THE APOLLONIANtheapollonian.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2.3.6.pdfinto the anguish which is central to the workings and artifice of rock music itself, which found its baroque high

THE APOLLONIAN A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (Online, Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed)

Vol. 2, Issue 3 (December 2015) || ISSN 2393-9001

Chief Editor: Girindra Narayan Roy

Editors: Subashish Bhattacharjee & Saikat Guha

Research Article:

All the Din and the Quietness Within: Existentialism

in Godot and The Rock Opera

Soham Ganguly

Find this and other research articles at: http://theapollonian.in/

The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 46

All the Din and the Quietness Within: Existentialism

in Godot and The Rock Opera

Soham Ganguly

University of Calcutta, India

Having found its roots in the traditions of psychedelic rock music, and further

influenced by the advent of avant-garde movements, the rock opera was spawned of

intrinsically reactionary acerbities latent within what passed as the rampant and

bourgeoning counter-culture, not merely of its time but also in consequent decades.

It was, if such may be said of it, the countercultural equivalent of the lofty

grandiloquence in the devices and depictions of a full-scale opera.

The selfsame void which was felt in the post World War II era percolated

into the odious machinations of the Cold War and the looming threat of a worldwide

debacle of human civilization as well as the human individual was mirrored in the

music stemming from the late 1950s onwards. It displaced, by far, the Classical and

its pertinent forms with a major zeitgeist transition in sprit as well as form.

The Wall by the progressive band Pink Floyd exhibits singular changes which

the ethos of the rock opera underwent over time with its acclaimed nascence far back

in the likes of Tommy and Quadrophenia by the Who and its potential pinnacle in the

stentorian The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis.

Indeed the notion that permeates Floyd’s concept album is repeated amply in

other works of progressive rock as well tracing its origins in its heyday back in the

1960s.Existentialism, which seeped into Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in the backdrop

of its times and concerns, ramified heavily into all art forms, spreading its tentacles

into the anguish which is central to the workings and artifice of rock music itself,

which found its baroque high water- mark in the execution of the progressive rock

opera and allied pieces of music.

The play right at its very outset harbours the resonance of a shattered, strife-

torn world leading to the wasted, spiritually and aesthetically arid setting of – “A


country road. A tree. Evening” (Beckett, n.p.). There is no solace or comfort. The

hopelessness of it recalls Pink’s rancorous lament –

Daddy’s flown across the ocean

Leaving just a memory […]

Daddy what else did you leave for me?

Daddy, what’d’ja leave behind for me?

—Floyd, “Another Brick”

The answer is latent in the question itself, and like Pink, the characters in the play

don’t find even a shred of comfort to turn to. The landscape in which Vladimir and

Estragon commence their action may be likened to the desert of fatuous hopes which

but remain after the inestimable cataclysms wrought by the war. Utter haplessness

prevails in their lives from the very initiatory part of the play. Tommy also begins

his life having never known a father – “Captain Walker/Didn’t come home/His

unborn child,/Will never know him/Believe him missing/ With a number of men”

(The Who, “Captain Walker”). The property of Tommy and Pink finding themselves

fatherless is like the absence of any higher moral guardianship which is typically

thought of as streaming from a paternal figure, embedded in the absence of Godot. It

may also be thought of as the consequence of the patriarchal world model leading to

the inevitable war. As a result, both Pink and Tommy are brought up by either their

mothers or someone more compassionate than coarse, soldierly fathers. Vladimir

functions as the caring character in his tenderness towards Estragon. The stage

though bare to the audience boasts, as Estragon states, of a ditch where he spends

the night. Therefore, the terrible prospects of the characters are insinuated directly

from the outset, one of great moral and physical torment.

They are ridden by a profound nostalgia, even in the face of their bane, since

along the course of existence, nostalgia persists as the shadow of memory,

something less yet more than memory, which can be looked back to. Vladimir

opines:

VLADIMIR: Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first.

We were respectable in those days. Now it’s too late. They wouldn’t even let

us up. […]

ESTRAGON: (angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!”

—Beckett, n.p.


They collectively feel that something is inherently amiss in the way of the universe.

This anomaly is mirrored in “There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the

faults of his feet” (Beckett, n.p.). They are stranded not only in the landscape, but

cut-off from belonging to any system. They are keenly conscious of not fitting

anywhere, leading them to the scruples about whether Godot would care to meet

them and not, after consulting his devices. It is true that the play exhibits little sense

of chronological progression in the conventional sense and the action surfaces in

vacuous patches of sense impressions much like what Jean Paul Sartre expounds in

his magnum opus Being and Nothingness. Therefore the play only loosely follows a

sense of semi-comatose stagnation which in itself is the quandary characteristic of

existential philosophy.

Likewise, Pink displays in his transition from phase to phase a brief,

unremarkable, inquisitive childhood interspersed with and eventually entirely

supplanted by a condition deeply like that of Vladimir and Estragon, hearkening

back to the band’s earlier work-“We are just two lost souls swimming in a

fishbowl/Year after year/Running over the same old ground/Of how we found/The

same old fears” (Floyd, “Wish You Were Here”). Likewise, the characters hover

around in the same orbit, both in speech and in action, but the fishbowl of existence

walls them in, leaving them no choice. It is thoroughly exhibited when at the end the

play they once again try to hang themselves like they did at the beginning.

Also in an earlier album Ummagumma, the track, “Sisyphus” reflects the same

homogeneity with Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. The toilsome days of the characters

past to no avail just like Pink and Tommy, and constitute a knot of suffering. They

all roll the proverbial rock of Sisyphus all the way up the hill , only to watch it

trundle down again. This agglomeration consummately erupts in their rock opera

much in the fashion that Lucky breaks into unmitigated sentience in his speech, best

explained by – “If they say, a single one of the atoms which constitute the universe

were annihilated *…] there would result a catastrophe which would extend to the

entire universe […] This metaphor can be of use to us here. The For-Itself is like a

tiny nihilation which has its origin at the heart of Being; and this nihilation is

sufficient to cause a total upheaval to happen to the In-Itself. This upheaval is the

world” (Sartre, n.p.). This crisis comes for Pink when he finally finds nothing of any

avail in combating his situation, observed at the end of “Comfortably Numb” in the

second guitar solo. In fact, Lucky’s speech, in its steady ascent in strides ranging

from the erudite to the pejorative, fervent and furious, is analogous to the guitar solo

from its opening trudge, to the drawn out middle passages embodying the “waste


and pine” (Beckett, n.p.), of his speech and concluding in the unendurable crescendo

where the other characters struggle to make him stop, the last bit forming a sort of

fadeaway:

*…]

*…]

*…]

—Floyd, The Wall

This turmoil may be explained to be- “Roger Waters’ existential pessimism and

historical angst became the pillars of the band’s latter-day melodramas, such as The

Wall (1979). These monoliths of electronic and acoustic sounds, coupled with

psychoanalytical lyrics, indulge in a funereal pomp that approaches the forms of the

requiem and the oratorio” (Scaruff, n.p.).

But Lucky’s speech epitomises all the activity that is ever to come for them.

But except that the characters in the play have little choice but to wait. They seem

utterly and consummately disoriented with reality itself. Consequently the

memories which one would normally be supposed to retain fade behind a haze in

which they fail to make out one thing from another and it all appears to flatten out

undulatingly-

ESTRAGON:

We came here yesterday.

VLADIMIR:


Ah no, there you’re mistaken.

ESTRAGON:

What did we do yesterday?

VLADIMIR:

What did we do yesterday?

—Beckett, n.p.

They come incoherently round to a consequent vision, an inference which various

strands of logical living and arguments fail to spare them as they writhe and

struggle in the net which smothers them-

VLADIMIR:

Nothing you can do about it.

ESTRAGON:

No use struggling.

VLADIMIR:

One is what one is.

ESTRAGON:

No use wriggling.

VLADIMIR:

The essential doesn’t change.

ESTRAGON:

Nothing to be done *…]

A terrible cry

—Beckett, n.p.

The cry which prevails and makes its aural presence substantial from off stage forms

a homogeneous premise, likewise to the end of “In the Flesh” (Floyd). The

implication of the cry is indeterminate and leads to it straddling the realms of

anguish, dismay and eventual resignation.

Vladimir and Estragon are a pair of hapless tramps who find it an uphill task

to come to terms as well as make their way around the quagmires of temporal

principles which may or may not be the laws of their essential situation. They,


despite all platitudes, sink to the proportion of what characterizes the natural

protagonist of the rock operatic mode- “And Tommy doesn’t know what day it is./

He doesn’t know who Jesus was/ Or what praying is” (The Who, “Christmas”).

The utter haplessness of the protagonist of a rock opera veritably mirrors the

ebb and flow of Fortune as it finds Vladimir and Estragon, along with their

realisation of how matters essentially stand leading inevitably to the plaintive

exclamation: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes. Nobody goes” (Beckett, n.p.).

The scheme of things change roughly at around the middle of the album for

both Pink and Tommy. Just as the rendezvous with Lucky and Pozzo unclasps to

the characters whole vistas of wisdom about the universe. What they learn from

Lucky at such a cataclysmic cost is in some ways a post-modern intermingling of

variegated, extremely ill assorted tropes bordering upon the irascibility of the

universe where the overarching ontological order may be nothing short of pure

randomness. This revelation lies at the heart of what the play seeks to explore and its

agent, Lucky, never really leaves the stage after his first appearance in Act One,

considering that Act Two is not without Lucky’s hat at the same place, which, as

Pozzo mentioned, facilitates Lucky’s thinking.

Inherent absurdity is further emphasised by the sordid song crooned by

Vladimir rather blithely at the opening of the second Act, which in itself implies the

inescapable oppression of state apparatuses upon the transgressing individual –

A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread.

Then cook up with a ladle

And beat him till he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running

And dug the dog a tomb

—Beckett, n.p.

they go on to enact an elaborate farce concerning the precarious matter of happiness

under the circumstances –

VLADIMIR:

Say you are, even if it's not true.

ESTRAGON:


What am I to say?

VLADIMIR:

Say, I am happy.

ESTRAGON:

I am happy *…]

ESTRAGON:

We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are

happy?

VLADIMIR:

Wait for Godot.

—Beckett, n.p.

Pink enquires and is told –“ Mother do you think they'll like this song? / *…] She

won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing. /Mama will keep baby cozy and warm”

(Floyd, “Mother”). The song emphasises how Pink, in an existence where he fails to

make much sense of anything at all, is controlled and conditioned by his mother in

such ways which may lead him to worldly contentment. Vladimir, in this portion,

likewise acts as a parent and strives to bring his friend back into the quotidian

course of things which comprise life, and find joy in it.

In a way here, Vladimir functions as a bit of a guardian to his friend,

displaying a tender, maternal side to his character, with its attendant balmy

endeavours to placate the ire of his long-suffering friend which seethes in buried

reticence. It is a semblance of happiness which alone can sustain them in that desert

all around them and in the “heart of brothers” (Eliot, n.p.). The only reward that

their wait ever fetches them is the solace of meeting Pozzo, who resembles Tommy’s

vision –

He's dressed in a silver sparkled

Glittering gown

And his golden beard flows

Nearly down to the ground

— The Who, “Journey”

Tommy’s meeting with a sort of angelic figure even in his reverie is on all accounts

as close as he ever got to meeting someone exalted or godlike in the archetype of


Christian dogma, much in the way Pozzo towers over the characters in the play,

completely self-assured in his supremacy and refusing to let go of it even in his

blindness.

The process of waiting seems to grow upon them until they weary of it and

age. They are tired of waiting, but must wait in order not to suffer. Caught in this

limbo, what is left to them is mankind’s own predilection, to waste and pine. A

disembodied voice reasons accordingly with Pink –

Hey you, out there in the cold

Getting lonely, getting old

Can you feel me? *…]

No matter how he tried,

He could not break free.

And the worms ate into his brain

— Floyd, Hey You

It also follows that the characters appear to wait for what alone is available to them,

and death itself can render them liberated from the toils of their mortal coil. Pink

finds himself helplessly acting accordingly –

Sitting in a bunker here behind my wall

Waiting for the worms to come.

In perfect isolation here behind my wall

Waiting for the worms to come.

— Floyd, Waiting

Vladimir and Estragon try to work their way around the void which they feel deep

within their hearts. But eventually they are left to grapple with it and negotiate in

such ways as they may. This comes in a variety of ways and often in a culmination of

cumulative epiphanies. This comes also to Pink –

What shall we use

To fill the empty spaces

Where we used to talk?

How shall I fill

The final places?

How should I complete the wall

— Floyd, Empty Spaces


Fantasies, whims, and delusions often fill the lengths of their wakeful lives. For

instance Vladimir often tries to offer whatever solace lies in conversation via trifles,

unassorted cheap jokes, and silly songs. Their forceful exertions at being happy may

be likened to tranquillity which is artificially induced or extraneous to them. They

gambol around in a puerile fashion and even try to lose themselves in playing at

hanging from a tree, or contemplating it. They are tired of the world to the point

where the suggestion of hanging themselves appears to be something interesting.

Pink reaches it too – Goodbye, all you people, / There's nothing you can say/ To

make me change my mind (Floyd, “Goodbye”).

Likewise, sandwiched in between Pink’s ordeal as he traverses the course of

the album, is a fatuous celebration on a national scale, snidely suggestive of its

hollowness and fallacy, although consisting of many voices indicating the public

mind – “Bring the boys back home” (Floyd, “Bring”). Tommy, on the other hand,

takes recourse in his severe state of being blind and deaf, to games of pinball- “That

deaf dumb and blind kid,/ Sure play a mean pinball!” (The Who, “Pinball”).

He is also subjected to the most humiliating sport of apparent hide and seek,

but really only suffering and being bullied by his stronger cousin Kevin-

Do you know how to play hide-and-seek?

To find me it would take you a week,

But tied to that chair

You won't go anywhere

—The Who, “Kevin”

It is noteworthy that Pozzo travels from light to darkness, from mirth to grief, from

plenitude to incompletion, and entirely unwholesome state. Tommy, on the other

hand, has a curious movement contrary to this bathos. He soars from being an object

of pity lacking sentience in the worldly sense to actually founding a camp offering

such respite as he and his uncle could conceive of from the misery of existence –

“Welcome to the Camp,I guess you all know why we're here./ My name is Tommy

/And I became aware this year” (The Who, “We’re Not”).

Lucky’s utter servitude to his master necessarily impedes any attempt he

might have made to constitute an individual. A poor excuse for a man, he remains

subservient even at the end despite the fall in stature of his master and is

peremptorily treated to the whip even at the end. He too, like Tommy, becomes

aware of the universe at a point of time. Through him, the characters realise the

futility even of freedom –“I’m free-I’m free/And freedom tastes of reality” (The Who,


“I’m Free”). This is what Pink finds as well – “But it was only fantasy./ […] No

matter how he tried, he could not break free” (Floyd, “Hey You”). Thus collectively,

rock operas brought about an “almost Brechtian conception of theatre” (Macan,

n.p.).

It is also said that “Pink Floyd's Animals and (especially) The Wall rather

poignantly symbolize the end of progressive rock's "classic" period precisely because

of the emphasis on pessimism, bitterness, and cynicism” (Macan, n.p.). Despite the

change in attitude, the strain of hopelessness not only remains but intensifies, only to

be consolidated by Pozzo’s banal disintegration. He is left in the difficult state that

Tommy started out in. – “Deaf, dumb and blind boy/ He's in a quiet vibration land”

(The Who, “Journey”).

Remembrance and forgetfulness become a winding game in a central pattern

in the play. Vladimir, Estragon, and Pozzo all struggle and often fail, hinting that

memory and dream are to them of nearly equal worth. Likewise, the protagonist of

Quadrophenia warbles-

I've had enough of living

I've had enough of dying […]

I've had enough of childhood

I've had enough of graves

— The Who, “I’ve Had Enough”

The ambiguity continues with – “Why didn't I ever say what I mean?/There's a story

that the grass is so green,/What did I see?/Where have I been?” (The Who, “Sea and

Sand”). The same applies to the characters in the play –

VLADIMIR:

The tree, look at the tree.

Estragon looks at the tree.

ESTRAGON:

Was is not there yesterday?

VLADIMIR:

Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember? […]

ESTRAGON:

You dreamt it.


VLADIMIR:

Is it possible you've forgotten already?

ESTRAGON:

That's the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never

Forget.

—Beckett, n.p.

These lines are reminiscent of Pink’s deep epiphany when he realises – “I cannot put

my finger on it now./ The child is grown./ The dream is gone” (Floyd, “Comfortably

Numb”). What the characters forget is rendered irredeemable. Agony, however,

lingers with them even though they would much rather forget it. They recount

sufferings even though they would much rather not. Vladimir fails to forget his

excretory issues and leaves his fly open while Estragon recapitulates every horror in

minute details such as trenches, muck – heaps, and Lucky’s kick to the shin. It is

rather in line with Schopenhauer’s argument about the essential futility of existence

considering that it has little pleasure to offer and happiness is never felt as fully or

readily as grief or pain, which is summarily felt in fullest measure and retained even

to the point of being indelible. It also smacks of the Descartesian dream argument,

wherein all existence might only be a prolonged dream and the sense of time is

blurred.

Nowhere does Pozzo assume the mantle of power and authority and become

a veritable embodiment of it as he does when he says:

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to

weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He

laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier

than its predecessors. *…] Let us not speak well of it either. *…] Let us not

speak of it at all.

—Beckett, n.p.

He goes on to add, regarding Lucky: “But for him all my thoughts, all my feelings,

would have been of common things” (ibid).

It is unclear whether Pozzo, considering his habits and meticulous

consumption of victuals and unwavering control over Lucky, would have been

displeased to have confined his thoughts only to common things. He might as well

be regretful, in a corporeal sense that people have any feelings at all, which serve

only to complicate matters. Pink, accordingly, has the ignominious label of a feeling


creature to grapple with, thrust upon him by the judge –“The prisoner who now

stands before you/ Was caught red-handed showing feelings/ Showing feelings of an

almost human nature” (Floyd, “Trial”). Humanity is nullified – “The bleeding hearts

and artists /Make their stand” (Floyd, “Outside”).

The mellifluous strains of a church choir which attend the concluding song of

the album symbolise the inescapability from the question of religion and the

presence or absence of God even in the face of death under dolorous circumstances.

The album merely touches upon the concern expressed for Tommy – “How can he

be saved/From the eternal grave?” (The Who, “Christmas”). Even in the stolid drear

of their situation Vladimir asks if his friend has read the Bible. Issues of belief are

inherently connected –

ESTRAGON:

Who believes him?

VLADIMIR:

Everybody. It's the only version they know.

ESTRAGON:

People are bloody ignorant apes.

—Beckett, n.p.

They are therefore compelled to judge their own position with respect to God, and at

best only feel uncared for. This is a common burden of thought in the ethos of the

rock opera, considering that:

Protests against organized religion—and much more specifically, the

Anglican Church, with which many of the middle-class and upper-middle-

class English musicians were intimately familiar—were also common *…]

Denominational Christianity is criticized for its glorification of ritual over

meaningful experience, its dedication to a rigid hierarchical order at the

expense of equality and egalitarianism before God, and its perceived

intolerance in terms of doctrinal matters *…+ reality itself was seen as relative

and open to individual interpretation, not as absolute and revealed through

divinely inspired canon.

—Macan, n.p.

Towards the end of the play, Vladimir is finally consumed by an enquiry into

the nature of things and of his own being:


Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow,

when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? *…] But in all that what

truth will there be? *…] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the

hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow

old. The air is full of our cries *…] of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping,

he knows nothing, let him sleep on.

—Beckett, n.p.

The concern and qualm that abruptly assails Vladimir and nearly tears him apart is

mirrored adequately in –

Can you see the real me preacher?

Can you see the real me doctor?

Can you see the real me mother?

Can you see the real me me me me me me?

— The Who, Real Me

Thus, the common vein of the existential question rankles the play as well as two

important rock operas which were singular and important in forging a genre,

inquiring into the manifold facets of the Self and all that is extraneous to it. This in

turn culminated in Floyd’s work, epitomising the profound angst which drives one

of the foremost dramatic works of its age and times to come. The very foundations of

the rock opera invert the equation that the musical and creative apparatus bears to

the milieu of its subject, for, while a classical opera may be seen to be apposite to the

implications of its content, a rock opera serves only to unravel the minutiae of the

manifold contradictions at the very heart of life itself. On that selfsame note, one

may reminisce how Vladimir and Estragon plod on through the play’s action,

perpetually purposeless and completely “for reasons unknown”(Beckett, n.p.).

WORKS CITED:

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. 1954. New York:

Grove, 2005. Print.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays. 1955. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Print.

Eliot, T. S. "Choruses From The Rock." Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Print.


Floyd, Pink. “Another Brick in the Wall”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsreyr&j1Hbe>

---. “Comfortably Numb”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjVtrGpCSig&feature=youtu.be>

---. “Empty Spaces”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnaNu4o91cI>

---. “Hey You”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS6aoz0xiBg>

---. “Mother.” YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw_QJ8hliIc>

---. “Outside the Wall”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH9J2_7AzoU>

---. “Sisyphus”. YouTube. 4 Dec. 2013

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61X3dQ2-nwc>

---. “Waiting for the Worms.” YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUneAyAO6cg>

---. “Wish You Were Here.” YouTube, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=217JOBWTolg>

Macan, Edward. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture.

New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

Sartre, Jean. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York:

Philosophical Library, 1956. Print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms,. Ed. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth,

Eng.: Penguin, 1970. Print.

Who, The. “Amazing Journey”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9U-7GdvuEc>

---. “Captain Walker”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdusyjiuvY>

---. “Christmas”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.


< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BWiYJ3yykw >

---. “Cousin Kevin”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xoB96gVFjk>

---. “I’m Free”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRD_gIoVOmY>

---. “I’ve Had Enough”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72dhRJnZHTI>

---. “Pinball Wizard”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AKbUm8GrbM>

---. “The Real Me”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohhMx9EdNc>

---. “Sea and Sand”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRWZlp8asyQ>

---. “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. YouTube, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqmC1T9rukk>

AUTHOR INFORMATION:

Soham Ganguly is pursuing his MPhil at the Department of English, University of

Calcutta, India. His articles appeared in such journals as Rupkatha, New Academia and

Lapis Lazuli. His areas of interest include phenomenology and existentialism, digital

humanities and gothic fiction.

Documents

THE APOLLONIANtheapollonian.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2.3.6.pdfinto the anguish which is central to the workings and artifice of rock music itself, which found its baroque high