You must proclaim your acceptance of your most sacred beliefs being inverted, or else you will be excluded from polite society. That is the essence of all this latest pop post-modernism.
Actually I think the essence of post modernism is a denial that truth exists. And as a post-script, that any behavior, however abhorrent, will not prompt punishment or retribution.
Both ideas are quite wrong, though retribution may not occur until after one's death.
I don't wish for the folks creating such a hideous "montage" to die, and indeed pay that they might repent. Their own suffering when they realize how badly they have erred will be great-whether on Earth or in the afterlife
You know who came up with lighting the torch at Olympia and bearing it to the Games? Goebbels, that's who. The Olympics almost make me yearn for the NFL.
Whenever I hear mention of Dr. Goebbels my corrupted memory kicks into gear and that testicularly obsessed ditty that starts off with mention of der Führer and is sung to “Colonel Bogey” comes insuppressibly to mind.
(Alas, I have the same problem when mention is made of certain philosophers in the Western tradition. The most vigorous exercise of will cannot repel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SqQNgDrgg).
On the other hand, given the general trend of Western Civilization, maybe I shouldn’t feel too guilty.
I know the verse. We sang it all the time in the neighborhood where I grew up. Of course that was less than 20 years after the fall of Berlin, and all our fathers had served in the military in WW II.
"Imagine" is not only a vile song, John Lennon lies when he advocates some sort of collectivist utopia. If he wanted utopia, why didn't he and Yoko Ono surrender all his money and live in a housing project in the Bronx? As it is now, Yoko Ono sits on a pot of $750 million with a steady stream of income.
“Imagine” is responsible for most of the reprehensible pop philosophy which runs this evil society. Young people automatically believe religion, i .e. Christianity to be the cause of most wars despite the 20th century’s bloody record which had nothing to do with it ( WWI may be seen as a failure of it), and murder on a titanic scale perpetrated by atheistic regimes. Even the so-called wars of religion had power and politics as their real motivation.
Responsible in that it tells the young being raised without religion that they aren't lacking something, that being against religion is the normal and the subject of a much loved song. People two generations away from churchgoing who heard this as friendly, neutral background music as children were not helped. I admit I was disturbed from the moment that I understood the words.
Ted has it right: emblematic. Lennon himself doesn't appear to have cared for the song much. He was a naif who wanted a hit record.
Had you known that in 1978, he told people that he had become a born again Christian, even exchanging letters with Pat Robertson? If he had, his faith wasn't going to have a chance to flourish, given his thralldom to a practicing witch.
It's a crappy song, a boring dirge. Lennon and McCartney were a fantastic songwriting team but John went way downhill as a solo and (though I think Paul a great human being, a true mensch) he wasn't as good as a solo either.
The culture pretends that John Lennon was some sort of genius; he wasn't. He was a barely passable rhythm guitarist with little or no education, just a huge ego. (Edited for typos. Fat Fingers types too fast.)
Just don't put them in a class with Dylan, that's all. Harrison could play the guitar (the Willburys), and evidently McCartney could have made a nice living playing the bass guitar as a studio musician. That's about it. Besides, it wasn't just silly love songs. At they end they were mighty prophets, seers blest. But it was till corn, Rocky Raccoon.
No, I'm saying that you don't have a moral right to hold him in contempt unless you yourself are one of several people in the world: Stevie Wonder, Donald Fagen, Elvis Costello. After that, the bouillabaisse is more akin to consomme.
Your laughter wounds me terribly. I want you to know that I'm sobbing as I write this. Large tears with the consistency of glycerin shoot from my eyeballs like projectiles. Ropes of snot hang from my nostrils, my chest heaves in an agony of grief, I shall never be the same again.
Lennon was a fine rock singer. He wrote rock lyrics well. His fame got to his head. If not for Brian Epstein, he might have become a cook at a fish and chips restaurant.
Yes. Good lyricist and performer. The Beatles are justly revered as pop artists. And their music matured over time (though I think it was starting to go downhill at Let It Be, still good, but not as good).
Yeah I'm going to agree, the Lennon/McCartney combination produced some truly brilliant music (along with some drug addled crap). People may be tired of hearing how good they were, but it's true nonetheless.
The late rock critic Lester Bangs infamously said that whenever he heard James Taylor on the radio he fantasized smashing a bottle and carving up Taylor's face with a shard of glass. I have a similar revolting reaction whenever/wherever I hear "Imagine".
How could one possibly be so bereft as to conceive "Imagine". For simply having penned "Imagine" I would never consider John Lennon a "genius" or even a good songwriter beyond contributing some nifty teenage crush ditties. There really was no there, there with Lennon.
Just how many singular and remarkable popular songs have you had a hand in writing? Maybe it's generational. I am a Boomer, and know that many people who came after us have felt almost an obligation to show contempt for The Beatles. But all of the sociological histories are right: that gloomy late fall/early winter 1963/1964 was suddenly broken up by The Beatles' appearance in our consciousness. I think it was John Updike who likened it to sunburst after a lot of thick cloudiness, and that's not a bad description.
When The Beatles broke up in 1970, a musicologist was solicited by one of the news magazines to give her view of how history would view The Beatles in three hundred years.
"Like the Baroque Era," she answered.
You don't consider John Lennon a genius, and I presume that would include The Beatles as an entity. It seems that Leonard Bernstein did, however. Are you old enough to know that by 1963, rock and roll was thought to be extinct, then suddenly, there was This Thing? Those guys drew on everything: English folk songs, Baroque, classical, English music hall, Motown, other soul, country, and, of course, Fifties rock and roll, and made one great, original song after another. There is even an argument to be made that it was The Beatles who invented rock and roll, with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis, et al, being precursors.
Really, I don't understand the bitterness of guys like you. Can you laugh? If you can sit through A Hard Day's Night and not think it's hilarious, I'm sorry for you. And it's Lennon who is by far the funniest of them.
You cite Lester Bangs, which makes me suspect you might be a Boomer, if a dyspeptic one. ( And what a sour man Bangs was; why wouldn't such an astringent soul have overdosed? )
Have you read Lennon's two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works? I doubt it. An excerpt from one of them, The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield, Lennon's Sherlock Holmes parody, is freely available online.
Of course, Imagine is an awful song. A man who brought so much beauty, delight, and amusement into the world is entitled to an occasional turkey. Nobody sensible looks to artists for thought, anyway. When Paulette Goddard was married to Charlie Chaplin, she said to someone about Chaplin's genius, "Oh, Charlie thinks he thinks."
No, what I said about Lennon wasn't profound, anymore than it would be profound to say that Vermeer was an astounding painter or that Hoagy Carmichael was The Great American Songwriter. These things are evident, but there's always going to be a Mark Chapman, a Lester Bangs, a Rare Earth. Because of that, occasionally, someone needs to talk back.
Bob, you must see "Get Back" (if you haven't already). I was able to borrow it from the library on DVD. I came away from it liking all of them. As a kid I didn't like Lennon because of his picture on The White Album....he looked like an annoying hippie....a bit smelly maybe.
Lennon and McCartney didn't take themselves all that seriously before the breakup. They were kind and polite to each other. George was a bit cranky because he wanted to contribute more, and Paul was on fire, creatively. John was helping him tweak his songs, with really no signs of a jealousy detected. George's son said that the movie was a revelation for him and answered much of his confusion about his father's attitude towards the band.
It's funny, but I haven't seen it. Five bucks to Disney? I should do it. If you want to see something wonderful on YouTube, there's maybe a five minute film segment from the spring of 1971. It's called Beatle John and Beatle George Eat a Beatle Lunch. You're exactly right. They didn't take themselves seriously.
The movie used to be called What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA 1964. It's a Maysles Brothers documentary of that February, 1964 trip. I'm not sure it's even available, but I've seen enough outtakes from it to feel as if I've seen the movie. From those outtakes, you can understand why Alun Owen wrote A Hard Day's Night as he did.
Have you ever read Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic for The New Yorker for maybe forty years? He's one of the best writers I've ever read, and his collection, American Musicians, as well as other collections of his, provide endless interest. I also recommend Richard Sudhalter's book, Lost Chords. It's controversial and has been treated as fairly by the msm as the Trump/Vance ticket, but it's a great book.
I've heard of Balliet but never read him. I just looked up Lost Chords on Amazon and may buy it although I have several books on the shelf here that have waiting for me to open them....for several months now.
Black and White musicians were mixing and trading musical ideas long before the rest of society. And not only in jazz.
When I was a kid the local human society ran a spot with "You've got a Friend" playing over images of dogs and cats in cages waiting for adoption. I hope it led to many adoptions and I'm willing to have that song ruined for me due to to that, but ruined it is.
Of course, Imagine is a dreadful song in every way. And supposedly, one of the drivers of Mark Chapman's hatred of Lennon was Chapman's view of Lennon as a champion hypocrite, though the principal driver of it was Chapman's grinding envy of Lennon. But Derek, who knows what would have become of him if he hadn't been killed? For a few months in 1978, he told people he had become a born again Christian, and exchanged letters with Pat Robertson.
Was his faith real? If it was, it wasn't going to have a chance to thrive, given his enslavement to a practicing witch.
I still enjoy the Beatles very much. When you are as successful as Lennon and the Beatles were, you're going to get a few arrows shot your way. Part of fame.
I would bet that Lennon was a Reagan supporter. That said, if Lennon hadn't been murdered, he likely would have been mocked relentlessly, beginning in the 80s and picking up from there, by certain quarters where he would have been totally nonplussed, figured it wasn't worth it, and decamped from NYC, at least.
Imagine certainly was one of his worst. He was far better before he went solo. And by many accounts a pretty unpleasant human being, though perhaps at the end he was reforming as you suggest.
The Beatles were a fantastic musical force, and that era from the 60's through the seventies produced tons of amazing music.
I think Lennon's best stuff was the rock and rock he and Paul cranked out in the early to mid period. Day Tripper, I Feel Fine, Hard Days Night, etc. As the years went on, I would say Julia (love it) and his contribution to Day In the Life.
Paul was always the more serious and mature musician of the two, and was the main one digging into peripheral stryles of music (Eng. music hall, classical influences, etc.)
If I remember correctly, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (Steely Dan) had a song on their first album, "Only A Fool Would Say That", which was a harsh put down of Lennon and his kumbaya utopian ideas.
I am in France at the moment. I watched the ceremony on the TV in a bar.
Usually I love the opening ceremony. Seeing the competitors march in, from all corners of the globe, at the proudest moment of their lives always makes me tearful.
But that spectacle last night was an abomination. It was like a 2 hour gay pride parade. The pale horse from Revelation turning up was an added bonus.
Jillian, I sense that next year's PRIDE month isn't going to get the suckuppery from major league baseball which has been the rule for several years now.
I hope so. I stopped following sport ages ago. In my country we have pride football days and lots of nonsense line that. In fact our best Rugby Union player was banned because he put a FB post up using the Bible. And our Christian Islander Australian Rules players were not allowed to play in the pride match because they wouldn’t wear the jerseys. The female Muslim Aussie ruled player was ‘respected ‘ for her refusal to participate in a pride event.
Actually that wasn’t Lady Gaga it was some forgettable duo. But yeah, hate that song. Love the Beatles but Lennon was a hypocritical pretentious ass. Though there were reports he was moving right before his death. But anyway I’m not sure which song I dislike more, Imagine or Only the Good Die Young.
"OTGDY" is Billy Joel (unless Lennon had a song of the same name). I think Joel wrote a fair number of pretty great tunes but don't like "OTGDY" (because lyrics) or "Piano Man" (depressing) that much.
IMO, Joel wrote better and more interesting songs before he split with his first wife. The albums 'Streetlife Serenade', 'The Stranger', and '52nd Street' are loaded with gems: 'Scenes from An Italian Restaurant', 'Roberta', 'Rosalinda's Eyes', 'I've Loved These Days' , etc.
However, his ever present cynicism was offputting.
Sorry to miss most of your comments, I am still figuring out how to navigate an email that features more than one reply.
He is a quite a good songwriter though I'd rank him below Simon. Different genre though so that could be unfair. When I pulled up his material in an app I have I was astounded at how many really memorable tunes he has written.
I believe this is perhaps, among other things, one example of the Abomination of Desolation. I believe such a thing has happened in historic context. Some say it will happen again. It is biblical. I am absolutely not saying this specific event at the Olympics was prophesied in the Bible, but I say it is a parallel of what was prophesied.
Christ tells us it was spoken of by the prophet Daniel ( ...and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate). One fulfillment was when a 2nd C BC Greek king set up an alter to *Zeus* - note the Zeus - in the temple and sacrificed a pig.
Another instance was in AD 70. People disagree over whether Christ about 70 AD or about the future yet to come, or both, but the Temple was filed with Roman symbols and then destroyed in 70 AD. "Mark 13:14 "So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains"
But look at this abomination. Untold millions watch from all over the world. A Zeus nude-appearing figure pointing repeatedly at his penis is served at the table of the last supper as food, instead of bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ. - - Again, I **do not** say the Bible prophesied specifically this, but I say this is an example of the type of thing it did prophecy. And a scary one.
And then death riding on a pale horse. I know we are not in the tribulation and I personally believe the prophecy portion Revelation is about ancient Rome. - - But the abominable symbols are here in our symbolic world.
PS: I realized those not watching might not know why I spoke of Zeus At the close of the mock Last Supper scene Rod showed us a picture of, a covered platter descended to center of the table, , the cover was lifted, and a costumed figure portraying Zeus was inside.
Zeus?? not Baal or Ishtar either .No, that was Bacchus/Dionysus., god of wine, etc.
The Wall Street Journal's story this morning mentions the headless Marie Antoinette's but none of the other objectionable sights. (And let's be glad the can-can dancers were doing it the authentic, original way--sans panties.)
The things missing were also significant. Nothing from ancient or medieval France: no Vercingetorix, Clovis, Charlemagne, St. Louis, St. Joan of Arc, Louis XIV. Warriors and kings (gak!) Can't have that. St. Genevieve, original patroness of Paris who rallied the city against the Huns would have been appropriate but who's heard of her? Except for a performer in a white 16th C costume, I didn't see any reference to France before the Revolution, as if the nation's history started then. Perhaps it's no accident that the mascot of these Olympic Games is "Prygie," an anthropoid Prygian (ie Liberty) cap.
I just looked at the WSJ's article online. Lots of people complaining about the anti-Christian elements and the reporters' failure to mention same. Some trolls mocking the complaints, too. One commentator said that the DAILY MAIL and the NY POST did cover the mockery. It will be interesting to follow the media food chain on this.
"I didn't see any reference to France before the Revolution, as if the nation's history started then. "
I get the impression a lot of French people actually do think like that. I remember travelling in rural France, and there are signs for "Feudal relics" (I can't remember the French), meaning castles, etc.
One of the things I've picked up from watching a lot of Pageau is that one of the things the Bible does is describe patterns that are true on many levels. While there will one day be an "ultimate" antichrist at the end, along the way the pattern will present itself as many "antichrists" appear at the ends of various worlds.
It strikes me that one thing our advanced technology is allowing is the overlaying of the symbolic tropes that underlie our experience of the world onto our material experience of the world in ever more immediate and terrifying ways. This is especially true of things seen via the medium of screens and in our movies, where we get to see human beings inhabit worlds otherwise materially unrealizable. Eventually, whether via the integration of our conscious mind with the machine or via some sort of digital interface which interacts in real time with our experience of physical reality, the goal seems to be to completely mediate humanity’s experience of the world through some symbolic medium. There is a dual tendency here, because we can both imagine heaven and imagine hell (and imagine heaven as hell and hell heaven) and to that end we can overlay our experience in ways both captivating beautiful and unbelievably ugly. It seems we have chosen to manifest demonic ugliness, and we become ever more ugly and demonic the more we interact with it.
The Apocalypse (Revelation) may well be about ancient Rome but not only about ancient Rome. There is no reason to assume any part of inspired scripture has only one referent. Sometimes it does, yes, but a traditional reading of Old vs. New Testaments sees typology crisscrossing. And if, say, the New Testament anywhere refers to the future, as it obviously often does, as with the Second Coming, etc., texts of the Apocalypse may well be referring to that distant future, even as they take up Rome as "content".
In any case, the present decade seems to be like a trailer for the Abomination of Desolation. On that we are fully agreed.
I'm glad I didn't watch any of this Olympics. And won't.
Yes, you are right. I am cautious after "The Late Great Planet Earth" and "Left Behind: and such things with their certainty about Revelation's meaning, but that is not what you are saying - you are saying it does not have to all be Rome, certainly the 2nd coming is not, which is very true.
I think modernity in general (including those recent examples you cite) has a mistaken tendency to read scriptural texts as if they were written something like history textbooks or news reports (in this case *news reports about the future*, which this or that obsessive claims to have deciphered). It’s our bias. It’s a case of projecting modern norms of “authoritative writing” or “meaningful writing” onto genres of writing that work by different norms. It leads to all kinds of overconfident error. I agree with you that we must be cautious, and stick with the larger truths Our Lord stressed.
It cannot be Rome, full stop. Revelations was written in the 1st century. In the 4th century (310), Constantine the Great defeated Maximian’s pagan army and turned Rome into a Christian nation. By the final collapse of the (western, the eastern half would last another thousand years) Roman state in 475, the Romans and the barbarians they fought -north, east, south and west- were all Christian, even peoples like the Vandals who as pagans were known to be basically animals. Hardly accurate to a prophecy saying Jesus will descend on a world where nary a soul still believes.
Similar events around this time period that directly contradict the prophecy would include Julian’s apostate army being destroyed by Christian forces, the Jews’ attempt to rebuild the temple being beset by fireballs and explosions, and the pagan Huns being broken by a Christian coalition of Romans and Goths in a battle that was a direct inspiration for Tolkien’s Pelennor Fields.
It is Rome of the 1st Century according to those who instructed me in the Catholic faith. In an earlier post, I referred to the "prophecy section" but I would have done better to say "the section Dispensationalists regard as prophecy". Christians did not think Revelation was about the future until the 19th century, and the idea that it was about the future was really popularized by Dispensationalism. Yes, I realize the sections on Christ's return have not happened - but other than that....
666 adds up to the numerical value of Nero's name. City on seven hills - that is Rome. And much more. Here is a link to a detailed article written by a professor.
I never venture an opinion on whether we are actually living in the end times or not. But I'm willing to state dogmatically that the spirit of anti-christ is very active and plainly visible in Western culture right now.
My tradition (Lutheran, amillenialist) holds that we *are* living in the end times, and have been since the Resurrection/Ascension. While we aren't exactly reading Revelation with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, we would generally accept examples of wars and rumors of war and famines and such as general confirmatory evidence that we are indeed in the end times, even as it doesn't say anything about the timing of The End (no one knowing the day or hour).
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.
You must proclaim your acceptance of your most sacred beliefs being inverted, or else you will be excluded from polite society. That is the essence of all this latest pop post-modernism.
The key is not to give a rat’s ass about polite society. Not that the cringeworthy opening ceremony was polite. Quelle horreur!
Fair point but I gotta live in for some time yet (God willing)!
Polite society can go to Hell where it belongs as it has completely embraced evil.
Actually I think the essence of post modernism is a denial that truth exists. And as a post-script, that any behavior, however abhorrent, will not prompt punishment or retribution.
Both ideas are quite wrong, though retribution may not occur until after one's death.
I don't wish for the folks creating such a hideous "montage" to die, and indeed pay that they might repent. Their own suffering when they realize how badly they have erred will be great-whether on Earth or in the afterlife
The Olympics are dumb, and the IOC are tax farming extortionists.
You know who came up with lighting the torch at Olympia and bearing it to the Games? Goebbels, that's who. The Olympics almost make me yearn for the NFL.
Whenever I hear mention of Dr. Goebbels my corrupted memory kicks into gear and that testicularly obsessed ditty that starts off with mention of der Führer and is sung to “Colonel Bogey” comes insuppressibly to mind.
(Alas, I have the same problem when mention is made of certain philosophers in the Western tradition. The most vigorous exercise of will cannot repel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SqQNgDrgg).
On the other hand, given the general trend of Western Civilization, maybe I shouldn’t feel too guilty.
I know the verse. We sang it all the time in the neighborhood where I grew up. Of course that was less than 20 years after the fall of Berlin, and all our fathers had served in the military in WW II.
And Lady Gaga singing the lousy song Imagine, although she seemed mumble the part about “no religion.”
No, Lady Gaga sang something else. A different performer did “Imagine,” which I have to sit through in just about every Olympic opening ceremony.
I liked the Imagine performance even if it was on that weird barge-turd-boat.
"Imagine" is not only a vile song, John Lennon lies when he advocates some sort of collectivist utopia. If he wanted utopia, why didn't he and Yoko Ono surrender all his money and live in a housing project in the Bronx? As it is now, Yoko Ono sits on a pot of $750 million with a steady stream of income.
“Imagine” is responsible for most of the reprehensible pop philosophy which runs this evil society. Young people automatically believe religion, i .e. Christianity to be the cause of most wars despite the 20th century’s bloody record which had nothing to do with it ( WWI may be seen as a failure of it), and murder on a titanic scale perpetrated by atheistic regimes. Even the so-called wars of religion had power and politics as their real motivation.
It is an insidious song
Well, "responsible". Emblematic, maybe.
Given the state of most young people’s education in history and philosophy and their saturation in the lyrics I stand by my word.
Emblematic of our shameful generation’s disrespect for things that seemed like they were impervious to our destructive behavior. They weren’t.
Responsible in that it tells the young being raised without religion that they aren't lacking something, that being against religion is the normal and the subject of a much loved song. People two generations away from churchgoing who heard this as friendly, neutral background music as children were not helped. I admit I was disturbed from the moment that I understood the words.
It is sickening when you realize how prophetic the words were at a time when nations and churches seemed stable.
Ted has it right: emblematic. Lennon himself doesn't appear to have cared for the song much. He was a naif who wanted a hit record.
Had you known that in 1978, he told people that he had become a born again Christian, even exchanging letters with Pat Robertson? If he had, his faith wasn't going to have a chance to flourish, given his thralldom to a practicing witch.
Yoko is a practicing witch? I thought she was just a crappy singer.
It's always nice when a person can excel at two unrelated things.
And I don't want to see her naked.
🤣😂
Did that really happen??
It's a crappy song, a boring dirge. Lennon and McCartney were a fantastic songwriting team but John went way downhill as a solo and (though I think Paul a great human being, a true mensch) he wasn't as good as a solo either.
It is known in non English countres too. They teach ESL with it. A lot of propaganda in English teaching materials. Climate Change, and Obama worship.
The culture pretends that John Lennon was some sort of genius; he wasn't. He was a barely passable rhythm guitarist with little or no education, just a huge ego. (Edited for typos. Fat Fingers types too fast.)
The Beatles were purveyors of corn.
Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs.
And what’s wrong with that?
Just don't put them in a class with Dylan, that's all. Harrison could play the guitar (the Willburys), and evidently McCartney could have made a nice living playing the bass guitar as a studio musician. That's about it. Besides, it wasn't just silly love songs. At they end they were mighty prophets, seers blest. But it was till corn, Rocky Raccoon.
I don't like Dylan either.
I do like Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.
I love you, Ya, Ya, Ya...
Agree. I knew it by the time I as about 14 (1970).
Anathema, anathema. You're still a fine fellow, Ted.
Rare Earth is a username. Come on, tell us who you really are. We want to celebrate that someone who had comparable impact artistically is among us.
OK so in your world, someone has to have had "comparable impact artistically..." in order to comment on Rod's Diary? I am laughing my ass off at you!
No, I'm saying that you don't have a moral right to hold him in contempt unless you yourself are one of several people in the world: Stevie Wonder, Donald Fagen, Elvis Costello. After that, the bouillabaisse is more akin to consomme.
Your laughter wounds me terribly. I want you to know that I'm sobbing as I write this. Large tears with the consistency of glycerin shoot from my eyeballs like projectiles. Ropes of snot hang from my nostrils, my chest heaves in an agony of grief, I shall never be the same again.
Could one not name literally fifty or a hundred superb performers from that era? What amazing music was produced then.
Now many people are creating great music as well, though not what shows up in popular culture.
Now that was funny!
Lennon was a fine rock singer. He wrote rock lyrics well. His fame got to his head. If not for Brian Epstein, he might have become a cook at a fish and chips restaurant.
If Andrew Lloyd Webber is a standard for you, my grief is turned to giggling.
Yes. Good lyricist and performer. The Beatles are justly revered as pop artists. And their music matured over time (though I think it was starting to go downhill at Let It Be, still good, but not as good).
Yeah I'm going to agree, the Lennon/McCartney combination produced some truly brilliant music (along with some drug addled crap). People may be tired of hearing how good they were, but it's true nonetheless.
The late rock critic Lester Bangs infamously said that whenever he heard James Taylor on the radio he fantasized smashing a bottle and carving up Taylor's face with a shard of glass. I have a similar revolting reaction whenever/wherever I hear "Imagine".
How could one possibly be so bereft as to conceive "Imagine". For simply having penned "Imagine" I would never consider John Lennon a "genius" or even a good songwriter beyond contributing some nifty teenage crush ditties. There really was no there, there with Lennon.
Oh, come on.
Just how many singular and remarkable popular songs have you had a hand in writing? Maybe it's generational. I am a Boomer, and know that many people who came after us have felt almost an obligation to show contempt for The Beatles. But all of the sociological histories are right: that gloomy late fall/early winter 1963/1964 was suddenly broken up by The Beatles' appearance in our consciousness. I think it was John Updike who likened it to sunburst after a lot of thick cloudiness, and that's not a bad description.
When The Beatles broke up in 1970, a musicologist was solicited by one of the news magazines to give her view of how history would view The Beatles in three hundred years.
"Like the Baroque Era," she answered.
You don't consider John Lennon a genius, and I presume that would include The Beatles as an entity. It seems that Leonard Bernstein did, however. Are you old enough to know that by 1963, rock and roll was thought to be extinct, then suddenly, there was This Thing? Those guys drew on everything: English folk songs, Baroque, classical, English music hall, Motown, other soul, country, and, of course, Fifties rock and roll, and made one great, original song after another. There is even an argument to be made that it was The Beatles who invented rock and roll, with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis, et al, being precursors.
Really, I don't understand the bitterness of guys like you. Can you laugh? If you can sit through A Hard Day's Night and not think it's hilarious, I'm sorry for you. And it's Lennon who is by far the funniest of them.
You cite Lester Bangs, which makes me suspect you might be a Boomer, if a dyspeptic one. ( And what a sour man Bangs was; why wouldn't such an astringent soul have overdosed? )
Have you read Lennon's two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works? I doubt it. An excerpt from one of them, The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield, Lennon's Sherlock Holmes parody, is freely available online.
Of course, Imagine is an awful song. A man who brought so much beauty, delight, and amusement into the world is entitled to an occasional turkey. Nobody sensible looks to artists for thought, anyway. When Paulette Goddard was married to Charlie Chaplin, she said to someone about Chaplin's genius, "Oh, Charlie thinks he thinks."
My Lord, what a bitter little man you are.
No, what I said about Lennon wasn't profound, anymore than it would be profound to say that Vermeer was an astounding painter or that Hoagy Carmichael was The Great American Songwriter. These things are evident, but there's always going to be a Mark Chapman, a Lester Bangs, a Rare Earth. Because of that, occasionally, someone needs to talk back.
Bob, you must see "Get Back" (if you haven't already). I was able to borrow it from the library on DVD. I came away from it liking all of them. As a kid I didn't like Lennon because of his picture on The White Album....he looked like an annoying hippie....a bit smelly maybe.
Lennon and McCartney didn't take themselves all that seriously before the breakup. They were kind and polite to each other. George was a bit cranky because he wanted to contribute more, and Paul was on fire, creatively. John was helping him tweak his songs, with really no signs of a jealousy detected. George's son said that the movie was a revelation for him and answered much of his confusion about his father's attitude towards the band.
It's funny, but I haven't seen it. Five bucks to Disney? I should do it. If you want to see something wonderful on YouTube, there's maybe a five minute film segment from the spring of 1971. It's called Beatle John and Beatle George Eat a Beatle Lunch. You're exactly right. They didn't take themselves seriously.
The movie used to be called What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA 1964. It's a Maysles Brothers documentary of that February, 1964 trip. I'm not sure it's even available, but I've seen enough outtakes from it to feel as if I've seen the movie. From those outtakes, you can understand why Alun Owen wrote A Hard Day's Night as he did.
Lester Bangs was a rock 'critic.' Rock 'critics' are up there with jazz 'critics, maybe a step below.
Now Thelonious Monk had an astute remark about jazz 'critics':
"Writing about jazz is like dancing to architecture."
Have you ever read Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic for The New Yorker for maybe forty years? He's one of the best writers I've ever read, and his collection, American Musicians, as well as other collections of his, provide endless interest. I also recommend Richard Sudhalter's book, Lost Chords. It's controversial and has been treated as fairly by the msm as the Trump/Vance ticket, but it's a great book.
I've heard of Balliet but never read him. I just looked up Lost Chords on Amazon and may buy it although I have several books on the shelf here that have waiting for me to open them....for several months now.
Black and White musicians were mixing and trading musical ideas long before the rest of society. And not only in jazz.
Laughing. A fantastic quote.
I myself am not a jazz fanatic but if I had extra music appreciation time I'd delve into it more.
I was not aware of Bangs, incidentally, until he came up in this thread.
I think there are people who can't stand music that is beautiful and prefer the ugly. Possibly it drowns out the pain in their souls, I don't know.
Bangs must have zero taste. Taylor is a superb songwriter, respected and covered by many. And a serious guitarist.
Taste is subjective and I find it astounding how many people like raucous sounding noisy music. Or rap for that matter.
Back in the day I thought Bangs' tastes were sub-zero.
When I was a kid the local human society ran a spot with "You've got a Friend" playing over images of dogs and cats in cages waiting for adoption. I hope it led to many adoptions and I'm willing to have that song ruined for me due to to that, but ruined it is.
Of course, Imagine is a dreadful song in every way. And supposedly, one of the drivers of Mark Chapman's hatred of Lennon was Chapman's view of Lennon as a champion hypocrite, though the principal driver of it was Chapman's grinding envy of Lennon. But Derek, who knows what would have become of him if he hadn't been killed? For a few months in 1978, he told people he had become a born again Christian, and exchanged letters with Pat Robertson.
Was his faith real? If it was, it wasn't going to have a chance to thrive, given his enslavement to a practicing witch.
I still enjoy the Beatles very much. When you are as successful as Lennon and the Beatles were, you're going to get a few arrows shot your way. Part of fame.
I would bet that Lennon was a Reagan supporter. That said, if Lennon hadn't been murdered, he likely would have been mocked relentlessly, beginning in the 80s and picking up from there, by certain quarters where he would have been totally nonplussed, figured it wasn't worth it, and decamped from NYC, at least.
Imagine certainly was one of his worst. He was far better before he went solo. And by many accounts a pretty unpleasant human being, though perhaps at the end he was reforming as you suggest.
The Beatles were a fantastic musical force, and that era from the 60's through the seventies produced tons of amazing music.
I think Lennon's best stuff was the rock and rock he and Paul cranked out in the early to mid period. Day Tripper, I Feel Fine, Hard Days Night, etc. As the years went on, I would say Julia (love it) and his contribution to Day In the Life.
Paul was always the more serious and mature musician of the two, and was the main one digging into peripheral stryles of music (Eng. music hall, classical influences, etc.)
If I remember correctly, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (Steely Dan) had a song on their first album, "Only A Fool Would Say That", which was a harsh put down of Lennon and his kumbaya utopian ideas.
She’s not even French. The French have lost their national pride.
I really despise that song!! It’s the national liberal anthem!
I am in France at the moment. I watched the ceremony on the TV in a bar.
Usually I love the opening ceremony. Seeing the competitors march in, from all corners of the globe, at the proudest moment of their lives always makes me tearful.
But that spectacle last night was an abomination. It was like a 2 hour gay pride parade. The pale horse from Revelation turning up was an added bonus.
They literally had drag queens dancing with children.
https://x.com/JosephLTrahan/status/1817001048952783077
I'm so glad to see you posting, Mrs S. I hope your time in France is wonderful despite this abomination.
Hi Linda
Nice to see you here too. Yes thanks we're having a wonderful time in Brittany. It's a gorgeous place.
What was the reaction from people in the bar?
They applauded when the French team arrived on the boat.
But overall they did not look impressed.
I knew it would be. Anything thing do with sport has become deeply evil.
Jillian, I sense that next year's PRIDE month isn't going to get the suckuppery from major league baseball which has been the rule for several years now.
I’ve noticed overall that this year all Pride store displays, sports mentions, etc., were markedly attenuated
I hope so. I stopped following sport ages ago. In my country we have pride football days and lots of nonsense line that. In fact our best Rugby Union player was banned because he put a FB post up using the Bible. And our Christian Islander Australian Rules players were not allowed to play in the pride match because they wouldn’t wear the jerseys. The female Muslim Aussie ruled player was ‘respected ‘ for her refusal to participate in a pride event.
No surprise in that.
And Lady Gaga singing the terrible Imagine, even though she seemed to mumble the part about “no religion.”
Actually that wasn’t Lady Gaga it was some forgettable duo. But yeah, hate that song. Love the Beatles but Lennon was a hypocritical pretentious ass. Though there were reports he was moving right before his death. But anyway I’m not sure which song I dislike more, Imagine or Only the Good Die Young.
Imagine, hands down. It's not even musically good.
If you have to "imagine there's no heaven," that provides a strong implication that there is one.
Lennon is said to have exchanged letters with Pat Robertson in 1978. Who knows?
Well I hope so. I’ve heard that if we get to heaven, we’ll be surprised at who’s there. We’ll also be surprised at who’s not there.
I'll be greatly relieved if I'm there. I'll worry about who else is there later. :)
"OTGDY" is Billy Joel (unless Lennon had a song of the same name). I think Joel wrote a fair number of pretty great tunes but don't like "OTGDY" (because lyrics) or "Piano Man" (depressing) that much.
IMO, Joel wrote better and more interesting songs before he split with his first wife. The albums 'Streetlife Serenade', 'The Stranger', and '52nd Street' are loaded with gems: 'Scenes from An Italian Restaurant', 'Roberta', 'Rosalinda's Eyes', 'I've Loved These Days' , etc.
However, his ever present cynicism was offputting.
Sorry to miss most of your comments, I am still figuring out how to navigate an email that features more than one reply.
He is a quite a good songwriter though I'd rank him below Simon. Different genre though so that could be unfair. When I pulled up his material in an app I have I was astounded at how many really memorable tunes he has written.
I believe this is perhaps, among other things, one example of the Abomination of Desolation. I believe such a thing has happened in historic context. Some say it will happen again. It is biblical. I am absolutely not saying this specific event at the Olympics was prophesied in the Bible, but I say it is a parallel of what was prophesied.
Christ tells us it was spoken of by the prophet Daniel ( ...and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate). One fulfillment was when a 2nd C BC Greek king set up an alter to *Zeus* - note the Zeus - in the temple and sacrificed a pig.
Another instance was in AD 70. People disagree over whether Christ about 70 AD or about the future yet to come, or both, but the Temple was filed with Roman symbols and then destroyed in 70 AD. "Mark 13:14 "So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains"
But look at this abomination. Untold millions watch from all over the world. A Zeus nude-appearing figure pointing repeatedly at his penis is served at the table of the last supper as food, instead of bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ. - - Again, I **do not** say the Bible prophesied specifically this, but I say this is an example of the type of thing it did prophecy. And a scary one.
And then death riding on a pale horse. I know we are not in the tribulation and I personally believe the prophecy portion Revelation is about ancient Rome. - - But the abominable symbols are here in our symbolic world.
PS: I realized those not watching might not know why I spoke of Zeus At the close of the mock Last Supper scene Rod showed us a picture of, a covered platter descended to center of the table, , the cover was lifted, and a costumed figure portraying Zeus was inside.
Zeus?? not Baal or Ishtar either .No, that was Bacchus/Dionysus., god of wine, etc.
The Wall Street Journal's story this morning mentions the headless Marie Antoinette's but none of the other objectionable sights. (And let's be glad the can-can dancers were doing it the authentic, original way--sans panties.)
The things missing were also significant. Nothing from ancient or medieval France: no Vercingetorix, Clovis, Charlemagne, St. Louis, St. Joan of Arc, Louis XIV. Warriors and kings (gak!) Can't have that. St. Genevieve, original patroness of Paris who rallied the city against the Huns would have been appropriate but who's heard of her? Except for a performer in a white 16th C costume, I didn't see any reference to France before the Revolution, as if the nation's history started then. Perhaps it's no accident that the mascot of these Olympic Games is "Prygie," an anthropoid Prygian (ie Liberty) cap.
Well, we do have a British site speaking of the "blue scrotum" and other such scathing remarks :)
"'Blue Scrotum' performance leaves Olympic viewers shocked in what they say was the 'worst opening ceremony ever'"
https://www.unilad.com/music/news/paris-2024-olympic-opening-ceremony-blue-scrotum-shock-223593-20240727
While some there also thought it was Zeus, your insight about Dionysus was good, I thought, and I love to learn.
I just looked at the WSJ's article online. Lots of people complaining about the anti-Christian elements and the reporters' failure to mention same. Some trolls mocking the complaints, too. One commentator said that the DAILY MAIL and the NY POST did cover the mockery. It will be interesting to follow the media food chain on this.
"I didn't see any reference to France before the Revolution, as if the nation's history started then. "
I get the impression a lot of French people actually do think like that. I remember travelling in rural France, and there are signs for "Feudal relics" (I can't remember the French), meaning castles, etc.
I wonder if Marine Le Pen had won if she would have let this crap be put on.
I think that the disgust felt by people is not just limited to Christians, although it was certainly aimed at Christians.
Anyway, it's a stain on civilization.
I saw a Twitter post from a Muslim today - it said, paraphrase - We have Jesus too. This was wrong.
One of the things I've picked up from watching a lot of Pageau is that one of the things the Bible does is describe patterns that are true on many levels. While there will one day be an "ultimate" antichrist at the end, along the way the pattern will present itself as many "antichrists" appear at the ends of various worlds.
It strikes me that one thing our advanced technology is allowing is the overlaying of the symbolic tropes that underlie our experience of the world onto our material experience of the world in ever more immediate and terrifying ways. This is especially true of things seen via the medium of screens and in our movies, where we get to see human beings inhabit worlds otherwise materially unrealizable. Eventually, whether via the integration of our conscious mind with the machine or via some sort of digital interface which interacts in real time with our experience of physical reality, the goal seems to be to completely mediate humanity’s experience of the world through some symbolic medium. There is a dual tendency here, because we can both imagine heaven and imagine hell (and imagine heaven as hell and hell heaven) and to that end we can overlay our experience in ways both captivating beautiful and unbelievably ugly. It seems we have chosen to manifest demonic ugliness, and we become ever more ugly and demonic the more we interact with it.
The Apocalypse (Revelation) may well be about ancient Rome but not only about ancient Rome. There is no reason to assume any part of inspired scripture has only one referent. Sometimes it does, yes, but a traditional reading of Old vs. New Testaments sees typology crisscrossing. And if, say, the New Testament anywhere refers to the future, as it obviously often does, as with the Second Coming, etc., texts of the Apocalypse may well be referring to that distant future, even as they take up Rome as "content".
In any case, the present decade seems to be like a trailer for the Abomination of Desolation. On that we are fully agreed.
I'm glad I didn't watch any of this Olympics. And won't.
Yes, you are right. I am cautious after "The Late Great Planet Earth" and "Left Behind: and such things with their certainty about Revelation's meaning, but that is not what you are saying - you are saying it does not have to all be Rome, certainly the 2nd coming is not, which is very true.
I think modernity in general (including those recent examples you cite) has a mistaken tendency to read scriptural texts as if they were written something like history textbooks or news reports (in this case *news reports about the future*, which this or that obsessive claims to have deciphered). It’s our bias. It’s a case of projecting modern norms of “authoritative writing” or “meaningful writing” onto genres of writing that work by different norms. It leads to all kinds of overconfident error. I agree with you that we must be cautious, and stick with the larger truths Our Lord stressed.
This is very insightful. Most of us do read Scripture through a lens of distorting modernist assumptions. Thank you.
In approaching the Scriptures and religion (and literature) in general I’ve found William Blake’s observation in “The Everlasting Gospel” very apt:
“This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.”
Blake is often extraordinary. Here he gives the Blakean version of Paul's "through a glass darkly."
It cannot be Rome, full stop. Revelations was written in the 1st century. In the 4th century (310), Constantine the Great defeated Maximian’s pagan army and turned Rome into a Christian nation. By the final collapse of the (western, the eastern half would last another thousand years) Roman state in 475, the Romans and the barbarians they fought -north, east, south and west- were all Christian, even peoples like the Vandals who as pagans were known to be basically animals. Hardly accurate to a prophecy saying Jesus will descend on a world where nary a soul still believes.
Similar events around this time period that directly contradict the prophecy would include Julian’s apostate army being destroyed by Christian forces, the Jews’ attempt to rebuild the temple being beset by fireballs and explosions, and the pagan Huns being broken by a Christian coalition of Romans and Goths in a battle that was a direct inspiration for Tolkien’s Pelennor Fields.
It is Rome of the 1st Century according to those who instructed me in the Catholic faith. In an earlier post, I referred to the "prophecy section" but I would have done better to say "the section Dispensationalists regard as prophecy". Christians did not think Revelation was about the future until the 19th century, and the idea that it was about the future was really popularized by Dispensationalism. Yes, I realize the sections on Christ's return have not happened - but other than that....
666 adds up to the numerical value of Nero's name. City on seven hills - that is Rome. And much more. Here is a link to a detailed article written by a professor.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/revelation/white.html
(310); no, (312)
a Christian nation; puttting aside "nation," not till 380 (Cunctos Populos)
the Vandals who as pagans were known to be basically animals; no, the Vandls were Arians
Julian’s apostate army being destroyed by Christian forces,; no, by the Persians (who weren't Christians)
So many words, so many erroes (except for the end re: Battle of the Catalaunian Plains and of Pelennor Fields)
I never have anything to do with professional sport or sport of any kind
I never venture an opinion on whether we are actually living in the end times or not. But I'm willing to state dogmatically that the spirit of anti-christ is very active and plainly visible in Western culture right now.
My tradition (Lutheran, amillenialist) holds that we *are* living in the end times, and have been since the Resurrection/Ascension. While we aren't exactly reading Revelation with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, we would generally accept examples of wars and rumors of war and famines and such as general confirmatory evidence that we are indeed in the end times, even as it doesn't say anything about the timing of The End (no one knowing the day or hour).
Oh, I say it’s been nearly 20 centuries of end times, and perhaps 2 or 3 more to come.
Agreed. Very simple.