Songbook #20 tried to talk about the 9-11 interregnum and how it dealt a blow to rock’s radicalism, but in retrospect, it was really more about the nineties revival-of and eventual disenchantment-with such radicalism, with 9-11 seeming to serve as the final nail in the coffin. And Songbook #21 . . . . Continue Reading »
. . . social democracy has been unable to fill the vacuum left by the failure of the great communist hope. Does this mean, as many predict, that the hour of the churches has come? If this should turn out to be the case, I hope that there will be left on the earth at least a small handful of human . . . . Continue Reading »
Great Paintings shouldn’t be in museums. . . . Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on the radio and records, . . . . Continue Reading »
Rock’s other significance in relation to modernity, which David Bowie understood better than anyone, is that it sanctions a new type of heroism, that in contrast to, say, an astronaut’s bit part in a space-flight that is essentially the military-industrial establishment’s . . . . Continue Reading »
For never are the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved. Plato, The Republic, 242c And so they say, this the golden age . . . U2, “New Year’s Day” At this point one might well wonder why I am bothering with rock, having abundant reasons to dislike the . . . . Continue Reading »
Rock intellectualizing’s third basic flaw is its captivity to bohemian/New Left assumptions regarding morals, culture, and politics. The Songbook will examine rock’s largely uncritical promotion of the sexual revolution as it unfolds, but here we consider the oddity of its leftism. On one . . . . Continue Reading »
To continue where we left off in Songbook #14, rock intellectualizing not only involves dismissal of the musically fine, but also of intellectually fine. It’s very activity demonstrates its ambivalence toward the core activity of the life of the mind, the wrestling with thinkers of first rank. . . . . Continue Reading »
. . . the rock and roll apparatus affectively organizes the everyday life of its fans by differentially cathecting the various fragments it “excorporates” along these three axes. . . . It involves vectors (quantities having both magnitude and direction) that are removed from the hegemonic . . . . Continue Reading »
I accept the saying that The Who were one of the “thinking man’s rock bands,” but this Songbook entry is more music-focused than idea-focused. Instead of considering the fairly interesting and very zeitgeist-representative lyrical content of these two songs, I’m contrasting them . . . . Continue Reading »
Today was a day for patriotism, and Tocqueville describes two kinds. One is the natural love humans develop for the place and polity they were raised in, for its folkways and so forth. The second is a more reflective patriotism that, aided by enlightenment rationality, “grows with the exercise . . . . Continue Reading »
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