So, I'm again about 4 books back on keeping up with this thing. In fact, I completed Murmur by J. Niimi before the last couple of bookson this list. What to say about this book... it is a book about the R.E.M. album written by a University of Chicago student. I could emphasize this with a lot of "No, really. REALLY"'s after some of those nouns, but it'd probably be easier to just quote a paragraph from the book (incidentally, about a Wire song) to make the point:
The second half of each chorus ("Squared to it/ Faced to it/ It was not there") seems to imply that the true nature of the thing to which the song continually alludes was eventually uncovered, but that its uncovering was stillborn for the fact that it could still be only communicated through the Leviathan of psuedo-bureau-speak. "It" was never to be revealed, the triumph of its discovery evaporated into clouds of lingua franca, a mutual conspiracy necessary for each party's continued sustenance. Wire turns the expected climax of the chorus into a meditative anticlimax.So if you'd like to read an entire book like that (and I'm not coming down on either side, just noting that the entire book rolls this way), then get to it.
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