Attitude, overview - Thomas De Zengotita

• You can disagree with friends about movie stars, TV shows and even humour. But you can't be friends with someone who loves the latest boy band if you are into Ani DiFranco and Gillian Welch.
• It's no accident that ancient Greeks, linked music and morals to closely, given their interest, it was only natural for them to ask which forms of media was most powerful.
• They drew the line around arts and artifacts whose essential purpose was to communicate through representations of some kind, they found one modality that belonged with communicating arts like writing and painting - yet could not be containes by the representational criterion.
• Music doesn't represent anything else, it's there, humanly crafted, yet given, more like the wind itself than a description of the wind. It moves out of us and into us im-mediately. It blends with emotion, it becomes emotion or passion.
• Music, like the stream, like time, like life itself, will not stand still - it will not last, it cannot last, it is music, it has to end, it is mortal.
• Music takes hold of you on levels of your being that precede intentional articulation, levels of being that contain what you can put into words.
• Words when sustained by the immediacy of music, they represent, they articulate, they fill dumb bodies with meaning.
• A code 'anchored' in music has the power to 'form character', and mediated teenagers understand this, because they are engaged in constructing themselves from the ground up.
• Attitude names what the fundamentals of posture and gesture and rhythm come together to engender - the gestalt of a personality, the form that makes details of expression and deportment into a coherent identity.
• Attitude is the very nexus of music and morals.
• The essential attitude is what the heroes teach because attitude is what the fans crave.
• The great performers of this culture will have to be regarded as the heroes of this age.
• Ask yourself this, if you are under forty: who are your heroes? Who do the kids you know idolise, if anyone?
• Sports, no matter how hyped, avoid virtualisation, entertainment performers who stand for something across their appearances come as close to our culture allows heroic stature, e.g. pop stars (mainly) and movie stars (less so).
• Movie stars are not heroes in the way that pop music stars and athletes are - their land is too distant, too fictional, a realm of dreams.