Sunday, 23 January 2011

SULTANS OF SWING:
The Very Best of Dire Straits
(2004)

RATING:60%
FORMAT:CD

Technically-proficient but emotionally-sterile music that rarely touches the affections. The kind of popular-style music for people who do not like popular-style music: Faux popular in every sense.

Many of the tracks (not really songs) are over-produced to perfection, with any and all human warmth squeezed from them - if any passion ever existed there to begin with.

Like White-men’s blues, this music lacks direction or purpose and comes not from lived experience so much as from a desire to ape, and yet supersede, their musical betters.

Like The Rolling Stones (a Blues tribute band), Dire Straits is a tribute band that represses its own instincts and praises those of better men instead - through music that is inevitably little more than form-over-content. Appropriating other cultures and styles (in this case, US Country & Western) is the lot of those who have nothing to offer of themselves.

Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
Posted by Frank TALKER™ at 11:11
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Science:



No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.



Jacob Bronowski… (1908 - 74), British scientist, author. Encounter (London, July 1971).


Sleep of Reason:



The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.



Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes… (1746-1828), Spanish painter. Caption to Caprichos, number 43, a series of eighty etchings completed in 1798, satirical and grotesque in form.


Humans & Aliens:



I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.



Terence… (circa 190-159 BC), Roman dramatist. Chremes, in The Self-Tormentor [Heauton Timorumenos], act 1, scene 1.


Führerprinzip:



One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves… There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus - in other words, the party - which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress. In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.



Albert Camus… (1913-60), French-Algerian writer & philosopher. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt: New York: Vintage Books, (1984; page 182.)