Do you believe in Magic?

But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll

What a defensive line! And rightly so!

Is the young girl in the song really freed? Or does she just experiences a temporary escapism via a pop song?

I think she is freed. I would say it is more what Tom is talking about -- "realising where you are is beautiful" -- than any notion of escapism.

Do we still believe that a great song can set us free?

I do.

And if so, does that mean that lifetime of 'bad' song can imprison us?

Definitely. I think a lot of people who have been somewhere where a song they hate has been imposed on them has probably felt imprisoned to a certain extent.

So, er, yeah.

Yesterday evening I got to hear the new Broadcast album 'haha sound' & while it didn't exactly change my life it was so extraordinarily good that it did make me as happy as a loon for quite a while, a feeling which has continued today during further plays. Magic.

(Would insert a link, but either their site or my ISP are up the creek.) There are 2 CD versions, one limited with a hardbound book cover.(?)

From what does one want to free oneself?

Is it plausible that one could be freed from it?

Does it even exist?

Is freedom really the issue, or something else?

To answer the Pinefox, I suppose it's about being freed from a kind of teenage boredom and not having a lovely lovely girlfriend. For the listener, not the character in the song. She wants to be freed from oppressive parents who won't let her go out with the listener, that is, me.

You can see that the Felt video has done wonders for my powers of recall.

Just watched all of it. The bass player is popular because he moves around a bit, this being enough to make him visually more stimulating than Lawrence, who can only do play guitar, hold mic & (once) scratch leg.

The teenager could be freed by being the first person in history to die of boredom!

What a beautiful question. I side with the latter, I guess. Like Pinefox says, is freedom really the issue? I don't think it is; I think happiness is, and we don't necessarily need to be as free as people might 'want' to be in order to be happy. I'm always slightly confused by friends of mine who've needed to go to Nepal or Brazil to "find themselves", when I found myself wandering down the country lanes at the back of Teignmouth.

Let's not forget Madonna's "Only when I'm dancing can I feel this free."

I think Southall is right: happiness, not freedom, is the issue. But we could get a lot more specific. Probably there are many kinds of happiness. Contentment, for one, does not seem to be what the Nipper is after. He is interested here in something that might be called 'transcendence'.

So does transcendence exist? Presumably yes, though the same kinds of questions could be raised about it as the ones I tried to raise about 'freedom'.

Believing in magic in the Nipper's sense seems to me to have nothing to do with believing in God. So his last question seems easily answered in the negative.

The Nipper says something else that stimulates: can we be imprisoned by bad songs? This is quite a knotty question. Presumably some of the prisoners are happy. So is their happiness devalued, or inauthentic? Who is to say so? There is a Brave New World dimension to the utilitarian / happiness issue. From some POV, happiness might not be such a value after all. Truth, or freedom, might be reckoned better values.

It seems vaguely ironic to think of the Lovin' Spoonful rescuing anyone from a lifetime of bad songs. But then, have I ever really heard, or listened to, the band?

Pixies tribute band.

I can hear the great vocal delivery already.

Tim, that's the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me - TRUE FACT.

It is better than this thread ever led me to hope.

Earlier he played 'King of Pain' because it goes: 'There's a little black spot on the sun today'.

I put a CD into this computer, holding many files, to add to the computer. And the computer started what it called a 'Wizard' (hey - Magic!) to take the photos on board. The photos all flashed past, one by one, 715 of them, as they were beamed up. Many of them had YOU in them! Some of you looked good. There was a moment when Carsmile came by that really touched my heart. Others had places that I like, looking great, in snow, in rain, in sun, and so on.

I cannot share the pictures with you, here, but watching them go by, almost, if you like, as if I was watching (in truth, a wee fraction of) my life flashing by as it ended, was a MAGIC EXPERIENCE.