Plan B Forum

Alan Vega, who passed away July 16 at age 78, was deeply in touch with the darkness at the heart of our most euphoric music.

Alan Vega was not a rock star, he was the shadow behind every rock star, a brutal, bone-cutting burlesque of the rock star’s desire, the entire animal reduced to stuttering incoherence and a few words about lust, love and violence.

The man born Boruch Alan Bermowitz refused to be blinded by the happy light of the frontman’s sexdream; his cold, caged stare, prisoner flails, and bubbling, hissing, pleading voice, were kindling for the eternal flame he guarded of rock’s dark roots, its stories of despair, even as he fronted one of the more progressive and adventurous bands of our time.

Alan Vega wasn’t just one of our greatest rock singers; a century of rock and its brutal and beautiful antecedents lived inside of him.

For the last 45 years, he reminded us that behind the happy distraction of rock ’n’ roll was the howl of the frightened, the hungry, the desperate. Rock ’n’ roll was their sound, their voice—even before it was called rock ’n’ roll, rock ’n’ roll was the ecstatic messenger of the politically, economically and emotionally disenfranchised. Alan Vega understood this.

Alan Vega’s rock ’n’ roll was not a route to Pink Cadillacs; it was a path to survival.

MajGenl.Meade wrote:Who he? (Don't answer. Looked at Wiki). Who he?

Plays the same musical phrase over and over again for 4 1/2 minutes, calls the people who came there to see him "fuckfaces" and then flips them off.

Gob wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Vega

I could turn Hillary Clinton into Mother Teresa (or vice versa)

MajGenl.Meade wrote:

I could turn Hillary Clinton into Mother Teresa (or vice versa)

Mother Teresa was an appalling person. I don't think Hillary would thank you for the transformation. Even she....

MajGenl.Meade wrote:No way... he was an atheist. Mother Teresa was a terrible woman - she believed that suffering was good for the soul and accordingly withheld useful medication from the dying. She advised them to pray to "their gods". She did nothing to alleviate suffering and was a piss-poor "Christian" (her theology was crap, in common with others of her ilk). For the Romans to believe her a "saint" is to mock the term.

Guinevere wrote:"...
Agreed that she was a horrible human being. I have a law school classmate who volunteered at one of her homes in India. She treated her patients and refugees with contempt, she withheld meds (as Meade says above), she refused to teach women how to help themselves by educating them about birth control or even abstinence. She didn't have a compassionate bone in her body. Her "work" was nothing more than a huge ego trip.