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

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	CD

(http://www.amazon.co.uk)

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.

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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.