Underground Music Quotes

The leaves were long, the grass was green, The hemlock-umbels tall and fair, And in the glade a light was seen Of stars in shadow shimmering. Tinuviel was dancing there To music of a pipe unseen, And light of stars was in her hair, And in her raiment glimmering. There Beren came from mountains cold, And lost he wandered under leaves, And where the Elven-river rolled. He walked along and sorrowing. He peered between the hemlock-leaves And saw in wonder flowers of gold Upon her mantle and her sleeves, And her hair like shadow following. Enchantment healed his weary feet That over hills were doomed to roam; And forth he hastened, strong and fleet, And grasped at moonbeams glistening. Through woven woods in Elvenhome She lightly fled on dancing feet, And left him lonely still to roam In the silent forest listening. He heard there oft the flying sound Of feet as light as linden-leaves, Or music welling underground, In hidden hollows quavering. Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves, And one by one with sighing sound Whispering fell the beechen leaves In the wintry woodland wavering. He sought her ever, wandering far Where leaves of years were thickly strewn, By light of moon and ray of star In frosty heavens shivering. Her mantle glinted in the moon, As on a hill-top high and far She danced, and at her feet was strewn A mist of silver quivering. When winter passed, she came again, And her song released the sudden spring, Like rising lark, and falling rain, And melting water bubbling. He saw the elven-flowers spring About her feet, and healed again He longed by her to dance and sing Upon the grass untroubling. Again she fled, but swift he came. Tinuviel! Tinuviel! He called her by her elvish name; And there she halted listening. One moment stood she, and a spell His voice laid on her: Beren came, And doom fell on Tinuviel That in his arms lay glistening. As Beren looked into her eyes Within the shadows of her hair, The trembling starlight of the skies He saw there mirrored shimmering. Tinuviel the elven-fair, Immortal maiden elven-wise, About him cast her shadowy hair And arms like silver glimmering. Long was the way that fate them bore, O'er stony mountains cold and grey, Through halls of iron and darkling door, And woods of nightshade morrowless. The Sundering Seas between them lay, And yet at last they met once more, And long ago they passed away In the forest singing sorrowless.

Rock'n'roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages--they could be 15, 25 or 35. It all boils down to whether they've got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit... -Calvin Johnson

This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.

Nothing's perfect," sighed the fox. "My life is monotonous. I hunt chickens; people hunt me. All chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. So I'm rather bored. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don't eat bread. For me, wheat is no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you've tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat...

Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.

The music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always - the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.

If she could see the beauty of this underground world, and appreciate what it means: the music, the dancing, the feeling of fingertips and lips, like a moment of flight after a lifetime of crawling.

Writing this now, God, how I miss the cultural side of the eighties - the rhetoric, the raggedy clothes, the politics, gigs you were frightened to go into, Radio 1 when it had weird bits, Channel 4 when it was radical, the NME when it had writers, and the thrill of discovering underground music and new comedy for yourself.

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

Hair in darkness doesn’t feel the way it does in light. In light, you can touch a person’s hair and not feel it at all - you might think you are feeling it, but really you are seeing its color, seeing its shape, seeing the light and the shadows intertwined between the hair and your own hands. But in darkness, her hair poured across his palms like molten music between his fingers. Skin in darkness is different, too. In light, you don’t notice skin, distracted as you are by eyes watching you, eyes you are afraid to trust, eyes that could be waiting for your shame. But in pure darkness, her skin was warm and trembling and alive - secret whorled passageways of ears, soft fingertips tracing circles on his neck, the living heartbeat-shudders of falling-closed eyelids, cheeks erupting into lips and giving way to his tongue. And in light you don’t think of how warm a person is, of how a person can enfold you, enclose you amid arms and clothes and ribs in pure primeval underground darkness, the heat between you glowing like an ember that you are afraid to put out.

Five seconds, and my body's humming. I go half-man, half-machine, and my thoughts go straight to touching her more, to how far I want to go, how far she might want to go, and damn, I start to hurt. No amount of music or hard work will fix this. My body's a beast. A beast that's been held back too long.

It was around this time that I’d begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people’s minds. I’d figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn’t know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I’d talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I’d talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I’d talk about Roy Lichtenstein; if he knew a lot about pop art, I’d talk about Jean Genet; and so on. Do that in a small provincial city and you never lose an argument.

What would the fearsome Lou Reed insist on? Boys? Girls? Drugs? No, kielbasa.

Just tell her the B side's the sad one, and that the sad ones are the truth.

Music can inspire people to wake up and say, ‘Somebody’s lying.’ This is the point I’d like to make with my music,” Watt told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Make you think about what’s expected of you, of your friends. What’s expected of you by your boss. Challenge those expectations. And your own expectations. Man, you should challenge your own ideas about the world every day.

When the music started and the dancing commenced, they appreciated the extent of their gratitude for Jockey. Once again he picked the right day for a birthday. He had been attuned to a shared tension, a communal apprehension beyond the routine facts of their bondage. It had built up. The last few hours had dispelled much of the ill feeling. They could face the morning toil and the following mornings and the long days with their spirits replenished, however meagerly, by a fond night to look back on and the next birthday feast to look forward to. By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.

Sometimes they ask if you want to hook up your iPod for background music. Do not do this. It's a trap. They'll put it on shuffle, and no matter how much Beastie Boys or Velvet Underground you have on there, the following four tracks will play in a row; "We'd Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover" from Annie, "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips, "That's What Friends Are For, Various Artists, and "We'd Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover" from Annie.

The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.

Today’s champions of globalization are so busy celebrating the wondrous wealth and the charming artifacts of food and music produced by international interchange that they have little time for the plight of the invisible underclass that helps make it happen.

As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests.

believe in music in that way—if you want something to happen, you write a song about it.

you could perform together because you were coming from the same places in your heart. You may not make the same music, but you feel about music the same way.

I continue through the forest, all the way to the gazebo where Hettie and I once watched a show of a thousand-colored stingrays, where we once danced to lulling music, and where I finally realized it was all a lie.

Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world. where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous, impaling of a woman on a man´s sensual mast

dreamt of a … nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was”—he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS—“this.

Cora hoped the musicians wouldn't think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

This is the part they don’t tell you about in the movies. Or in On the Road. This is not rock ’n’ roll. You are not William Burroughs, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if Kurt Cobain was slumped over in an alleyway in Seattle the day Bleach came out. There is no junkie chic. This is not Soho and you are not Sid Vicious. You are not a drugstore cowboy and you are not spotting trains. You are not a part of anything—no underground sect, no counter-culture movement, no music scene, nothing. You have just been released from jail and are walking down Mission Street, alternating between taking a hit off a cigarette and puking, looking for coins on the ground so you can catch a bus as you shit yourself.

There's a lot of creative music happening in the underground, which is a very hopeful kind of sign....[These initiators are] usually kind of outcasts--for the most part no one can relate to them. And it's all over the planet; you go and look in the alleys and under the doorways, in the coal mines--they're there, lurking in the shadows; a significant amount of people in different parts of the planet who are genuinely creative. And I associate and attach myself to that. Usually when I go to any new place I try to find out from the musicians--they'll usually say 'this guy can't play,' or 'he's crazy,' 'he's not doing anything,' 'he's a sick, warped, demented fool'--and immediately I try to find him. He's probably one of us.

THE music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. The

But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I’ll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don’t eat bread. For me wheat is of no use whatsoever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you’ve tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I’ll love the sound of the wind in the wheat…

He was unprepared for the sound. The city was all around him, and he was lost in the noise. There were trucks, horns, sirens from Lexington Avenue and from the cross streets, but behind these individual noises was the sound he stopped to listen to sometimes when he was jogging alone in Central Park at night. A sound formed of traffic and helicopters and distant airplanes, voices, car horns, conversations and music, sirens and shouting and the underground passage of trains, all combined into a susurration as constant and as endless as the sound of ocean waves.

With the indie kids you have to remember this: they really think that what they do matters in some way. They reckon that history will care. (They don’t know that history will have other shit to be getting on with.) The indie kids figure that they’re passing on the torch or some fucking thing. That, just as they were influenced by someone—the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, the Stooges, whoever—then, in the future, young bands will be influenced by them. Maybe so. Maybe a few thousand malnourished cockless freaks scattered around the globe will give a shit. So what? Real people don’t..

A Sikh told me once that everyone was a flower in the Lord God's garden - all the individuals, the colours and races, tribes and religions; it was an idea that I fell in love with, and kept coming back to over the years, and eventually I chose to be a flower. I don't believe in any kind of God; if there is such a beast, he has horns and hooves and plays the pipes and doesn't live in the sky, for us to look up to and worship, but underground, and pushes all the wonderful things out of the soil for us to admire, pushes us out into the world, then takes us back again to join the earth. A creator that gives us passion and music and lust: that's my kind of deity, should I ever need one.

My life is monotonous. I hunt chickens; people hunt me. All chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. So I’m rather bored. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I’ll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don’t eat bread. For me wheat is of no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you’ve tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I’ll love the sound of the wind in the wheat…

We rode in a darling neighborhood of little bungalows cuddled together. I love the gray-green-putty colors against the leafless cherry trees and Japanese maples. I could feel the crocus, daffodil, and tulip bulbs underground, gaining strength, patiently enduring our winter, waiting to burst forth for another glorious Seattle spring. I held my hand out and whooshed it through the thick, healthy air. What other city has given birth to the jumbo jet, the Internet superstore, the personal computer, the cellular phone, online travel, grunge music, the big-box store, good coffee? Where else could somebody like me ride bikes alongside the man with the fourth-most-watched TEDTalk? I started laughing.

As a world that has no well, Darting bright in forest dell; As a world without the gleam Of the downward-going stream; As a world without the glance Of the ocean's fair expanse; As a world where never rain Glittered on the sunny plain; - Such, my hear, thy world would be, If no love did flow in thee. As a world without the sound Of the rivulets underground; Or the bubbling of the spring Out of darkness wandering; Or the mighty rush and flowing Of the river's downward going; Or the music-showers that drop On the outspread beech's top; Or the ocean's mighty voice, When his lifted waves rejoice;- Such, my soul, thy world would be, If no love did sing in thee. Lady, keep they world's delight; Keep the waters in thy sight. Love hath made me strong to go, For thy sake, to realms below, Where the water's shine and hum Through the darkness never come: Let, I pray, one thought of me Spring, a little well, in thee; Lest thy loveless soul be found Like a dry and thirsty ground.

The funny thing: I’d worried, if anything, that Boris was the one who was a little too affectionate, if affectionate is the right word. The first time he’d turned in bed and draped an arm over my waist, I lay there half-asleep for a moment, not knowing what to do: staring at my old socks on the floor, empty beer bottles, my paperbacked copy of The Red Badge of Courage. At last—embarrassed—I faked a yawn and tried to roll away, but instead he sighed and pulled me closer, with a sleepy, snuggling motion. Ssh, Potter, he whispered, into the back of my neck. Is only me. It was weird. Was it weird? It was; and it wasn’t. I’d fallen back to sleep shortly after, lulled by his bitter, beery unwashed smell and his breath easy in my ear. I was aware I couldn’t explain it without making it sound like more than it was. On nights when I woke strangled with fear there he was, catching me when I started up terrified from the bed, pulling me back down in the covers beside him, muttering in nonsense Polish, his voice throaty and strange with sleep. We’d drowse off in each other’s arms, listening to music from my iPod (Thelonious Monk, the Velvet Underground, music my mother had liked) and sometimes wake clutching each other like castaways or much younger children. And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet—fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream. We never spoke of it; it wasn’t quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about. And yet, more than once, I had wondered if I should step up my nerve and say something: draw some kind of line, make things clear, just to make absolutely sure he didn’t have the wrong idea. But the moment had never come. Now there was no point in speaking up and being awkward about the whole thing, though I scarcely took comfort in the fact.

Desire is… " Desire is the glow of bathing lunatics. Starlight is the liquid used to power a whispering machine. Humming is the music of a forest moving in unison with your eyes. * A slip of the tongue and the hummingbird’s empty throne make the acquaintance of the word frenzy, which in turn adopts the phrase: “I am closest to you when we are furthest apart,” and together they follow the anxious doorway that leads far out of the city, where travelers always meet, alone and abandoned with only their mysteries to guide them… and when the sun bleeds out of the dampness of the earth, like pale limbs entwined and exhausted, they all pause in their own fashion to reflect not upon themselves but on the white wolves in the garden shivering like mist, in the mirror hiding your face. * The nature of movement is an image lost between the objects of an eclipse fervently scratched into the face of a sleeping woman when she approaches the liquid state of a circle, wandering aimlessly in search of lucidity and those moments of inarticulate suspicion… when the riddle is only half solved and the alphabet is still adding letters according to the human motors that have not yet arrived, as a species, scintillating in the grass, burning time. Not far from your name there is always a question mark, followed by silent paws… * It is not without the mask of the Enchanter’s dance of unreason, that joy follows the torment of seductive shapes, and sudden appearances in the whisper of long corridors. Tribal veils rising out of fingerprints on invisible entrances in the middle of the landscape, assume the form of her shoulders and the intimacy of her bones making dust, taking flight. * The axis of revolt and the nobility of a springtime stripped of its flowers, expertly balanced with a murmur of the heart on the anvil of chance. Your voice arcing between the two points of day and night, where the oracle of water spinning rapidly above, that is your city of numerology, mixes with the flux of a long voyage more stone-like and absurdly graceful then either milkweed or deadly nightshade, when it acclimatizes the elements of transparency in the host of purity. * The dream birds of a lost language are growing underground in the bed of sorcery. It is all revealed in the arms of your obsession, Arachne, (crawling to kiss) pale Ariadne, (kneeling to feed) in a pool of light that exceeds the dimensions of the loveliest crime. She turns into your evidence, gaining speed and recognition, becoming a brightness never solved, and a clarity that makes crystals. * The early morning hours share their nakedness with those who bare fruit and corset fireflies in long slender bath-like caresses. “Your serum, Sir Moor’s Head, follows the grand figures of the sea, ignites them, throws them like vessels out of fire, raising the sand upwards into oddly repetitive enchantments. Drown me in flight, daughter of wonder…

When I pull my hand away, my fingertips are not stained red, but silver. I stare at my nails, trying to make sense of what I see when out of the formless gloom, a monster emerges. I do scream when a pair of blue-white eyes appear, a pinprick of black in their center. Slowly, a shape coalesces into being- a long, elegant face, whorls of inky shadows swirling over moon-pale skin, ram's horns curling around pointed, elfin ears. He is more terrifying and more real than the vision I experienced in the labyrinth. But worst of all are the hands, gnarled and curled and with one too many joints in each finger. With a silver ring around the base of one. A wolf's-head ring, with two gems of blue and green for eyes. My ring. His ring. The symbol of our promise I had returned to the Goblin King back in the Goblin Grove. Mein Herr? For a brief moment, those blue-white eyes regain some color, the only color in this gray world. Blue and green, like the gems on the ring about his finger. Mismatched eyes. Human eyes. The eyes of my immortal beloved. Elisabeth, he says, and his lips move painfully around a mouth full of sharpened teeth, like the fangs of some horrifying beast. Despite the fear knifing my veins, my heart grows soft with pity. With tenderness. I reach for my Goblin King, longing to touch him, to hold his face in my hands the way I had done when I was his bride. Mein Herr. My hands lift to stroke his cheek, but he shakes his head, batting my fingers away. I am not he, he says, and an ominous growl laces his words as his eyes return to that eerie blue-white. He that you love is gone. Then who are you? I ask. His nostrils flare and shadows deepen around us, giving shape to the world. He swirls a cloak about him as a dark forest comes into view, growing from the mist. I am the Lord of Mischief and the Ruler Underground. His lips stretch thin over that dangerous mouth in a leering smile. I am death and doom and Der Erlkönig. No! I cry, reading for him again. No, you are he that I love, a king with music in his soul and a prayer in his heart. You are a scholar, a philosopher, and my own austere young man. Is that so? The corrupted Goblin King runs a tongue over his gleaming teeth, those pale eyes devouring me as though I were a sumptuous treat to be savored. Then prove it. Call him by name. A jolt sings through me- guilt and fear and desire altogether. His name, a name, the only link my austere young man has to the world above, the one thing he could not give me. Der Erlkönig throws his head back in a laugh. You do not even know your beloved's name, maiden? How can you possibly call it love when you walked away, when you abandoned him and all that he fought for? I shall find it, I say fiercely. I shall call him by name and bring him home. Malice lights those otherworldly eyes, and despite the monstrous markings and horns and fangs and fur that claim the Goblin King's comely form, he turns seductive, sly. Come, brave maiden, he purrs. Come, join me and be my bride once more, for it was not your austere young man who showed you the dark delights of the Underground and the flesh. It was I.

A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor. How deep is it? Nobody knows. Going down to the first underground floor, people can write novels and music. However, I believe that such works cannot move people's hearts.

A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor. How deep is it? Nobody knows. Going down to the first underground floor, people can write novels and music. However, I believe that such works cannot move people's hearts. F. Scott Fitzgerald said; "If you want to tell a story which is different from others, use words that are different from others." Thelonious Monk's music is so unique that we cannot believe he played his music with popular instrument such as the piano. The depth of this kind of art can move people's heart. These artists found a way to go down to the deep underground floor. First underground floor novels are easy to be criticized, because they are easy to understand. Second underground floor novels, however, can touch hearts. The difference between the two is like the difference between a spa and a house bath, or Mozart and Salieri. I would like to go down to the deep underground floor without going mad.

During my time in India, the commitment level of the believers there shocked me. I visited thousands of Christians who had been beaten or watched relatives murdered for their faith. At one point, I said to one of the leaders, “Every believer seems so serious about his or her commitment to Christ. Aren’t there people who just profess Christ but don’t really follow Him?” He answered by explaining that nominal Christianity doesn’t make sense in India. Calling yourself a Christian means you lose everything. Your family and friends reject you, and you lose your home, status, and job. So why would anyone choose that unless he or she is serious about Jesus? I witnessed that same passion during my time in mainland China. The highlight was attending a meeting with underground church members training to become missionaries. The way they prayed and gave testimony about being persecuted was convicting and encouraging. The most surprising part of our time together was when they asked me about church in America. They laughed hysterically when I told them that church for Americans tends to focus on buildings and that people will sometimes switch churches based on music, child care, preaching, or disagreements with other believers. I honestly was not trying to be funny. They laughed in disbelief at our church experiences, thinking it was ridiculous that we would call this Christianity. Keep in mind that the population of China is over 1.3 billion, and in India it’s over 1.2 billion. Meanwhile, there are around 300 million people in the United States. This means that we are a small minority. Our views of “Christianity” are peculiar to the vast majority of the world. I used to think of those “radical believers” overseas as the strange ones. Some simple math revealed to me that in actuality we are the weird ones. The majority of believers on this earth find it laughable that we could reduce the call to follow Jesus and make disciples to an invitation to sit in church service.

Mein Herr? For a brief moment, those blue-white eyes regain some color, the only color in this gray world. Blue and green, like the gems on the ring about his finger. Mismatched eyes. Human eyes. The eyes of my immortal beloved. Elisabeth, he says, and his lips move painfully around a mouth full of sharpened teeth, like the fangs of some horrifying beast. Despite the fear knifing my veins, my heart grows soft with pity. With tenderness. I reach for my Goblin King, longing to touch him, to hold his face in my hands the way I had done when I was his bride. Mein Herr. My hands lift to stroke his cheek, but he shakes his head, batting my fingers away. I am not he, he says, and an ominous growl laces his words as his eyes return to that eerie blue-white. He that you love is gone. Then who are you? I ask. His nostrils flare and shadows deepen around us, giving shape to the world. He swirls a cloak about him as a dark forest comes into view, growing from the mist. I am the Lord of Mischief and the Ruler Underground. His lips stretch thin over that dangerous mouth in a leering smile. I am death and doom and Der Erlkönig. No! I cry, reading for him again. No, you are he that I love, a king with music in his soul and a prayer in his heart. You are a scholar, a philosopher, and my own austere young man. Is that so? The corrupted Goblin King runs a tongue over his gleaming teeth, those pale eyes devouring me as though I were a sumptuous treat to be savored. Then prove it. Call him by name. A jolt sings through me- guilt and fear and desire altogether. His name, a name, the only link my austere young man has to the world above, the one thing he could not give me. Der Erlkönig throws his head back in a laugh. You do not even know your beloved's name, maiden? How can you possibly call it love when you walked away, when you abandoned him and all that he fought for? I shall find it, I say fiercely. I shall call him by name and bring him home. Malice lights those otherworldly eyes, and despite the monstrous markings and horns and fangs and fur that claim the Goblin King's comely form, he turns seductive, sly. Come, brave maiden, he purrs. Come, join me and be my bride once more, for it was not your austere young man who showed you the dark delights of the Underground and the flesh. It was I.

We are born with a natural delight in the music of language. As infants we coo and babble and let consonants roll around in our mouths like mother’s milk. As young children, we invent words, mash syllables together, and delight in nonsensical lines. We let ourselves be lulled to sleep by the playful rhymes of Mem Fox (“It’s time for bed, little goose, little goose, / The stars are out and on the loose”). We seek out stories with fanciful sounds (“Quickberry / Quackberry / Pick me a blackberry”). We begin to sense the link between what’s on the surface, and what’s under it (“I meant no harm. I most truly did not. / But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got. / I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads. / I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads”). As we mature, our delight in the music of words goes a bit underground, but it’s still there. We repeat not just Chaucer’s prologue, but also advertising jingles. We let brand names like Chunky Monkey and SurveyMonkey tumble off our tongues. We appreciate the curt sentences of Hemingway as well as those that are long and loose and lyrical. We let ourselves be moved by the moral authority of Nelson Mandela. We follow the Dalai Lama on Facebook. We let Chris Christie voice our outrage after a hurricane, Barack Obama our sorrow after a massacre of children. Language remains an adventure, if sometimes a somewhat mysterious one: We are drawn to reliable narrators and find that metaphors lift us. We are transported by soaring vowels. The cadence of sentences acts on us like the rhythm of an ancient drum. The music of language leads us to meaning, to our own humanity.

began taking their churches above ground. They rented buildings and started running services the way we do in America. It was great for a while, but these pastors became so discouraged. I wish I could convey the frustration and desperation in their voices. They talked about the good old days, when their people were risking their lives and radically sharing the gospel, making disciples. But now these pastors were lamenting the way their people attend services and expect the leaders to feed them and cater to them. They had seen this same transition in Korea and were terrified it would happen in their context as well. All anyone wanted was a Jesus and a church that served their needs and kept them comfortable. What started as a movement became a bunch of people sitting safely in services. My mind flashed back to five years prior when my daughter and I went to an underground gathering in China. Young people were praying so passionately, begging God to send them to the most dangerous places. They were actually hoping to die as martyrs! I had never seen anything like it. I still can’t get over the fearless passion for Jesus this church embodied. As they shared stories of persecution, I sat in amazement and asked for more stories. After a while, they asked why I was so intrigued. I told them the church in America was nothing like this. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it was to try to explain to them that people attend ninety-minute services once a week in buildings and that’s what we call “church.” I told them about how people switch churches if they find better teaching, more exciting music, or more robust programs for their kids. As I described church life in America, they began to laugh. Not just small chuckles; they were laughing hysterically. I felt like a stand-up comedian, but I was simply describing the American church as I’ve experienced it. They found it laughable that we could read the same Scriptures they were reading and then create something so incongruent.

Heavy Metal has been forced to create its own underworld. It plays by its own rules, follows its own aesthetic prerogatives… Metal is no longer a staple of FM radio, nor are record labels publishing it like they used to. Watching MTV and reading popular magazines, one might not even realize Heavy Metal still existed at all. Rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated, however, as the Metal underground boils and seethes worldwide. Especially left to its own devices and relegated to independent labels run by the fans themselves, this has allowed Metal’s most antisocial and aggressive tendencies to develop unburdened by any system of moral checks and balances, which society provides–at least tenuously–for other forms of music.

With their less-than-rudimentary musicianship, Beat Happening might have been making a conceptual point, but it was also the best they could manage. The way the music harked back to sounds from throughout the rock & roll timeline said much more about the inherent characteristics of rock music than it did about the breadth of the band’s record collection

K recordings, Johnson felt, were “folk music, music made by peasants.” The label had turned out exactly as Johnson had hoped.

The funny thing was the album was a fairly complete compendium of the music the industry had been largely ignoring for the previous ten years, synthesizing underground bands like Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr, the Pixies, Scratch Acid, the Melvins, and others. But it made that sound palatable to the mainstream with strong melodies and slick production

He says his parents were “really uptight and not very affectionate,” and, consequently, young J grew up somewhat aloof and self-absorbed. All the furniture in his room was arranged to create a wall around his bed, and there he’d lie for hours, listening to music.

This is what I am trying to do across the board,” says MacKaye. “If you’re going to see me play music, that’s the way it will manifest. If you came over to my house, you’d see the way I live. If I make you dinner, you’ll see the food I eat.

The conversations changed after ’91,” says Guy Picciotto. “Before, people talked about ideas and music. And then after that, people talked about money and deals.

That's how I've felt about making this music, as an act of destroying myself, & for what, peoples mild amusement? longing for things to go wrong? fame & fortune? I'm not sure anymore. anything I do or say will be viewed by thousands of people, picked apart, criticised by people who think it's in any way at all important. It's hardly a spotlight, it's a magnifying glass under the sun. I never expected things to have been this way, when I was younger I wanted to be the next GG Alin, but more importantly, stay underground, stay unknown, & keep this as a hobby only, push the boundaries, piss people off, black metal aesthetic, etc. & anyone who questioned it can get the finger. But then I grew up, I matured, & saw the world differently, I changed. But the internet is the internet, & Ive been paying for those mistakes by the pound. These things I've done that I regret & have done my best to atone for, simply won't matter, not when people show no forgiveness & want nothing but blood to pay the debts. & blood is what they will get, & even then I'm not sure it will be enough. Even in saying this, even by coming back at all, It feels like I'm just lighting myself on fire & then watch all the moths come towards me. I sometimes get asked what's it's like to be famous, a thought which never occurs to me but whenever people ask I look at my numbers & realise how far I've come, & I don't feel pride, I feel paranoid, I feel threatened. that's how many people are watching you now. & every time I tell them the same thing. Don't ever be famous, It destroys you, I hate being me.

A little white girl stares, holding her father's hand tightly. She has dewy eyes, round with wonder. as the Maxwell St. Bluesman voice sounds like the crackle of thunder. The Lost Culture of Maxwell Street

It is tempting to think of such men as a deviant sub-culture, a pathological underground, a sick minority. Yet splatter films which revel in pornographic scenes where women are tortured and killed are part of the mainstream; music videos celebrating male violence against women to the point of death and beyond are also mainstream. Misogynist hate propaganda is so normalised it has faded into the texture of the everyday – and we barely notice how pervasive it is.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us.

THE MID-1980S, the American musicologist Louis Sarno recorded the music of the Aka people living in the forests of the Central African Republic. One of these recordings is called “Women Gathering Mushrooms.” As they wander around collecting mushrooms, their steps tracing the underground form of a mycelial network, the women sing amid the sounds of the animals in the forest. Each woman sings a different melody; each voice tells a different musical story.

If we assess the results of this swift foray into the ancient Celtic literature, we can conclude the following: dwarfs are handsome or ugly, hostile or helpful, sometimes thieves or kidnappers. They inhabit kingdoms that are located on islands, in lakes, or in the sea, or are even underground. They live in communities there that are headed by a king. They celebrate festivals, play music, ride small horses, possess magical objects, and have supernatural powers. It appears they are excellent craftsmen. It is important that we underscore the fact that this image of the dwarf owes much to the romances, and the ancient features it contains no longer hold any value. It is obvious that there are several races of dwarfs—as the terms corr and afanc attest—who are deeply entangled with the otherworld, which does not seem to be restricted only to the land of Faery, and on this point the Celtic dwarfs and the dwarfs of the romances are opposites. But through the channel of the Matter of Britain, a veritable bridge set down between the Celtic world and the Romance world, certain peculiarities of these dwarfs from green Ireland and Wales have crossed over into France and combined with other motifs—motifs which, in this case, stem from the Germanic world.

Morghan relaxed into the music, into the world, into both worlds, the magic of the music making it effortless to draw the Otherworld around her so that she danced in her room at the same time that she danced in a clearing in the woods, the ground soft under her bare feet, the moonlight between the branches gleaming silver upon her skin, the trees gathered around, their roots touching underground, their branches overhead. She felt them there, in a circle around her, and she danced, feeling the music in her blood, in their sap, in her sap.

Dwarfs experience the same passions as men, especially the torments of love and the goad of ambition. They wage war among themselves to conquer other hollow mountains. They have hereditary enemies in the form of giants and dragons. Their amusements correspond thoroughly to those of the human world: they love music, singing, dancing, good meals washed down with wine or mead; they organize jousts and tourneys on the green meadows that extend before their underground palaces; and finally, they know how to speak courteously. The great majority of dwarfs are well meaning and helpful; it is only in the Arthurian romances—in agreement with romance literature in general on this point—that we find portrayals of treacherous or thieving dwarfs.

One of our great problems today is that we have gotten caught up in our culture-wide quest for authenticity. We want our jeans authentic (pre-ripped at the factory), we want our apples authentic (grown locally instead of somewhere else), we want our music authentic (underground bands nobody ever heard of), we want our lettuce authentic (organically manured), we want our literature authentic (full of angst), we want our movies authentic (subtitles), and we want our coffee tables authentic (purchased from a genuine peasant while we were on some eco-tour). In short, we are a bunch of phonies. We are superficial all the way down.

Sweet Jane" Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand Jack is in his corset, and Jane is in her vest, and, me I'm in a rock'n'roll band. Huh Ridin' in a Stutz-Bearcat, Jim Y'know, those were different times Oh, all the poet, they studied rules of verse And the ladies, they rolled their eyes Sweet Jane! Whoa! Sweet Jane, oh-oh-a! Sweet Jane I'll tell you something Jack, he is a banker And Jane, she is a clerk Both of them save their monies, ha And when, when they come home from work Ooh! Sittin' down by the fire, oh The radio does play The classical music there, Jim "The March of the Wooden Soldiers" All you protest kids You can hear Jack say, get ready, ah Sweet Jane! Come on baby! Sweet Jane! Oh-oh-a! Sweet Jane Some people, they like to go out dancing And other peoples, they have to work. Just watch me now And there's even some evil mothers Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt Y'know that, women, never really faint And that villains always blink their eyes, woo And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush And that, life is, just to die And, everyone who ever had a heart, oh That wouldn't turn around and break it And anyone who ever played a part, whoa And wouldn't turn around and hate it Sweet Jane! Whoa-oh-oh! Sweet Jane! Sweet Jane. Sweet Jane Sweet Jane. Sweet Jane

Bernard and I always believed that most pop music fits into the board category called rock and roll. Rock and roll was ever changing, and this art form had different genres of classification for the benefit of consumers, like sections in a library or bookstore. Once any genre-folk, soul, rock or even some jazz-reaches a certain position on the pop charts, it does what’s known in the music business as crossing over, and gets played on the Top Forty stations. That’s the reason so many of us own songs by artists from genre’s we normally wouldn't-their hit songs crossed over into the pop Top Forty mainstream. When a genre repeatedly crosses over and comes to dominate the Top Forty, what had originated as an insurgency becomes the new ruling class. This was the path disco had taken-from the margins where it started, a weird combination of underground gay culture and funk and gospel-singing techniques and, in the case of Chic, Jazz-inflected groovy soul. But it was basically all rock and roll, historically speaking, as far as we were concerned. But the media and the industry pitted us against the Knack-the disco kings in their buppie uniforms verses the scrappy white boys. But we never saw it that way. We thought we were all on the same team, even if our voices and songs followed different idioms. Boy, were we naïve. And boy, did things change.

Jay Stevens’s classic LSD history Storming Heaven

How quiet it is,' Danny said, digging in his knapsack for the canteen full of water he had brought. 'You don’t realize how scary it is, having a whole mountain on top of you, until you’re in the dark as I was in that tunnel, or when you begin hearing the silence.' 'I didn’t know you could hear silence,' said Irene. 'Then just listen.' They sat still, and Danny added, 'Put out the flashlights for a minute.' In the dark, they understood what he meant. All the familiar noises of the upper world were gone: the wind, the rustle of branches or leaves, the chirping of birds, the sounds of automobiles and doors slamming, and people laughing. There was nothing but the faint tinkle of droplets of water, each drop like a distant musical chime, and each one pursued by tiny echoes. Then, after such a note had sounded there would be a long and empty quiet in which they could hear their own breathing and the steady beating of their hearts. They found themselves straining their eyes to see something, anything — the slightest sign of light, but they could not even tell the difference between opening their eyes and shutting them. Irene burst out suddenly, 'Put on the lights!' Danny let out his breath with a whoosh. They all snapped on their lamps, and as the welcome light flooded the chamber, he said, 'It’s — it’s like being buried alive.' 'Don’t let’s try that experiment again,' Irene said, with a shiver. 'I just hope we get out of here before our flashlights give out.

The thought turned him topsy-turvy. It seemed to summarize the whole worthless way of the world--if there was one. And versions of it began to flutter wildly through his head. You have to look round to see straight. Good enough. Useful. And the rough places plain. But all that's geometry. But it measures the earth. You have to go slow to catch up. Eat to get thin? no, but fast to grow fat, that was a fine one. Then lose to win? fail to succeed? Risky. Stop to begin. The form made noiseless music--lumly lum lum or lum-lee-lee lum--like fill to empty, every physical extreme. Die to live was a bit old hat. But default to repay. And lie to be honest. He liked the ring of that. Flack! I'm white in order to be black. Sin first and saint later. Cruel to be kind, of course, and the hurts in the hurter--that's what they say--a lot of blap. That's my name, my nomination: Saint Later. Now then: humble to be proud; poor to be rich. Enslave to make free? That moved naturally. Also multiply to subtract. Dee dee dee. Young Saint Later. A list of them, as old as Pythagoras had. Even engenders odd. How would that be? Eight is five and three. There were no middle-aged saints--they were all old men or babies. Ah, god--the wise fool. The simpleton sublime. Babe in the woods, roach in the pudding, prince in the pauper, enchanted beauty in the toad. This was the wisdom of the folk and the philosopher alike--the disorder of the lyre, or the drawn-out bow of that sane madman, the holy Heraclitus. The poet Zeno. The logician Keats. Discovery after discovery: the more the mice eat, the fatter the cats. There were tears and laughter, for instance--how they shook and ran together into one gay grief. Dumb eloquence, swift still waters, shallow deeps. Let's see: impenitent remorse, careless anxiety, heedless worry, tense repose. So true of tigers. Then there was the friendly enmity of sun and snow, and the sweet disharmony of every union, the greasy mate of cock and cunt, the cosmic poles, war that's peace, the stumble that's an everlasting poise and balance, spring and fall, love, strife, health, disease, and the cold duplicity of Number One and all its warm divisions. The sameness that's in difference. The limit that's limitless. The permanence that's change. The distance of the near at home. So--to roam, stay home. Then pursue to be caught, submit to conquer. Method--ancient--of Chinese. To pacify, inflame. Love, hate. Kiss, kill. In, out, up, down, start, stop. Ah . . . from pleasure, pain. Like circumcision of the heart. Judgement and mercy. Sin and grace. It little mattered; everything seemed to Furber to be magically right, and his heart grew fat with satisfaction. Therefore there is good in every evil; one must lower away to raise; seek what's found to mourn its loss; conceive in stone and execute in water; turn profound and obvious, miraculous and commonplace, around; sin to save; destroy in order to create; live in the sun, though underground. Yes. Doubt in order to believe--that was an old one--for this the square IS in the circle. O Phaedo, Phaedo. O endless ending. Soul is immortal after all--at last it's proved. Between dead and living there's no difference but the one has whiter bones. Furber rose, the mosquitoes swarming around him, and ran inside.

With the meal there was karaoke. As the Chinese waiters brought the food, everyone at the restaurant sang “shanson,” the gravelly, syrupy gangster ballads that have become some of Russia’s favorite pop music. Shanson reflect the gangsters’ journeys to the center of Russian culture. These used to be underground, prison songs, full of gangster slang, tales of Siberian labor camps and missing your mother. Now every taxi driver and grocery plays them. “Vladimirsky Tsentral” is a wedding classic. Tipsy brides across the country in cream-puff wedding dresses and high, thin heels slow-dance with their drunker grooms: “The thaw is thinning underneath the bars of my cell / but the Spring of my life has passed so fast.” At the Chinese restaurant Miami Stas sang along too, but he seemed too meek, too obliging to be a gangster.

As we continued walking and holding onto each other I noticed music playing between the snowflakes. Maybe the air had always had music in it, but I’d never heard it before.

Naomi took down the instructions, confirmed her cell phone number, and put the bag in the plastic bin headed to the lab. As Hailey left, Naomi turned the music back on. “Who is that?” Hailey asked. “Velvet Underground,” Naomi said. “Cool, huh?” “Very,” Hailey agreed, though she wasn’t sure if it was cool or awful.

Like the music itself, the lyrics were very concise and unambiguous,

Renouncing sex, drugs, and drink was renouncing the unattainable rock & roll myth, making music relevant for real people—you couldn’t pursue the rock & roll lifestyle and then get up in the morning and go to school or work.

I mean, rock music’s got to be something that your mom would hate—if you want it to be really satisfying. We made music that moms would really hate,

The band members’ voracious appetites for all kinds of music and their enthusiasm for spreading the word about it was a big part of the networking process. “We were, on the one hand, trying to take it all in,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, “and on the other hand, using whatever position we had to reflect people back out to see a larger world.

Hardcore’s organizational energy was just as important as its musical energy—

Gordon was an artist who simply transferred her highly refined aesthetic skills to rock music, a genre that, as punk proved, required a sensibility more than chops anyway.

Sonic Youth recognized two things: One, that without substantial radio airplay, press was the main promotional outlet for underground bands, and two, that underground music fans paid particular attention to music criticism.

The members of Sonic Youth realized that “a life involving music” depended on cooperation—if bands worked for each other, everybody would benefit.

My experience of it,” says Lunsford, “was having a feeling like there are people who are destined to be rock & roll stars and those are the people that make the music. It’s a special breed that feels it in them to scale the stage and climb up to be with the gods. I didn’t feel like I was capable of that.

People work all day and they want a release,” he told the L.A. Times. “They want a way to deal with all the frustrations that build up. We try to provide that in our music.

Punk rock was an idea, not a musical style.

It certainly made for music that relied less on melody and conventional song structure and more on mood and texture.

The band members were outspoken about their distaste for conformism, especially within the post-punk scene, where bands were already tailoring their music to contrived images, threatening to reverse punk’s hardwon gains. “It’s so much style over content,

These are shows designed for the underground artists, painters, philosophers, thinkers, musicians, visual artists, poets, set designers––it’s a creative community that’s coming together to change the world.

In their music the Minutemen told stories, postulated theories, held debates, aired grievances, and celebrated victories—and did it in a direct, intimate way that flattered the intelligence as well as the soul.

an underground music network was starting up: record stores that championed independent labels were beginning to appear in major cities and college towns, college radio was noticing the music, fanzines were flourishing, and an underground railroad of venues was assembling.

punk rock doesn’t have to mean hardcore or one style of music or just singing the same lyrics,” he said. “It can mean freedom and going crazy and being personal with your art.

Music can bind people in weird ways—socially, information—a lot of people get everything they know from songs and groups.

certain kinds of music will never be accepted by certain people.

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?

I HAVEN’T HAD the Dream in a long time. But it’s back. And it’s changed. It does not begin as it always has, with the chase. The woods. The mad swooping of the griffins and the charge of the hose-beaked vromaski. The volcano about to erupt. The woman calling my name. The rift that opens in the ground before me. The fall into the void. The fall, where it always ends. Not this time. This time, these things are behind me. This time, it begins at the bottom. I am outside my own body. I am in a nanosecond frozen in time. I feel no pain. I feel nothing. I see someone below, twisted and motionless. The person is Jack. Jack of the Dream. But being outside it, I see that the body is not mine. Not the same face. As if, in these Dreams, I have been dwelling inside a stranger. I see small woodland creatures, fallen and motionless, strewn around the body. The earth shakes. High above, griffins cackle. Water trickles beneath the body now. It pools around the head and hips. And the nanosecond ends. The scene changes. I am no longer outside the body but in. Deep in. The shock of reentry is white-hot. It paralyzes every molecule, short-circuiting my senses. Sight, touch, hearing—all of them join in one huge barbaric scream of STOP. The water fills my ear, trickles down my neck and chest. It freezes and pricks. It soothes and heals. It is taking hold of the pain, drawing it away. Drawing out death and bringing life. I breathe. My flattened body inflates. I see. Smell. Hear. I am aware of the soil ground into my skin, the carcasses all around, the black clouds lowering overhead. The thunder and shaking of the earth. I blink the grit from my eyes and struggle to rise. I have fallen into a crevice. The cracked earth is a vertical wall before me. And the wall contains a hole, a kind of door into the earth. I see dim light within. I stand on shaking legs. I feel the snap of shattered bones knitting themselves together. One step. Two. With each it becomes easier. Entering the hole, I hear music. The Song of the Heptakiklos. The sound that seems to play my soul like a guitar. I draw near the light. It is inside a vast, round room, an underground chamber. I enter, lifted on a column of air. At the other side I see someone hunched over. The white lambda in his hair flashes in the reflected torch fire. I call to him and he turns. He looks like me. Beside him is an enormous satchel, full to bursting. Behind him is the Heptakiklos. Seven round indentations in the earth. All empty.

The divide between that which was commercial and that which was “real” seemed larger, and what was real didn’t always sell, so there was pressure from both sides of that divide: be real enough to stay underground, or go pop enough to get money.

This was the Goblin King. That was my sister in his arms. This was my sister tilting her head back to greet his lips. That was the Goblin King bending down to receive her kisses like sacred offerings made at the altar of his worship. This was the Goblin King running long, slender fingers down the line of my sister's neck, her shoulder, her back. That was my sister laughing, her bright, musical bell of a laugh, and this was the Goblin King smiling in return, but looking at me, always looking. I was entranced; my sister was enchanted. Enchanted. The word was a dash of cold water, and my senses returned with a jolt. This was the Goblin King. The abductor of maidens, the punisher of misdeeds, the Lord of Mischief and the Underground. But was he also not the friend of my childhood, the confidante of my youth?

Music journalist Chris Nelson once wrote, “Their friendship formed the living core of the Minutemen, while their loyalty to each other and San Pedro informed the overarching theme of brotherhood that permeates the band’s catalog.

My mission with Rave Scout is to promote cultural inclusiveness and increase the visibility of marginalized talent and diversify the underground scene through and by producing digital immersive experiences. The ultimate aim is to motivate the community and the scene to experience and learn how to feel and passively accept their vulnerabilities and one another.

Now a negro was dancing, and the faster he danced, the wilder grew the hidden music. Suddenly as it grew louder still, his limbs began to expand and he could touch the eight corners of the vast room with head, finger or toe. His white draperies, too, flowed out, unrolling from some compact centre within themselves. As he spun and somersaulted, his bones ceased to stiffen, his skin to bind, his muscles came untied; gravity was abated, space negated, volume grew fluid. But time danced on, to the tempo of the music without source; and when this music stopped, the negro shrank again to his usual size. In an underground cave, shining warmly from some hidden illumination, a line of swathed dancers began to move, springing up and down on the same spot with magnetic gesticulations. Their leader passed along the lines with an iron whip, lashing them like spinning-tops to make them dance more fiercely. Up and down the line he strode, more and more swiftly; and all at once, as his strokes grew more potent, the dancers began to glow. Then, as he reached each one in turn, they successively burst into flame. Leaping ever higher, these human torches filled the low-roofed cavern with their ardent rite; and finally left the floor, to circle, a chorus of serene fire-balloons, near the ceiling.

FALLIERE WAS TWENTY-EIGHT, with the dark, Gallic looks of someone who seemed like he’d be more at home DJing trance music in an underground Paris nightclub than poring over reams of printed computer code during a commute on the Métro. In reality, he was fairly shy and reserved, and sifting through dense computer code was in fact a much bigger draw to him than spending sweaty nights in a throbbing club.

It’s as if Sonic Youth has gone back to the very beginnings of the process by which the world reveals itself as something other than its advertisement, as if the band has discovered the most marginal no,” Marcus wrote. “The power of Sonic Youth’s no will be negligible; few will hear this music. That the spirit of the act is still at work may not be.

We were in Nashville and the whole place was packed with country music executives. They played all their punk rock—just as loud and fast as they could until they virtually cleared the room until there was nothing left but punks. And then they played country music the rest of the night.

Of course, the teachers were ostensibly the ones who held the school under their sway, but they were merely the kings of the day, while the kings of the underground, the sovereigns of all darkness and terror, the merciless kings who dispensed with reason and logic, the brutal monarchs whose lust for fresh victims had all the hunger of a school of sharptoothed piranhas, who would on no account allow their prey to go free until they were sated; they the kings of the night, already bearing in large part the natural disposition of the mob, and having cultivated day by day, the anti-educators were none other than the pupils.