With devotion's visage and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself.
Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.
Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.
Sexuality. . . is at the same time the most personal of realms and also the realm most carefully constrained by social order.
To the large extent that music can organize our perceptions of our own bodies and emotions, it can tell us things about history that are not accessible through any other medium.
Tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire.
The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music. . . . The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is. . . devestating.
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
My character is meant to know nothing about rap, and not to like it very much, but I know about it, because my kids make me listen to it. There's some rap I do like very much. I like Eminem, Blackalicious.
To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.
I do want to bring up the fact that Hillary Clinton were the one that brought up the words super-predator about young black youth. And that's a term that I think was a - it's - it's been horribly met, as you know. I think she has apologized for it. But I think it was a terrible thing to say.