Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two—or twenty-three—years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What ”Astral Weeks” deals in are not facts but truths. ”Astral Weeks”, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
— Lester Bangs (One of my favorite recordings of all time. Post via: wolfandfox, langer, thenewinquiry & tniarchive)
Posted 2 years ago 84 notes 1,561 plays
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Fell in love with this song. It’s such an uplifting song, that it makes me sad.
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A favorite record.
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my favorites as well
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