The Mr. T Experience - The History Of The Concept Of The Soul

 

  Here's one that most of you might already know but it deserves a place on a blog that celebrates great songs. It's from The Mr T Experience, a band that emerged from the Gilman Street scene in Berkeley, California in 1985 and who have been fronted throughout by vocalist/songwriter Dr. Frank (Portman).

  Supposedly still together but pretty inactive since their last album, Yesterday Rules, was released in 2004, they were one of Lookout! Records' most prolific artists. If pop punk's your cup of tea then no doubt you'll have several of their records in your collection filed alongside the likes of The Queers and Screeching Weasel.

  The song I'm posting was pre Lookout! Instead it was on 1988's Night Shift At The Thrill Factory which was released on Sixth International and distributed by Rough Trade (Lookout! re releasing it in the mid '90's). This is The History Of The Concept Of The Soul. Slightly more intellectual than most pop punk but no less catchy for it......

Homer didn't have a comprehensive word for mind.
the psyche and the conscious self had not yet been combined.
He understood events as repetition of the past,
and individual consciousness was not a part of that.
But early Greek thought played a role in the complicate history
of the concept of the soul.

By the time of Plato these ideas had taken shape.
The Phaedo and Timaeus are works which demonstrate
the consious separation of the knower from the known
and the dual nature of the body and the soul.
Modern thought was possible:
the complicated history of the concept of the soul.
Whoa!

Pythagoras and Orphic doctrines all came into play,
because Plato was a mystic in his own Platonic way.
The pre-Socratic Naturalists saw things in terms of "stuff".
But Plato's metaphysics showed that this was not enough.
This is the incredible complicated history of the concept of the soul.
Rock and roll.