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Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

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Tag: popular music

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The Andrews Sisters in uniform

Rum and Coca, the Congo and Brazil

February 13, 2019 by Walter Cummins

How 1940s American pop songs framed the world beyond the United States as exotic playgrounds or lands of folly and belittled non-Europeans. The songs discussed: “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” “The Coffee Song,” “The Maharajah of Madagor,” “Managua, Nicaragua,” and “Rum and Coca Cola.”

Categories: ZiR • Tags: colonialism, Donald Trump, international relations, neo-colonialism, popular music, songs

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Wilfred Owen's mother, pictured center with her family

Dylan Ramona Other Poets Soul

April 10, 2018 by William Eaton

By William Eaton This appreciation of one of Bob Dylan’s love songs, “Ramona,” leverages its lyrics to make three basic observations about poetry and to call attention, to include in the endnotes, to several poems by other writers. While not all of these comments are positive, in general this short essay is watered with a love of poetry.   1 your magnetic movements still capture the minutes I’m in Many, many poems can be valued for the fact that—in the […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bob Dylan, empathy, love, mortality, poetry, popular music

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Bob Dylan. Photograph: Jan Persson/Redferns - cropped for Zeteo cover, full image inside

As Dylan Went Out One Morning

December 11, 2017 by William Eaton

By Oriana Schällibaum and Marcel Grissmer As I went out one morning may strike the casual listener as one of the more insipid songs Bob Dylan ever wrote. Recorded for the 1967 John Wesley Harding album it has never been very important to Dylan; he recorded the song in only five takes and, to date, has performed it in concert only once (in 1974).[1] Yet, “As I went out one morning”—apart from being a joy to listen to—is worth a […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, celebrity, literary theory, popular music, The Bible

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Dylan: “Gotta Serve Somebody”

November 28, 2016 by William Eaton

You may be an ambassador to England or FranceYou may like to gamble, you might like to danceYou may be the heavyweight champion of the worldYou may be a socialite with a long string of pearls But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeedYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyWell, it may be the devil or it may be the LordBut you’re gonna have to serve somebody — Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” 1979   Bob Dylan, who first achieved […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, Christianity, Jesus, popular music, The Bible

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eiffel tower flashing at night, blue with white lights

Dylan, Nobel, Paris, Chimes Flashing

October 19, 2016 by William Eaton

Le monde s’étire s’allonge et se retire comme un accordéon qu’une main sadique tourmente The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion tortured by a sadic hand Dans les déchirures du ciel, les locomotives en furie In the rips in the sky insane locomotives S’enfuient Take flight Et dans les trous, In the gaps Les roues vertigineuses les bouches les voix Whirling wheels mouths voices Et les chiens du malheur qui aboient à nos trousses And the dogs […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Blaise Cendrars, Bob Dylan, Clintons, French, John Donne, Paris, poetics, poetry, popular music, songs, translation

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Exhibition image for Jewface, Yiddish Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research - detail from larger image

Jewface: Comic Songs, Vaudeville Stereotypes

June 14, 2016 by William Eaton

Mock Yiddish and Ethnic Parody in the Vaudeville Melting-Pot     While weary critiques of Blackface, Yellowface and Redface have become almost a Halloween tradition in their own right, “Jewface” in popular music has largely been forgotten.[1]). However, this past spring, the Center for Jewish History in New York City hosted an exhibit by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research: “Jewface: ‘Yiddish’ Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley.” I quote from the exhibition’s website: With his fake beard, putty nose, […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: comedy, Irving Berlin, Jews, popular music, stereotypes, vaudeville

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Berlinde De Bruyckere, No Life Lost II, Installation view, Hauser & Wirth, 2016, photo by Mirjam Devriendt

De Bruyckere, Ibsen, Gatsby, Graceland

March 31, 2016 by William Eaton

Or, Dying, “What does it feel like?”   First approach Torvald Helmer: Oh, you think and talk like a heedless child. Nora, his wife: Maybe. But you neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over—and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you—when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Adorno, aporia, art, Belgium, Berlinde De Bruyckere, death, dying, Gatsby, Ibsen, Jean-François Lyotard, juxtaposition, Paul Simon, popular music, reverie, sculpture

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Beyoncé

Does Feminism Need Beyoncé?

March 8, 2016 by William Eaton

By Emily Tobey   Ever since the word feminism first appeared in public discourse in the late 1800’s, it has stimulated debate and disagreement about its meaning and purpose. The basic definition of feminism is the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality with men. The fundamental tenor of this definition frequently gets lost, however, amidst conflicting views, myths and misconceptions. Nonetheless, from the suffrage movement through the fight for equal pay and reproductive […]

Categories: Article • Tags: African-Americans, Beyonce, celebrity, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, feminism, gender, Jay-Z, Ms. Magazine, music, popular music, women

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“A phrase in connection first with she”

August 24, 2014 by William Eaton

  I have long wanted to write in praise of the Bob Dylan song “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word,” a song that Dylan has apparently never recorded, but that Joan Baez has been performing since 1965. In a documentary about Dylan, Baez is shown saying that she was with Dylan when he first heard her recording of the song on the radio. She says that he said, “Hey, that’s a great song!”, apparently having forgotten that he had written […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bob Dylan, dialogue, isolation, love, Martin Scorsese, narrative, philosophy of language, poetry, popular music, relationships, songs

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Welcome to Zeteo, since 2012

Zeteo is for people who are readers, lookers, listeners, thinkers. Increasingly we are interested in short texts that call attention to other texts, works of art or music that deserve more attention than they are getting. And we are interested similarly in historical phenomena, ignored aspects of contemporary life, . . . We look forward to hearing about your ideas, your reading, what you’ve seen . . .

  • Aaron Botwick
    • Reviving Shylock
  • Adrian Wittenberg
    • Identity, Illness, Guillain-Barre
  • Ana Maria Caballero
    • In Favor of Fantasy
  • claratimsit
    • THE VIRUS, MEXICO, POVERTY, DEATH
  • danielpage49
    • Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Moss
  • Daniel Taub
    • The Chosen Comedians
  • Ed Mooney
    • In Poetry Pre-Linguistic?
  • Emily Sosolik
    • Spiritualism, Summerland, Slavery in the Afterlife
  • fritztucker
    • Look Rich or Go Bankrupt Trying
  • Alexia Raynal
    • Narcissism in children
  • Jennifer Dean
    • Storytelling
  • John Sumser
    • Cartier-Bresson, Senior, Trump (Gaps)
  • Martin Green
    • Foreign Meddling, President’s Ego: World War I
  • Steven A. Burr
    • Reading, Violence, Solidarity
  • sjzeteo2015
    • Reading a poem/A poet reading
  • stewchef
    • Culinary Star Wars
  • Walter Cummins
    • Rum and Coca, the Congo and Brazil
  • William Eaton
    • Sue Tilley after Lucian Freud (Art as Conversation)

Recent Posts

  • Sue Tilley after Lucian Freud (Art as Conversation)
  • In Poetry Pre-Linguistic?
  • THE VIRUS, MEXICO, POVERTY, DEATH
  • Cy Twombly, Charles White — Art & the Unspeakable
  • Valéry, Landscapes, the Whole Human

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