LLOSA AND THE ZIETGEIST

An insightful comment on youth culture by Nobel laureate in literature; Mario Vargas LLosa:

"Fashionable bands and singers attract huge crowds to their concerts, which, like the Dionysian festivals that celebrated irrationality in ancient Greece, are collective ceremonies of excess and catharsis, worshipping instinct, passion and unreason. The same can be said of the packed electronic music parties, raves, where people dance in the darkness, listen to trance-inducing music and get high on ecstasy. It is not too far-fetched to compare these celebrations to the great religious popular festivals of old. We find in secular form, a religious spirit that, in keeping with the spirit of the age, has replaced the liturgy and catechisms of traditional religions with these displays of musical mysticism where, to the rhythm of raw voices and instruments, both amplified to an inaudible level, individuals are no longer individuals; they become a mass, and unwittingly return to the primitive times of magic and the tribe."

To which the millennial reply's in a bored voice: "whatever!"