November 21, 2024: Rush, Ayn Rand, Copies of Copies in Music & Fight Club
The love I have for music memes 😎. I have a box with every little trinket, ticket (when you could print those things out), anything tangible I've collected from my travels since I was about 16. At this point, this place right here is less of a regular YouTube channel and more of a digital version of that box for my Internet travels. Shockingly good lyrics when you sit down to read them:
Speaking of Rush (from Wikipedia):
"While in London, [Neil Peart] came across the writings of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. Rand's writings became a significant early philosophical influence on Peart, as he found many of her writings on individualism and Objectivism inspiring. References to Rand's philosophy can be found in his early lyrics, most notably "Anthem" from 1975's Fly by Night and "2112" from 1976's 2112."
You really need to find Ayn Rand before you find more spiritually-minded intellectuals because that would serve as the more natural progression to your thinking. It's hard to go from Eckhart Tolle & David Hawkins and then to Ayn Rand, but I guess it's a skill to hold a diverse set of incongruent ideas in your mind all at once.
And on a related note:
I really do wonder when it became normalized to be dumb in mainstream music — when was that turn exactly? The irony is that some acts will accuse their successors of being dumb imitators of them when their own predecessors would say the exact same thing about them. It's almost like making a copy of a copy (a Fight Club reference — such a quotable movie — "Everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy.") Eventually, you're looking at the most watered down version of what used to be great.
And speaking of Fight Club:
I now view Tyler Durden as more of a shadow than a dissociated personality. Are those two the same? Not quite. Dissociated personalities do fully manifest themselves once in a while for those who have them — more so than the unconscious does in any given person. The unconscious is a different deal. So, Edward Norton's character was undergoing a huge psychotic episode underpinned by the complete loss of control of his Jungian shadow. This movie was about the sudden and completely unfettered leaking of the unconscious; that's what I'm going with from now on.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." —> I always wonder what life experiences it takes for someone to immortalize those words somewhere.