>From: "Bureau of Public Secrets" <knabb@slip.net>
>Subject: Rexroth on Rock
>Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 12:49:15 -0700
>
>Kenneth Rexroth's article "Subversive Aspects of Popular Songs" is now
>online at http://www.slip.net/~knabb/rexroth/songs.htm.
>
>It's a lively examination of marginal or underground music, from the
>medieval lyrics of wine, women and satire popularized in Orff's "Carmina
>Burana" to the folk and rock songs of the 1960s counterculture.
>
>Rexroth traces its development in France through the bohemian underworld of
>nineteenth-century cabaret and street singers to the post-World War II
>renaissance of poet-singers such as Georges Brassens and Anne Sylvestre,
>whom he praises for "replacing the acquisitive appetite with the lyric
>sensibility."
>
>In America he traces a parallel evolution from traditional folksongs and
>blues to the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and the rock
>bands of the sixties. Along the way he has lots of pungent comments on jazz,
>rhythm & blues, protest songs, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and on the
>society they at once reflect and (with varying degrees of awareness) react
>against.
>
>* * *
>
>The Bureau of Public Secrets website, which has received nearly 200,000 page
>visits during its first two years, features Ken Knabb's SITUATIONIST
>INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY (translations from the notorious group that helped
>trigger the May 1968 revolt in France) and PUBLIC SECRETS, the recent
>collection of Knabb's own writings, including "The Joy of Revolution,"
>"Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State," and an assortment of
>comics, leaflets and articles on Wilhelm Reich, Gary Snyder, Chinese
>anarchists, radical Buddhists, the Watts riot, the Iranian uprising, the
>Gulf war, and the recent jobless revolt in France. The new site index --
>http://www.slip.net/~knabb/index1.htm -- includes over 2000 name and topic
>entries, from anarchism to Zen.
>
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