Messages

I say nothing is original not out of post-modern spitefulness or close-mindedness, but out of the fact that everyone has been influenced by certain things, and everyone steals from somewhere.

And I'm not saying they shouldn't have taken their money, I'm saying they got used and they didn't ever do anything about THAT.  Maybe it's expecting too much, but I would have to expect it before assigning them super human levels of coolness.

Beggars can't be choosers.

Yeah but it's just more fun that way.
Only way to impress the ladies with an acoustic and a bad voice too.

I don't know their motivations, but you can only do something original like that once or until they catch on, and then it's dead or illegal.  People have to work with what they've got.

I do know that Johnny Cash, Elvis, Dylan, and James Brown made a lot of money for people buying into their oozing coolness,

1.  Or they can try to find something original to do, themselves.

2.  What the hell is wrong with that?  You expect them to starve in a garrett?  Is success automatically equal to selling out?  It sure as hell wasn't for Brown or Cash...and when Elvis DID sell out, it was in such a grotesque, obscene way that he actually got cooler.

1.  Nothing is original, or originality is subjective.

2.  Emphasis was supposed to be placed on the last half of that sentence which you omitted.  But no, I meant to say that they were exploited, and that that wasn't neccessarily cool.  Then, I meant to say that from being exploited, they irresponsibly paved the way for modern pop music.  If they had have been these grand paragons of coolness, I would have thought they could come up with a more substantial "fuck you" than flipping off the opry, and then selling millions of albums to make the people who didn't want them doing that sort of stuff, a whole mess of cash. 

Fuck Dylan.

And on to address this blasphemy.

I guess I just like my intelligent song writing to be delivered from the mouth of the person who wrote it, instead of a soon-to-be-washed-up cover band that can't manage to write their own hits, but sound pretty so people support them.

Dylan's voice lent itself better to focusing on the lyrics and what was being said instead of getting people hung up on how it was being sung.  You can spew bullshit when it sounds pretty, but when it sounds ugly, it better be pretty fucking impressive.  The same goes for the simple traditional chord progressions and whatnot.

As for him going electric, I never saw the big deal.  Dylan wasn't a folk singer exclusively, ever.  Blues musicians had been playing electric for years before the Newport Folk Festival, and no one got pissed at them.

Shit, Dylan got played on by an electric set before he took the stage at Newport. 
Either way, he never once assigned himself the label "Folk singer" or "Folk rock singer" or anything like that.

He was awesome incarnate, which I know contradicts my last post, but I make this one exception, because I like him more like I enjoy Blake or Eliot, rather than as an entertainer.

Nah, fuck those guys, seriously.

If you're bored, you're boring.  It's retarded to measure the spirit of rebellion or unrest in a country based on the status of its celebrities, whether they are the man in black or the whores in nothing.  I fail to see how Elvis and James Brown aren't souless celebrities.
 

Let me get this straight...are you saying that celebrity causes soul-lessness?

I disagree...it is the fact that the public has become so soul-less that we have so many soul-less celebrities. 

James Brown and Johnny Cash would have oozed cool under ANY circumstances.  Stick them in a cube with a workstation, and they still would have rocked.  And then they'd burn the office down.

If you missed Cash flipping off the opry (and then trashing the stage), and understood the context of it, you wouldn't be stacking him up against Marilyn fucking Manson, who does stupid shit as an ACT, instead of a barfing of hatred and rage against the people who dumped him when he was down, and then wanted him back when he got back up.

There is no comparison.  No comparison at all.  One was vengeful hatred, and the other is a cynical act.

I don't know their motivations, but you can only do something original like that once or until they catch on, and then it's dead or illegal.  People have to work with what they've got.

I do know that Johnny Cash, Elvis, Dylan, and James Brown made a lot of money for people buying into their oozing coolness, and that they didn't seem conscience of that fact, or of the fact that they were heralding in the age of even more souless music and stardom.

Maybe they were the real deal though, but most likely it's like Saturday Night Live.
Every generation thinks that the SNL which was around 5-10 years before they started watching SNL, was the best set of seasons ever. 

Every generation thinks they saw at least a few original people at some point, even if they missed them by a few decades.

But if we could have bitched back then, oh how we would have bitched.  I would probably be argueing with you for talking about how the staunch suburbanism of the 1950s was infecting Woody Guthrie with Huntingtons Chorea, and that emerging consumerism was poisoning Robert Johnson's whisky at the crossroads.

I'm just going to refrain from assigning any level of importance to people who get paid to entertain.
Because even if they aren't "celebrities" or possess any of those terrible connotations that the word implies, their main goal is to entertain.

Whether or not they're sincere doesn't mean shit in the long run, it only applies to how much most people see of them.

If it were neccessary, we wouldn't be able to believe it doesn't exist.
Or find out.  It isn't so crushing as you might think to resign yourself to fate.

You're still the same afterwards as you were before, and still just as important.
I always tied in the lack of free will with determinism, which when taken with only that one idea, can be a bummer.  It would mean you're never in real control, and the idea of control that you once had, was bullshit.

But then again, it does mean that your actions have true consequence, and you do contribute to this Universe and crazy human comedy in a much more real way.  If we could all act outside of cause-effect, we would all be Gods with the ability to askew and rend the achievements of other from time and space.

It can't exist, and that isn't so disturbing.

Nah, fuck those guys, seriously.

If you're bored, you're boring.  It's retarded to measure the spirit of rebellion or unrest in a country based on the status of its celebrities, whether they are the man in black or the whores in nothing.  I fail to see how Elvis and James Brown aren't souless celebrities.

Maybe a little less souless than others, but still for the most part, amphetmined up husks of once original people.

The world is homogenized, but really, less so than it was when Cash started doing his thing, or when Elvis started stealing black folk's music. 

Either way, Dylan isn't dead.
I won't start counting down days to The End until that happens.


Besides, did Johnny Cash ever hop off the stage, and start fucking random fans in the mouth, WHILE CONTINUING TO SING?  No.  Manson does that like, all the time.  Also, I remember that awesome fella who squirted a syringe of blood in the fact of some interviewer and had to go to jail or some shit for it.

That guy has HIS finger on the pulse of Amer.....
Well, is it still a pulse if blood doesn't pump through it anymore? 

I want to kill a mother fucker too,
We all do.

Wow...
Yeah...

Just wow.

At least we're winning the culture war amirite?

Well it just stops short of it.
It was what sent me into finding out what primitivism was.

The book overglorifys the lives of "uncivilized" people and tries to assert that social "progress" as we think of it, is fundamentally impossible.

It probably did a lot to wake me up though, I was pretty young when I read it.
I stand by it that the sequels are god awful though.
Maybe they sullied my memory of the original...

BS sounds like he just finished the book "Ishamael", or maybe its dreadful sequels.
God that book was terrible in retrospect.

He's done a lot of research.
When he was a kid, he had a pet dolphin (kind of) it would swim up to his dock, and I guess he would pet it and talk to it.

I think he was molested.

Not a marine biologist, just keep very strange company.

http://www.sexwork.com/family/dolphins1.html

Hide from BS at all costs.

Oops.

I actually have a friend who sincerely wants to befriend a dolphin, and then have consentual sex with it.
He's a really cool guy though.
Not like BS at all.

You might have to beat her to it.
I hope that doesn't make it a three way.