4. Purple MountainsPurple Mountains
I fell in love with the Wagnerian expression gesamtkunstwerk a few years ago. It basically means a total artwork, an artwork all encapsulating, that somehow manages to embrace the full spectrum of the human dilemma, that reaches out beyond its medium and grabs you firmly by the soul. Something like that, anyway. Armed with this wafer-thin definition Saul and I set about deciding which albums or artists in the pop/rock canon had attained this dizzying height. Many an hour was spent deliberating over whether or not to include Elvis Presley, on account of the man’s music, but as much on account of the way he died. His life arc, especially his death, constituted the ultimate approximation of the American Dream in the mid 20th century. The king died on the bog, bloated like a hog, pumped full of deep fried something and pharmaceutical smack. He might not have intended it, he almost certainly didn’t want it, but in that final act he offered us mere mortals the ultimate portrait of our world at that time. You could gauge which way human history was about to bend pretty accurately based on Elvis’ death alone. It was immensely prophetic. A key qualifier. I posit that the same could be said about this record by the late, great Dave Berman. If you’d rather forget which way the wind was blowing, maybe give it a miss, but if your bag is HARD truth, then saddle up.
