Posts

Showing posts from September, 2010

The Brute & Sakineh Ashtiani

Image
Preamble:- Satriani's 'What Breaks A Heart' captures the sentiments of Fasride and Sajjad Ashtiani while Marco Brambilla's "Ghost" (@ 6.00) depicting a multi-shot rendition of Natasha Poly's deconstruction is their mother's lingering pain. Fasride and Sajjad Ashtiani  said the term Stoning is so horrific that they would never use it. Instead, they politely say that their mother is in danger and all options are exhausted. The brutal linguistic of the Iranian judiciary obscures the tranquil language of its victims as it pronounces a mother of two to be Stoned to death. It is another day in the office of the Iranian judiciary while at the United Nations, Prime Minister Ahmadinejad wax lyrical to a rapt audience on human rights of the oppressed. It is not a question of fearing the hypocritical cowards but suffering them. The deafening silence of the Hollywood staple and its Feminist left is understandable, even when a news-bite of medieval prac

The Prize & Sidebar: Siti Nurhanim Aziz

Siti epitomizes  the female’s true calling – the power to love. In a trying moment of her life, she extricates the gallstone of hate and liberates her power - the only power left to her. Her generation pronounces her weak and underachieving, not because her love is naive, but because gallstones of the generation renders such unremitting love, unachievable. A doctrinal institution says that between a spouse and child, one is a prize and the other, a sidebar. Siti said to her spouse that he would always be the prize and her child, the sidebar. She said to her child "as much as mummy loves you and daddy in equal portions, you will always be mummy's sidebar while daddy will always be mummy's prize". Her child is taken aback by the harsh words but when the little girl regains her composure, she embraces her mother's wisdom because (a) she is growing up to be somebody's prize (b) her unit is safe and fool-proof because daddy is mummy's pri

The Moses 12:3 Rule

If you take anything from the  Old Testament,  note (a) the voluminous treatise  was penned by mere men – polygamous, patriarchal slave-owning men (b)  Genesis 12:3  says those who rail  God's Chosen People  are cursed while those who do not are blessed. Historical nuances and trajectories of nations lay the uncanny prophecy of Moses bare. While the old man proposed the verse as a moral and intellectual barometer, he implied a form of  Pre-emptive Intimidation  to the potential warmonger against his people.  Consider  Renaissance Europe  that descended to doldrums in the 20 th century with  persecution of the Jews  but saw ascendency only when its acrimony ceased. On the other hand, despite being blessed with earthly resources, ideology stymies and continues to  stymie the Middle Eastern coterie  with the prevailing  Antisemitism  inversely proportionate to a regressive and unproductive society. On the micro, quiet and secular Singapore is on the  ascendency  while v

Tool: Schism - The Patient

When dreary sounds emanate from depths of a strange planet, the atheist prays that God is at last eliminated from the theorem, at which point Tool is  quantum gravity  thrust upon the daft punk who hangs onto the  principle of contradiction  caused by fear of his dark side. The quantum causes unsettling vibrations and articulating pain, which allows him to vomit what he does not remember consuming. The disbeliever yearns for warm pig blood filled  with Schism  -  The Patient  and while trapped in his cold coffin, he ejaculates feverishly craving for infinite space screaming ‘I Know The Pieces Fit.’ To the hip and hop and everything else the fool thinks is cool (a) Tool does not boast a fan base but a growing crop of  Manchurian Candidates  (b) denial of basic musical assumptions is converse with the ideological basement (c) lyrical expletives are not the yardstick for Parental Guidance but the potential Manchurian that ferments in the left-brain hemisphere, is (d)

Gorillaz: Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head

If you wish for a band with no posers to engage, no egos to tolerate and no blind loyalties to pledge,  Gorillaz  it is. A virtual band of real people represented outwardly by cartoon caricatures, leaving fans not only with a  biographical prank  but with an eclectic mix of sounds and stories that partake in hypothetical and sometimes real world scenarios such as  Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head  where the baritone of  Dennis Lee Hopper   (1936-2010)  the clever story telling of  Albarn  and noise of  Danger Mouse  comes together in a carnatic-reggae mix, taken well with lights dimmed and a dose of Algerian hashish. Hopper’s sobering recital of the disguised little parable draws inference the atrocity of 911 where Oil refers to the Jewels, the Twin Towers point to the Monkey, the Perpetrators of the carnage the Strange Folk and the Ignorant who never expected the atrocity to occur, the Happy Folk. Generally, it is an allegory of social disintegration via greed and infusion

Limp Bizkit: Behind Blue Eyes / Break Stuff

When ‘hard underground’ goes mainstream, Behind Blue Eyes is Limp Bizkit’s offering - the track in her discography that passed the granny-test and featured poignantly in  Halle Berry's Gothika.  Surprisingly, Durst’s rendition is mellower than  Townshend's original  that evolves from a harmonical strain into a slamming riff towards the end and then winds down to the initial theme. Time ensures the ‘hard’ eventually winds down to the ‘initial theme’ and Behind Blue Eyes has proved to be a distinct Bizkit milestone. Another milestone is the abusive Break Stuff where the hook instantly  turns on the crowd.  A simple two-note grunt from Borland’s Yamaha and Durst lets it rip. The vulgarity is docile but the deliverance brutal and ‘deadly’. The simplicity of the hook that jabs at you intermittently is brilliant. Valid reasons for lyrical expletives (a) entertainment (b) lack of suitable synonyms (c) insanity. If vulgarity is the entertainment operative of the genre, then i

Zappa: The Massive Improve'lence

Sub-genres in the Alternative category are Grunge, Indie-Punk and Zappa. Sub-genres in Rock are Classic, Grunge and Zappa. Sub-genres in Blues are Classic, Hard-Boiled and Zappa . The thing is, the twentieth century maestro is hardly described as Grunge, Punk or Hard-Boiled, but entirely a genre unto himself manifested into an ‘adjective’ raking across the board without validation, acclaim or approval of the industry. The genre is 'Zappa'. Period. Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) was inducted into Rock & Roll’s Hall of Fame and granted a Lifetime Grammy - posthumously – Why? - Because counterparts simply could not ignore the Mozart in their midst. They endured the genius long enough and the guilt borne was a thorn to extricate after he passed. Like his eighteenth century Germanic counterpart, the ‘madness’ in Zappa’s psychic upset the Salieris of their time. He made no apologies for vulgarity. His diction-challenged narratives were authored for a later

Donovan: Please Don't Bend (My Heart)

Donovan Leitch's stories are so coherent and uncomplicated that, in an infantile way, they partake in our dreams but, when psychical activity in his lyrics gets complicated and mystical and the Scotsman starts chanting mantras, it conjures up visions of The Tillerman who, after his beef with Christ, dabbled in eastern mysticism and traversed into the seventh century. The antidote for a journeyman about to enroll in a religious school is simply to engage the bibles of KoRn, Thousand Foot Krutch and Puddle of Mud, in order to locate his bearings. A Scotswoman artist assured me that, although her Hurdy Gurdy countryman is not likely to time-travel or close his gem box to his fans, his administration has become a bone of his contention. Where are the signs I wondered, because the stripped-out Sutras released 1996 sounds as fresh as grass under an open sky. She replied that it was Celtia that would have been his last in 2004 if not for the slew of numbers hijacked