Listen to the dying man

I'm definetly no country geek. I'm actually putting a lot of distance between me and that genre, as I can't even stand it. Once I was in Nashville, visiting the grand ole opry... jesus christ, what a sad picture of "musical humans". Actually I was in Nashville right one day after Cash had died. They didn't pay as much tribute to him as they would have to "Johnny little finger", the famous Grand ole opry star (who should be put away from the surface of this world once and for all).

One Hundred Million Angel Singing

It may take that many angels to provide us the same joy that Johnny Cash did in his long and fruitful life. Rather than talk about the entire CD which I think is uniformly great, I just want to make a remark or two about the title track " The Man Comes Around." Christians and Christian theologians have been wrestling with the book of Revelations for a long time and none of them have, to my mind, ever been able to make much sense of it; then along comes J.R. Cash and in three minutes makes the most compelling and accessible intepretation of that work I have ever heard. In the liner notes he says he never took longer to write a song than this one and it really shows. He takes a complicated subject and makes a powerful and lovely artistic statement accessible to every feeling person. No need to think it through very much. I think he probably was the greatest troubadour of the last century in our language - a troubador is a worthy man who communicated important spiritual messages to ordinary people in the form of music. I wonder if something important died with Johnny Cash, something irreplaceable.

Don't be put off by the slavering Christian...

I often enjoyed Cash for not only not caring if he didn't fit the "country and western paradigm" but he was also double hard and didn't care who knew. He seemed to be perfectly capable of transcending all boundaries, even to people like myself who normally can't stand country.