi place, chiar nu ma omor nici dupa Diana Ross. Pe Lady Gaga nici n-am cunoscut-o pina la parodia cu bibliotecarii. Gaga e penibila.

    Si eu ascult „dinozaurii” cu mare placere.

    Continui sa sustin ca muzica moderna de orice fel poate f. bine sa se lipseasca de cuvinte, la fel ca muzica clasica. N-am spus ca nu exista muzica clasica vocala, cu text sau fara. Opera in general nu-mi place, multe din ele sint kitch si impopotanate. De multe ori narative patetice care creeaza reactii automate, destul de golase, ca si textul. Stiu ca voi supara pe multi cu aceste afirmatii, dar asta e parerea mea. Unele piese de hip-hop ating niste coarde si sensibilitati nu mai putin decit alte muzici socotite elevate, si in orice caz nu le gasesc mai prejos decit opera.

    Red Hot Chili Peppers – Multe ale lor ma lasa rece, dar nu asta:

    Dar sa nu-l uitam pe Bob Dylan – in el sintem uniti ????

    Reply

20. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    * Vlad M.

    Muzica devine tot mai proasta…

    Nu sint de acord cu asta. Totdeauna s-a crezut asa. Peste 30 de ani, tinerii de azi vor spune acelasi lucru copiilor lor.
    Cind a aparut tangoul, batrinii erau scandalizati. Apoi pentru tinerii din urmatoarea generatie devenise invechit, de la naftalina, al babacilor (sint constienta ca de citiva ani buni se bucura de mare revival).

    Cu ce e mai prost trip-hop? Exista piese extraordinare in acest gen. Totul e sa nu pierdem legatura cu ce se intimpla, altfel ni se vor parea ciudate. Eu mi-am promis in tinerete to follow si sa nu devin ca tata. Tata a ramas in urma inca de tinar, dar mama s-a adaptat f. usor si traia emotii mari cu Dylan, Leonard Cohen. Sa nu mai vorbim de Doors – era nebuna dupa muzica lor. Bowie si mai ales Jagger. Pe care i-a descoperit dupa virsta de 50 de ani prin mine. S.a.m.d.

    * Am vrut sa pun Lay Lady Lay / Bob Dylan inca de ieri, dar pe Youtube nu a fost chip de toate cover versions si alte prostii, sau fara calitate sonora. Are cineva un link bun?

    Reply

21. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    Nu am vrut sa spun ca v-ati rupt de muzica contemporana si ca nu sinteti actualizati la zi. Eu vorbeam de fapt de acea tendinta de a atasa valoare mai mare muzicii din trecut si de a desconsidera intr-o oarecare masura ce se creeaza astazi. Am si eu aceasta tendinta dar nu in domeniul muzicii ci despre raporturile dintre oameni, rabdare, atitudine, respect, legaturile de familie, etc.

    Reply

22. 

    Vlad M.

    24 May 2011

    Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio – suna bine

    In my little black dress I have come to confess; that defiance is not what it seems
    I am covered in dirt and my fingers they hurt; from the women I’ve tried to appease
    I am soothing my soul with indulgence and gold; I will bury my face in your loins
    I will master this dance with my cock in your hands; there’s a slot in my back for the coins
    There’s a little black man in the palm of my hand, who keeps saying that fire will come
    I have wandered this earth from the time of my birth, so my legs they are starting to numb
    In the heart of my soul I will make me a hole; just to marvel when evil comes out
    Let my silence convey all the things I can’t say, you can salvage my sex with your mouth

    Totul e sa nu pierdem legatura cu ce se intimpla, altfel ni se vor parea ciudate. Eu mi-am promis in tinerete to follow si sa nu devin ca tata.

    Novitismul — frenezia de a fi nou şi original cu orice preţ şi oricât ar costa

    Reply

23. 

    Liv St Omer

    24 May 2011

    Vlad-lasa-i pe Ordo Rosarius, nu sunt un exempolu bun. Si Oliver, si Liviu Craciun ti-au dat aici 2 exemple de muzici contemporane, wich do not suck, care n-au avut treaba cu progresismul, nihilismul, etc (intre altele, Rush au si o piesa „big money”, un fel de oda marelui capital…..ce vrei mai mult??). Sigur ca sunt 1%, din valul urias de junk care ne inconjoara. Dar asta nu inseamna ca „muzica e din ce in ce mai proasta”, wrong, inseamna doar ca n-a avut nimeni cand sa faca o triere, ca mai trebuie sa asteptam cativa ani pentru asta (btw: da, de acord, Metallica sucks, mie nu imi plac deloc….then again, si Rush sunt tot heavy metal, stii!). Daca ai fi trait pe vremea lui Mozart, ai fi spus matematic exactacelasi lucru: muzica actuala e din ce in ce mai proasta, nu se mai canta ca pe vremuri, operele astea in alta limba decat cea italiana sunt de kk, eheeeeei, ce bine era pe vremea lui Bach! Desi, si pe vremea aia, muzica cu adevarat buna era cam 1% din tot ce aparea, iar Mozart facea parte din acest 1%. Iar „marea majoritate” era junk, intre timp a disparut in neant, insa pe vremea aia „marea majoritate” era la moda. Sa nu imi sari la jugulara, tot ce vreau sa apun e ca „toate-s vechi si noua-s toate”, asa ca „tu ramai la toate rece”

    Reply

24. 

    Vlad M.

    24 May 2011

    Am raspuns la ceva concret, Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio.

    Metallica does not suck, dar aici vorbim despre muzica in sensul inalt, nu in sensul de „daca imi place, e fenomenal” , „daca suna bine, e grozav”, „daca MJ vinde si se asculta, atunci face muzica buna”. Sau ma rog, eu vorbesc in acest sens, voi mai degraba preferati sa ganditi ca niste fani, adaugand la gandirea de fan putin relativism cultural („ai fi spus la fel si despre Mozart”). In aceasta privinta, nu vom cadea de acord. Ramaneti cu ce doriti, eu stiu ca pot ramane cu Metallica si fara sa ii pun langa Dvorak. ????

    P.S. Facts don’t cease to exist numai pentru ca le ignoram. Lady Gaga e mainstream si se asculta. Rihanna e mainstream si se asculta. Katy Perry e mainstream si se asculta. Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio nu e mainstream. In schimb, toate-s jeguri, produse ale unei culturi ajunse intr-un punct mort. Mizerii, nemaivorbind de manelele gipsanilor si pansuerile „baietasilor” de cartier scuipate pe ritmuri saltarete.

    Reply

25. 

    emil b.

    24 May 2011

    Mai bine deconectati-va cu muzica japoneza.

    Boris – Naki Kyoku
    

    Keiji Haino – Here (part 1 & 2)
    
    

    Yonin Bayashi – Omatsuri
    

    Reply

26. 

    bugsy

    24 May 2011

    Metallica is the ONE!
    

    este in eroare cine compara Metallica cu Bach/Mozart/Beethoven. pot fi ascultate impreuna sau pe rand. sunt muzici bune, care vor ramane!

    MJ, Madonna, Rhyanna,…., Justin Biber = recycle bin! nu ar fi fost nimic fara MTV!

    @silvapro: excelenta alegerea cu RHCP. U make my day!
    dar nu e singura de calitate. de ex:
    

    nu stiu daca este „dinozaur”, dar Love & Respect pentru Johnny Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..re=related

    Reply

27. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    Vlad M.
    Nu m-am referit la cuvintele din Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio. Jeg nejeg, si tu ai spus ca suna bine,

    Bugsy,
    Cunosc bine numai ce s-a mai dat pe la radio RHCP. Nu stiu de ce nu-mi place Californication. Mai erau inca vreo 2 care ma cam plictiseau. Dar intr-o zi la bufet la servici pusesera un disc de-al lor f. fain cu muzica pe care n-o auzisem.

    Despre Madonna – Am cunuscut-o prin Like a vergion. Toata lumea in jurul meu era innebunita. Eu am detestat-o ani de zile, era pe primul loc la cintareata cea mai infernala pt. mine, de fapt era in concurenta cu Olivia Newton-John. Nu-mi placea nimic la ea, inclusiv vocea.
    Pina cind a aparut un cintec pe care il ascultam seara de seara la servici in timp ce lucram. As fi dat orice sa-l am, sa stiu cine-l cinta. Si nu aveam cum afla, deci nici cum sa fac rost de el. Dupa vreo doi ani l-am auzit in masina dar si numele de Madonna. Am crezut ca n-am inteles si ca n-avea legatura una cu alta. Apoi inca o data acelasi lucru s-a intimplat si la urma s-a adeverit. Culmea e ca imi placea enorm si vocea. Era vorba de acest cintec:

    Sint curioasa daca mi-ar fi placut la fel de mult deca il ascultam biased din capul locului stiind ca e al Madonnei. Sper ca da, pentru ca de multe ori mi-am revizuit pareri despre muzica. De obicei de la negativ spre pozitiv.

    Nici Kruder & Dorfmeister nu s-au dat in laturi si au o cooperare impreuna cu Madonna::
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTCcdNu7928

    Si asta-mi place (tot asa, n-am stiut ca ea il cinta)::
    

    As fi preferat sa gasesc clipurile fara imagine, pentru ca experienta mea de la inceput era abstracta, si bineiteles neasociata cu Madonna.

    Insa sint de acord ca peste 95 % din ceea ce face este pentri trash bin.

    Reply

28. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    * Inca una buna cu Metalica:
    

    * Ca sa nu ziceti ca nu sint sensibila si la cuvinte in cintece, pe acest cintec l-am ascultat si analizat timp de o luna intreaga, de citeva ori pe saptamina impreuna cu o prietena:

    Leonard Cohen – The Master Song:
    

    Reply

29. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    Emil B.
    Ce surpriza placuta cu muzicile japoneze!

    P.S. – ne faci si noua embed la cintece (si la #19 si la ultimele)?

    Reply

30. 

    bugsy

    24 May 2011

    Silvapro, uite o solista care este mult peste Madonna:
    

    Reply

31. 

    dr pepper

    24 May 2011

    si ca tot a adus cineva aminte de genesis pe aici, una dintre preferatele mele:

    Reply

32. 

    dr pepper

    24 May 2011

    ???? daca a adus aminte bugsy de anastacia:

    http://video.mail.ru/mail/hristina71/867/871.html

    restul au sters video clipul.

    Reply

33. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    Bugsy,
    Gind la gind cu bucurie, si eu postasem acelai cintec al Anastaciei „Left outside alone” la itemul de 8 Martie! Si Dr. Pepper o place, si tot acolo adusese „Not that kind”. Deci pentru Bugsy (pentru ca Dr. Ppper deja il vazuse acolo) imi permit si eu sa dublez cintecul „Jesus Christ Superstar” interpretat de Anastacia:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..r_embedded

    Sint de acord ca Anastacia e mult peste Madonna. In orice caz, Madonna in afara de cele citeva putine cintece bune, in mare majoritate e trash.

    Iata inca una unde isi etalazeza vocea in toata splendoarea ei:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..re=related

    Reply

34. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    Si pentru ca am tot amintit de citeva ori de Legendary Pink Dots, cu inclinatii spre progresiv si psychedelic:

    BellaDonna:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..re=related

    I love you in your tragic beauty:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtdYnLadNaw

    Citadel:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7lNYx4iCkU

    Harvest Babies:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIs9cF_wMzg

    Reply

35. 

    Silvapro

    24 May 2011

    Si acesta este de-a dreptul splendid. E f. potrivit si pentru un numar bun de modern dance:

    Legendary Pink Dots – Rainbows too?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..re=related

    Reply