|k| clippings: 2015-01-12 — sing sing

WORK

Some of my favorite songs: ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ by Neil Young; ‘Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me’ by the Smiths; ‘Call Me’ by Aretha Franklin; ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ by anybody. And then there’s ‘Love Hurts’ and ‘When Love Breaks Down’ and ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ and ‘The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’ and ‘She’s Gone’ and ’I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself ’and … some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

—Nick Hornby
—from High Fidelity

WORD(S)

ostinato. adjective or noun. Of a continuously repeated melodic or rhythmical phrase. An example of such a phrase. From Italian ostinato (obstinate, persistent).

“O madness of innocent white flowers
blind snowstorm
crest of a wave
aubade with a short stubborn ostinato
headless aureole” (Zbigniew Herbert)

“He became aware of the noises of summer—of insects, larks, leaves—that provide the normally unidentified ostinato that nevertheless enriches the obvious themes of colour, sun and cloud.” (Roy Fuller)

“The pianist broke off in the middle of an ostinato, stood up, and left the stage. Maddy reached out, palm up, but couldn’t stop him. The reduced ensemble kept turning over notes that now lined up to reveal themselves as a permutation of the delaying fragment that had opened the first song.” (Richard Power)

“I know you, O force, reducing everything to a common denominator. I know you basso ostinato in the lowest register of existence. I hear your relentless step.” (Witold Gombrowicz)

WEB

1. A Biography of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios, Its Ownership, and Other Black Memories

2. The fascinating story of Cold War-era X-Ray Film Bootleg Recordings

3. Scientists Just Discovered Why All Pop Music Sounds Exactly the Same

4. The 10 best Shakespeare-inspired pieces of music—in pictures

5. Today in 1969, Led Zeppelin releases their first, eponymous album—a staple of “Top 100” albums lists—which they recorded in just two weeks (less than 40 hours of studio time). Like much of the band’s music, the tracks on Led Zeppelin have a significant amount of material stolen from other artists (both older blues artists and Jeff Beck), were initially panned by critics, and then sold in the bazillions anyway.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader G.: ​“My response to Reader H. — Life’s too short…​”

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