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Direct Link To This Post Topic: Dream Theater and T. S, Eliot: An Essay
    Posted: March 01 2008 at 19:04
Hello all!

I wrote an essay putting T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" side-by-side with Dream Theater's track "Octavarium" on terms of theme, movements, and rising/falling action...I thought it would be of interest to the folks around here. Enjoy, and give feedback please! Thanks!

T. S. Eliot and Dream Theater: Echoing the Eternal Music

"Hm."

That's what my girlfriend thinks of progressive metal.

Dream Theater is a progressive metal band, specializing in abrupt key/tempo changes, a symphonic and sometimes bombastic tendency in their composition, melodic vocals, and individual member virtuosity. The five members of Dream Theater combine their disciplines (guitar, drums, vocals, keyboard, and bass guitar) to create a sometimes frantic, sometimes silky-smooth polyphonic frenzy. On their 2005 album Octavarium, Dream Theater trek farther along on the sonic trail they have blazed for themselves by composing a 24-minute epic of the same name. This piece consists of five movements of individual emotional quality that when presented as whole serve the listener with a five-course dinner of multi-faceted music.

"Was that all one song?"

Dream Theater is not unique in the attitude toward the suite to express a deeper, more elaborate sense of meaning. T. S. Eliot gave his definitive effort with "The Waste Land", also a five-movement piece that uses varied moods and themes to express a large-scale picture. The similarities between the two works do not stop here, however. "Octavarium" and "The Waste Land," on closer inspection, seem to be attempting an expression of similar states of humanity as a whole. Both Dream Theater's "octavarium" motif and T. S. Eliot's "wasteland" are literary devices used to express fatalism in regards to the human condition as it grows steadily toward empty repetition and efficiency through conformity. In this way, T. S. Eliot and Dream Theater similarly entrap their audience in their respective symbols for socialized humanity, the wasteland and the octavarium.

"The Waste Land's" impact when it was published in 1922 was considered phenomenal in part because it was an abstract poem that treated itself like a suite of music (Publishes 1). The work trades the traditional method of using concrete plot and/or themes for an abstract presentation of multiple symbols all working together to make one impression on the reader. As David Perkins, an English and American literature professor at Harvard writes of the "mad medley's" first fans, "admirers were challenged to account for their feeling of coherence in a poem without continuity of setting, style, speaking voice, or plot. The poem, they presently said, was organized like music" (Perkins 76).

The poem utilizes three main themes that reccur throughout the entire work to convey the concept of the wasteland: the theme of the "wasteland" itself (to represent the defeated, conformist state of humanity), the "water theme" (to represent salvation from the wasteland), and the metropolitan theme (to represent the masses who are stuck in the figurative wasteland). Perkins sees a similarity between the presentation of themes in "The Waste Land" and that of a post-Wagnerian suite: "As the themes return in a new context, they bring with them suggestions and associations from former contexts and become progressively denser nodes of connotation and feeling" (77).

Where T.S. Eliot's piece has a music-like effect, Dream Theater's "Octavarium" is, in fact, a piece of music. In the context of music, Dream Theater is allowed to convey themes on two levels: both lyrical themes and melodic motifs. Dream Theater's piece has three main melodic themes that reccur throughout: the main theme (presented early-on and touched back upon at the end), the melancholy theme (played initially by a solitary flute at the beginning of the first movement) and the optimistic theme (played first at the end of the second movement on Rudress' squeaky-clean synthesizer).

"Octavarium" deals with non-conformity to social norms with the lyrical symbol of the octavarium. The octavarium is a word which functions as a Latin neologism: "octave", meaning the concept of a musical octave, and "-arium", used to denote a place where something is held (Octavarium 1). The arrangement of notes on the eight-step musical scale has a bottom note, "1", and a top note, "8". The top "8" can be expressed as the "1" of a higher scale (the distance between 1 and 8 is called an octave), beginning the 8-step scale anew. This symbolic "octavarium" is used to describe the band's experience of being engulfed in their music careers and the human experience in general. Humanity, Dream Theater argues, suffers an inescapable, cyclic fate that has been predetermined for them by their society, just as the band personally feels trapped by their music careers (pressures from fans to produce output that meets their expectations, pressure to maintain an artistic and commerical level of success, etc.) The fate varies from person to person, but its universality does not.

The pieces go through similar cycles of emotion and theme. Both begin their first movements calmly: Dream Theater's introduction consists of a soft, atmospheric synthesizer playing chords beneath a melodic, seemingly wandering lap steel guitar lead, while Eliot's piece begins with sets of chant-like rhyming lines describing a melancholy spring scene. This rhythm, Perkins writes, "Seemed to be continuing in the eighth line with 'Summer surprised us'. But suddenly an altogether different voice was heard, that of Marie" (Perkins, 75-76). The pieces take a darker turn as Dream Theater's synthesizer gets spookier, corresponding with Eliot's turn from rhyme and rhythm into the haunting free-verse style that dominates the piece. The pieces proceed to unveil their main themes. In "Octavarium," it is presented with the main melodic theme, thundered in by the entire band sans vocals. In "The Waste Land," the line "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?" (33) introduces the desolation theme to the audience.

Octavarium proceeds in its first movement to introduce lyrics about the will to take a non-conformist stance toward social norms. The first words, sung over only a strumming acoustic guitar, emerge: "I never wanted to become someone like him so secure / Content to live each day just like the last." The lyrics first give a narrative of the protagonist's decision to pursue the life that is right for him before they tell of his subsequent desire to be like everyone else: "So suddenly / the only thing / I wanted / To become / To be someone just like him".

Eliot describes a theme of non-conformity by using his "metropolitan" theme to symbolize the will of the masses. In the poem, the narrator observes a huge crowd of people traveling across London Bridge. He then sees someone he recognizes on the bridge and begins to attempt a conversation of odd pleasantries from afar, but to no avail. The narrator ends up cursing his friend and giving up on the discourse at the end of the movement: "Hypocrite reader! –my double! –my brother!" (86).

These words usher the beginning of the second movement. Octavarium kicks in with the whole band in a funky, wandering groove that changes the scene from the protagonist's testimony of his non-conformist tendencies to a scene at a doctor's office. The protagonist asks the doctor to cure him "from a state of catatonic sleep", but in the end, the doctor provides no cure for him, despite his pleas for assistance: "Medicate me […] / can't you stop what's happening?"

Eliot changes his piece into a narrative at this point too, depicting at first a surreal scene with a woman who seems to be the speaker's significant other. She asks the narrator questions he cannot answer, eventually growing frustrated with his silence: "Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?" (37). The scene then changes to an almost comical conversation between two housewives concerning one of the women's husbands returning from the military, and outlining the social expectancies of such a return: "he wants a good time / And if you don't give it him, there's others will" (39). Like Dream Theater's plea to the doctor, Eliot uses these and other situations as commentary on the social expectations people are burdened with.

Both artists go deeper into the heart of their message of entrapment in the third and fourth movements. At the end of Octavarium's second movement, the optimistic synthesizer lead kicks in, and the whole band intensifies as the piece increases tempo. This optimistic segment eventually darkens into the third movement's sinister wave of virtuosic, instrumental fury, which finally reaches a plateau as the vocalist begins the verses of the third movement. These verses are packed with references to Dream Theater's musical influences, which get interrupted by a refrain that narrates the band's entrapment in the octavarium (here, the term expresses the unavoidable influence of other musicians on their personal octavarium, their immersion in their life of music). The sentiment of this movement is culminated in the lines, "scream without a sound […] / stumbling all around / only to find I've come full circle".

The instrumental insanity resumes, as carefully orchestrated musical nonsense leads to the fourth movement, where the dangers of the Octavarium are expressed: "Tortured insanity, a smothering hell / try to escape but to no avail". The threat of entrapment makes itself universal with the lines, "When you finally start living, it becomes too late", and the threat turns into reality with the barked words, "Trapped inside this Octavarium".

Just as Dream Theater intensifies in these third and fourth movements, Eliot begins his third movement, called "The Fire Sermon", in which dark, often revolting images (like "A rat crept […] dragging its slimy belly on the bank") (41) give the reader a similar sense of danger. Although T. S. Eliot's constant literary allusion occurs throughout his piece, its use in this movement bears similarity to the allusory technique used by Dream Theater to describe their "full circle". In Eliot's fourth movement, he makes the threat of the wasteland a reality with his passage on the death of Phlebas, who dies by drowning. Phlebas' death is peculiar because he died at the hand of water, the object of desire of wanderers in the wasteland.

The pieces conclude in their fifth movements. The desert imagery becomes more prevalent in Eliot's narrative of wanderers in the geographical waste land. The narrator remarks, "If there were water we should stop and drink / Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think" and goes on to say of the wasteland, "Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit" (47), relaying that the symbolic desolation stems from the absence of free will. The poem then takes a turn for optimism when a rain begins. This rain proves to be harmful, however, as cities are told to have disintegrated beneath it: "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down," "the Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower" (51, 91). The crumbling of the cities of those who have conformed proclaims the wasteland as the victor in humanity's struggle against it.

Dream Theater's octavarium seems to come out on top at the end of their piece as well. The narrator admits to its triumph in the final movement by stating the phenomena's effects as fact, saying, "We move in circles […] / A perfect sphere, colliding with our fate / the story ends where it began."

The simultaneous defeat of humanity in both pieces at the hands of the octavarium and the wasteland echo each other in one last respect: their endings. After each piece's emotional surrender to the powers that be, they fade into a heartbeat: in "Octavarium," a throbbing, electronic pulse of the ending note fades the piece into silence, and in "The Waste Land," a repeated Sanskrit word ("Shantih", which means "the peace that passeth understanding") gives the poem a fade-out effect.

"Octavarium" and "The Waste Land" utilize impressionistic techniques to solidify abstract concepts in their audience's minds. Although "Octavarium" features very sophisticated composition and theme development, "The Waste Land" may more easily be interpreted as "high art" than the output of a metal band. As a Rhapsody.com music critic states,

"Dream Theater's 2005 release, their tenth full-length since the group formed in the mid-1980s, may boil down to synth-heavy, 12-sided-dice nerd metal, but that's not the worst thing in the world. There's always ritual murder, and you have to listen to something on the way to Laser Tag" (McGuirk 1).

Despite the conflict between progressive rock sympathizers and those with no taste, the pieces, for those who can appreciate both, are like-minded works that function as appeals to resist conformity aimed at the masses that consume them.



Works Cited

Dream Theater. "Octavarium." Octavarium. Atlantic, 2005.

"Eliot Publishes The Waste Land, 1922." DISCovering World History. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Discovering Collection. Gale. Kirksville Sr High School. 14 Feb. 2008 <http://find.galegroup.com/>.

Eliot, T. S. "The Waste Land" and other Poems. Ed. Helen Vendler New York: Penguin, 1998.

McGuirk, Mike. Free Music: Octavarium by Dream Theater. Residence. 23 February 2008 <http://www .rhapsody.com/dreamtheater/octavarium>.

"Octavarium." Wikipedia. 21 February 2008. Residence. 23 February 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Octavarium>

Perkins, David. "T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: The Chief Example of Modernist Poetry." American Modernism. Ed. Scott Barbour. San Diego: Greenhaven, 2000. 72-81.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2008 at 19:09
Was this just for fun? For class??



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2008 at 21:59
Not bad my friend. Not bad at all. May I suggest next time to format it going through one work and then the other instead of at the same time? Just a thought. Other then that it was brilliant.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2008 at 23:42
Good work, I hope that you got an A (if this was, indeed, for class). From this one essay, it is clear that you have a strong style and passion for writing. I encourage you to continue along in your scholarly jaunts. I know that this might be difficult, but when writing a similar essay in the future, I would include a bit more about what the music itself is doing. Furthermore, I would try to continue the girlfriend motif throughout the entire essay, and not just drop it.

Either way, excellent work. What level class is this?
Prog... It's good.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2008 at 11:50
Oh my God!

Cheers, thumbs up, hail, \m/ Ò_Ó \m/, and all the possible salutations to you my good sir!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 08 2008 at 09:03
you suck
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 08 2008 at 11:32
That was a great essay. You have a really good analysis and you apply each work to the other very well.
<font color=white>butts, lol[/COLOR]

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 09 2008 at 17:01
This essay was written for my high school English class (I'm a senior in HS)


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 25 2008 at 16:48
Docsolar i have  read your essay and i liket it a lot, in fact i have read the Genesis Chapter and Verse book (you must have to read) and as far as i remember, some Genesis members, especially Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford are influence in the T.S. Eliot poem, when they along with Collins and Hackett wrote W and W.
 
Good essay!




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Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 28 2008 at 17:50

Dream Theater is an American progressive metal band formed in 1985 under the name "Majesty" by John Myung, John Petrucci and Mike Portnoy while they attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, before they dropped out to support the band. Though a number of lineup changes followed, the three original members remain today along with James LaBrie and Jordan Rudess.

Dream Theater has become a successful progressive rock band, despite the drop in popularity of the genre since the mid-1970s. Although the band has had a few successful hits (notably "Pull Me Under" in the early 1990s, which received extensive MTV rotation), they have mostly stayed underground for their career, feeding off support from their fans.

The band is well known for the technical proficiency of its instrumentalists, who have won many awards from music instruction magazines. Dream Theater's members have collaborated with many other notable musicians. Guitarist John Petrucci has been named as the third player on the G3 tour six times, more than any other invited guitarist, following in the footsteps of Eric Johnson, Robert Fripp, and Yngwie Malmsteen.

The band's highest selling album is the gold selling Images and Words (1992), which reached #61 on the Billboard 200 charts. Both the 1994 release Awake and their 2002 release Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence also entered the charts at #32 and #46 respectively and received mostly positive reviews. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence also led to Dream Theater becoming the initial band reviewed in the Music Section of Entertainment Weekly during its opening week of release, despite the magazine generally preferring more mainstream music. In 2007, Systematic Chaos entered US Billboard 200 at #19 Dream Theater has sold over two million albums in the U.S and over 8 million albums and DVDs worldwide.

Formation (1985)
Founding%20members%20%28from%20left%20to%20right%29%20John%20Myung,%20Mike%20Portnoy,%20and%20John%20Petrucci%20in%201985.
Founding members (from left to right) John Myung, Mike Portnoy, and John Petrucci in 1985.

Dream Theater was formed in September 1985 when guitarist John Petrucci and bassist John Myung decided to form a band in their spare time while studying at the Berklee College of Music. The pair came across drummer Mike Portnoy in one of Berklee's rehearsal rooms, where he was asked to join the band. The trio started off by covering Iron Maiden and Rush songs in the rehearsal rooms at Berklee.

Myung, Petrucci, and Portnoy settled on the name Majesty for their newly formed group. According to the The Score So Far… documentary, they were waiting in line for tickets to a Rush concert at the Berklee Performance Center while listening to the band on a boom box. Portnoy commented that the ending of the song "Bastille Day" (from the album Caress of Steel) sounded "majestic." It was then decided that Majesty would be the band's name

The trio then set out to fill the remaining positions in the group. Petrucci asked his high school band-mate Kevin Moore to play keyboards. After accepting the position, another friend from home, Chris Collins, was recruited as lead vocalist after band members heard him sing a cover of "Queen of the Reich" by Queensrÿche During this time, Portnoy, Petrucci and Myung's hectic schedules forced them to abandon their studies to concentrate on their music, as they did not feel they could learn more in College. Moore also left his college, SUNY Fredonia, to concentrate on the band.

Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 26 2008 at 19:38
This was really good! Gah, your girlfriend annoys me. lol some girls just don't understand the AMAZINGNESS of prog rock, and even Dream Theater. But other girls [like mahself] are completely in love with the music and can't seem to get enough of it. lol hope you got an A  ^_^
For the <3 of John Petrucci!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 01 2010 at 14:10

Great essay man- what assignment were you responding to? I wish my essay prompts were like this.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 01 2010 at 14:39
I once wrote one comparing The Waste Land to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 01 2010 at 18:11
Interesting essay Thumbs Up

Well, I think you've imposed a (superfluous) conceptual unity on the Wasteland and also simplified the ideas a bit, particularly missing the ideas of hope/relief in the conclusion (hence the 'Shantih shantih shantih') - it's not exactly the 'and this is the way the world ends' of The Hollow Men, which is a truly pessimistic poem. I was reading a book on Four Quartets lately in which Eliot was quoted to have said that he didn't really worry about whether he understood everything when writing The Waste Land.


Edited by TGM: Orb - June 01 2010 at 18:12
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 04 2011 at 15:28
Hi,
 
Quote
...

Octavarium proceeds in its first movement to introduce lyrics about the will to take a non-conformist stance toward social norms. The first words, sung over only a strumming acoustic guitar, emerge: "I never wanted to become someone like him so secure / Content to live each day just like the last." The lyrics first give a narrative of the protagonist's decision to pursue the life that is right for him before they tell of his subsequent desire to be like everyone else: "So suddenly / the only thing / I wanted / To become / To be someone just like him".

...
 
I think this is incorrect ... and the paragraph is trying to make a comment about "non-conformist" ... and the quote you give is ... the opposite, or suggesting the opposite ... "to be just like him" ... which is NOT (usually) a non-conformist stand in any way.
Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 04 2011 at 15:47
Originally posted by docsolar docsolar wrote:

This essay was written for my high school English class (I'm a senior in HS)

 
And a damn good job ... albeit I think that TS was writing more about the wasteland left behind the world war than he was about the theme of non-conformity, which is all that is left, when all else is dead and gone ... there is no "society" to conform to ... which is the point that is kinda missed all along.
 
TS's work, is not the easiest thing to discuss, and it is really easy to get lost in the generics of a lot of academic terminology that is not very good any more, and tends to dilute the strength of the work altogether ... no one writes because it is a symbol of the degeneration of the social conformity to ideals ... you write because there is something that you don't like that everyone does in your midst ... and that -- eventually -- gets lumped into some fuel for a fire to supposedly mean this and/or that ... and in general, that is 'AFTER" the fact, not during, or with (even!) the person that created it off their vision.
 
I like DT's work, on this one, even if some don't ... and many times, because they don't! ... why? ... because it takes guts, determination and a very special desire, to even consider writing and doing something like that ... and the band deserves the credit for doing it ... but how to make sense of it, and help us not get lost is another story ... and I'm not sure they need to slap us with a "meaning" ... since we're gonna develop our own anyway!
 
If this was a college paper, you would get nailed for the generalities, btw ... be aware of that.
 
Now let's see if you can re-write this, after all that ... this is good enough to be a rough draft for a senior in college!


Edited by moshkito - August 05 2013 at 12:26
Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 04 2011 at 16:02
I remember this essay which goes back as far as 2008 and I did not hear what the final outcome was. On a High School level, It perhaps deserves an A or at the least a B+ for the way it justifies the two texts as compared to one another and the command of the English language. I dont know what the criteria was but I assume that he clarifies the question well, as a stimulus, and it appears that the whole essay is his own work. If this were for college at the best i would give it a B, if it were for Uni it would not even get that. It needs more academic research.
 
One thing I would not do and that is use Wikipedia. It is an unreliable source and unprofessional. In fat I boycot Wikipedia for my students. If they need to use it I always tell them to use one more reliable source to back up and support their argument. The problem with Wikipedia is that it is written by anyone, rather than scholars who have some kind of research skills and the academic backing to support their ideas Wikipedia is easier for students so they use it but I would not pass an essay based solely on it. Thankfully the essay in question here is well supported with reliable sources and the in text references are well used and especially the quotes used give a powerful persuasive argument.  


Edited by AtomicCrimsonRush - March 04 2011 at 16:05
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 04 2011 at 17:00
Originally posted by docsolar docsolar wrote:

This essay was written for my high school English class (I'm a senior in HS)


Very good work man!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 04 2011 at 18:55
Originally posted by AtomicCrimsonRush AtomicCrimsonRush wrote:

One thing I would not do and that is use Wikipedia. It is an unreliable source and unprofessional. In fat I boycot Wikipedia for my students. If they need to use it I always tell them to use one more reliable source to back up and support their argument. The problem with Wikipedia is that it is written by anyone, rather than scholars who have some kind of research skills and the academic backing to support their ideas Wikipedia is easier for students so they use it but I would not pass an essay based solely on it. Thankfully the essay in question here is well supported with reliable sources and the in text references are well used and especially the quotes used give a powerful persuasive argument.  
 
The history is usually ok and the listings are usually ok ... but the write ups are far short, and one of the main reasons why I really think that we should "revamp" as much of our information here on PA, why ... because we are showing how useless the site can be in giving someone any kind of information on a scene, or an idea, or an artist.
 
Our information, is not good enough, and sometimes, it is ... LAZY. And when not lazy, it is not willing or capable of asking more meaningful questions in order to help raise the impression that our site can make ... and with all due respect, Wiki, does list links in the bottom, and in general you can check many of them ... but I still like the one calling Popol Vuh a Norwegian band!
 
It really says it all ... but we do the same thing here by spending too much time trashing/commenting/trolling in the board, instead of helping fix things ... but writing reviews of singles and EP's? I have to ask mom about that! And ... ohh, that was the Japanese single, not the American single!
 
When it comes to terminology and the use of it, I agree that it is not a good place, and I would not exactly rely on it, but then ... I can read a whole lot more about Incredible String Band on Wiki, than I ever will on PA (except one thread -- and even then it is not more complete as it could, and should -- because the writer is not aware of the theater side of things!)  ... because we have not taken the time, dedication, or make use of the folks that have the interest to help make a lot of artists more interesting and important ... up to and including ... the interviews that Toro does, which are ... unreal ... beyond description! But, NEVER quoted, or used in the writeups by any reviewer or person writing on this board! ... so how do you expect it to be better?
 
I can already see, and hear the krautrock folks upset at what I have written, which is what I have been saying for all the time I have been here ... but it has been ignored, and in many cases, folks saying that it's sh*t, and just me whining! But it tells you that the real interest to make it better is either totally scattered, or simply not there ... but passing up having that person as a part of a team? ... I'm blind ... I never see talent or abilities or knowledge ... and writing about something progressive? ... not likely! But my favorite solo and keyboard player ... ALL OVER IT BABY! ... what does that tell you? ... all of a sudden, Wiki has more credibility!


Edited by moshkito - March 04 2011 at 19:16
Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 05 2011 at 01:25
""" YOU are right. It has merits but overall it is disallowed as a resource in most academic circles, including my own classes. Wiki is Icky. 
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