Quote:
Originally Posted by mikephxaz
I'm relieved to hear that it wasn't your attempt to be compassionate when suggesting Stevie use her "junk" about her mom's death because you sound like an fool at best and a rude fool at worst.
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Luckily, you don't have to be subjected to such foolishness.
I'm not sure why you're conflating the inspiration for a song with its quality. Everything sparked by grief, mourning and death does not rise to the level of high prose. The basis for HAEWAFY does not make it a better song.
Lindsey has written about his family and death before. Sometimes it works for me (
Turn it On), sometimes it doesn't (
Flying Down Juniper).
I like
Soldier's Angel. I don't like
Desert Angel. My opinion on neither song is related to my feelings about dying and injured troops or the ravages of war. I can love or hate either song, without loving or hating war.
I've seen pages from Stevie's diary and they contain a lot of junk. When she was left alone with a dying uncle and she didn't know where her parents or aunt were, it caused her to write a line that has sent many of us running up the stairs and down the hall without finding an answer ever since. As much as I love
those words, I am 100% sure that she pulled that line from diary pages containing other mediocre sentences which would not have made such moving song lyrics. Beauty is
often culled from mental debris and emotional pain. But the outpouring of emotion itself is not art and I'm not going to treat everything Stevie may have written about pain, every rambling word, with tender concern.
In threads actually discussing her mother's death, I have posted with empathy. Someone said in the Stevie forum that this would be a hard Christmas for her, the first without her mother. I said that for the year after a loss like that, there will be many firsts, many sad anniversaries, because that's how I felt when my own father died. In 2006, I was marking every milestone: A year ago he got sick. A year ago he had his surgery. A year ago he died. I mused that that would be how it was for Stevie and wondered if it was better that Barbara died unexpectedly and had been healthy almost until the end or if it it would have been better if Stevie had known it was coming, as she did when Jess died.
When they ail for a long time, then you mourn for a long time, a little each day. Every day a bit of death -- from
A Little Night Music. Love it, but that doesn't mean the play does not contain other songs that are full of
JUNK.
A journal is for catharsis. It's supposed to contain stream of consciousness. It's not supposed to be poetry. And Stevie's aren't. But she takes lines from her journal entries and sometimes she makes magic out of them. My point was that she has had a lot of reasons to write since IYD was released. Many monumental things have happened in her life. I'm sure her diaries are spilling over with her experiences. Furthermore, she hardly needs a reason to enter her thoughts there. She will write about great events like her mother's passing and she will write about sordid ones like Monica Lewinsky.
My suspecting that she has written lots of junk in the last year or so has nothing to do with a loved one's dying. It was related to the fact that she's prolific and melodramatic and probably has written about lots of stuff from her mother to the end of the
Twilight saga. I'm sure that she has material for many good songs swirling around in the mass of J-U-N-K she has put to paper. You separate the wheat from the chaff to get a good song. But that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend its all golden wheat, just because it's sentimental. Indeed, even if it's good, I'm not a big fan of maudlin.
I think of
Temporary One. I was disappointed in both that song and
Sweet Girl. But when my father died in 2005, I used the lyrics from
Temporary One at his funeral, because I liked the sentiment of a bridge bringing us back together someday. Good words, but not a good song -- not to me.
Jane Goodall does good work, but Stevie's admiration for her did
not make good song lyrics. All the journal entries about forgotten chimpanzees: JUNK. The fact that a child fell out of the window to his death does not mean I have to talk about
Tears in Heaven with reverence.
And as to your comment that what I said wasn't nice, who said you had to be nice when talking about anyone's songs here? Who said you had to be nice when talking about any of the Macsters? You don't. It's more important to be nice to people who are actually here posting with you than it it is to be nice to the celebrities who are not.
Michele