However I think you misunderstood my meaning slightly, probably because I wasn’t clear enough. I wasn’t saying fashion=beauty or talking exactly about fashion in the usual sense of the term. I meant the complicated way in which essential qualities find different shapes during different eras of time; its weirder than fashion, and gets expressed very much in popular arts. I was wrong to use the word “ugly” but what I mean is that a mode of expression that makes total sense in one era is just inexplicable in another. I remember as a kid seeing clips of people dancing the Charleston and being just utterly baffled that anyone could find this attractive–but it expressed something essential in its moment, albeit something minor that I could not recognize *in that form*. I agree that the cave drawings and Homer will always speak to people. But as much as I love Roxy Music, I don’t think they are on that sublime level or even close. When I showed the Remake, Remodel video to a young girl I know she said about Andrew McKay “He looks like an insect trying to have sex,” and frankly, I could see what she meant! But he didn’t look that way to me when I was her age.

Really I just think I wrote too much on this. I wanted to just post the videos but once I started writing, I couldn’t stop. Anyhow, thanks.

The effluvia that helped form it, the thousands of bright tiny pieces that form social life, won’t mean anything anymore. The expression may still be identifiable, but vaguely, like a rubbed-away face on an ancient painting or a bodily gesture recognizable as, say, one of aggression towards or desire for something no longer visible. What was beautiful is now ugly, what seemed profound is trite.

I understand the poetic feeling that life and the world as we see it now will disappear, “like tears in rain.” I realize you’re speaking to the poignant way popular music can weave bits of our lives into the gauze the songs pull across our face each time we hear them play.

But I don’t think truly beautiful music becomes ugly over time. I don’t think its impact fades. It may go out of fashion for a while, but fashion has nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with trying to assert power. The guillotine was a popular lady’s brooch in post-revolutionary France.

The beautiful ( not the ‘beauty’ of fashion and trends) is braided with endurance and survival.

The cave drawings at Lascaux thrill us. We identify with the happiness or loneliness in a bird’s song, and so did Homer. We’re made of music, the gurgling of blood in veins and arteries, the beat of the heart, the cadence of our cerebrospinal fluid — hitting every interval, rhythm and pitch. The way we cry out when making love. We ARE like birds, and music is part of us.

I sing to you now, in the music of words. It doesn’t fade.