Sport in Live Performance

Today’s modern sporting events reflect the most seductive part of live performance:  Creating Dramatic Tension — and the buildup to the annual Super Bowl celebration is one of the finest examples of spectacle in performance wrapped in football pads and held tight with crossed fingers.  The countdown clocks on NFL.com today directly inherit, and reflect, the innate sense of doom and pending explosion that so many modern dramas lack on the live stage.

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The Album as Storytelling Device

Individual songs often can serve to tell a story — good or bad. Cream played a song called Crossroads, later widely covered by Phish — it was based on the story of how Robert Johnson got to be great at playing the guitar after meeting the devil at a crossroads and selling his soul.

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