Word: formful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Raises, pensions and other such mundane bribes would not have kept him. His price is much higher: individuality. To eliminate the draft, the services would have to adopt an entirely new form of discipline, one in which conformity would be secondary to personal initiative and common sense. Whether such a posture would be militarily effective is a question for the psychologists, but I suspect that "volunteer army" will remain a politician's oxymoron for some time to come...
...gripping and this immediacy is what makes the greatest rock music as widely popular as it is. Jimi Hendrix was named the most important star of the year by, of all publications, Billboard, that infamous organ of AM radio rock. This would all be fine, and all the various forms of music would coexist happily, if it were not for the fact that American rock today is in some danger of being subverted by pernicious influences. This is a message I bring back from the Miami festival: The music of groups like the Grateful Dead, Iron Butterfly, Spirit, the whole...
Rock 'n' roll is the only high-quality mass art form we have today and it would be a ghastly mistake to allow it to degenerate into the middle-class art form that classical music is, or into the cliquish limited-audience music that modern jazz became. It is disturbing to see many of the best musicians in America trying to remold rock in an alien jazz and classical music inspired cast...
...Grateful Dead took the field midway through the second day. After much exacting tuning and preparation they began--and played without stopping for 45 long, and sometimes short, minutes. The music was essentially freeform or no-form jamming. If you put any bunch of talented musicians on stage and have them improvise for an hour it is inevitable that they will get it together a few times. For all that, it is clear that progressive rock is not instantly exalting the way supreme unvarnished rock 'n' roll (Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Who, etc.) is. Rather the Grateful Dead came into their...
This paradox can perhaps be resolved if we recognize that rock and roll is basically a working-class, lower-class art form (all the greatest American music has come from blacks while the English groups are, nearly without exception, staffed by urban lower-class kids) and much of the working class is not interested in revolution. In America today the main impetus for social change comes from alienated middle class kids. Some of them, the musically inclined, turn to rock music, but they retain the musical values they were brought up with, those of classical music. No wonder that their...