Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2018

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels, and Franz Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music's power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil to culture and nature. Music, as exemplified in these pieces, can put us in touch with the abiding mystery of the eternal in the historical, the unhuman in the human... The hills are alive! REFERENCES Bob Dylan, "Jokerman" Franz Liszt, “Mephisto Waltz no. 1,” performed by Boris Berezovsky Andrew WK, "Music is Worth Living For" Leonard Cohen, “The Future” C.G. Jung, Aion Douglas Rushkoff, Testament The Guardian, “Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say” Garry Wills, "Our Moloch" Minoan snake goddess statues Richard Wagner, Parsifal http://www.monsalvat.no/ T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts Beckett, Not I Nikolaus Lenau, German Romantic poet Wolgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by David Luke Weird Studies, Episode 3: Sin: "Ecstasy, and the White People" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:21.8	For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Andrew W.K. song called Music is worth living for.
0:56.7	Right. Music is one of the very few things I think of as being like genuinely worth living
1:01.9	for on some level that I can't articulate rationally. Music seems to me to be consubstantial
1:09.6	with life itself.
1:11.0	It is to me a life force.
1:13.2	The great Franco-Romanian thinker essayist Emil Cioran, he wrote that if it wasn't for Bach,
1:22.2	there'd be no value in this universe at all.
1:24.5	Oh, that's a great line.
1:25.9	I've actually often thought that without realizing I was someone else's thought.
1:30.9	Right.
1:31.9	He thought that Bach alone could justify existence.
1:36.6	And if it wasn't for that, then there'd be no purpose at all.
1:40.0	He was a pretty dark-minded fellow.
1:42.6	But what he's saying really is that beauty justifies the
1:45.4	world. And this is one of the key notions in Nietzsche, is that the existence is justified
1:50.1	aesthetically. And nowhere is this more obvious, or is at least the sense of that sentiment
1:55.6	more obvious than in music. So let's get started then. Yeah, let's actually talk. So we're doing Joker Man, right?
2:03.3	Yeah, we're doing Bob Dylan's song, Joker Man from the album Infidels, which was released in
2:09.6	1983. 1983. This is sitting right. And I know this because the genius lyrics page for Jokerman is open in front of me.
2:21.0	I figured we would probably talk a little bit about the lyrics because everybody does with Bob Dylan's music.
	...

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