The Dark Knight: Batman, The Joker and the Fight for Gotham at the Toss of a Coin

by Christopher Barr

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”

 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Dark Knight is an outstanding film that expands upon the possibilities of what a super-hero movie can become.  Using an obvious influence from Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece Heat and the gritty realism from comic book artist Frank Miller’s take on the character, director Christopher Nolan created a mature superhero film by shedding all the silliness and fantasy usually present in these types of movies.  He created a super-hero movie for adults by dressing his interpretation of the character and surrounding world in realism.

The Dark Knight is about personal and social identity; How do I see me, how does the world see me and how do I want the world to see me?  It’s also about the capricious nature of evil and good, and the fact it is not actually black and white.  The film is a meditation on how evil gets on you and you cannot get it off, how under the right circumstances the law abiding citizen can become horrific.  It explores the concepts of how right and wrong can be far more difficult to navigate than how one would expect.   

In the film, Batman is still growing into his role of the cape crusader but he is also beginning to realize the consequences of being Batman.  We see this in the beginning of the film when Batman interrupts a crime going down in a parking lot.  When he crashes through a wall and over two cars with his Tumbler, he soon sees the criminals but also a group of copycats sporting, basement bargain Batman suits.  These wannabes only want to help out but they are doing more harm than good.  Here we see that desire to help isn’t the same as actually helping to solve a problem in the world.  Desire is a great starting point but then must be grounded and thought through.

Bruce Wayne is dealing with the late night jumping from the roof tops of buildings by sleeping his days away.  He’s bruised and cut all over his body but is determined to forge on because it’s the right thing to do.  This project is a way he is able to prove himself, the Batman is a manifestation that was birthed out of his inaction when his parents were both murdered, an inaction that was clearly not his felt because he was a child but never the less, the guilt of not doing anything lingers through his veins.  This is a dark chapter of his young life that holds sway in his adult decision making.   Mental trauma remains and wallpapers itself over all future action or inaction, depending on how one confronts or retreats from stress.

“I believe whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you stranger.”

-  The Joker

When the Joker arrives in Gotham, Batman soon sees that he’s dealing with a whole new type of villainy.  The Joker is a tornado, he is a deadly virus, he is everlasting, unchangeable and more troubling, he is unpredictable.  We see this when he talks about how he got the scars on his face, giving him a somewhat grotesque permanent smile.   He tells different stories as to how he got the scars which is a clever way the filmmakers want to avoid the audience pinning down his motives.  The Joker is also a form of symbolic evil that permeates society, that non-negotiable element that sharks possess, a malice that is not interested in the status of a person, that is not interested in who society deems deserving.  The Joker is a malevolent force that Alfred describes to Bruce while discussing the lack of definable motivation normally identifiable in autocratic people; “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money.  They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with.  Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Terrorism and what must be done to combat it underlines this film.  There is a force in this world that wants to change people into their image, in order for their victims to believe in what they believe in.  Ideologies are weapons as well as curses; they motivate people to perform horrific acts to justify what it is they believe in.  They force their fantasy onto the world and kill anyone or anything that doesn’t claim it to be true and real.  This sickness is part of the darkness, hidden in the shadows and colored on the Joker’s face in The Dark Knight.  Anarchy is the enemy of structure which is why the Joker’s primary goal in The Dark Knight is to introduce chaos to the order of society.  ‘The League of Shadows’ in Batman Begins had a more definable reason behind their motives in destroying Gotham.  They felt that balance was needed to be restored in the wake of bureaucratic corruption running unchecked for the most part in Gotham.  The Joker it seems just wants to watch it all burn to the ground, which makes him ever more mysterious and volatile.

The Joker is present so Batman can exist and vice-versa.  He is responsible for Batman’s elevated strength during times of weakness.  The Joker is aware of their symbiotic relationship even when he declares that they will be pitted together forever.  The conflict with Batman is he does not quite see that relationship (or denies its existence), he sees himself as nothing like the Joker.  Batman sees himself as a symbol for good defending against all the evil in the world.  The Joker, albeit a madman, is smart and self-aware.  This makes him psychopathic as oppose to crazy, he knows what he is doing but he does it anyway.  He trashes ‘norms’ and steps on symbolic rituals followed by the majority of the populace. 

How does one combat madness, how does society not only combat it outside its borders but how does it combat it within?  Swimming with sharks is never advisable but those that are good at doing it have a rare understanding of the creature.  They appreciate it by trying to understand its chaos and the Joker is such an animal.  Batman needs to understand his own chaos in order to understand the Joker’s, and that’s the point of their on-going, ever-lasting, relationship, or as the Joker says in the interrogation scene; “You complete..meeee.”

The Joker and Batman have a ying and yang relationship.  Mainly this focus is on Batman, a man struggling with his morality as he edges into the gray dividing the black and white idealism of what’s right and what’s wrong.  An armageddonist, the Joker pleads with Batman that if he wants to beat him, he’ll have to break his one rule.  That rule being murder, Batman will have to kill in order to do what’s right.  Batman, thankfully, resists this advice and beats the Joker with his mind and his technology rather than giving in to lunacy like the frustrated Harvey Dent later does.

I BELIEVE IN HARVEY DENT

Harvey Dent’s coin toss and his gamble with fate, takes him down a darker path of vengeance.  He buys into the Joker’s madness in order to justify his murderous actions in the aftermath of his girlfriend, Rachel Dawes’ murder by the Joker.  Harvey’s face is brutally mutilated from fire as Batman saves him from blowing up in a warehouse.  After being hospitalized, Harvey swears revenge against those within the corrupt police department and district attorney’s office that provided the stepping stones that resulted in Rachel’s death.  Harvey’s face was badly burned on its left side giving him a sinister evil feature.  Like the coin he tosses to help him decide a particular outcome, Harvey “Two-Face” Dent has become that very coin.  But the coin was a lie, a rationalization or blame-shifter so Harvey can do as he pleases without psychological consequences.   

The films climax resulted from Harvey Dent going on a killing spree to avenge Rachel’s death.  After an attempt at keeping everything fair by flipping his coin to decide the fate of Commissioner Gordon’s family, himself and Batman, Harvey falls to his death.  Batman virtuously decides to take the blame for Harvey’s misdeeds in order to keep Harvey’s “White Knight” legacy in good standing with the people of Gotham.  

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” – Harvey Dent

The problem with this course of action is Gordon and Batman lied about what happened to Harvey.  They did this for the benefit of the people of Gotham but is this a noble lie?  Why not tell the truth about what happened to Harvey?  People in society are being so pampered from reality that they have become sheltered from the storm like infants.  People understandably keep certain realities from their children subsequently allowing them to develop the basics of language and the fundamentals of processing their thoughts, before they are burdened with the complexities of wars and politics.  But adults do not deserve this leeway, they need reality to function healthy in the world, not lies to keep them quiet and shopping until they die.

Telling the truth is far more beneficial to society and the person trying to navigate through it.  At the end of The Dark Knight they made it out to be a righteous thing that Batman takes the fall and is therefore hunted down like the bad guy, if that allows people to sleep at night.  Maybe Gotham needs a revolution, maybe it needs to wake-up and see the criminality for what it is, maybe Gotham wouldn't need Batman to do their dirty work if they all just woke the hell up, maybe then he wouldn’t have to be a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight.

“I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.”

- Batman

WHY SO SERIOUS?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson and the Disintegrated American Dream

by Chris Barr

“We were somewhere around Barstow, when the drugs began to take hold.”

“We can’t stop here!  This is bat country!!

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a Terry Gilliam film about the failure of the American Dream.  It features an eccentric journalist, Raoul Duke and his psychopathic attorney, Dr. Gonzo who travel to Las Vegas for a series of trippy psychedelic exploits.  Duke is assigned to cover a dirt bike race in the desert for a sports magazine but doesn’t really do anything with it, largely because the Vietnam War was blazing in Southeast Asia and the Civil Rights movement was still very much fighting to forge a path of equality, also he was stoned and drugged out of his mind to really pay attention to anything like dirt bikes racing in circles in a dust-filled desert.  Reporting on a sports event at that time in America likely just seemed inappropriate.  The film takes place in 1971 where politics and the American people were still very much out of alignment.  The roaring sixties was still winding down after its crash in 1968 and the achievement of the moon landing in 1969, splashing promise over the many fires of despair.

“We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.  Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

Duke and Dr. Gonzo drive in their rented red convertible shark along the sandy, scalding desert black top, speeding to Las Vegas to find the American Dream.  While there, they check into a hotel at The Mint and proceed to stiff, suck, inhale and drink every mind-altering, consciousness traversing drug known to civilized man.  They were essentially flagrant pulse-pounding drifters in time and space, floating along the Milky Way of the great cosmos, heading nowhere.  Meaning in this place had eluded them, drugs softened reality and in the mind, its weight pushed and pulled at them, creating a topsy-turvy of cellophane enlightenment coupled with existential meandering.  

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on a book, quite accurately and faithfully, by real life gonzo Journalist, the late Hunter S. Thompson.  He was a man that pushed outward toward the edge of existence, the edge that most of the living wouldn’t dare go, out of fear or spite; they see no use for it, the uninspired bastards.  Hunter saw the edge as something to push and poke at, something to die for if only to actually live because of.

Hunter S. Thompson was a rock n’ roll journalist and political impostor, but remained a creditable journalist where one should remain - on the outside.  That place out there where honesty and balance exists, that place that most journalist don’t dare travel.  Today his type of journalism is as dead as those sonar-guided flying rats are in Bat Country, sizzling off the side of the highway in the scorching California desert. 

Nowadays mostly all journalism is a complete sell-out, it’s a contact funnel for politicians and warmongering corporations to ‘connect’ with their servants.  These contemporary journalists are spin doctors for the oligarchy, they ultimately are a disgrace.  Woodward and Bernstein were actual journalists with integrity, as was Hunter S. Thompson, albeit an unconventional one, a man that wrote largely for Rolling Stone magazine but never sold-out to them.

The riots of the sixties were when the American Dream was truly clubbing itself to death, while ‘free love’ wasn’t stopping the bombs from dropping.  This uprising against oppression, against the Vietnam War and centrally, against the totalitarian control the government was enforcing over the people, was what defined that era in American history.  Hunter S. Thompson was in the tornado, waltzing with suicide; he was on the unpleasant edge that society was sleepwalking itself toward, an approaching cliff with no bottom in sight.  The malice of the Chicago Police department during the 1968 riots against the war protests, were a devastating blow for any hope that America might survive as a nation of equals, where race and gender would be words to describe groups instead of targets to discriminate.  Robert Kennedy had been murdered just a couple months prior and along with him, he took hope, which died with him on that kitchen floor, along with any promise for a unifying future for America.

“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of.  Maybe it meant something, maybe not, in the long run.  But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world, whatever it meant.  There was madness in any direction, at any hour.  You could strike sparks anywhere.  There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.  And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense: we didn’t need that.  Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of high and beautiful wave.  So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

The way out at this point, the only way to escape the menacing angst of the aftermath, of a failed revolution - was drugs.  The hippies smoked themselves toward a simulacrum of happiness, dropping acid and aimlessly dancing naked at outdoor concerts.  Nothing made sense, the body count in Vietnam was rising and actual reasons for American military involvement were lost on most.  What was happening to the world, why was everybody always fighting each other, carving their own names in the foreheads of their meaningless enemies?  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the ‘promise land’, he envisioned an America that discarded its inconsequential differences for a more equal prosperous future, he was greeted with horror by the power structure, who believed they were the privileged and in the end they killed him for that.

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” 

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What they didn’t quite know then but we know now was, it was all about business.  The people wanted peace, but the swine corporations and the government bastards know no peace, their prime directive does not lie in the well-being of the American people, their bottom line is grounded deeply in their power and control apparatuses.

Hunter S. Thompson was a patriot, he was a man that wanted his country to succeed but not by the barrel of a gun in the face of an unnecessary enemy.  He saw the potential in America being bloodied with petty differences and profiteering.  He was a man that believed in the American dream at one point in his early life; however later saw the tragedy of why a journalist like him even had to exist.  Was his early hopes of prosperity all lies, were they ‘lame fuck-arounds’ so business in America could prosper, above the very population of the country?  That is sheer madness, a result of losing every value and tenet that the country was founded on.

The slithering snake with skinny human legs and the nose and ears of a raging gorilla, overflowed the dam in Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos, both countries that were simply guilty due to proximity.  Richard Nixon saw the demonic under-skin of America, he saw what George W. Bush would later see, that America is scared to death of change and is insecure about identity, so killing thousands of people in foreign countries gave the citizens of America something disgusting to be proud of.  The sick reality is; it gave them something, and still does to this day, to call their own.  They are the superpower; genocide and destabilization be-damned.

“All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit.  But their loss and failure is ours, too.  What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.”

Las Vegas, Nevada is the nucleus of the death and commodification of the American dream.  It is Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message’, It’s Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacrum’, it’s Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and it is Karl Marx’s ‘Superstructure’ with a million glittering lights.  This grossly atavistic city is decadent and in some cases inhumane because money is above all else.  It’s hyper-reality is compounded in one pulsating vein that is Las Vegas boulevard, a strip of billion dollar real estate that steals hopes and dreams by simulating hopes and dreams.  It is that fun version of hell on earth, that place you can truly lose yourself and the contents of your wallet along with it.  Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, gambling and no clocks in sight, it’s a dream away from the reality of the machine, that function that most must participate in, in order to buy into the possibility of escaping an expanding debt that is in tandem with the swelling universe itself, never ending.

The illusion that somehow one knows something that someone else doesn’t know is amplified in Las Vegas, people go there to gamble, hoping they will win above all others, they’re special and they are able to beat the almost algorithmic system of gambling.  That’s the true power of Las Vegas, and like Harry Houdini, it shows everything but tells you nothing, it makes you think that you’re winning, when all the while it’s breaking your bank.

The discombobulated savage and depraved reality is Las Vegas is a nightmare disguised as a dream; it’s a place where hearts go to die alone side fast-food wedding chapels.  In that regard, Las Vegas, through its simulacrum, can become real to those that hit the wall of desolation, those that see through the looking glass at its borders, but most fail at such an insight, most buy into its plastic walls that cover the doors and its sprawling pageants that hypnotize the mind, and the atmospheric aromas that tranquilize the soul.  Las Vegas speaks to the werewolf in us when the full moon comes too close, the savage man in a Hawaiian shirt and the 12 hour stink of alcohol on his breathe, peels the cheap paint away while he plays symbolic Russian Roulette with reality.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas entered the vampiric center of the fundamental problem in America and that was/is paralysis, the country froze as a result of disbelief, it never recovered from the reality of its own inferiority.  Like the Freudian narcissistic, egomaniac patient sprawled out on the Indian-rugged couch wondering why he’s the problem, when everyone around him keeps holding him back; America was never able to get over itself.  It’s a self-professed Empire with ringing bells and glitter from coast to coast, attempting to deify itself and angered at any nation that fails to see the illusion they worked so hard to build for themselves.  They are the psychopath that means to force their superiority complex onto the world.  Nations of the world will lay waste to the military power of the American Corporation Complex; they will be battered, beaten and left beyond all recognition.   

The film along with the book that inspired it, clamped down on the beating pulse of the on-going problem in America.  The film showed these two misguided men as representations of dissention against the new world order of McDonaldization, endless consumerism and globalization as we see it today.  The hippie flower movement failed before it even started with the Timothy Leary’s and the sit-in and sing-alongs.  That generation and this one have very little understanding of the enemy of freedom and opportunity.  The sad state today is that enemy knows us, in most cases, more than we know ourselves.  

They studied us like alien invaders, learning our customs, our strengths and weaknesses.  They’ve learnt about our emotional buttons, dreams and desires.  These alien invaders do not plan to assimilate us into their collective though, they plan to control us through pharmaceutical drugs, endless TV programming, color psychology, meaningless music and a slew of other forms of mind control.  These corporations and governments plan and have already succeeded in manufacturing a populace that embraces their enslavement, because they have been too dumbed-down, too distracted to see the chains anchoring them to the post.   There is this sadness within the oxygen permeating in the air and getting into people’s lungs, creating hallucinations that look dream-like but are in fact nightmares.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” 

- Robert Kennedy

Robert Kennedy was a speaker for the people and was shot to death in 1968, McGovern in 1972, won the Presidential Democratic Primary election, running on the platform that, if elected president, he had plans on pulling the plug on American military involvement in Vietnam and let the failed war spin down the drain.  Even Al Gore in 2000, represented hope for a new America, imagine if he had won the election; imagine how he would have handled the events of September 11, 2001.  One could certainly argue, had Gore not been cheated out of the election by Bush, 9/11 might not have even happened.  Political leeches like Nixon and Bush are necessary so the evil bankers and power mongers maintain the impaled claws they have dug in the backs of the world’s population.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along with its drug use and iconoclastic bohemianism, is a profound statement against, maintaining, subservience, control and conformity.  But the real problem is; freedom has its cost, and most people who want, or think they want it, also need a structured society that is for the most part - safe, for them to run amok, or express their individuality.  Here we run into the problem of wanting our cake and eating it too.  

The failure of the sixties and levels of protests today have all parted ways in support for the very system they have fought so hard to crumble.  Maybe that’s realizing that the war between the working people and the aristocracy was already lost, or maybe, and certainly more prevalent today, maybe the people want their Big Mac’s and 500 channels.  Whether it was confabulation or most likely pluralistic ignorance, the people supported what they assumed everyone else supported and didn’t want to say anything otherwise for fear of ostracism.  This is one of the most important issues facing us today, we are afraid to speak out against a ‘norm’ in society because we don’t want to be left out of the group.  The resulting calamity is the treacherous fabricators of war can continue steamrolling over whomever they wish, for their own profit.  As a result of a disruption in their cognitive narrative, the general population of America retreat and seek the comfort of their predictable bubbles while the world destroys itself around them.  The unfortunate thing with this revolution is; truth does not cease to exist when we chose to ignore it.  Peace can never be if we begin by avoiding the reality of why we need it in the first place.  This was likely the forming dark cloud that often rained over the head of Hunter S. Thompson, a man that believed that anything that was worth doing, was worth doing right.

“Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander in a casino any time in the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla.”

Begin Again and Fighting Against the Corporate Take Over of Music

by Christopher Barr

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” 

- Plato

“Play it fuckin’ loud!!”

 - Bob Dylan

Begin Again is about the love of music, it is about the love of real, organic, earthy music.  The film is also about finding passion when one is drifting without direction, this passion often allows focus.  The film is also about New York City, a city that’s had many love songs written about, a city that pushes the human condition to break and crumble or rise to a level of the unimaginable.  New York City is not without its mechanized, advertisement saturated spaces but it’s also a global market of multicultural people and filled with diverse opportunities, thus allowing for a parade of creative inspiration for those seeking it.   

Begin Again is a story about a weary, nearly off the cliff, lost everything he has, music producer and a young singer songwriter that wondrously cross paths.  This synergetic, cosmic connection results with them creating a record together on the acoustical rhapsodic streets of New York City.

Dan, drunk and having suicidal thoughts meets Gretta in a little smoky bar, watering hole with a small stage and a drunken crowd.  Gretta is playing guitar and singing a song on that small stage when Dan looks up, and with a wave of inspiration slashing over him, he focuses his rusted eyes on her.  With the magic of imagination, the unmanned drum set, double bass and violin come to life and assist Gretta in the artistic space in Dan’s mind.

Gretta sings in the tradition of Nora Jones, Jewel and Aimee Mann, with personal lyrics and melodious chorus’ driving each soulful song.  What’s great about her singing and what Dan sees in it is its freeing quality, the music isn’t fake like so often the music of today is.  This film explores music as it is meant to be, from the creative side of living, filled with poetic expression and naturally flowing musical articulation.

In the case of the film, they take their love of music to an extreme by recording her album, not in the environmentally controlled darkness of a sound studio, but rather falling prey to the colliding and convoluting sounds of the city, along with the elements of weather.  Gretta stretches her wonderful voice, along with the accompaniment of some local talented musicians, over car alarms, subways, birds, traffic, the marching of thousands of sidewalk commuters and the hum of electricity surging through the circulatory, ubiquitous systems of the city.

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom.  If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” 

- Charlie Parker

This fantastic collaboration pulls Gretta and Dan out of their respective holes they have been digging for themselves to climb into, hiding from everything.  Music makes an often unbearable existence livable; it creates a universally welcomed ambassadorship by bringing people, who otherwise might never meet - together.  The idea and love of music transcends cultures much in the same way New York City does, at least the good parts anyway.  Discrimination in music comes down to talent because at the end of the day, all Gretta and Dan want to do is make beautiful music, while simultaneously recognizing talent when they see it.

The music business has become the lowest common denominator in order to reach the widest possible audience; they cast a massive untalented net over a population of people that are merely rationed talent.  Skill, trained or untrained, is unfortunately becoming more and more scarce as we commit to the most shallow form of musical ‘progress’ to ever exist on our planet. CBS Newsman Dan Rather, after decades of bringing news to the world was ‘removed’ from his position for breaking a story about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service, a service that was in question because Bush was often unaccounted for when he was supposed to be so-called serving his country.  The fact is, he was being groomed for big things politically but he was rich and from a rich family, meaning the elite doesn’t go to war, and in this case the elite faked it.  Dan Rather was simply doing what he’s always been doing, trying to bring the truth to the news and he was fired for it.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us.  It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” 

- Carl Sagan

There has been a massive shift of ideology in America in the last couple of decades.  There’s always been corruption, there’s always been lying but there hasn’t always been this governmental and corporate 'gag-order' forced on the news and the entertainment industries of the country.  Certainly on levels there has been, for instance during World War 2 with movies were reaching a high in propaganda but never to the degree that it is today.

Music, like the news, has been assimilated and coopted into the corpovernment, propaganda industrial apparatus.   Music’s function these days is damage control and distraction while the oligarchy of the world reign supremacy over the population.  Rolling Stone magazine isn’t a credible music news magazine anymore.  The old days are gone where musicians spoke their minds and sang from their truthful souls.  Now popular music is a not-so disguised commercial and a form of misdirection where the ignorant, take what they want because Beyoncé says so while looking corporately stylish doing it.  Music these days is an embarrassment for those that no better and a tragedy for those that don’t.  The latter gets to live their lives thinking that the current musical hits are the best there is.

Movies like Almost Famous and Begin Again are fighting back and attempting to turn the volume down on this impending and now pervasive calamity.  As much as I’d love to say that the musical revolution is a foot and the radio waves will be reclaimed by artistically driven musical poets, the reality is I’d be operating under an illusion of hope.  The power of dissent is too well known to the disingenuous elite of the world to allow a ‘grunge movement’ of sorts to ever go mainstream again.

Credible news and authentically inspired music will have to remain in the shadows of the un-surveilled corners of rustic, antiquated bars and in specialized areas on the internet.  As imagination becomes a commodity for recycled blockbusters it’s refreshing to watch a film like Begin Again, reminding its audience of a time when music was revolutionary and more importantly, that now today in this technopolis, there are still people out there with the same verve as Bob Dylan had in the 60’s.

“Music is everybody’s business.  It’s only the publishers who think people own it.”  - John Lennon