"music is the superb illusion"

 E.M. Cioran having a rare chat with Jason Weiss - in this excerpt talking about music, without which life would be a mistake

 “I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start.The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial.

“I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.”

- Theodor Adorno, 1968, televised interview, with imagery of Vietnam War and Joan Baez singing "Oh, Freedom".