Listening tonight to the alternatingly sweet / heavy, intense / broadway, pastoral / political voice of Nina Simone, who passed on yesterday at age 70. Saddened not just at her death as I am always to see the great masters peeling away, one by one. Great music still rises up to take its place, it’s true, and I don’t want to come off like I romance only the past, blind to the present, but I always want to ask, who will be this generation’s Nina Simone / Sun Ra / Django Reinhardt? History is one-way and I don’t hear world-changing music anywhere around me.
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Music: Nina Simone :: Mood Indigo
well, its just an issue of taste and recognition (not just, but…).
eddie van halen was our django.
no? oh. ok, ummm…..
actually i think it has more to do with cultural entropy than anything. over-genrefication, shorter attention spans, and just plain more people out there tryin to be rock stars makes it very difficult for a single (singular) talent to get the wide recognition and “place” (as in an enthronement among the faithfull) that talents of the past were privy to. make sense?
(NB – i DON’T mean cultural entropy the way wittgenstein talked about a similar sounding but different meant concept of cultural *degeneration*. more later if you want it. but i hope not. cuz then i’d have to start thinking. like a philosopher or crit theorist or sumfin. and that is SO passe.
baald
oh, forgot to mention – the news made me sad sad sad. even though i wasn’t even sure if she was still alive. she’s one of my pantheon. ‘wild is the wind’ is at like the TOP of my desert isle record list.