The Supertramp formula

Can't go a month without coming across someone who wants to learn from Trotsky how to reach the masses. I so totally don't want to do that. How about learning it from Supertramp instead?

Because, Supertramp, they pursued their success very methodically. Now, as I pointed out in the previous post, people come in six flavours:

• serving,
• manipulative,
• adaptive,
• self-reliant,
• irresponsible and
• shameless.

And the masses are...? Adaptive! So, the idea is to let them adapt. And how to go about that?

Well, teach them about reality and let them dream about things not yet realised. And that is precisely what Supertramp almost slavishly did: Davis would teach them about reality

• that it ain't so bad, because there's a reward,
• that it ain't so good, because there's a price, and
• that it ain't so clean, because people are no angels,

and Hodgson would let them dream:

• Rudy (limited self-reliance): not so bad,
• Goodbye Stranger (irresponsible): not so good,
• Oh Darling (manipulative): not so clean, and a little more ambivalent
• Asylum (shameless): not so bad and not so good
• (no sense in listing Hodgson's songs).

It's a good formula, isn't it? And completely natural. You say, you've seen something similar somewhere else already? Raising the spirits towards a yet to be incorporated notion in remembrance of its last incorporation? And at the same time learning some hard nosed lessons about the world, this one* that is?

Let's just stick with what's good.

* τοῦ κόσμου τούτου

Postscript from the following morning. The teaching I'm talking about here is indirect teaching through relating, the teaching that makes for bad music I was talking about earlier is teaching by proclamation and/or mockery, like in pretty much every song from Breakfast in America that I haven't explicitly mentioned by name until now (one could argue about the song Breakfast in America itself, it does make me feel kind of seasick).