Originally, rock and roll was an African-American term to describe the mystery dance, making out, horizontal dancing, the act of love – you get the drift. Then in the 1950s it became the name for the most gloriously life-affirming, rebellious, carefree and romantic of popular music idioms. How wretched a thing it is to see this lovely, evocative verb prostituted to the cause of hype and computer industry blather. Microsoft Products Rock With Intel’s Pentium II With MMX Technology, we read yesterday. Truly our culture has become debased almost to the point where we are indistinguishable from the Babylonians, the Romans, or the Byzantines, before the collapses of their relative civilizations. If some flack in Redmond – almost certainly a 26 year old with a humanities degree or two from an Ivy League university – thinks there is some appropriate link between the joy of love making, and/or the ultimate expression of the life force found in Elvis Presley’s early Sun sessions, and the fact that Office 97 may open a spreadsheet a tad faster on a new overpriced computer, then for goodness’ sake someone signal the beings in the UFO behind the comet to wipe out all life on our planet immediately. á
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