Aretha Franklin Saves the Grammys (Rick Walker) 💡3 Quotes 🌩️2 Videos 🧠1 Essay
Rapper Ruslan KD & Winning BigReply to this email to let me know what you're doing this summer! Sentenced for Stealing.The best sentences I could find for you to steal (but, please credit). "The chalice shimmering in eternal light calls forth from unfamiliar darkness. The sword of the piercing prevents the fear of our shadows. The safe thing is rarely the right thing."
Rick Walker (This Week's Essay)
“We cover our deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder. We are afraid to whisper ‘mystery’”
A.W. Tozer
“Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.”
Kahlil Gibran
Video Pick.Why I'm the glue guy and you should be too!The Big Idea Essay. How Aretha Franklin Fulfilled Justice with BeautyAn Essay About a Video I loved performing on a big stage as a trumpet player in college. The lights, the risk, the vulnerability. The bigger the stakes, the more alive I felt. And I still love to watch greatness live in concert. Nessun Dorma is the most-storied male vocalist feature from the world of Puccini’s opera, Turandot. A fairytale filled with a blood thirsty bride who murders her lovers, the tenor loves her all the more. In Italian, ‘Nessun Dorma’ is a little difficult to translate. It means that there shall be no sleep. But its content is quite different. The bride wishes her unknown secret admirer be rooted out, before tomorrow’s wedding. She sings that no one shall sleep tonight until he is known and she can kill him. Brides, blood, and gods come together, just ask Agamemnon’s daughter Iphagenia. Her bridegroom, further infatuated, sings one of the darkest yet triumphant pieces in all of operatic history. Written in 1926, it was not performed to its potential for another half-century, when in 1972, the ascendance of Luciano Pavarotti greeted Tchiakowskian greatness. It was 1998, and Luciano Pavarotti, scheduled to perform this classic at the 40th Grammy Awards just prior to accepting his Lifetime Achievement award, was stricken. Tragedy. Thirty minutes after the Grammys began, Pavarotti rang Producer Ken Ehrlich he was sick and could not perform. Mayhem ensued backstage. Legends of music sat a wall away. But, here rested a hero. Unlikeliest of all, in fact. Remember Black Swans never sway. One who also sang about Body and Soul. The one who needed no last name: Aretha. Known as the Queen of Soul, Aretha was named the Greatest Singer of all Time by Rolling Stone. Twice. Aretha, who made famous “Natural Woman” could have performed one of her classics from her illustrious repertoire. It was the safe thing. But greatness dwells not in safety. "Legends are so because they walk straight into the dark forest of their vulnerability. " That which beckons dwells least where we want to travel. "The chalice shimmering in eternal light calls forth from unfamiliar darkness. The sword of the piercing prevents the fear of our shadows. The safe thing is rarely the right thing." The two opposite genres in a yin-like dance with the yang. Soul’s darkness, opera. Opera’s darkness, soul. Aretha determined the darkness is right. So, she shattered the night. This, her act of immortal light. "Risk is right." In Italian. Live to the whole world. Without rehearsal. She roared over all the genres. Arrived the Queen of Soul. Reenthroned. Now with an immortal crown: Queen of Music. Her kisses broke the silence, shattering ever false conception of artistry. The greatest triumph in cross-genre music history was better than any story we would have invented. That night, a king was rescued by the Queen. Vulnerability swallowed up power and fame. And with it, every ounce of oxygen in every home in the world – for a moment. Pavarotti’s illness met with an act of representative overcoming. Transcendence of Aretha Franklin: risk inverted to beauty. As I would not have believed it unless I witnessed it with my own eyes; so it is with justice. That existence of all injustices, now affronting justice everywhere, shall be publicaly brought before the gallows for its condemnation by a peer-judge. "So Prince Lev Nikolyaevich Myshkin, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, proclaims: “I believe the world will be saved by beauty.” " And so it was. The night when a queen saved a king. |
