Word: backdrop
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...album continues with the title track, "Emotional Rescue." Over an eerie carnival backdrop and an ingenious bass line, Jagger sings of the psychic strategies necessary to life with women, which is, as I have said, identical to life in general. It moves from a return to adolescence and ideal love (matched in from by the carnival figures and the unnatural falsetto) to a life of chronic depression ("And I was crying, baby, crying like a child," in a pain-wracked natural voice) to a vision of sexual redemption worthy of Lawrence, sung in the dread/voodoo accents of a Jamaican deejay...
...midst of a revival. He is well aware of the risk in seizing the national spotlight, if only for a week. "We have our warts," Young says with typical candor, "and we see them too." Republican Party leaders, in turn, hope to use Detroit as a theatrical backdrop in their bid to lure blue-collar workers and blacks away from the Democratic Party...
...European estimate of the American decline is surely exaggerated, and the reaction to it is misguided. The decline is being used to support a self-serving and self-defeating course. Indeed, the recent European attitude toward the Soviet Union has been so cautious as to verge on neutralism. The backdrop to the conflict between the U.S. and Europe is an old skein of misapprehensions and reproaches, failed hopes and even disappointed loves that can only be compared to an ancient family quarrel: tediously familiar, yet ever fresh in its capacity to wound. On both sides of the Atlantic, one regularly...
...reins of repression during the past 16 years. At the same time, however, material conditions are easier, and life has settled into a consistent, predictable norm that avoids the extremes of Khrushchev's erratic liberalization and Stalin's relentless terror. For many Soviets, that is reassuring, especially against the backdrop of their country's new prestige and power abroad...
Against the historical backdrop, each Commencement seems fleeting. The caps and gowns and top hats and sashes, the remnants from the days of Thomas Aquinas, the pomp and splendor and complacency and controversy combine to create an image of both continuity and peculiarity. Captain George Walsh of the Harvard police, who has witnessed the last 30 Commencements, lends perspective to this intangible double-life: "Every one is just as great as the next, but every one is a little different from the last." And today will probably bear out Walsh's maxim; the legacies of the past will melt together...