Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Inarticulate speech of the heart

Robert Plant in an interview with Rob Trucks:
Once upon a time," sayas Plant, "all we knew about Elvis was that he sang like a motherfucker. And that was all that mattered. You know, when you gas up and you go to pay inside the gas station and you hear Elvis singing 'Surrender,' you know that the mystery of that guy, at that time, was everything. The voice and the mystery and the not knowing. And I think the great thing about anything that you hear over the waves is, you don't want to know too much, you know?"
In the same issue, Rob Harvilla's review of Weezer's The Red Album, specifically "Pork And Beans," Rivers Cuomo's attempt at "Silly Love Songs," an inarticulate defense of a lucrative ethos:
Is Cuomo that inarticulate, or is he amazingly good at articulating the feelings of inarticulate teenagers in their own words? Much of this record isn't so much good as it is entertainingly mystifying: a 16-car pileup that may or may not have been staged for your benefit.
If I may: a 16-car pileup looks the same to an adolescent as it does to geezers Plant's age. "Entertainingly mystifying" is a response to art with which most of us have some acquaintance, familiarly so, and hence not so mystifying in itself. Surfing YouTube and contemplating "Mystery Train" will stiffen the geezer and the adolescent's determination not to know too much.

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