[The following contains spoilers for Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Oppenheimer and, especially, The Odyssey.] In the last week or so, there has been an awful lot of discourse out there about The Odyssey – proof of its cultural impact, if nothing else[1]. Some of this discourse
Some love songs live in the everyday world, full of mundane details to help make the song and the sentiment more easily relatable. Others are more abstracted and idealised, with vistas of grand operatic emotion. This is true of all lyrics and lyric poetry, broadly speaking, which revolves around the
Can we separate art from the artist? Roland Barthes aside, any number of extremely dull and predictable thinkpieces have wrung their hands over this age-old question, particularly in the last decade or so, where a seemingly endless parade of predominantly male artists have fallen over themselves in revealing their
“Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?" "A man may do both," said Aragorn. ‘For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend,
We’ve dealt a lot with ideas of presence and absence in songs we’ve seen so far. Absent lovers are a constant obsession in B-Sides, but even some A-Sides are built on the anticipation of seeing the lover again (including, in different ways, the first two that
Last time, we touched on the idea that to be in love makes it feel like you’re separated from the world. A corollary to that is that there’s no shortage of love songs catering to people who already feel like they’re outside of the norm in one
For a project writing about depictions of romantic love, I actually haven’t overtly covered sex very much. This is surprising not only because sex is, for many people, an enormous part of a romantic connection, but also because popular music is in some ways built around sexual appeal, whether
It's been a busy couple of months, so this project has fallen by the wayside a little, but here it is, back up on the road, with an entry I've been looking forward to for some time, no less. Love is, to some degree, inherently counter-
In 2002, I read The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time. Being a particularly dedicated eleven-year-old, and having seen the film several times by that stage, I read it in less than 12 hours, a feat which continues to stagger me. In the first few months
Two songs of experience here, songs that very pointedly deal with the lived experience of a relationship over and above abstracts (indeed, one of them, as we’ll see, is contrasted explicitly by its writer with a song of abstracts). A lot of popular music, certainly since the advent of
Well, 'tis the season of love. And as it happens, the playlists from which this project grew began life as a Valentine's Day project, growing out of a radio show a decade ago. So to mark the occasion, a double-helping of posts - number 13 today, on
My A-Side/B-Side distinction is, I admit, an arbitrary and at times a tenuous one. Sometimes whether a song is “positive” or “negative” is impossibly subjective, sometimes it depends from what angle I approach it. And so this time, I’ve gone for two edge cases, from a