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Good art can come from the minds of many, but great art usually comes from the mind of one.
Despite the avalanche of publicity that eventually surrounded The Grey Album, the first part of Burton’s explanation for its creation is consistently overlooked: This was mainly a linguistic coincidence. If everyone referred to the Beatles’ 1968 double album by its proper eponymous name (The Beatles), none of this would have ever happened.
The scoreboard is the scoreboard is the scoreboard. Everything else is just, like, your opinion, man.
“Presidential campaigns exist inside their own reality,” he told me. “They have to. It’s the only way they can work.”
The same could be said about loving a band that everyone else prefers to ridicule. Your worldview must align with your construct.
It’s important to remember that every reality is always happening at the same time.
There are a few bricks hither and yon
What makes Beatles lyrics so wonderful is not that they can be interpreted to mean whatever the listener wants; what makes them wonderful is the way they seamlessly adopt contradictory interpretations as the listener matures.
Ever since MTV pre-decided “Loser” was the future of middle-of-the-road coolness, the underclass has become the overclass. The counterculture has become a product that’s available to everybody. And this didn’t happen naturally; it happened because somebody made that choice (and the rest of us didn’t know any better). Which, on balance, is probably the greatest thing MTV ever did for anyone.
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics. —George Santayana We are the robots. —Kraftwerk
When a famous man dies, his critics tend to vaporize (at least temporarily). The type of pundit who disparages the newly dead always comes across like an opportunistic coward, and almost every postmortem potshot has the opposite effect of its intention. When a problematic man dies, you don’t dwell on the qualities that made him a problem. There’s simply no point in attacking a man who is no longer there.
Mass media makes a lot of things about life confusing, one of which is the recognition of age and maturity.
