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Wildworld makes me faint with its sexiness. Nick Cave is sexy without even knowing it. I'm sure of this.
I brought The Secret Life of Love Songs to work with me. It's a lecture by Nick Cave that I spoke of in this entry. He performs several songs throughout the lecture. As I was doing terribly boring work, I listened to it for the twentieth time. This part, in particular, stood out today...
"In his brilliant lecture, The Theory And Function Of Duende, Frederico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives at the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sounds has 'duende'," he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have at its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often, anger, sometimes - but true sadness, rarely. Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically with it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and, though he tries to, he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. My friends The Dirty 3 have it by the bucketload. But, all in all, it would appear that the duende is too fragile to survive the compulsive modernity of the music industry. In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class, where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror. Sadness or duende, needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. I feel sorry for sadness, as we jump all over it, denying it its voice and muscling it into the outer reaches. No wonder sorrow doesn't smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad."
This is probably the reason why I find it difficult to listen to the vast majority of rock music on the radio. The public has no taste or patience for duende, and I cannot live without it.
I brought The Secret Life of Love Songs to work with me. It's a lecture by Nick Cave that I spoke of in this entry. He performs several songs throughout the lecture. As I was doing terribly boring work, I listened to it for the twentieth time. This part, in particular, stood out today...
"In his brilliant lecture, The Theory And Function Of Duende, Frederico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives at the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sounds has 'duende'," he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have at its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often, anger, sometimes - but true sadness, rarely. Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically with it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and, though he tries to, he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. My friends The Dirty 3 have it by the bucketload. But, all in all, it would appear that the duende is too fragile to survive the compulsive modernity of the music industry. In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class, where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror. Sadness or duende, needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. I feel sorry for sadness, as we jump all over it, denying it its voice and muscling it into the outer reaches. No wonder sorrow doesn't smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad."
This is probably the reason why I find it difficult to listen to the vast majority of rock music on the radio. The public has no taste or patience for duende, and I cannot live without it.
