If there's one effusive catchword that I can rattle from the top of my head to indicate the core values of this part, it is one and only : COMMUNITY. The kind that takes to creativity like fish to water and leaves room for contemporaries and veterans to breathe in one unified exaltation of spirits. Where the eye towards incorporating our patterned everyday vis a vis issues big and small but detailed in execution is paramount for artists and the beatitude of collaboration is sans that three letter bigot EGO.
In this part of musical interests of this early year, the community of artists handling legacies they and we have grown up listening, admiring and exemplifying to great lengths rubs shoulders with the panorama, mortal and immortal, of those great stalwarts who continue to ink pages of artistic integrity with their " forever words" as the title of an album of Johnny Cash discussed here illustrates. Then there are individual artists who represent our insecure reserves and pick up our complexes from their interiors and those fronting groups and outfits with their natural talents collectively expressed. All lead to one ideal place of reckoning. The art of collaboration. The propulsion of community. It humbles us, leads us to great new junctures and reinvents pedigreed contributors from years past to tune us to templates of the future. These songs do that and more.
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1)FOREVER WORDS -a tribute which sets to tune some of the most noteworthy unused lyrics and poems of iconic trailblazer Johnny Cash.
A play acting yawn and ' yeah yeah yeah' refrain is not off the beaten track when some from the basket of millennial youth fail to recognize your celebration of past contributors and tokens of diverse musicality they set with their original benchmarks. You are dubbed old school carelessly and are joked around with the idea of taking a time machine some fifty years back. You are deemed the odd one out. Well, there's no reasoning with such absent mindedness towards those who came before us and curated works lasting eons later. With a contemporary way of life it is sometimes taken for granted that pioneers who toiled and tirelessly conserved their labours years back actually led to the cross cultural apex which directed us all the way here. However, I am sure such mocking figures are not in a majority as a world that fails to be contented with past laurels by way of embracing their blessed origins in our modern consciousness is fragmented in its self satisfied center. The self centered preserve of youth is guilty of that. To that end, I would ask all of us to never give up on the magic of discovery and the act of evolution.
Then out of the blue as also tact and care of some select souls comes the reassurance of legacies stored with pride and proper felicitation when a work like FOREVER WORDS gently lays to rest shallow estimations of what goes in the name of art today. It makes exemplars out of purists like you and me who settle for the best in/from any given era. That ethic pervades the slew of young artists who honour the unused lyrics and poems of Johnny Cash in this collection. They are the originators allowed the individuality to collaborate and nothing comes close to the originality of this set in 2018 so far; especially since Cash's children John Carter Cash, Rosanne and Carlene all congregate their eulogies as singers and producers and give others the go ahead to shine. That is exactly the kind of community that music lets us thrive on. So here I write about the contemporary chronicle of Johnny Cash's ' forever words' by artists I know about and admire from among a whole bevy of invaluable voices and creators on the album who have entered my purview.
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** TO JUNE THIS MORNING by KACEY MUSGRAVES and RUSTON KELLY.
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A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .
SachbücherI have often wondered about the very curdled natures of our opinions so much so that the perch of imagination simply becomes a bystanding abstraction and real thoughts of genuine merit slip between the fingers. That is a human tendency, to beat arou...
