Website review: Ginsberg/Blake
b-bear discovered this in Poetry
•1 reviews since May 14, 2008
poetry
•writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/linking-page/Gins...
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b-bear discovered 2 months ago- Allen Ginsberg sings William Blake. Songs online here at University of Pennsylvania. There are many of you who do not 'get' Ginsberg's songs. I only 'get' them in the sense that I respond to their scratchy, beat-authentic energy, without finding them the most complete or beautiful rendition of Blake's system. On the other hand, Tim Carmody explains the simple fact of the 'lowbrow' attraction of Allen Ginsberg's peculiar warbling of Blake's songs: Ginsberg's recordings of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience plays a larger role in pop music history than you might expect. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice gave the album an A- when it appeared in 1970 (close company with The Beatles' Let It Be, Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon, and James Brown's Superbad). And you can hear shades of Ginsberg's distinctive vocal warble in his friends' and admirers' recordings: Patti Smith, David Byrne of Talking Heads, Tom Verlaine of Television, and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. And Songs of Innocence and Experience got a fresh look in 2004, when Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Josephine Foster and other musicians associated with what came to be called 'freak folk' in San Francisco cited the voice and music on Ginsberg's record as an influence. Respect.
