zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — with the nost remarkable, beautiful, unexpected, unexpectable music at the very end, a total surprise ]
.

Kendrick Lamar just won the Pulitzer for music. A small while back, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I haven’t seen anyone comparing Kendrick Lamar‘s Pulitzer fuss with Bob Dylan‘s Nobel shenanigans — yet.

**

The black on white of the Dylan lyrics (upper panel, above) and the white on black of the Lamar lyrics (lower panel, above) aren’t racially intended, nor do they represent good and evil as so commonly elsewhere — and in any case, in black on white is it the black or the white that carries the meaning, and vice versa — but in the case of white on black, which do you notice most? And above, below, what do they mean?

Both, and.

Good’n’evil, rock’n’roll. Rock on, world.

**

Sources:

These two will give you the surprise, surprise narratives:

New York Times, Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize, Redefining Boundaries of Literature

NPR, How The Pulitzer Jury Opened Its Doors To Hip-Hop

And those two headlines make a nice contrapuntal DoubleQuote, too.

**

Me, I’ve been listening to Dylan since I could crawl and he was folk, and had never consciously heard the words Kendrick Lamar until yesterday, when I started in on this piece.

Sources:

Here are the two musics from which the lytrics posted above are taken, both of which you may skip if you know them already:

and:

**

But. And. Yet. Also. Splutter —

My remarkable discovery of the day.. It’s Caroline Shaw‘s astounding Partita for 8 Voices, written for and sung by Roomful of Teeth. Listen closely, beauty is born fresh here:

Kudos, where kudos due:

Slate, Classical Music Needs Kendrick Lamar More Than It Needs the Pulitzer

**

Okay, just in case — what I hear:

Human voice sound poetry of Henri Chopin — I visited him briefly circa 1965 — via Glenn Gould‘s polyphonic voice radio plays, meeting Machaut, via Morten Lauridsen‘a O Magnum Mysterium, plus what funk meant first, before it was limited to funk — a twisty ringing of changes in sound: cough, swoop, taal, stutter and bend weaving in and out of dissonance, of purity..

Utterly fresh and brilliantly performed: watch and listen..

And tell me below if you knew this wonder already.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2018 at 11:09 am and is filed under beauty, bob dylan, Charles Cameron, counterpoint, Doublequotes, music, nobel, poetry, polyphony, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.