Better over the top than under the top
successor to Thinkige Kru whose feed doesn't seem to be working properly for reasons unknown - the old blog + archive remains here https://thinkigekru.blogspot.com/ -^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^vintage thoughts from others, vintage thoughts from me - varying degrees of profundity - thoughts quoted for the turn of thought / phrase rather than for truth value - quoted not necessarily because i agree with them or approve of them - i don't necessarily agree with my own past thinkiges!
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
"Is it possible - and I know this mad hypothesis is asking for ridicule - that we are poisoning ourselves with music? Our lot, my contemporaries, from our adolescence on, we listened to dance music, day and night, and it was all of it romantic or sentimental. It yearned, it wanted, it longed, it needed - and expected, too, for somewhere, some time, a promise had been made. Some day I'll find you... We were immersed in dreams. But since then music has changed. Its rhythms no longer swoon or sway or linger, they beat and pound and drive and the sound is so loud you have to hear it with your nerves.... So my question is, when some person goes out to kill or torture or maim, can one reason be that he or she has been set for the crime by music that has driven them mad? Shamans have used music for thousands of years to create special moods, young men are prepared for killing by stirring marches, churches use inspirational music to hold their flocks together, and it is known that real spiritual teachers use music, but this is so delicate a thing that it is used carefully, by specialists, in special circumstances. But we deluge ourselves with music, of every kind, soak ourselves in it, often feed it direct into the brain with machines designed for this purpose - and we never even ask what effect it may be having. Well, I, for one - and I know there are others think it is time we do ask."
- Doris Lessing, 1994
(from Under My Skin:
Volume I of my Autobiography, to 1949)
Sunday, September 14, 2025
"Outdoors, minor!"
"Sometimes my contribution [as a record producer] might have been as minimal as just saying, 'Shall we stop for a few minutes?... And then of course, other times I work like a normal musician. I say, 'Why don’t we have a G major instead of that B minor' or whatever. In fact, I nearly always say that, 'Why don’t we have a major instead of a minor?' It’s part of my destroy-minor-chords crusade that has been going on for 50 years or so"
- Brian Eno
Questions for people who know music from a musician's point of view:
- why would Eno take against minor chords? (Is it because they connote a "subtlety" that he finds middebrow, a too easy signaling of sophistication?)
- does Eno in fact avoid minor chords in his work? I haven't inspected them with this in mind (and not wholly confident I would spot their presence) but I can't help thinking that the downbeat, dreamy-drifty songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science might feature some minor chords...
Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone...and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this wi...
-
There is something so delicious, so sensually pleasing, when you come across a thinker whose ideas fit – not your own ideas, but impulses th...
-
"Sometimes my contribution [as a record producer] might have been as minimal as just saying, 'Shall we stop for a few minutes?... ...
-
Someone recentl y asked Greil Marcus why "sixties and seventies rock crits hate prog so much?" "Why do people hate prog roc...