Matt Marchese writes:

> "Bittersweet Symphony" is the "Dust in the Wind" of the 90s.

<growl>

"Bittersweet Symphony." This kind of thing makes me cringe (first) and reach for the lead pipe (second). They bloody well ought to be calling this the "Saccharine Symphony," except that it overlooks the one consideration that saccharine won't make enough of a sticky mess when it's all over. What we really need is an artificial sweetener that can rival sugar for making a mess.

Bittersweet is mutually exclusive of pretentious. Naming anything a symphony, unless you are a classical composer, is the bloody definition of pretentious. It's all prepackaged, and God only knows we wouldn't dare prepackage anything with real fucking sugar. Or real fucking pain.

Bittersweet hurts. "Bittersweet Symphony" is commercializing other people's pain. You can't get any farther from feeling real pain than to take other people's money under the pretense of relieving their pain. Not that anyone who would actually fall for this scam is capable of dealing with real pain in any case. And you certainly can't get any farther from feeling real pain than by sucking up to other people's pain in hopes that it will obliterate your own.

There's no bitterness in bittersweet anyway. Bittersweet is for chocolate. It's goddam candy; it's goddam pretense of pain. The operative feeling word that these people couldn't find if it were oozing out of every pore on their bodies is "sad." See how easy that is? How fucking direct? Bittersweet is nothing but window-dressing; it's prettying up your pain instead of feeling it. Real bitterness has an equal component of rage. Tell me that there's anything like fucking RAGE in "Bittersweet Symphony."

You want to know what bitterness is? Go listen to Shostakovich. Try the 8th symphony, in which he batters you with violence and anguish for 45 minutes, then lets you feel a glimmer of hope, and finally crushes that hope with a tank. Try the second piano trio, which ends with Jews being forced to dance on their graves before being shot. Try the 9th symphony, which was to be a grand celebration of Russia's victory over Germany. The finale is so frantically, desparately light that the only appropriate description is "vapid." At the end you can hear Shostakovich step out into the street behind a military parade, and give it the "finger in a pocket." That was his celebration, laid on the line in concert for an audience of Stalin and his generals. That's fucking bitterness. Late in his life he said that most of his symphonies were tombstones. You don't get bittersweet over a tombstone.

"Bittersweet Symphony." Sadness without the calories. I hope it comes in a pretty, pink celophane wrapper.