Sitting here listening to some old Crosby Stills Nash & Young songs, and it occurred to me how powerful many of the lyrics of that era were. I must be getting old, or listening to the wrong stuff. If anyone can point me to some recent music lyrics that are as eloquent, spare and moving as these two from Stephen Stills, I’d be grateful; I’d like to have my belief in the importance and power of contemporary music renewed:
|
Navigation
Collapsniks
Albert Bates (US)
Andrew Nikiforuk (CA)
Brutus (US)
Carolyn Baker (US)*
Catherine Ingram (US)
Chris Hedges (US)
Dahr Jamail (US)
Dean Spillane-Walker (US)*
Derrick Jensen (US)
Dougald & Paul (IE/SE)*
Erik Michaels (US)
Gail Tverberg (US)
Guy McPherson (US)
Honest Sorcerer
Janaia & Robin (US)*
Jem Bendell (UK)
Mari Werner
Michael Dowd (US)*
Nate Hagens (US)
Paul Heft (US)*
Post Carbon Inst. (US)
Resilience (US)
Richard Heinberg (US)
Robert Jensen (US)
Roy Scranton (US)
Sam Mitchell (US)
Tim Morgan (UK)
Tim Watkins (UK)
Umair Haque (UK)
William Rees (CA)
XrayMike (AU)
Radical Non-Duality
Tony Parsons
Jim Newman
Tim Cliss
Andreas Müller
Kenneth Madden
Emerson Lim
Nancy Neithercut
Rosemarijn Roes
Frank McCaughey
Clare Cherikoff
Ere Parek, Izzy Cloke, Zabi AmaniEssential Reading
Archive by Category
My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
My Circles
E-mail me
--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
Dave, I don’t know if you’d find this song, New World Water, by Mos Def, spare and moving in the same way as the songs you listed. But something tells me that you will appreciate the lyrics. I’m trying to think of somer others. This would be a great thing to TrackBack to…
Maybe Neil Young will do it with Greendale:http://www.dotmusic.com/reviews/Live/May2003/reviews29504.asp
I started reading “The Tipping Point” in Mark’s latest edition, and had to put it aside for this afternoon’s reading hour. Need to concentrate to read something like this, and the morning is too filled with household chores. Woman, thy name is House Slave.
I’ve been severly hearing disabled for nine years now and, of course, I had tears running down my face trying to remember and then sing those great old lyrics, recall the sublime vocal harmonies… and then I was thinking about how much solid value there is in “After the Gold Rush” — Southern Man, Silver Spaceships, Fly Away Without You (or whatever the real titles are.) I found out recently that my 12-year-old son doesn’t even know what “flip-side” means. :) A whole metaphor on quality, primacy or the transcendance thereof lost in the techno-digi churn of pseudo innovation.Thanks for the nudge. …edN
Mike: Could make for an interesting diablog, though if it’s anything like the debate over novels and films in these parts, there’ll be absolutely no consensus.Paul: Neil Y. wrote my favourite song, Will to Love and I keep coming back to him from time to time, but since Goin’ Back he hasn’t come up with the raw, memorable lyrics he once was famous for. I’ll buy the new album, of course. Rust never sleeps.Maxine: I sympathize: I find it hard enough keeping up with everything as a Somewhat coddled empty-nest male. I don’t know how you do it. Love your turn of phrase in the pieces that punctuate your visuals. You should write poetry.Ed: Thanks. I suspect that it’s women singer-songwriters who have taken over as the new guard of lyric craftsmen (craftspeople?). Just went through my favourite 20 songs of the last decade and 15 of them are by women: Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple, etc. Wonder what that means?
Ed: BTW, I enjoy your writings on language, especially the posts skewering PowerPoint, our 21st century NewSpeak.
Spooky – I have an mp3 CD in my car with about 110 tracks on it, which I play randomly almost daily. It includes about 6 Bob Dylan, 8 Neil Young and one CSN&Y, namely Love the One You’re With (from Woodstock). The rest are a selection of my faves thru the ages right up to Queens of the Stone Age. For deep and witty lyrics you might try Neil Hanlon of Divine Comedy.
And “Wooden Ships” (by CS&N)
Ian: Divine Comedy is new to me, but just reading this one line from one of their songs in an album review is enough to make me put it on my Buy list: “a mourning nation weeps and wails, but keeps the sales of evil tabloids healthy – the poor protect the wealthy”. Wonder how come I’ve never heard of these guys? Now I really feel old.
Kara: Yes. That’s the only song I love two versions of — the original and the Jefferson Airplane version on Volunteers. “Probably keep us both alive”. BTW, thanks for the wonderful quote from Marshall McLuhan on your blog:There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
Ian: Forgot to thank you for the link to “The Nonsense of Knowledge Management”. My reply to it coming up tomorrow morning.
Boob