I make mixes that are eclectic in their genres, yet coherent in their themes. For my enjoyment mostly, yet also perhaps for yours.

Whenever there is an umbrella on the artwork, the playlist is made of covers.

Why machinegun? From L'horreur économique (Viviane Forrester, 1999):

"[…] in 1978 during a colloquium at Graz in Austria, when one of the speakers asked the very international audience whether they knew Mallarmé, ‘a French poet’, the whole audience burst out laughing. Imagine not knowing Mallarmé! Later, an Italian speaker expressed his indignation at that laughter. He also mentioned some proper names. ‘Do you know them?’ We knew none of them. They were those of machine gun brands. He was back from a country he cited as an example, a country in the throes of civil war where ‘90 per cent of the people’ knew those brand names‘ while 0 per cent of them knew that of Mallarmé’. Hence we were all elitist, affected snobs, in short, ‘intellectuals’. … He contemplated us with disgust, with wrath in his eyes. Humble and sheepish … the hall gave him an ovation.

Something made me uneasy, I rose to speak and heard myself saying that it might not be desirable to find it quite natural for an immense, a huge majority to have no other choice but to be ignorant of Mallarmé. A majority that had not chosen not to read him, but that had had no chance whatsoever to read him or even know his name. While our very denigrator showed he was no stranger to that name since he was able to deplore our erudition. [...]

The work of Mallarmé is not elitist. It tends to break the straitjacket hampering us, to decipher language, its signs and its discourse, and thereby makes us less deaf and blind to all that is hidden from us. [...]

To have read Mallarmé presupposes the acquisition of certain abilities which could lead to certain faculties, and thus to the approach to certain rights. They may also lead to the ability not to respond to the system in the reductive terms that are all it offers and that squash contradiction. And to the ability to denounce the demented version of a world in which we are caught and paralysed, while the authorities who deliberately set it up complain of having to run it.

But whatever the side the powers may be on, so as to better indoctrinate, manipulate, and subjugate populations, the human organism must be diverted from the arduous, visceral dangerous practice of thinking, and the search for exactitude, that rarity, must be shunned. Once reserved for only a few, the practice of thought will preserve their power.

Mallarmé, I heard myself concluding...

That’s when a man in the audience exclaimed, ‘Mallarmé is a machine gun!’

He was right, too. I let him have the last word."

SO IS MUSIC.

bullit

bullit

Player Debug Information Can't play anything? Troubleshoot here

Notes

12 tracks

Comment on this mix

Similar playlists