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Tales From the Down Under: #22- White & Grey

I felt forlorn watching the calamity of Japan on the telly since months ago I just spent my most brilliant time traveling around its capital. It was one of those chill but not bleak days when I strolled about the streets of Tokyo. I had an image of colours instantly, of a swaying white and grey. For me it was the cleanest and most impressive combination of colours, and the one that exuded the most contented serenity.

The titillated image of white and grey rarely popped up in my life. Besides the aforementioned the closest one I can conjure up is when scouring around the vicinity of my house after a washover rain. I deem the white-and-grey incidents my happiest moments in life. When such moment occurs the colours are wrought in a most cliché romantic veil where they will dance and swirl around me like bubbles. And like bubbles they pop and vanish within a blink of an eye.

Everybody has his own definition of what a suffering will be. It would be indubitably ungrateful for me to acknowledge my constant predicament, since seeing in a humanistic scope mine is hardly a scrape. But the feeling of weeds on my head is incessantly palpable which resembles to that of a young bird whose wings and feathers have already crowded the nest yet is still reminded that she is no more than a callow bird.

Being a dire optimist and having a downright positive thinking save me. I am always the one who sees the light sift through the curtain and feels hopeful of the unfold of a new day. My optimistic mind might contribute somewhat to my role of a persistent dreamer. Several past incidents have cast several whips on that dreamer, lessons are better learnt than taken for granted. The dreamer proclaimed that whoever asks her perspective of her future she will remain modest and only reveal that she is not a careerist, and she is never the one who gets out of the hardship of the young adolescent years unscathed.

Talking about optimism, there arises a group of aspiring singers/bands who flatter themselves on making cheerful music. Cheerful but not the Beach-Boy-esque sunshine pop, they actually allege their music of being unconventionally whimsical, creating sounds that are certainly the drills to your ears. People have been too preoccupied making music that differs from the others to hunker down to the basic question of whether the music you endeavour to make actually makes any grain of sense.

There is also this group of intelligentsias whose songs are packed full of any artistic or literary references. Listening to their music makes me a cultural handicap even when holding an English Literature major. The question has been harbouring in my head for a long time but I have yet found an answer to whether music is more important than lyrics, or lyrics music, or equally important, or important but in a synchronized way. Listening to Tyrannosaurus Rex though, put all those doubts and questions in a temporary respite. The music is simple, raw but unarguably sensible. The whims of the music are ingeniously enlightened by the idiosyncrasy of Marc Bolan’s emotive voice. The lyrics, on the other hand, seems to be the highlight of the songs, the cherry on a chocolate tart, by which one can see implicitly of their literary references, be it Blake, Wordsworth or Borges, but instead of assiduously gleaning over influences like some run-of-the-mill singers, Bolan’s influences are obviously the accumulative ones. Such accumulative influences are mingled with Bolan’s dexterity on words, which tackle obsolete subject matters but never in an esoteric way.

Another thing I admire Marc Bolan the most is how his music never gives glimpses of world-weariness. Ladies and gentlemen he’s singing with his head above heaven!

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