Category: Essays

4 To ask whether Frank Zappa speaks to modernity is to ask what modernity demands from an artist. Does it demand ecstasy? Does it demand rebellion? Or does it demand consciousness that knows it is living inside systems that have already absorbed rebellion as style? The comparison with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix clarifies the…

4 To ask whether Jimi Hendrix is the soul of rock ’n’ roll is not to rank guitarists. It is to define rock itself. “Soul” implies condensation rather than origin. It asks not who began the genre, nor who sold the most records, nor even who wrote the finest songs, but who most purely embodied…

4 To call any song the greatest pop song ever is to risk absurdity. Pop music resists coronation. It multiplies rather than culminates. It thrives on immediacy, fashion, mood. Yet every so often a composition emerges that does not merely succeed within the form but stretches it to structural extremity without breaking it. If one…

“In My Life,” written primarily by John Lennon and released on Rubber Soul by The Beatles, is a small song that behaves like a visitation. Not an apocalypse. Not Sinai. Not thunder. Something briefer. Almost embarrassed by its own clarity. Which is perhaps why the question presses: why does God manifest so briefly? If divinity…

4 If “Tomorrow Never Knows” dissolves the self into cosmic suspension, “Eleanor Rigby” anchors it to the ground. It does not float. It falls. And in that fall, it establishes a gravity that popular music had rarely dared to sustain. Released on Revolver and written primarily by Paul McCartney, “Eleanor Rigby” represents an astonishing pivot…

In 1966, at the close of Revolver, The Beatles placed a song that did not close an album so much as open a threshold. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” written primarily by John Lennon and shaped in the studio under the direction of George Martin, does not function like a pop composition. It behaves like an event….

The medieval Black Sabbath was not merely an episode in the history of superstition; it was a ritual condensation of a fully articulated theology of evil. In the Sabbath, the metaphysical adversary took liturgical form. The Devil was not only believed—he was enacted. The Black Mass, in particular, represented the inversion of sacrament, the parody…

The history of evil in Western thought is not the story of a superstition that modernity outgrew, but of a profound metaphysical relocation. What changes from antiquity through the Middle Ages into modernity is not the intensity of evil but its location, its grammar, and its visibility. Evil shifts from cosmic ambiguity to personal adversary,…