When you make music, you call up a lot of ghosts. American music no less than any other.
This country may be new, but its people are ancient.nWhen you play its music, you’re responsible – if not to them, then for them.
If your melody waxes nostalgic for Dixie, then your words better talk the ghosts down.
On the movies of Clint Eastwood, by The New Yorker:
“Mass culture is a machine for showing desire,” Roland Barthesnwrote. It’s also a machine for expressing resentment, a frustrationnof desire. Harry Callahan is lonely, hard, intolerant. Eastwood became npopular, in part, because he allowed people to dream that they couldnbe effective without being nice.
What does our mass culture desire today? Winning arguments and passingnjudgment according to cable news and reality television…
