Words About Music - A Top Of The Head Selection

Words About Music – A Top Of The Head Selection

January 27, 2013, 12:55 pm
Filed under: Reading, Uncategorized | Tags: Books

“If as a teenager you feel music this powerfully, it is very difficult to grow up and grow out of it. You are in fact likely to spend the rest of your life searching for similar experiences, even at ages when other life experiences should have suggested that there is a kind of immaturity in feeling so strongly about what is, after all, merely music, which is merely a form of guesswork about consciousness.”      Words & Music, Paul Morley

 

 

“A man sits in a car on a tree-lined street, watching a fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love with her. I’ve almost come to blows with friends because of my insistence that much of Van Morrison’s early work had an obsessively reiterated theme of pedophilia, but here is something that at once may be taken as that and something far beyond it. He loves her. Because of that, he is helpless. Shaking. Paralyzed. Maddened. Hopeless. Nature mocks him. As only nature can mock nature. Or is love natural in the first place? No Matter. By the end of the song he has entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstasy; the music aches and yearns as it rolls on out. This is one supreme pain, that of being imprisoned a spectator. And perhaps no so very far from “T.B. Sheets,” except that it must be far more romantically easy to sit and watch someone you love die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health and know that you can never, ever have them, can never speak to them.”                                                                                                        Lester Bangs on Astral Weeks

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