41 posts tagged “music”

Lately it's been heavy
all my friends have been in trouble by the pound
And they're spread out
and there is only so much of me to go around

Asking how things are going to go is like asking, "What's the shape of water?"
The condition is not the process is not the outcome is not the aftermath

Lately it's been harder
to stay present and not drift too far out of reach
What keeps me focused
is knowing the moment has so much to teach

Asking how things are going to go is like asking, "What's the shape of water?"
The condition is not the process is not the outcome is not the aftermath

The shape of water depends on the shape of the container you carry it in
The shape of water depends on the shape of the container you carry it in
The shape of water depends on the shape of the container you carry it in
The shape of water depends on the shape of the container you carry it in

[...] The adviser said that he had heard from a source in Iran that the Revolutionary Guards have been telling religious leaders that they can stand up to an American attack. "The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American security," the adviser said. "They are bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship—to signal the Americans that they can get close to them." (I was told by the former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull's-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.) [...]

[...] "Everything in life is about personal relationships – including the way one feels about music. I want to create as many opportunities for people to have that 'aha' moment – give people the chance to really connect with the composers." [...]

[...] "Musicians, like actors and writers, can be maddeningly inarticulate about what they do – because they do it, not talk about it. Marin is that rare exception. She has such a lucid, human understanding of music that she can explain something the way that others might tell you about certain items on the wall of their living room." [...]

"Marin Alsop breaks the glass baton," Elaine F. Weiss, Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 26, 2007

[...] Gould' s thoughts on ‘ideal' music were most vividly expressed in a few lines he wrote about Jan Sibelius in 1974: “at its best, his style partook of that spare, bleak, motivically stingy counterpoint that nobody south of the Baltic ever seems to write.”

Spare, bleak, motivically stingy counterpoint. You might describe the music of Webern or Schoenberg the same way, without meaning to praise either one of them. But for Gould, stinginess could be an artistic virtue and bleakness could be liberating, just as the North that Gould idealized was free of buildings, roads and other people. [...]

"Our Man for Bach, but Also Schoenberg," Robert Everett-Green, Toronto Globe and Mail, Sept. 22, 2007

[...] So, however rude and annoying Obama got in his repeated insistence that he would not dislodge the earbuds from his senatorial ears, I felt the strong urge to make him comfortable, happy, and part of the party. "Tell me what kind of music you like." I said, "Maybe we have a CD you'd prefer to the one that's playing." Obama obliged, listing six or eight band names I'd never heard of. If only I could recall some of them, but all I can say is that 1. they sounded like indie rock bands and 2. they were totally unknown to me. I felt foiled.

Then I got another idea. "Let me listen to a couple of songs on your iPod, and I'll see if I have some music that I think you would like, based on what you're listening to." Reluctantly, Obama obliged, handing his earbuds over to me. At this point a surreal, only-in-your-dreams moment occurred and I realized that Obama's iPod was somehow connected to a heavy cable that trailed off into the other room, which made it awkward to manipulate. I managed to get the earbuds in and, to my great astonishment, I recognized the song that was playing. Quite improbably, it was "Race for the Prize," the first track off the Flaming Lips' CD The Soft Bulletin. I got inordinately excited, all of the frustration and anxiety that had built up over Obama's musical intransigence and my inability to please him melting away in a wash of excitement. "The Flaming Lips! We listen to that band! We have this CD!" As I disentangled myself from Obama's iPod and rushed off to put The Soft Bulletin on the CD player, my dream melted into some other scene...

[...] Barack Obama said his last purchase was "probably" "Ray," the score from the Oscar-winning movie on the life of R&B crooner Ray Charles. [...]

At first listen, the Indigo Girls don't make any sense, not for the hyper-macho world of a presidential campaign, much less a summertime rally for a superstar like Barack Obama. But his sound people are piping in the feminist folk duo's music anyway to pump up a crowd of hundreds at this small-town coffee shop on the Fourth of July. They play "Hammer and a Nail," a 1990 declaration of female empowerment and emancipation. "You've got to tend the earth," the Girls sing, "if you want a rose."

Then Obama comes out, looking lithe and dashing, with his 6-year-old daughter, Sasha, in his arms. The soundtrack starts to make sense. "I'm a sucker for girls," says the man who wants to be president. "There is nothing more difficult than me being on the phone hearing about their soccer game, hearing about what happened to them in school and knowing that I am not there in the evenings to share a lot of their life." He turns to his wife, Michelle, who is sitting nearby on a stool. "She is smarter," he says. "She is tougher." [...]

[...] "I'm old school, so generally, generally, I'm more of a jazz guy, a Miles Davis, a John Coltrane guy, more of a Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder kind of guy," Obama said in the interview. "But having said that, I'm current enough that on my iPod I've got a little bit of Jay-Z. I've got a little Beyonce." [...]
 

"Barack Obama gets name-dropped in hip-hop,"
Peter Hamby,
CNN,
August 17, 2007

"You've been in a room once in a while with a rock star. He walks into the world, and he takes your breath away. I'd love him to be president, quite honestly. [...]"

[...] Rock stars may hide behind all sorts of masks -- be it makeup, a thuggish image or an alter ego named Sasha -- but when they perform, the best of them give the audience the sense that it's witnessing a very real part of their personality.

There's something charmingly old school about the notion of a rock star, a larger than life character that at once seems untouchable but also like an intimate friend. The Internet can't make a rock star -- at least not yet. Sites like YouTube celebrate accessibility and the notion that everyone should be equally seen and heard. Rock stars still benefit from the quaint notion that they are more subversive, more audacious, more fearless, more sensitive than everyone else. They speak truth to power. They speak for the disenfranchised. They are poets. It doesn't matter that some of the biggest stars are akin to private corporations with all the hierarchies, for-profit motives and mainstream popularity that implies. The myth of the rock star endures. And at some point, everyone turns into a groupie.