Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Boston was infected early with the Syphilis of Success, Status Anxiety. There never was a Boston Sound, a music with its own definable character, and that is partly the fault of the musicians, partly the fault of the expectations of the audiences. They preyed upon their music with the teeth of unfair comparison, and took out their boredom as a token of their hipness. The musicians were wasted away by self-consciousness. These are to some degree the afflictions being visited upon the whole rock scene today, out Boston consumed itself in its rage to be recognized. It forgot that...
...first night on Miami Beach I found myself in a grunjy teen-age hangout semi-filled with its regulars. Music from a tape-recorder on a table in the center of the room with a huge lampshade hanging right over, filled with a disturbingly weak bulb. The music was unmentionable top-40 staple. The girl in rapacious charge of the tape-recorder brutally cut short "Hey Jude" saying "I don't like that song at all" to a general chorus of approval. Walls covered with Gauguinesque posters and Peanuts homilies. The kids didn't dance but twitched spasmodically on their...
...more time: the purring of the Atlantic Ocean by night, to the visual beat of four tiny buoy lights, red, green and blue, blinking on and off in god knows whose rhythm, is a form of music if you too are sitting there feeling the instability of the cosmos and brooding...
...this by way of pointing out that Any collection of sounds, from the most banal to the most complex and abstract, is enhanced by the right environment, spatial and spiritual. Ordinary music can be transformed into transcendental music if the conditions for it are right, if its purpose is felt at any one instant to be compelling, if it takes the listener's thoughts and sense-perceptions and embodies them in sound. Any music can be good music depending on your mood and the objective circumstances you find yourself...
With this axiom firmly in mind we can begin to understand the peculiar vitality and uniqueness of rock and roll. Of all the forms of music, rock is the least demanding of a particular environment and atmosphere. Thus, I can see that "Revolution 9," which is hardly rock 'n' roll, might turn out, some dark and wintry night, to be right (it hasn't happened yet for me) but I know that "Ob-la-di Ob-la-da," which is pure rock, is right nearly all the time. This instant impact that rock 'n' roll has is due in part...