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Showing posts from June, 2017

Desolation Row revisited: was that some kind of joke?

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Desolation Row is the final track on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 album. Unlike the album’s other tracks, Desolation is an entirely acoustic number, travelling out long at 11 minutes 21 seconds. The song begins with a downbeat two strum, limping acoustic strings slowly tick and rick upon adoor. After four or a five seconds, just before Dylan’s voice enters, a second acoustic begins to whine, softly winds around the strumming dumbing beat, drifts in and out: light notes, small streaks of brief fire amid darkness. They’re selling postcards of the hanging They’re painting the passports brown Noted for its wide range of canonical references, including Ophelia, Robin Hood and TS Eliot, Desolation Row is considered to be Dylan’s most literary effort. But the song holds so much more than just that. Desolation Row is one of the saddest songs I have ever listened to, a song about dejection, the final whimpers of a dying dream. Highway 61 was written only a year before Dylan’s infa

what next for Tories

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What next for the Conservative Party, then? Robert Halfon, the old Skills Minister was on the BBC three days ago insisting that the party was in need of a 'fundamental rebranding' from the Conservative Party to the Conservative Worker's Party, which should stand for election on the basis of a worker's charter. Of course, this shows just how far Corbyn has managed to swing the debate. Indeed, Theresa May's speeches since the election result have included the vague promise of a 'country that works for everyone', and there's no doubt that the party will be searching for a new campaign, a new message, after the disaster of her most recent campaign. Turnout at the most recent election was 68.7%, the highest since 1997. The Conservatives  are aware of two things: 1) That the wealthy are overrepresented within the actual voting population. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to not vote 2) That Corbyn's strategy is to try and mobili