Rap music and sincerity.
What Sincerity Looks Like...That’s what Chance the Rapper did on Monday on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
And since nothing improves music more than having it disassembled with a cold* chisel by America's Most Unctuous Conservative Public Intellectual...
He begins, not completely originally, by implying...
Then he compares his own first-world problems with actual problems...
The first part of the song is about...Then it changes mood with each verse.
The chorus is...
Sometimes that sounds like a hopeful...
Sometimes it sounds like an angry...
If you watch the video from the show, you see Chance just sitting on a stool...
It’s interesting to compare Chance’s song with Taylor Swift’s new song...
Swift is a phenomenally talented and beautiful songwriter who has lost touch with herself and seems to have been swallowed by the ethos of the Trump era.
The crucial lyric is ...
This is a song for a society without social trust...
It’s interesting how corporate the video looks and the song sounds...
It’s been a long time since the Sex Pistols burst on the scene...
I could have gone one million years without getting David "Mr. Music Explainer Guy" Brooks' Hot Take on the Sex Pistols.
The Acela's Corridor's resident Lester Bangs continues:
Johnny Cash was a rebel hippie of the First Water --The first thing you notice in comparing the Chance and Swift songs is the difference between a person and a brand.
The second thing you notice is the difference between sincerity and authenticity.
Back in the 1950s, sincerity seemed treacly and boring, and authenticity, in the form of, say, Johnny Cash, seemed daring and new.
-- who would have eaten Mr. David Brooks alive.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
*Thanks for the catch, alert readers!
4 comments:
Damn, can't go wrong with Johnny Cash. That man was the real deal.
As for David Fucking Brooks? Well, I keep waiting for his recent, even worse than usual political/social navel gazing these last few weeks to implode upon itself like a cosmic singularity, causing him to retire and be heard from no more. OTOH, I hope for a similar implosion with Trump & the Republicans. Triumph of hope over experience, apparently.
BTW, it is a cold chisel.
David F. Brooks. He is forever trapped in that English Comp. class with the hot chicks and cool kids and nerds who actually get what the prof is talking about; and then there is the resume-building position. I mean, really, is he going to get to work with Buckley if he is a hippy? Is he ever going to get laid if he's David Fucking Brooks?
Luckily, he has a system.
The world, as represented by series y is divided into two types of x.
x1 is outdated
x2 is exotic
Seminar:
So, class, Jefferson Airplane just released their album "After Bathing at Baxters." Let's listen.
Class discussion about the intersection of art, music and literature with politics and social critique.
Prof: So Dave, You've been awfully quiet. What's your impression?
I think The Jeffersons' Airplane really serves as a counterpoint to The Jeffersons' television series. On the one hand, they are the same, and on the other hand, they are really quite different. Grace Slick, however talented a singer, is really a monster. "I want my country to die for me?" That's selfish.
Prof: Um, yeah, that is a line from James Joyce, hence the title ReJoyce. It's about Ulysses.
Dave: Erm, yes, James Joyce is an important author, Irish, you know Catholic, from Ireland. Very controversial. Amazing. Still, Grace needs to shut the hell up when she is not singing; you know, like that Carpenter chick.
Prof: Have you read Joyce?
Dave: Erm, yes, you know, I was reading Joyce, his letters and essays, this summer with my Canadian girlfriend at Niagra Falls.
And it goes on for fucking ever.
In high school (in the 80s, in what looks [by comparison with Chambersburg, PA] like the enlightened liberal paradise of the Mississippi Gulf Coast), I played Tom Wingfield in a theatre department production of The Glass Menagerie. The title "David Brooks Writes About What He Knows Best" reminds me of an accusation leveled at Tom ("the narrator of this play and also a character in it") by his mother Amanda toward the end, an accusation which is somewhat true about him and incredibly true about her: "You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream, you manufacture illusions!"
Not so sure Brooks would comprehend two other men in Black.
Like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.
Brooks had trouble when another guy in black. President Obama wearing a tan suit.
hadn't listened to the "cut you down" track in some time. Thanks for that one.
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