Seems we might be missing “anger”
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Research scientist and bona fide musician Daniel J. Levitin is out with a new book, “The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.” VeryShortList wonders out loud, “So ‘Baby Got Back’ is in the Love category? Comfort? Knowledge?”
Those would be three of the six categories. The others are Friendship (”Can’t We Still Be Friends”), Joy (um, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?) and Religion (”God Save the Queen”). But seriously, Levitin takes an earnest look at condensing the human experience with music into understandable stanzas, so to speak.
Reviewer Theodore Rushton writes at Amazon.com:
“Exquisitely written, it is really about ourselves because we are such a musical species. It makes me wonder: What if humans had never learned to talk, but merely communicate through music? It seems far more reasonable than merely talking without understanding — at which we’re all too expert.”
Getting back to the headline above: There have been some profoundly angry songs over the years: “Four Dead in Ohio” (About the 1970 Kent State shootings, which anger an entire generation to this day), “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (Massacre in Northern Ireland), “Horse to Water” (from REM’s most recent CD, “Accelerate”). Maybe the next edition will include a seventh category.
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