Word: misunderstand
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...create a broader awareness of the human condition, in a particular place or in every place. But to assume that getting kids to listen to hip-hop is the key way to bring about that awareness and that change is really to misunderstand the way both music and the phenomenon of social change work. And if you expect commercial radio stations to be on the front lines of political or cultural battles, you need to realize that commercial radio in Boston, like commercial radio everywhere, is not about black and white--it's about green. But good music is still...
...moralists misunderstand two things. One is that Starr's rejection by most Americans was itself an ironic triumph of conservatism. For the past 50 years the right has claimed that government can't perform most public purposes, whether those might be educating kids, caring for the poor or buying toilet seats for aircraft carriers at popular prices. This was an attack that started, of course, in the antigovernment rhetoric of the 1960s left. In the '90s Gingrich and his House revolutionaries consolidated that critique and focused it on Congress, assuring us that the place was a ship of fools...
Roberto Calasso resists this temptation to "exoticise" or trivialize the stories through humor with triumphant results. Don't misunderstand--there is plenty of humor, horror and wonder about the stories is Calasso's writing; but these feelings spring from Calasso's treatment of the stories as texts to learn from, not to snicker pre-pubescently at. Even more interesting is his incorporation of Western texts and ideas into a decidedly Eastern way of thinking. Thus Proust becomes a Vedic prayer-chant master; the great creator-spirit Prajapat faces Kafka-esque dilemmas that lead him to be compared to The Trial...
Within this framework of upbeat and catchy music, it is often difficult to take the messages of the songs on Why Do They Rock So Hard seriously. Perhaps the inconsistency of the music and the lyrics is a failing, allowing listeners to willfully misunderstand or ignore the meanings that Reel Big Fish are attempting to express. But the inconsistency may also serve to highlight alternative music's disturbing acceptance of conflict. And besides, if Reel Big Fish set their lyrics to appropriately violent music, their songs would not be nearly as much...
...play, "I can't make sense of these things anymore!" Caught in a constant mess of conflict and hypocrisy, nobody in this play ever really makes any understandable sense to each other or even to the audience. The folks at the A.R.T. wisely choose to leave the enigmas and misunderstandings in the play wide open to interpretation, presenting the characters as they are--faulty, hypocritical and always amusing. In the end, what makes the most sense about The Marriage of Bette and Boo, what makes the play so intensely human and what we all leave the theater understanding, is that...