Let me invoke the lyrics of Queen: Empty spaces.ĭoes anybody know what we are looking for? One such is that once high-brow ideas fall to a level of ordinary people, the inevitable result is nihilism. One may draw many conclusions from Bloom. We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. The problem lay with his sense of self, not with original sin or devils inside him.
A generation earlier he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner. He said that he had found his identity and learned to like himself. It indeed had its effect on this taxi-driver. What an extraordinary thing it is that high-brow talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets. He responded, ‘All kinds-depth-psychology, transactional analysis,’ but what he liked best was ‘Gestalt.’ Some of the German ideas did not even require English words to become the language of the people. Happily, he had undergone ‘therapy.’ I asked him what kind. This is what he wrote in The Closing of the American Mind (1987): “A few years ago I chatted with a taxi-driver in Atlanta who told me he had just gotten out of prison, where he served time for peddling dope. ZJ: Your last remark reminded me of Allan Bloom’s conversation with a taxi driver.
#DARIA RESTORATION PROJECT IS IT FALL YET DRIVER#
Popular songs are a topic that a literary historian can talk to a taxi driver about. Besides, today there is a radio in every car. The history of pop music is the story of what happened to society in the second half of the 20th century. Romanticism gave a cultural identity to the bourgeois and popular masses that began to build modern nations on the ruins of class-based society. Here, I see a certain analogy to the situation that took place in the 19th century. These people needed their mythology and it was provided, at least to some extent, by popular music – Joan Baez, as already mentioned, Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan, and many others. At that time, the post-war generation, largely made up of university-educated workers’ children, was knocking on the gates of the middle class. Joan Baez and other folk music performers began their careers with the same or similar folk ballads. The aesthetic revolution, called Romanticism, which broke out in Europe after the French Revolution, began earlier with the rehabilitation of popular songs and with the ballads of Goethe and Schiller and later with Wordsworth and Coleridge, Mickiewicz and others.Ī similar phenomenon occurred in the 1960s, in the genre of popular song on the “lower” level of culture.
How come a professor of literature writes about about popular music?Īndrzej Wasko (AW): These topics are not as far apart as they seem. The English rock group Queen was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. The role they played in Poland (along with the third major poet Juliusz Slowacki) may be compared to Byron, Shelley and Keats in England.Īll of them belong to an epoch which existed two hundred years ago. You wrote your first major work, which received a national award, on Adam Mickiewicz (the prince of Polish Romantics) and your second on Polish conservative Romantic Zygmunt Krasinski. Zbigniew Janowski (ZJ): Let me begin this conversation with a question about your recent article about the popular band Queen. Zbigniew Janowski, on behalf of the Postil. Professor Waśko is here interviewed by Dr. He is the author several important books and currently serves as the advisor to Mr. This month we are greatly honored to present this interview with Professor Andrzej Waśko, the foremost authority on Romantic literature in Poland.
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