u/not_a_stick

Thaiboy × Basshunter

Yung Lean/Bladee × Bygdetrapen

Ecco2k × Snow Strippers

I think Bladee would absolutely slay on a Björk song.

Who delivers it? How do I know I can trust them? What can I do to ensure their safe passage? What could I do about translators interpreting my precious wording a little too liberally

Take the Norse myths for example: the gods, magical beings, and even mortal sorcerers like to change into animals often and very casually. Loki becomes a mare, Fafnir, famously known as a dragon, in reality is a dwarf who transforms into one.

The latest example I ccould conceive of was Bram Stoker's Dracula, where the titual count rransfoems himself into a bat and a wild dog. It always struck me as a very strange and foreign detail, very archaic.

What role did the Bible play in this? It is arguably a work including a great deal of mythology, but I can't bring to mind any passage where any person transforms into an animal, or vice versa.

Tänkt som ett spegelinlägg till det som postades nyss om vad dagens och framtidens ungdom inte kommer begripa från ens egen uppväxt. Vad höll de äldre generationerna på med som känns väldigt främmande för dig?

Exempelvis: indianfascinationen som folk hade från typ 40–80-talet. I alla gamla Kalle Anka- och Bamse-serier är det ett jäkla tjat om indianer. Oldtidens europé kunde inte gå en dag utan att tänka på indianer och cowboys, tycks det som.

I was previously kind of dismissive of the more minimal production on Whitearmor's more recent works (like Advent). He's a very expressive artist, and good at melodic motifs and texures, so, I don't know, it surprised me a little that most recent development in his style was just moving away from that. Advent is just a bassy texture that kind of, like, pulsates beneath Bladee and Lean. There exists a melody but it's pretty subtle. I don't think I could sing it.

But it just works so fucking well. After a while you just begin to get it (as usual with DG). On Versailles Flow especially the beat is so incredibly minimal that it sounds almost broken, like some dying electrical current. The percussive little tick noises sound more like audio rendering issues or what you hear when you rip our wired headphones too quickly, and when the bass hits after that bit of silence it doesn't carry any melody or rhythm of it's own. But you really feel it.

There's nothing to focus on but Bladee's vocals. They're mostly unprocessed, so it sounds like he's quietly confiding something to you in a silent room.

And when your ears are primed with a more minimal and less melodic beat, you are struck twice as hard when the distorted vocals kick in around 2:00.

The song feels feels so broken and struggling. It's like he's fighting his best to even be there.

Idk, I like the song.

The novel's relation to the notion of "paganism" is very interesting. In Ahab, like with vis namesake, it could be taken sign of the degeneration his character: he performs pagan rituals with his crew, blasphemes, and even invokes Satan, but I wouldn't just chalk it up to Christian moralism on Melville's part. Ahab, I'd argue, also represents the rejection of biblical virtues of subservience and faith in favour of the Greek will to power and hubris—being every bit Prometheus and no part Job—which puts him att odds with his Christian context. And to reflect this "Greekness" he must also be Pagan. He's a destructive madman, but not through and through meant to be taken as evil, right?

But aside from Ahab's paganism, which *could* be interpreted as a cautionary tale of where straying from the true faith gets you, Melville does not exactly endeavour to preach the Gospel elsewhere. He is remarkably tolerant of Queequeg's cultural practices, and actual something even the more tolerant people of his time would've considered absolute barbarism.

Not to mention the frequent references to sun worship: Fedallah is said to be a Zoroastrian, Ahab would avenge the sun if it smote him, and even the whales themselves are said to be sun-worshippers in Ch. 116 (I believe).

The treatment of religion is very, very interesting, since Melville doesn't frame everything in a purely Christian way, but has a very fluctuating and layered relationship to religion

What do you make of all the paganisms in Moby Dick?

Now, I understand that the cultural heritage of pre-christian Greece and Rome held a unique position in Europe—influential christian theologians like Thomas Aquinas borrowed extensively from pagan authors like Plato (and even from muslims!)—but the Bible doesn't exactly mince words when it proscribes idolatry. You can reinterpret some verses, sure, but you'd almost have to be reading it upside down to miss all the idol-bashing

How then did depictions of Bacchus, Venus, Jupiter and Poseidon become so commonplace in European art? How did the church view this?