Word: fervor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...home her Eastern sisters they would moan as they would read accounts of madness, childbirth, loneliness and grief." The words are printed like this in the album notes, as if they were bits of homespun prose from some cosmic farmer's almanac; but Merchant sings them with dreamy, insistent fervor, like a reverie from O Pioneers! Or maybe Wisconsin Death Trip...
...Avila the real thing? Officially, both Washington and Havana are mum, although Avila's involvement with Miami's Alpha 66 paramilitary group was long known to the FBI. He claims Castro covertly funded some exile raids on Cuba to build nationalist fervor at home and embarrass Washington. The red faces were most obvious, however, in Miami, where rabid anti-Castro militants like Alpha 66 and Commandos L denied that they had been infiltrated or financed by the enemy...
...evening. Bloom takes us through the stages of her disintegration. She sinks to the floor, wanders the stage, pulls at her hair, wrings her hands, looks wild, childish, ravaged, lost. Her soliloquoy "Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thought, unsex me here" is viscerally delivered, its cruel fervor made apparent. Bloom's composite of Macbeth is unusually harsh. In leaving out the "tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquoy--cutting right after "she should have died hereafter;/ There would have been a time for such a word"--Bloom's Macbeth appears less than devastated by the death of his wife...
...poverty and mystical spiritual aspirations of the black Jamaican underclass. His voice sounded like sugarcane but cut like a switchblade. His love songs, like Guava Jelly, Stir It Up and Three Little Birds (included here in a previously unreleased and altogether ravishing alternate version), were lighted with a sexual fervor suggesting that passion itself is a kind of temporary redemption. His political songs, whether metaphorical (I Shot the Sheriff) or straight-out and out-front (War, with its lyric from a speech by Haile Selassie, and still one of the most devastating assaults on racism in all of rock), were...
...know what to do with it. Instead of just isolating a disturbing tendency in pop culture, he is compelled to document it with suspicious statistics, to draw conspiratorial conclusions, to call for a return in spirit to the movies' puritanical Production Code of the 1930s -- all with the fervor of a modern Martin Luther, an angry evangelist determined to nail his 95 theses not on a church door but on a movie marquee. Problem is, he keeps hitting his thumb...