Word: refrains
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Probably the boldest and most subtle experiment in the latest album is with popular music itself. As Spinal Tap showed, mimicking bad rock is the best way to criticize it. Likewise, the songs Little Creatures dip into the sounds and dull themes of pop music, but carefully refrain from making the complete dive. Instead they go just far enough to poke fun at the music during the journey. The chance they take, nonetheless, is a big one, considering they are dealing with a genre they usually take no interest in. This sort of dialectic-bashing implies an experiment that...
...achieve satisfactory results." The hijackers added ominously that the next communique would be their last, presumably meaning that they planned to destroy the plane afterward. They also announced that they were sending a letter to President Reagan, reputedly signed by the hostages, asking him to negotiate their release and refrain from "any direct military action on our behalf...
...Senate, by a vote of 90 to 5, passed a nonbinding resolution calling on Reagan to "continue to refrain from undercutting" SALT II's provisions. Anticipating his decision, however, the Senate allowed for "proportionate responses" to any Soviet violations. Washington's NATO allies, meanwhile, urged the U.S. not to tamper with SALT II for fear of upsetting the nuclear status quo and undermining current U.S.-Soviet arms-reduction talks in Geneva...
Dylan has had a lot of practice at such radical departures. He not only shaped current American popular music, he changed it irrevocably. Baffled editorial writers and swamped reporters, trying to sort sense from the maelstrom of the late '60s and early '70s, would fall back on a famous refrain from Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. Now don't all sing at once: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones...
...pacing has never been more engagingly on display. Yet the restrictions imposed by these skills are also evident. In the world according to Irving, characters are the passive victims of life. They are either children or childlike, dependent on forces beyond their control. They "wait and see" (an ongoing refrain in this novel), wondering, like Homer and Dr. Larch, "What is going to happen to me?" What literally happens to them, of course, is the tricks, sometimes macabre, visited upon them by their creator...