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Showing posts from October, 2010

Jazz-Death

You can tell a lot about someone* from the historical year after which they stop listening to jazz. After white folks took it . (1917) Maybe you've an orderly mind ("What is this thing "improv", but anarchy ?") in which case Satchmo goes and ruins jazz as early as 1925. For loads of people it's 1945, where we noticed that, at some point in the Second World War, jazz ceased to be pop music and had donned the unwieldy headgear of art music . ("STOP DANCING AND LISTEN, DAMNIT." - signed, Gillespie, Parker, Monk ) Jazz became agitation, spontaneity, the sound of your nerves . Or there's 1952, when Chet Baker kills the piano (and thus yanks out the moderating seatbelt of standardised chord-accompaniments). What might look like the grandest self-obsession of an egoistic time (1955-63) and place (" Mingus Ah Um "; "Mingus Dynasty"; " Charles Mingus Introduces Charles Mingus "; " Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus &qu

To the Other's Side (Songs With Metaphysical Claims In)

The content of folk is fundamentally metaphysical. Our failure to recognize this is primarily due to our own abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and of its technical terms. . . . The true folklorist must be not so much a psychologist as a metaphysician, if he is to 'understand his material'. - Ananda Coomaraswamy On Spotify Here 1. Black and Gold - Sam Sparro (the fear of reductionism) Cause if you're not really here Then the stars don't even matter - Now I'm filled to the top with fear But it's all just a bunch of matter 'Cause if you're not really here Then I don't want to be either... 2. Do You Realise? - Flaming Lips (unreality of time/mortality) You realize the sun dunt go down/ It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round . 3. Childlike Faith In Childhood's End - Van der Graaf Generator (existentialism: song of a scientific human trying, trying...) Frightened in the silence- frightened, but thinking very hard, le