Word: rocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...familiar cliche, of course, that the Third World is trapped between its own traditional cultures and encroaching modernity. Old men driving donkey carts past skyscrapers, turbaned young boys listening to rock 'n' roll songs, etc., etc. During my three weeks in Tunisia, though, I saw how facile that cliche can be, yet how very real it is for the people caught in this clash of cultures. I saw it turned upside down in a place which is literally upside down...
...much more enjoyable) summer movie, Prince's Under the Cherry Moon, this one attempts to fit a very modern one-name pop superstar into a traditional, golden-age Hollywood format. And why not? Who else has that old-time charisma? Only the bad boy and material girl of rock 'n' roll. With Prince it worked, mostly, because his blend of Little Richard and Little Egypt spiced the stew. But Madonna seems straitjacketed by her role, and Penn, for once, looks bored. She smiles, he glowers. Neither glows like the incandescent movie stars they can and will...
...Simon will dig in, talking about a tune with the fluid confidence of a seminar master. Indeed, he has taught a few songwriting classes, and can cut loose about "pressure to keep music either raw and unsophisticated or to keep it young. On the one hand, that might make rock vital, but on the other, one reason my generation has stopped listening to music is that it doesn't have anything to do with their lives. In the '60s, it was what was happening in your life, in the life of your community. Now you hear what's happening...
...album's eleven tracks, but Simon has pulled off something much more here than a little groovy ethnomusicology. He has found a new wellspring for his own writing and a pipeline for African music, from inside a country that is effectively closed, straight into the bright center of American rock. Take his word for it. It's like a window in your heart...
...like sentinels, their bodies expanded into bosses and swells that suggest an infant's apprehension of the breast, or hollowed into womblike cavities. The fundamental experience of work that every miner's boy knew about -- that of going down into a cramped, cold and dangerous darkness to hew at rock -- was transcended in Moore's work as a man: still cutting stone, but in the light, and in the soothing precinct of his mother's remembered body. What anxiety was to Giacometti or sexual rage to Picasso, nurture and shelter were to Moore. His commitment to sculpture...