"What's interesting about rock 'n' roll is that its truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound. ‘Tutti Frutti’ is far more revolutionary than Lennon's 'Woman Is the Nigger of the World,' and the sound of Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did." 

- Robert Ray

"My argument has always been that the way rock works, both in terms of its emotional effectiveness but also in terms of its politics, is at the level of sound.  No matter how powerful you think “Ohio” is, in terms of politics “Tutti Frutti” is more politically profound."

- Robert Ray 

Having trouble correlating these righteous remarks with the barely-there quality of the sound of Ray's band The Vulgar Boatmen - The Feelies clarified to a consomme that barely touches the sides as it goes down.

Thinking more generally about this vague area of music - college rock  (Ray is an actual college professor) and Amerindie....   Hoboken as haven on Earth.... The Feelies, Camper Van Beethoven, Miracle Legion, Yo La Tengo.... a sensibility big in the Eighties, as a reaction-formation against mainstream rock, but one that endures as a strain to this day

Is it that America is still a Puritan nation at heart? 

How else to explain this musical preference for frugality of means and modesty of mode? The Quakerish  premium on egalitarianism  - the person onstage has no more of a voice than you do.  A dislike of drama that taps into the deep Puritan tradition of anti-theatricality. 

This taste formation doesn't go in for 'thickness'... it recoils from texturitis....  Performers can never be too self-effacing. 

Which is why Scrawl, say, got a better critical reception than Throwing Muses

Why the Mekons were always more of a cause here than Morrissey & Marr

"What one really learns from an Academy or College is not so much from one's official teachers as from one's fellow-students"

-  Vaughan Williams

(talking about his friendship with Gustav Holst) 

 “Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.”

― Norman O. Brown

“The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.”

― Norman O. Brown

 

“I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences.”

― Norman O. Brown

 

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.”

― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

spot the idiot

"Message songs are a drag!" 

- Bob Dylan, datebook magazine 1966

“Elektra is not the tool of anyone's revolution. We feel that the revolution will be won by poetics and not by politics - that poetics will change the structure of the world." 

- Jac Holzman of Elektra Records, in Rolling Stone 1969

"The act of being in a band and strapping on an electric guitar is a political action" 

- Jon Spencer, The Quietus, 2025

"an almost savage torpor", or, plus ca change

 

Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800

The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.

"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors... 

And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters. 

In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility.  Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today

"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled. 

Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes

   These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. 

an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798

I wonder if Wordsworth would have approved of this tribute? 

Busy bee

Buzzing all day long

What's the hurry?

There's surely something wrong

I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright

'Cause your friends are picking flowers

Take away all my light

But you see busy bee

It's all for love

People pick them

You lick them all for love

Lalalalala...

She was a virgin, a humble virgin

She knew of no sin

Her eyes as bright as the stars without light

Spent all the night

 For, nothing spake to me but the fair Face

 Of Hev'n and Earth, when yet I could not speak:

 I did my Bliss, when I did Silence, break.

 

Traherne, "Dumness."'