15 more songs to go after this; no more tonight! Hot Chip are precisely what Depeche Mode or The Pet Shop Boys were - but now - that is, masters of sexy vaguely ominous, smart, literate synth pop. And this one just happens to sound a lot like Tears For Fears, too. Oh boy. 'Motion Sickness' was, I think, the greatest British pop song this summer, catching as it did (as it does) the dizzying power of "the wall of sound" versus "the world is sound" - "everything locks to my grip" echoes Avril Lavigne's "Losing My Grip" but is far weirder. "World of entertainment in your hands".... the song is almost a Nirvanesque series of commodified non sequiturs mocking the music industry, but celebrating, paradoxically, the industriousness of music. Pop for Adornoheads?
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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