Please note that the SS in the abobe review is Young Steve, not Scott Soriano. I'd never write anything that idiotic. Okay, maybe I would, but not about that record.
One more thing, Steve: Your contention that literature is not immediate is stupid. If literature is story telling, then, yes, it can be immediate. Dostoyevsky is immediate. It is also complex and by complex I dont mean that he writes long books and uses Russian names. Melville is immediate and also complex. You can read either Crime & Punishment or Moby Dick without a guide. If you can't read. You can have someone read it to you and understand it. How deep the understanding depends on what you bring to it. I read C&P for the first time when I was 16. It blew me away. I read it when I was 30 and fourteen years of life and years of studying Russian history and the language gave me a much greater understanding and appreciation of it, but I dont think it blew me away any more than when I was a wee brained lad. That is what great art is about. Finnegan's Wake is a great book. When Joyce wrote it, he joked that he would have academics arguing about what it meant while the common Irishman, reading it aloud to each other would get the humor and word play, and thus the meaning, or at least the basic meaning of the book. The book was meant to be read aloud and its main audience was the Irish, so in that context it is neither complex or difficult. It is immediate and was designed to be.
Music is the same. Chopin, Monk, Cage, James Brown are all complex and immediate and one does not get in the way of the other. Plenty of Indian classical music or Arab music or gamelon sounds complex to people who aren't atune to the music, but it isnt. You like Group Innare because you can understand it within a rock & roll context. You would probably have more of a problem with Hazma al Din, who is less complex and more immediate than Group I. But it is very traditional and not based on Western musical concepts.
I dont like the distinction between high art and low art. To me it is too class oriented, but I do think there is a difference between a high level of artisticness and a low level. To me the highest level is to make the complex immediate and not only make the creation of it seem effortless but the experience of it can be effortless as well. It is also one that takes time and effort to fully appreciate. Get years in and you realize that Moby Dick is one of the funniest books ever written, something you wont get when you read excerpts in high school or the whole thing in an American Lit class. None of this means that GG Allin or the Simpletones arent great listening or that Harry Whittington aint worth tracking down or that there is no merit to Attack of the Killer Tomatos. Ultimately it comes down to what you enjoy. And I and others enjoy late Piranhas for a bunch of different things and for different reasons (I'd say the two primary ones are blind energy and free imagination, two things not high on your pop-sensible list....and that is fine). To us, it is obvious that they are immediate. Not to you. Your head isnt there. Your heart isnt there. Maybe it will get there. Maybe you arent wired for it. I am 86 years old, 350 pounds and 4'6" yet I still like to shoot some hoop. It will never be effortless or very pretty, and because of my age, size, and stature I might not be able to appreciate basketball like Michael Jordan or Kobe Rapist can, but I still like it. I am not sure what that means but it seems like a good way to end this babble.
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