Posts Tagged ‘Music’
[awesomeness] is the memory of awesomeness
December 24th, 2009
after the show, originally uploaded by s t e r n f a h r e r.
after the show, originally uploaded by s t e r n f a h r e r.
The show’s over.
The curtain drops.
The lights go out.
All lights but one.
A spotlight
at the center of the stage.
That one still burns.
The light is the memory
of the performance that was;
the rumble of drums,
the growl of guitars;
of thousands swaying to the beat.
The show’s over,
but the memory remains.
Tags: awesomeness, memory, Music, Rock, spotlight
Posted in Photography, random musings | Comments (0)
the existentialist’s burden November 7th, 2008
I must confess, that U2’s Pop album has always been my favorite. It had the panache of Achtung Baby and Zooropa, tempered with the memory of the innocence of The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum. Pop was genius, it was also a spectacular show. The fault lines of the self, only glimpsed in early U2 were laid bare in Pop. It was an almost Nietzschean rejection of all that came before, and in that sense, probably a catharsis that the late ’90s demanded, before they rebooted, with All that you can’t leave behind and How to dismantle an atomic bomb.
Within that record however, Please has always been my favorite. I like to call it the existentialist’s burden. How does one become an existentialist? Most of us are engendered into some religious way of thinking, long before we ever engage with Sartre or Camus or Heidegger or Kierkegaard.
Please raises an interesting question, in that; whether you take Camus’ endless dances of master-slave relationships, or go back to Nietzsche’s unflinching embrace of life; you more-or-less do away with the notion of ‘faith’. The Lion of “I Will” defying the Dragon of “thou shalt”.
Love on the other hand, is best explained with a grounding in faith of some form, faith being integral to its constitution. On the one hand, Camus didn’t see a problem with it; on the other, Sartre did, and went along a rather destructive path of the unflinching deconstruction of the various forms of it.
Nothing profound, just an observation.
lyrics:
Please stop fighting, please
Let’s talk, please
So you never knew love
Until you’d crossed the line of grace
And you never felt wanted
Till you’d someone slap your face
And you never felt alive
Until you’d almost wasted away
You had to win, you couldn’t just pass
The smartest ass at the top of the class
Your flying colours, your family tree
And all your lessons in history
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Leave it out
So you never knew how low you’d stoop
To make that call
And you never knew what was on the ground
Until they made you crawl
So you never knew that the heaven you keep
You stole
Your Catholic blues, your convent shoes
Your stick-on tattoos, now they’re making the news
Your holy war, your northern star
Your sermon on the mount from the boot of your car
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Leave it out
‘Cause love is big and love is tough
But love is not what you’re thinking of
September, streets capsizing
Spilling over and down the drain
Shards of glass, splinters like rain
But you could only feel your own pain
October, talk getting nowhere
November, December
Remember, are we just starting again
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please
‘Cause love is big, it’s bigger than us
But love is not what you’re thinking of
It’s what lovers deal, it’s what lovers steal
You know I found it hard to recieve
‘Cause you, my love, I could never believe
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Please, please, please
Please
Tags: existentialism, faith, life, logic, love, Music, philosophy, please, U2
Posted in Music, Politics/Ideas | Comments (0)
on creeping death May 30th, 2008
Came across Lovecraft by chance; and followed a trail back to an old Metallica song.
It’s always interesting to find the sources of inspiration for artists, musicians, writers, and so on.
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
In this case, Metallica seem to have found inspiration from Lovecraft’s work across many songs. Lovecraft had an oddly disturbing way of looking at the World, perhaps no less real than the framework that I, or any of us, for that matter may use. Only thing is, he seems to be coming to the same conclusion from the other side of a looking glass.
Will explore his work more over this weekend, hopefully.
“The thing that should not be,” Metallica
Tags: Existence, ideas, Lovecraft, Metallica, Music, songs, The Thing that Should Not Be, thoughts
Posted in Books, Music, Opinion, Politics/Ideas, poetry | Comments (0)
