Cactus Ed Abbey on muzak


"Rock" is the music of slaves. Of adolescents pursuing the illusion of freedom and protest while the steel chains of technology bind them ever tighter.




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Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
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Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
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How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
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"Rock": music to hammer out fenders by. Music for vomiting to after a hard day spreading asphalt. Vietnam music. Imitation-Afro, industrial air-compressor music.
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Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
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Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
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The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything--while the music lasts.
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Music is a savage art, a measured madness.


Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.


Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

Verstehen sie das, McSklaven?