Fastnbulbous

“I’d grown up listening to a lot of seventies progressive rock, songs about space travel and chivalry with frequent changes of time-signature and bombastic effects. As a teenager it had seemed superior to me, evidence of my intelligence. I had begun to listen to sixties psych and garage, inching backwards through the years, but at a certain point, I’d decided there were certain echoes I couldn’t afford to hear, so I made a run for it, away from human history and its dark places, into techno, the aural city on the hill. Here was a shiny sound-world made of pure electronic tones, in which I could float free of all context, cocooned in the reassurance that yesterday was long gone, or perhaps never existed at all.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“the survivors got a bit hardier. Kotter was like an inoculation that toughened everyone up for Olivia Newton-John, who in turn prepared the cosmos for Billy Joel. So as the music got marginally less awful, the mortality rate paradoxically dropped. And by the time they started exploring the FM frequencies, most Refined beings were ready for what they found. By then it was mid-1978. The FM dial was jammed with what we now call Classic Rock, and some stations occasionally played entire albums from start to finish. The last big die-off occurred when WPLJ broadcast both sides of Led Zeppelin IV. And anyone who survived that had what it took to safely listen to even the most stellar rock ’n’ roll.”
― Rob Reid, Year Zero

“Ghost-Managing Book List The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones Ceremonies of the Damned, by Adrian C. Louis Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice Father of Lies, by Brian Evenson The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto The Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah Beloved, by Toni Morrison The Through, by A. Rafael Johnson Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders Savage Conversations, by LeAnne Howe The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth Songs for Discharming, by Denise Sweet Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, by Gerald Vizenor Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence: A Novel

“We are a rock ’n’ roll band. We always were. We have heavy-metal hair so you can see why so many people put us in there with that. They’ve got no brains these people who categorise you. They are at these award ceremonies – here is an asshole who is taking your money on false pretences and he’s getting the award on the unanimous decision of all those cunts who never buy records and get into gigs free (laughs).”
― John Robb, Do You Believe in the Power of Rock & Roll?: Forty Years of Music Writing from the Frontline