Perhaps not of interest to you personally, but this speaks to the importance of Louisiana as the birthplace of Homer Flynn of The Residents (and perhaps, in part, their nonsense lyrics and savage mockery of the Beatles).
Though most of my attention to the Residents dates back to a time when we were not sure whether Homer Flynn was the driving force, or whether the Lousiana back story was just an invention.
I mean, I do not wish to diminish Hardy's contributions one iota, especially as I think he brought beauty to the band, where Homer tends towards the ugliness, though their genius was/is to show how inextricably interconnected disgust and delight are. "For pain and pleasure are the twins/ That, slightly out of focus, spin/ Around us till we finally understand/ That everything that gives us pleasure/ Also gives us pain to measure/ It by."
You're much more well versed in Chuck Berry, Elvis and James Brown than I am, I believe, so those influences on the Residents might be clearer for you than me, but some years back I wrote a long piece on their largely forgotten 'Disfigured Night' piece, which touches on some of the ideas you're touching on here, I think:
Yes please! I can think of few things I would rather read. The Residents really deserve far more engaged critical commentary than they get. In terms of their Beatles deconstructions, their cover of 'Hey Jude' never fails to give me a ghoulish smile!
This is indeed Capek, and indeed “On Literature”--I encountered it in the Karl Capek reader this summer. A charming volume but a tragic one, ending with his resolute defense of liberalism and humanism on the eve of appeasement
Although your summary isn’t quite right--he says “it is [not] a bad or useless profession: but it isn’t one of the superlatively fine and striking ones, and the material used is of a strange sort”
Bravo. I hope the book you're writing is a Morley-toppling work on popular music, and that you took the tip I gave you a few comments back.
For me, Chuck Berry is the devil in rock'nroll even if he is the one who handed it to the Beatles and onto Rock. He mashed up the genres - jump and latin jazz, country and blues - to create something new and fluid - he worked out a formula, but also the formula for varying it so it never sounded repetitive. For the first 28 sides - then he destroyed it with a thoroughness few artists have achieved, when he died you had to dig deep to find it again.
"the art-form began to degrade at the moment certain artists, notably British ones, started getting the peculiar idea that rock lyrics must be meaningful"
Recommend the book - How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, by Elijah Wald. Only the last chapter deals with the Beatles destroying R&R (I think Bob Dylan gets some blame too), most of the book is a good history of American pop.
Thank you for bringing up Karel Čapek. I loved your mentioning Hrabal (it took me back to a book I loved, "Too Loud a Solitude") I also believe that music structures our world before we learn how to talk. Music, kind of a mother. And I share your yawn at that "sweet and redemptive" group. It´s always great reading you.
I absolutely adore Latour - just a few days before I heard of his death I was thinking of reading "We Have Never Been Modern" and I thought, well, I can read that later?
What is your opinion on "French theory"? I mean like Derrida, Deleuze, Serres, Badiou, Latour. It seems to me as an Anglophone (who wants to learn French) that these authors have been misinterpreted and distorted for American academia, and distorted even more and misunderstood by their critics - so Derrida becomes a relativist, etc. But I wonder what you think of them. (Personally I like Deleuze, and he's been a great stimulation for me to go deeper into both art/literature and mathematics)
Perhaps not of interest to you personally, but this speaks to the importance of Louisiana as the birthplace of Homer Flynn of The Residents (and perhaps, in part, their nonsense lyrics and savage mockery of the Beatles).
I've been meaning to write about the Residents! Including their ingenious deconstructive take on the Beatles, e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n055WZMmGYY
Thanks for encouraging me to get around to it!
Though most of my attention to the Residents dates back to a time when we were not sure whether Homer Flynn was the driving force, or whether the Lousiana back story was just an invention.
I mean, I do not wish to diminish Hardy's contributions one iota, especially as I think he brought beauty to the band, where Homer tends towards the ugliness, though their genius was/is to show how inextricably interconnected disgust and delight are. "For pain and pleasure are the twins/ That, slightly out of focus, spin/ Around us till we finally understand/ That everything that gives us pleasure/ Also gives us pain to measure/ It by."
You're much more well versed in Chuck Berry, Elvis and James Brown than I am, I believe, so those influences on the Residents might be clearer for you than me, but some years back I wrote a long piece on their largely forgotten 'Disfigured Night' piece, which touches on some of the ideas you're touching on here, I think:
https://cagewisdom.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/the-residents-disfigured-night/
Yes please! I can think of few things I would rather read. The Residents really deserve far more engaged critical commentary than they get. In terms of their Beatles deconstructions, their cover of 'Hey Jude' never fails to give me a ghoulish smile!
I love the shameful shuffle backwards into the dark at the end of this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FP7nK9Iywk
This is indeed Capek, and indeed “On Literature”--I encountered it in the Karl Capek reader this summer. A charming volume but a tragic one, ending with his resolute defense of liberalism and humanism on the eve of appeasement
Thanks, Kevin, great to know! Now I recall that I read it in the Capek Reader myself, though it’s been about twenty years since I last saw it.
Although your summary isn’t quite right--he says “it is [not] a bad or useless profession: but it isn’t one of the superlatively fine and striking ones, and the material used is of a strange sort”
The position that we can seperate the art from the artist, entered the critical
discourse via T. S. Eliot and the New Critics. Paraphrasing Eliot he said when evaluating
a text we should seperate the man who suffers from the words of the text. Tall order.
However, the New Critics did bequeath to us a useful tool with which to read literature, namely close reading.
Thank you as always for an enthralling essay. If you do decide to take a deep dive on " Sussudio" let us know the results.
Bravo. I hope the book you're writing is a Morley-toppling work on popular music, and that you took the tip I gave you a few comments back.
For me, Chuck Berry is the devil in rock'nroll even if he is the one who handed it to the Beatles and onto Rock. He mashed up the genres - jump and latin jazz, country and blues - to create something new and fluid - he worked out a formula, but also the formula for varying it so it never sounded repetitive. For the first 28 sides - then he destroyed it with a thoroughness few artists have achieved, when he died you had to dig deep to find it again.
https://witchdoctor.co.nz/index.php/2022/05/64363/
"the art-form began to degrade at the moment certain artists, notably British ones, started getting the peculiar idea that rock lyrics must be meaningful"
Recommend the book - How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, by Elijah Wald. Only the last chapter deals with the Beatles destroying R&R (I think Bob Dylan gets some blame too), most of the book is a good history of American pop.
Thank you for bringing up Karel Čapek. I loved your mentioning Hrabal (it took me back to a book I loved, "Too Loud a Solitude") I also believe that music structures our world before we learn how to talk. Music, kind of a mother. And I share your yawn at that "sweet and redemptive" group. It´s always great reading you.
I absolutely adore Latour - just a few days before I heard of his death I was thinking of reading "We Have Never Been Modern" and I thought, well, I can read that later?
What is your opinion on "French theory"? I mean like Derrida, Deleuze, Serres, Badiou, Latour. It seems to me as an Anglophone (who wants to learn French) that these authors have been misinterpreted and distorted for American academia, and distorted even more and misunderstood by their critics - so Derrida becomes a relativist, etc. But I wonder what you think of them. (Personally I like Deleuze, and he's been a great stimulation for me to go deeper into both art/literature and mathematics)