Episode 79: Love, Death, and the Dream Life

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2020

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Weird Studies, an improvised analysis of two pop songs -- Nina Simone's version of James Shelton's "Lilac Wine" and Ghostface Killah's visionary "Underwater" -- becomes the occasion for a deep dive to the weird wellspring of artistic creation. In trying to understand these songs and why they love them so much, your hosts touch on themes such as necromancy, decadence, liebestod, visionary experience, the Muslim image of paradise, the necessity of rifts, Norman Mailer's concept of "dream life," and the magical operation that is sampling. Header image: Boris Kasimov, Wikimedia Commons REFERENCES James Shelton, "Lilac Wine" Nina Simone, "Lilac Wine" from the album WIld is the Wind (1966) Ghostface Killah, "Underwater, from the album Fishscale (2006) MF Doom, "Orange Blossoms," from the album Special Herbs, Volume 4, 5 & 6 Richard Strauss, [Salome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome(opera))_ Weird Studies, episode 25: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch C. G. Jung's practice of active imagination JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice Thomas Mann, Death in Venice Paul Horn, Visions Alexander Mackendrick (dir.), The Sweet Smell of Success Les Baxter, American composer Les Baxter, "Papagayo" Debussy, [Nocturnes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes(Debussy))_ Rebecca Leydon, music scholar Weird Studies episodes 73 and 74, on C. G. Jung's aesthetic vision Alexander Courage, Theme from Star Trek ("Where No Man Has Gone Before") Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket" James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weird Studies. I'm Phil Ford.
0:53.6	This week, J.F. and I are doing something we did all the way back in episodes 27 and 28. Each of us chose a song to serve as a topic of conversation. Actually, we each chose two songs and hoped that we could talk about them all in the single session. Well, J.F. hoped we could. I know
1:12.3	myself well enough to understand that there was never the slightest chance of me being brief on the
1:16.9	subject of music, which, after all, is kind of my thing. Indeed, I did talk way too much, and as a
1:23.6	result, we only got through two songs in this episode. Lilock Wine, a jazz standard composed
1:28.9	by James Shelton, and, in the version we are discussing, sung by Nina Simone, and Underwater,
1:35.1	a track by the rapper Ghostface Killa from his 2006 album Fish Scale. For all my excessive
1:42.4	talkativeness in this episode, I think it's a good one, and it exemplifies what it is that JF and I like to do on this show.
1:50.2	Each of us comes to any given topic with a different perspective and a different toolkit of approaches.
1:55.9	When we're talking about songs, JF tends to begin by focusing on the lyrics, while my natural tendency is to drill
2:02.0	down into the music. But as we get talking, we form like Voltron, as method man might say,
2:08.2	and start to spark off of one another's contributions. And this leads us to places we would
2:13.1	never have imagined we'd end up. After beginning with a general discussion of Ghostface Killah's characteristic flow and
2:19.9	lyrical imagery, we follow a circuitous path through dreams and visions, rifts, mid-century
2:26.5	exotica pop, and arrive finally at what Norman Mailer called the Dream Life, the vast
2:32.2	and borderless imaginal territory that artists cross and recross,
2:36.7	making connections between, for example, early 20th century French Impressionist classical music
2:42.5	and a Muslim's vision of paradise. Likewise, after starting off with J.F.'s theory that Lilac Wine
2:49.2	is about a necromatic operation to bring back a dead lover,
2:52.8	we zigzag our way to an understanding of the late 19th century decadent movement that resonates with the stuff we talked about in our trash Stratum shows.
	...

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