Word: text
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Volt and Uncle Tupelo fame—collaborate to craft a soundtrack to an upcoming documentary about Jack Kerouac’s 1967 novel “Big Sur.” Lyrics for the soundtrack are entirely drawn from the novel’s text, but while the project’s concept is intriguing, the album itself proves disappointing. Though certain tracks skillfully utilize the duo’s unique vocal talents, featuring pleasant enough instrumentation like rich piano and sultry bass, the album suffers from poorly chosen and sloppily crafted lyrics, which are often weakly delivered over...
Unsurprisingly, the album’s haphazardly culled lyrics often resemble an incongruous mishmash of words that aspire to poetry, but largely remain trite and poorly-culled from the original text. Even if one didn’t know the lyrics were patchworked from a novel, it’s easy to tell that the songs are at least somewhat internally disconnected, as each tune fails to tell a complete story and doesn’t quite form a lyrically unified whole...
...melodies. By contrast, Farrar’s deeper, rougher twang enlivens gritty, hard-up tracks, but his nasally drawl drags down slower paced songs, making them sound whiny, not wistful. On the whole, this album, though fortified by a few well-crafted tracks, fails to adroitly engage its source text and the vocal talents of its creators...
...Full text of the speech after the jump...
Included in the collection is a 1961 edition of the famous “Rabbit, Run”, edited for a 1964 reprint, in which the ever-meticulous Updike literally cut and pasted revised paragraphs into the margins and tucked them into the text. The Archive also offers proof that Updike was just another Harvard student, scrawling a less well-known moniker for the greatest English playwright—“Willie the Shake”—onto a copy of “The Tempest” for Professor Henry Levin’s Shakespeare course...