I don’t know if Taylor Swift writes her own songs or is just a pretty face with autotune, but the lyrics often have a certain “tay tay” quality, which makes me think she either writes, greatly contributes, or whoever writes her songs can, Pessoa-like, create a distinct Tay Tay persona.
Sleep in half the day just for old times’ sake I won’t ask you to wait if you don’t ask me to stay So I’ll go back to L.A. and the so-called friends Who’ll write books about me if I ever make it And wonder about the only soul Who can tell which smiles I’m fakin’ And the heart I know I’m breakin’ is my own To leave the warmest bed I’ve ever known We could call it even Even though I’m leaving And I’ll be yours for the weekend ’Tis the damn season
I’m discovering the hidden depths of Taylor Swift these days. Many of her songs have the propulsive fun & bittersweet delight of my favourite 80s songs. She has excellent songwriters, as demonstrated when Ryan Adams covered her album 1989. Here, for example, is ‘Style’:
Midnight, You come and pick me up, no headlights Long drive, Could end in burning flames or paradise Fade into view, oh, it’s been a while since I have even heard from you
I should just tell you to leave ’cause I Know exactly where it leads but I Watch us go ’round and ’round each time
You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye And I got that red lip classic thing that you like And when we go crashing down, we come back every time ‘Cause we never go out of style We never go out of style
You got that long hair, slicked back, white t-shirt And I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt And when we go crashing down, we come back every time ‘Cause we never go out of style We never go out of style.
So it goes He can’t keep his wild eyes on the road Takes me home Lights are off, he’s taking off his coat, hmm, yeah. I say, “I heard, oh, that you’ve been out and about with some other girl, some other girl.”
He says, “What you’ve heard is true but I Can’t stop thinking about you,” and I… I said, “I’ve been there, too, a few times.”
and then Ryan Adams’ cover, changing the “James Dean daydream look” line to:
You’ve got that Daydream Nation look in your eye I got that pent up love thing that you like
A pleasing reference to Sonic Youth’s 1988 album Daydream Nation. I would have liked to have heard Erasure, The Pet Shop Boys, or Eurythmics cover 1989. In the meantime, you can consider Murdoch Murdoch’s tribute to Tay Tay.
I grew up with Bill & Ted, the first (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) from 1989 and the sequel (Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) from 1991. I haven’t seen the first two films in literally decades, and vaguely remembered them as goofy, well-made comedies with Alex Winter and the of course more famous Keanu Reeves. The protagonists are basically retarded Californians of a kind I assumed were 100% parody until I met expats like this, and realised, Holy shit, in California everyone is genuinely retarded.
I wasn’t exactly enthused about a 30-year-later sequel, as Hollywood has a bad track record of such enterprises, but to my surprise this was a pretty solid, enjoyable comedy.
The plot, from what I remember of the earlier films, reprises the original need for Bill Preston and Ted Logan to travel in time and collect various notable personages. The Infogalactic entry for the first film:
In Futuristic City, 2688, humanity exists as a utopian society due to the inspiration of the music and wisdom of the Two Great Ones: Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves). Rufus (George Carlin) is tasked by the leaders to travel back to San Dimas, California, in 1988 using a time machine disguised as a telephone booth to ensure that Bill and Ted, who are dim-witted metalhead high school students, get a good grade in their final history oral report and allow them to pass the class. Should they fail, Ted’s father, Police Captain John Logan (Hal Langdon), plans to ship Ted to a military academy in Alaska, ending Bill and Ted’s fledgling band, the “Wyld Stallyns”, thus altering the future.
From the Future Perfect projections of the earlier films, the duo are destined to write a song which will unite humanity, but in 2020 they are middle-aged failures who can’t even play a wedding song without the guests recoiling in horror; there’s some kind of “reality will end if they don’t play the Song to Unite the Universe in the next 24 hours” plot device, but being largely talentless the pair decide to travel into the future to steal the song they are destined to write, from their future selves. This is by far the best section of the film, as they encounter variously weird loser version of themselves.
As in the earlier films, they have to assemble a band from the distant past. It’s all good-natured fun; however, I couldn’t help but notice that with the exception of Bill & Ted themselves, and Mozart, the band are all “people of colour”; including Ling Lun, legendary founder of Chinese music, but even then it’s not enough that LL is non-white: they arbitrarily decide to make him a woman. I could hardly cavil at the inclusion of Jimi Hendrix or Louis Armstrong, but when I think of the entire history of known music, it is mostly white, unlike the film’s band (mostly black). I’m just surprised they didn’t make Mozart black, or a woman, or a tranny; although I was pleased that they let him expostulate in German without translation, even if he expresses delight at Ling Lun’s flute music (in reality, Mozart hated the flute). There is also some popular black rapper called Kid Crud who is treated as a god of music, but who I’d never even heard of; he talks in the kind of polysyllabic patter common to fraudulent black “intellectuals”, to the point Murdoch Murdoch even had an episode with a black character talking like this a couple of years ago. It seems to reflect a higher verbal IQ, relative to g, among blacks (I’ve also noticed it among the Irish).
The band includes a prehistoric drummer, a grunting negroid creature called Grom, which is also the name of a good Italian ice cream shop. So that’s four blacks, one Chinese transsexual, and one Austrian.
Finally, when Bill and Ted have the band assembled in the right place, they still don’t have a song, because they are actually talentless; and then realise their daughters can write and perform the song, since all they know is that the Song to Unite Humanity was credited to Preston & Logan, which of course could as well be their daughters . So as with the mediocre Avengers Endgame film, the achievements & titles of white men are voluntarily handed on to women and People of Colour. To be fair, the daughters are music nerds so it is plausible, and actually rather pleasing, that they could inherit the mantle, and the whole thing is so good-natured that I could mostly ignore the anti-white, anti-Western message.
They learn that it’s not so much the song which will save humanity, as everyone playing it together; I thought then of those who dismiss the old gods as mere Jungian archetypes, or figments of the subconscious – for would everyone spontaneously sing a crappy song in unison? Just as, to be genuinely & deeply popular, a song would need to obey eternal musical principles, so one could say that Jungian archetypes like Wotan or Apollo would have no lasting value, did they not reflect something real; if they were not, in fact, real.
The song in question is actually just bland noise of some sort.
The supergroup of a prehistoric grunting negroid drummer, the fraudulently transsexual inventor of Chinese music, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, and King Crud, produce an utterly unmemorable barrage of vaguely musical exuberance. It’s a phenomenon I’ve noted with other supergroups, e.g. The Traveling Wilburys; you would think that a group comprising Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne would be pretty amazing but I found their music to be on the minor side, pleasant and hummable but nothing more, as if all that talent mostly cancelled itself out. Perhaps, that’s the secret Globalist message of the Bill & Ted song, to take all the variety and greatness of humanity and align it to create destructive interference, to reduce everyone, to reduce variety and greatness and birth der Letzter Mensch, the “last man” whereof Nietzsche wrote.
Amusingly, the hideous wedding song Bill & Ted play at the beginning is actually pretty good, a kind of late 90-s Spiritualized work:
I was pleasantly reminded of Spiritualized’s majestic ‘No God Only Religion’:
although, to be fair, it’s hardly a wedding song. Perhaps the genuine diversity of the Earth’s human races & ethnicities & cultures strikes the average globalist as a highly disagreeable, jarring dissonance, much as the above wedding song or ‘No God Only Religion’ would the average listener (I was utterly alienated by Spiritualized’s “noise” tracks until I saw them live, whereupon something clicked). And for me, the bland homogeneity of the film’s final song is just dispiritingly empty, a fitting music for der Letzter Mensch.
While it is a good-hearted, fun film, it is anachronistically so. In the late 80s and early 90s, in that interim between the Cold War and 9/11, there was time enough for fun, for optimism; in 2020 it seems strange, not so much naive as wilfully oblivious. The time for fun has long since passed.
I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd a lot recently. Until a few days ago, I only knew Wish You Were Here (1975) and ‘High Hopes’ from 1993’s The Division Bell. They are a strange band, not really typically 70s, not really typical of any time for all the psychedelia and prog-rock notes; the band itself has a shifting, chimeric identity with one of the four founders (Syd Barrett) leaving in ’68, followed by another (Richard Wright) in ’79, then the last (Roger Waters) in ’85, leaving the Pink Floyd brand to the drummer (Nick Mason) and relative latecomer Dave Gilmour, who joined the band 2 years after it was founded. As with Fleetwood Mac, only the name survived as three of the four originals left and were replaced, Ship of Theseus-like; but whereas Fleetwood Mac’s transformations mirror their fractured, selfish personae & love affairs, with Pink Floyd I feel it’s more a representation of their music’s fundamental theme: insanity, the fragility of personal identity.
The only photo of all four founders and Gilmour. Gilmour is at the bottom centre, then clockwise it’s Nick Mason with the stache, Barrett, Waters with the white scarf, and Wright.
Syd Barrett, as one would expect from the photo, went insane. Wish You Were Here features a long song suite, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ as a homage to the by-now vanished Barrett. Both the sound – an at times almost cacophonous jazz/rock – and the lyrics give me a sense of straying too far from sanity’s planetary orbit; all the promise, the potential of the young man turned against his own mind:
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun Shine on you crazy diamond Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky
and the sense of being relentlessly assailed by an enemy you will never be able to face or confront, an enemy whose destructive intent manifests not as hatred but as ridicule, a cold, alien mirth
Come on you target for faraway laughter
as if angels (or demons, or aliens) delight in our mental anguish and disintegration, from an impossible cosmic distance. You step outside the protective dullness of the mundane, entering a psychic Van Allen belt; you return with a scarred mind, an awkwardness:
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon
Insanity, or rather the apprehension of formidable, inhospitable realities just an inch beyond our ordinary limits. For men like Barrett, the world itself is a terrifying challenge; the sky ambiguous:
So, so you think you can tell Heaven from hell? Blue skies from pain?
Hence the album’s cover.
Just to be in this world is to be constantly imperilled. The corporate music world, presented in ‘Have a Cigar’, with its hint of Satanic temptation (“You’re never gonna die”), is one expression of this psychic attrition. The man on the cover, shaking hands and bursting into flames, is every unprotected soul in a world that is banal, drab (the grey hues, the warehouses) and yet utterly inimical to us; as if we don’t belong here – but then, in a sense we don’t even belong in our own minds: 1973’s ‘Brain Damage/Eclipse’ from the Dark Side of the Moon:
Many years ago at university a Leftist professor I knew used to say that things were moving in the right direction, meaning his direction: abolition of the death penalty, not merely legalisation but active governmental promotion of homosexuality, utter judiciary indifference to drug use; and very recently we’ve seen paedophilia being vigorously pushed by the powers that be.
For many, this Leftward swing is a natural, organic development. Every generation rebels and wants to let it all hang out, take drugs, burn things, and kill and rape, and so a conservative society will, in this view, inevitably develop and so come to some degree of enlightenment.
This raises some questions. Why exactly do some societies become liberal and others don’t? Why did the West remain largely conservative until the 20th Century? Why do Muslim immigrants to the West tend to retain their native conservatism?
My own feeling is that the decay of the West, to the point where convicted paedophiles are allowed to dress like demonic women and read stories to small children, is a far from organic development.
In reality, not every teenager rebels against his/her parents; I would guess it is about 20-30%, and perhaps only 5-10% are serious. Our biology seems to contain a necessary degree of mutation, even deleterious mutation; and this ranges from the physical to the psychological. Under normal circumstances, almost all of these teenage rebels become natural conservatives after a few years of hedonism. That is, they start like this:
and mature into this:
This natural order of rebellion, questioning, and eventual maturation has been purposefully disrupted by the Left; it would be as if the Amish themselves promoted Rumspringa as a chance to escape the boring stupidity of Amish society, and each Rumspringista was encouraged to go to LA and become a porn star and never return.
None of the supposedly inevitable developments of the last 70 years have occurred organically or according to “the will of the people”. They were all pushed by the political, media, and corporate elites – that is, by the Cabal.
This brings me to my last post, which was partly about the 70s group Big Star. I think it was Q Magazine, many years ago, which ran an article about the band, with a photo
captioned: “Big Star: none of them ever were.”
When I first heard their music, aged 20 or so, I was amazed that I had never so much as heard of them. Surely, I thought, they should be up there with The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds? But no. They released a few great albums to general indifference and then disappeared.
The conventional account is that their music was slightly too quirky, or they were on the wrong label. I think, now, that their music wasn’t pushed by the label; whether because Cabal didn’t want them to become successful, or because (as I think more likely) the label marketeers were incompetent, the important point is that a great deal of success is to do with marketing: the actual quality is kind of beside the point.
Big Star’s lyrics were often every bit as decadent as The Rolling Stones’, but their sweet high sound was perhaps dissatisfying to Cabal – or it was just bad luck. Either way, without marketing all their talent came to nothing.
As our society becomes ever more intricately interconnected & thus amenable to the puppeteer’s hand, success & failure are increasingly a matter of Cabal planning. Thus, something like Cardi B’s WAP (“wet-ass pussy”) is a success; according to Wikipedia:
Upon release, “WAP” received widespread critical acclaim. For Pitchfork, Lakin Starling called it “a nasty-ass rap bop, bursting with the personality of two of rap’s most congenial household names”, adding, “the detailed play-by-play in the verses doesn’t aim to impress guys—and that, the song suggests, is why Cardi and Meg’s expertise is credible,” as they “center themselves as women in order to freely celebrate their coveted power, sex appeal, and A1 WAP.” Jon Caramanica of The New York Times deemed it “an event record that transcends the event itself”, and stated that both rappers “are exuberant, sharp and extremely, extremely vividly detailed” in the song that “luxuriates in raunch”. Rania Aniftos of Billboard described the song as a “twerk-ready, scorching banger”. Mikael Wood of Los Angeles Times deemed it a “savage, nasty, sex-positive triumph” and stated that “the women’s vocal exuberance is the show—the way they tear into each perfectly rendered lyric and chew up the words like meat”.
There’s music journalism for you. They are talking about this:
I found the video unusually disturbing; I would broadly agree with the Vigilant Citizen: I can’t speak for specific details but my first (and last) impression was of something like a homage to, or advertisement for, MK Ultra, with purposefully disorienting visuals and music, and an atmosphere not so much of sexuality as of servitude and perversion.
So, consider the Cardi B video, and then listen to Big Star’s ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’ and consider that the former is being aggressively pushed by Cabal and their journalist/corporate puppets, and the latter disappeared without trace.
A friend sent me a link to this video by James, ‘Sit Down’:
He commented: “Interesting that this song was mostly meaningless in its presentation as teenage anthem but as old jaded honest man with no pretensions, it reveals its true beauty.”
The lyrics:
I’ll sing myself to sleep A song from the darkest hour Secrets I can’t keep Inside of the day Swing from high to deep Extremes of sweet and sour Hope that God exists I hope I pray
Drawn by the undertow My life is out of control I believe this wave will bear my weight So let it flow
Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy
Now I’m relieved to hear That you’ve been to some far out places It’s hard to carry on When you feel all alone Now I’ve swung back down again It’s worse than it was before If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy
Those who feel the breath of sadness Sit down next to me Those who find they’re touched by madness Sit down next to me Those who find themselves ridiculous Sit down next to me Love, in fear, in hate, in tears
Down Down
Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy
Oh sit down Sit down next to me Sit down, down, down, down, down In sympathy
Down
The 1989 original, which I always disliked:
I feel that the lyrics only make sense sung by an ageing man (Tim Booth was born in 1960, so 29 when the original was released, 60 now in 2020). It’s something to hold onto as I myself age; I lack the brilliance of my early 20s; the raw cognitive drive isn’t there anymore, but I have wrinkles and greying hair to make up for it.
Classic Pet Shop Boys: angelic vocals from Neil Tennant, and strong but not too strong hints of depravity in the lyrics:
I’m always hoping you’ll be faithful
But you’re not, I suppose
We’ve both given up smoking ’cause it’s fatal
So whose matches are those?
–
“Fatal” is very fine: it gives hints of drug overdoses and AIDS, of the wages of sin. A modern song would most likely eschew even the hint, and go into sordid, tedious detail. I also like the “I suppose” – a little overly polite, as if in discomfort.
Watching older music videos, I was struck by how many were pseudo-live, lip-synch versions where the band pose on a stage pretending to play their instruments & sing as their song is played from a record. For example, Oasis “performed” ‘Roll With It’ on Top of the Pops, but the Gallagher brothers swapped roles, the guitarist Noel pretending to sing Liam’s vocals and the singer Liam pretending to play guitar.
Live versions are never as perfect, but can have an unsettling energy, e.g. Arcade Fire’s ‘Rebellion’ live in 2006:
or the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’:
An amusing comment I found to one of their other live ‘Sabotage’ videos:
There is something unnerving about a good live version of a song you only know from the studio. I wondered how someone who grew up watching lip-synch videos would feel, watching something like this:
Much of our post-WW2 world is a man-made and managed “matrix” of advertising and political propaganda. Read the average contemporary writer, then go back and read some work on e.g. beekeeping or a history of church bells by some obscure clergyman or schoolmaster, and one is struck not merely by the far greater erudition and lexical/grammatical range of the latter – there is a sense of earthy grit & grain to the minor schoolmaster, in contrast to our contemporary propagandists.
I feel this is one of the reasons normies are so routinely affronted by Donald Trump; bizarrely – given his extensive background in reality TV – he is the political equivalent of a raw live take in a world of lip-synching fakes. He offends not by his middle-of-the-road civic nationalist opinions (“we are all American!”) but by breaking the illusion; even if he is weaving his own illusion, it is not part of the imprisoning deceit, it indeed violently jars with the narrative of the last three decades. He is his own man; like or dislike it, he’s not suborned to the manmade matrix (or should I rather say, demon-made). In a world of Top of the Pop lip-synching, Trump has the wild, controlled bluster & blister of, for example, Rod Stewart and The Faces performing ‘I’m Losing You’, with 15k likes and, at the time I viewed it, 358 dislikes:
As an old dog, I often think back to the formative artistic experiences of my late teens & early 20s. I have left most of them behind for one reason or another; some, like Nietzsche have receded as I only want to read him in German which means one page per 10 minutes; others, like U2, have become shameless globohomo shills, and Bono’s voice and talent have both disappeared; Tori Amos is a little special – as an impressionable 17-year-old, I found this hot redhead enticing & exciting
and she led me to read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. I even saw a concert of hers and got the eerie impression she was repeatedly looking directly at me – though I suspect this was a mere performative trick. Little Earthquakes was (I think) the first CD I ever bought, along with Metallica’s …And Justice for All; I was mesmerised by it, by the gorgeous ‘Silent All These Years’
Lyrics like “Yes I know what you think of me, you never shut up” cut to the point with an everyday unpoetic poetry, if you like.
As I grew older, I lost interest in her new music and increasingly disliked her persona; in my 20s I had been a little bruised by narcissists, and also come to recoil from my own narcissistic tendencies, and so perceived the exhibitionism, vanity, and grandiosity in Tori Amos; not merely in her “shocking” cover art:
but in her very musical technique – too many pointless trills, to showcase her voice. Of course, every performer tends to be a narcissist but I found her blend increasingly offputting. A couple of years ago I realised I hadn’t played any of her music in a decade and so googled, and found this (quite good) song with her daughter:
It’s nothing special; just what you would expect from an expensive studio, producer, and sufficient vocal talent. I was struck, however, by the expressions on both women’s faces – a smug, knowing, “I am better than you” look which I call the Streep. It’s a look I saw on one of the narcissists I knew in my early 20s, let’s call her B, a largely talentless midwit who read a book every six months and has now become a Guardian-reading school teacher; B is now marked by a look of permanent sneering hauteur, and finger-wagging certitude:
– a look to which I respond with either the Mel or the Vince:
Recently, I’ve had some Tori Amos songs in my head; the one which returns most often is ‘Tear In Your Hand’, not one of the big hits but, more & more, my favourite.
It’s a great break-up song:
I don’t believe you’re leaving cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream I think it’s that girl and I think there’re pieces of me you’ve never seen Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen well
All in all, my middle-aged self is glad she existed for my 17-year-old self.
Remainders 