The best of live music is that you can see play the band directly in front of your eyes, see what they do and how do the members interpret their instruments. Certainly, not all bands sound as good as they do ‘in studio’ when you see them playing in concert: sometimes just the human feature appears and a mistake, a note that doesn’t fit, a higher tempo, make you remember that you are watching humans play. Just good big rock’n’roll bands play without mistakes (and even!), but it is still magical to see mister Deep Purple’s Roger Glover playing wonders out of his bass-guitar.
A lot of people think that the West has advantages that the Eastern world doesn’t have. That is a vague position, because those ‘advantages’ simply aren’t such for other people. Nevertheless, if there have to be an answer to the question ‘what is the best of the west side?’, surely that answer should include, among several other things, the pop music, the rock’n’roll, jazz, salsa, merengue... But, where’s exactly ‘the West’? Rock’n’roll is from England, isn’t it? Well, that must mean that maybe the best of british twentieth century’s culture are the Beatless, since they have invented the new beat? And furthermore: West and East have no sense at all over a sphere. If you go to the west, you’ll arrive to the east without having changed your direction. So, West and East are just concepts, geopolitical concepts, that have no clear sense in terms of twenty-first century’s culture. The best of Pink Floyd and/or the best of David Bowie is now part of the global culture, part of the hypercivilization’s phenomenon, a place where East or West have become obsolete concepts.
