"[Kirk] Hammett, who is Buddhist, will talk at length about consciousness, God, enlightenment, resonance, Nirvana."

"He believes that the work he does with Metallica is an extension of some sublime and omnipotent creative force. 'I put myself in this space where I take in all the creativity around me and I channel it to create more,' he said. His hope is that Metallica facilitates a healing sort of fellowship. 'We are so nondenominational,' he said, laughing. 'Come to the Church of Metallica. You’ll become a member and rejoice! You don’t have to direct anything at us. You can direct it at the experience that you’re having.'"

Writes Amanda Petrusich, in "The Enduring Metal Genius of Metallica/On the road with the band in its forty-first year" (The New Yorker).

"[T]hat the book contains only four songs performed by women... is both grim and astounding...."

Writes Amanda Petrusich in"A Response to Bob Dylan’s 'Philosophy of Modern Song' There was something missing from the bard’s recent book" (The New Yorker).

Is it? Grim and astounding? Is it astounding because you'd think, in this day and age, that any informed writer would know you have to gender-balance your lists of favored works of art? That Bob Dylan didn't is a little astounding, but why is it grim? I think it's kind of encouraging that Bob didn't think he had to do that, and it can be a little grim to see other people's lists and suspect that's what they did.

In the book, Bob talks about women a lot, because the songs written about men tend to be about women — from the man's point of view. Why shouldn't Bob take the man's point of view? You want him appropriating what women think? He does that in his songs — "She's got everything she needs..." — but he's being the man who's imagining — maybe wrongly — what the woman is thinking.

Petrusich writes:

"Unlike many artists who reacted to the pandemic with a kind of dutiful tenderness—'Let me help with my song!'—Dylan has decided not to offer comfort, nor to hint at some vague solidarity."

"Lyrically, he’s either cracking weird jokes ('I’ll take the "Scarface" Pacino and the "Godfather" Brando / Mix ’em up in a tank and get a robot commando') or operating in a cold, disdainful, it-ain’t-me-babe mode.... Dylan is a voracious student of United States history—he can, and often does, itemize the various atrocities that have been committed in service to country—and 'Rough and Rowdy Ways' could be understood as a glib summation of America’s outlaw origins, and of the confused, dangerous, and often haphazard way that we preserve democracy. He seems to understand instinctively that American history is not a series of fixed points but an unmoored and constantly evolving idea that needs to be reëstablished each day—things don’t happen once and then stop happening. In this sense, linear time becomes an invention; every moment is this moment.... [F]or me, Dylan’s vast and intersectional understanding of the American mythos feels so plainly and uniquely relevant to the grimness and magnitude of these past few months. As the country attempts to metabolize the murder of George Floyd, it is also attempting to reckon with every crooked, brutal, odious, or unjust murder of a black person—to understand a cycle that began centuries ago and somehow continues apace. What is American racism? It’s everything, Dylan insists. Indiana Jones and J.F.K. and Elvis Presley and Jimmy Reed—nothing exists without the rest of it. None of us are absolved, and none of us are spared."

You can tell by the diaeresis in "reëstablished" that it's The New Yorker. Amanda Petrusich reviews Bob Dylan's new album, "Rough and Rowdy Ways," which will be released on Friday.

Petrusich sure is putting a lot of her own clunky words into Bob Dylan's mouth. She's insisting that he's insisting — insisting that everything is American racism. Why would you go and assume that what he's saying is what you're fired up to think everybody is supposed to be saying right now?

She did say "for me." You can listen to whatever you want any way you want.

"Since Peart’s death, photos of his drum kit—an expansive, fascinating structure of drums, cymbals, and assorted percussive tools—have been circulating around social media."

"Trying to make sense of its maze of components is nearly impossible for anyone not intimately acquainted with drum gear, yet the kit nonetheless communicates, in a glorious and unambiguous way, Peart’s vigor. It must have felt so excellent, ensconcing himself in that golden tower, an ever-expanding assemblage of surfaces to whack!... For decades, the band was hugely uncool. It’s fun to look up the early reviews—peeved critics huffing and puffing about bombast and pretension. How dare this band try so hard!"

Writes Amanda Petrusich in "The Misfit Awesomeness of Neil Peart and Rush" (The New Yorker). Here's that viral photo:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fred Armisen (@sordociego) on Jan 10, 2020 at 6:42pm PST

Understanding the creepiness of wholesomeness.

Here's a piece by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker: "Miley Cyrus's Creepy Return to Wholesome." Do we think that a young woman is pure until she're not, and after that, if she presents herself as healthy and good, it's a disgusting fraud, and we've got to point fingers at her and call her out, so that no one is deceived into allying with this loathsome slut? That seems awfully retrograde for The New Yorker. Perhaps they never liked wholesomeness in the first place. Okay, now, I'll read the thing.

1. At the Billboard Music Awards, Miley Cyrus was introduced by her younger sister Noah with the (obviously scripted) line: "For the first time in years with pants on, my big sis, Miley Cyrus." Here's how that looked. The "pants" are very short white cut-off jeans. She also had the kind of off-the-shoulder blouse that we were just talking about in the Michelle Obama context. Instead of dancing about, Cyrus stood planted at the microphone, in the take-my-voice-seriously style of singers like Adele.

2. Cyrus has a video in which she "pets a dog, runs with balloons, and flashes her gold engagement ring." The song, we're told, "is a mix of Laurel Canyon and Nashville, equal parts bohemian and smarmy." Which doesn't sound wholesome. Petrusich says it's "lifeless." Lifeless isn't wholesome. Wholesomeness relates to goodness and health. Lifelessness is death. But Petrusich happens to prefer Cyrus's more vigorous demeanor in her song "Wrecking Ball" (which is about celebrating body-slamming ("I came in like a wrecking ball/I never hit so hard in love/All I wanted was to break your walls")).

3. Cyrus had a period a couple years ago in which she indulged in the white privilege of "trying-on and discarding of black culture," and now she's "essentially scrubbed her music and image of any hints of the hip-hop and R. & B.," and that might be "sinister."

4. Now, she seems to be doing a "good-girl routine," and it might be "a sendup" of — among other things — "our racially polarized political climate." Pop music is full of "artifice," we all know, and part of the "charade" is a cycle of "reinvention." Cyrus already reinvented herself from "Hannah Montana" to game sex object. To go back to "guileless, fresh-faced ingénue" is to pendulum swing between the 2 most obvious options for a female pop star.

5. Cyrus is getting married, we're told, and that seems to mean she needs to "find[] a new way to be (or act) virtuous." But what she's doing now is so "banal": "pretty, tamed, straight, still, white." Why is the "path forward" for young women so "narrow"? She can "become less selfish and wayward only by embracing antiquated notions of femininity and propriety."

Is that "creepy"? "Creepiness" is the headline-writer's word. Perhaps Petrusich's point is more that the reinvention is just banal and boring. A girl veers into badness for thrills and excitement. What comes next should be a better form of emotional satisfaction, not retreat to the starting point. But is retreat "creepy"?

Being boring and uncreative isn't really creepy. The creeping sensation — to get back to origins — is a feeling in the flesh, a "chill shuddering feeling, caused by horror or repugnance" (OED). If that's your point here, New Yorker, you've got to take this to the next level, to what I said in the first paragraph of this post and say that the pose is gross because what looks wholesome is actually unwholesome, and you feel revulsion.

But that wouldn't fit with the conclusion you chose, which was itself banal and boring, that after the innocence and debauchery, there's a new third stage, something less "less selfish and wayward" but not just "femininity and propriety." I guess that's supposed to sound like feminism, but I'm a bit creeped out by the statement that "femininity" is an "antiquated notion" and "white" is "banal."

Who's really creepy here?

By the way, if you declare "femininity" a "notion" — even without the "antiquated" —  how can you be trans-friendly?