One Moment of Vision
Posted by ben on 30 Dec 2006 at 10:52 am | Tagged as: essays, music
Just thought I’d link y’all up to probably the most sublime review of a rock album ever written; in fact, one of the best pieces of art criticism I have ever read. The author, Lester Bangs, is among the most celebrated American rock critics, and although he has written some crap, this review shows why he deserves that reputation.
Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
“Buildings are always erected by people. People are children of their blood, are members or their race. As blood speaks, so the people build”
Heinrich Himmler