Burns

In my opinion, Tago Mago is second to none; it’s truly an otherworldly experience.

However, it is still necessary to make a distinction between intellectual and artist, even if many today argue that a true thinker, or philosopher, or intellectual is also a great artist, and vice versa. These are too grave matters and cannot be brushed aside in just two lines. However, I also think that school is not the pass that grants access to artistic genius; let's not kid ourselves, guys. Staying within the musical realm, people like Schubert or Beethoven lived in hardship, simply because the obtuse and petty society did not recognize their genius. They did not possess those pieces of paper you mentioned, Burns, clearly, to access a dignified life.

Regarding the term ignorance, let it be clear that I am not against progress; it is logical that we all would like to enrich ourselves, even financially, for a comfortable life. I also believe that, in certain ways, the boom was a good thing (even though it occurred so rapidly and with deleterious effects). However, today we miss that class so proudly ignorant (unfortunately, today it resonates as a negative term; perhaps this is the first damage). The economic boom of the 1950s, the homogenizing needs of consumerism, television, mass literacy, have all fueled the desire to break free from a past marked by poverty and underdevelopment. Yet, the very excesses of the rapid and widespread manifestation of the process of homogenization seem to have contributed, in recent times, to a strong revival of interest in the cultural value of diversity, or rather, tradition. This is a phenomenon of great importance, as it seems to express the dissatisfaction of large and heterogeneous segments of the population with the lifestyles induced by economic development. While these lifestyles are accepted for the undeniable advantages they bring, they are also felt to be insufficient in representing individual and collective existence and its expression (art, for example). Then, it is known that you stick to your positions and I to mine, but we need someone to occasionally remind us that, throughout history, great personalities have emerged from holy ignorance—ignorance not understood as stupidity, but as liberation from certain nonsense imposed by the system and as a release from certain ephemeral pieces of paper (degrees) that allow certain doors and opportunities to open. This is what I mean by sacred ignorance; far from being a negative term.

Ok, Massimo, the things you've written certainly make sense; they are what most people believe in the most. You say that school provides the tools to progress culturally (a point that is both shareable and debatable), etc. But are you sure that only state schools can lead to works like the one reviewed by Hal?? (In my opinion, when art becomes an expression of the state, then we're in trouble. Look at Tarkovsky, who had to emigrate from the USSR in order to be artistically free.) Did you know that Beethoven, for example, couldn't do 2 + 2? I'm not joking; I recently read some things in a biography of his. Well, Beethoven even had problems with basic math, but there are so many examples of geniuses who are as out of touch as he was, ignorant as donkeys when it comes to the basics, but endowed with something myst(ical)erious that has nothing to do with the school practice of literacy that all of us average(crowd) citizens are subjected to by law (the dictatorship of literacy). Then, if it's state literacy, it's even worse. I repeat, when you say that it's school that liberates the citizen from ignorance and thus helps to make them free from manipulation, I counter that far too often it's school that homogenizes the thought of young people and predisposes them to the "dictatorship" of democracy, forgive me the term, draining them of personality, compressing their individuality and creativity, and preparing them for a life of submission to the institutions.

Yes Ugly, I feel it too, that tone of American Gothic melodrama from the deep South, those specters from Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, in abulic pieces like Funeral in the Rain for example (especially the first two albums, Silvertone and the self-titled one). From the very first times I listened to it, I felt there was something strange and unsettling in his ballads. Now, I don't know if he paved the way for the Black Heart, but he was certainly a musician with his own fair share of neuroses, and it's precisely this tone that I like about him. I also know that Lynch, an old lover of 50s crooners, was quite fond of this so out-of-date guy. Unfortunately, today he is just a shadow of himself.

that when it comes to high art, it must be said, doesn't understand a damn thing, just like most of the plebeian masses.

here's why today we have to put up with the inappropriate comments of any random punisher...

quite indebted to the velvet underground

Yes, at the level of the 3 greats of CAN, the most psychedelic and perhaps the least kraut of the quartet.

No, I'm sorry but I don't agree with a single word of what you wrote.