Word: lyricism
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Money Mark, former keyboardist in the Beastie Boys’ live show, has created a lyric-less disc of processed vibes and snarls that winds up tasting a bit like elevator music on acid. While the soul of it may be elusive at times, the surprises keep coming. Much of the album is reminiscent of the recent explosion of electronic jazz, headed up by the likes of St. Germain and Karl Denson, but “Another Day,” is an electronic fantasy on Santana’s “Guajira,” (though unattributed...
...immolation: immolation of the infidel and self-immolation of the avenger. Not since the Nazi rallies of the 1930s has the world witnessed such celebration of blood and soil, of killing and dying. What Western TV would feature, as does Palestinian TV, a children's song with the lyric "How pleasant is the smell of martyrs...the land enriched by the blood, the blood pouring out of a fresh body...
...Lyrics are important, but they don't have to matter. Even when Bob Dylan, arguably America's finest lyricist, mumbles through a number, the poetry of his words comes out in the phrasing. "How does it feel?" Dylan famously asked on Like a Rolling Stone. We may not have known exactly what he meant, but we knew how it felt. Today's musicians have taken that lesson to heart. Thom Yorke of the British band Radiohead wrote some songs for his album Kid A by cutting up lyric sheets and pulling lines out of a top hat. The Icelandic band...
...white underclass, when he manages to get past his fixations on his mom, Everlast and boy bands.) And the undying Tupac Shakur--named for a revolutionary and tied, through his mother and musical executor, to the Black Panther movement--is a far more political figure than his lyric sheets suggest. But popular hip-hop, P.-Diddy-all-about-the-Benjamins-style, tends to be more like the black E! channel, celebrating money and fame. Only a handful of artists, like Dead Prez, are calling to change the channel: "You would rather have a Lexus or justice, a dream or some...
Four years later, the same benign neglect greeted his next book, Strong Motion, about toxic subterfuges carried out by a Boston chemical firm. "Sixty reviews in a vacuum," as he later put it. Franzen began to wonder if literary fiction were going the way of the lyric poem, a deluxe specimen of cultural product enjoyed only by the happy few. When, he asked himself, was the last time an ambitious novel achieved the name recognition of Portnoy's Complaint, to say nothing of Catch...