A presentation by writer John Waters, on rock and roll as a quest for the Infinite, or at least the moment when “the whatness of the song leaps to us from the vestments of its appearance”

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The descent-into-cliché of much rock music is not the fault of the musicians, but a trick of time. And yet it alerts us to something really interesting: that pop music is a code that can confirm what we already understand and have become bored by, while also being a language that takes us deep into ourselves, to our hunger for the unknowable, the infinite and the great. It seems an extraordinary burden to place on a fragile pop song, but we all know songs that manage to carry it nonetheless, having acquired through time some mysterious alchemy that enables this combination of words and notes and sounds to alert us to the danger of confusing what we are hearing with mere attraction to a fashion expressed in sound or to nostalgia for particular moments in our lives.

~John Waters

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