SWEET NOTHING
... in her imaginative exegesis of the song Werner-Jatzke morphs Reed’s refrain into a kind of Nietzschean mantra: it’s not just “sweet nuthin’” but “The Sweet Nothing,” a blissful, transcendent nihilism represented by four downtrodden Prophets who have been captured and quantified by the system. Imagine Lou Reed rewriting “An Orison of Sonmi-451” from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
– B.E. Hopkins
I started examining intersections of audio and literature in 2013 while I was a Jack Straw writer. It was during my year there that I wrote “Sweet Nothing” as part of what was originally going to be a collection of stories using the form of a mix tape. Like key changes in a song, I am concerned with how emphasis and stress change meaning. The song “Oh, Sweet Nothing” is a great example of this for being lyrically repetitive.
Read my full interview about Sweet Nothing on The Furnace website.
Read the full review from B.E Hopkins on the Tupelo site.
Read the full review from B.E Hopkins on the Tupelo site.