September 9, 2008
Compathia
About the Cat Power song ‘Good Woman’
Few songs have ever been written that are so bathed in compathia, which Octavio Paz describes as that state where love returns in a concentric circle to the beginning and another place further and washes away all the hatred for a person that only real love could create in the first place. A true freeing. It lives in the same company as [Bob Dylan's] “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Unlike most of the pathetic pleadings drowning the world that call themselves “love songs” but are merely made to mythologize oneself in the heart of the other through weepy melodramatics, “Good Woman” is a gift, not a trap. A close friend once taped a version of it off the BBC and it sounded like the Dirty Three were backing her up, but I could be wrong. But with a song like this, a fucking trustafarian hippie sitting on the street with a broken guitar could sing it and I’d give him 5 bucks.
MP3 Cat Power - Good Woman
MP3 Cat Power - Good Woman (live KCRW version)
(From a Dusted review, written by Six Organ’s Ben Chasny)
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2 Responses to “Compathia”
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thank you, Amanda.
That line has made its way into my vocabulary, “It’s a gift, not a trap.”
And Good Woman is no pathetic pleading.
I think she wrote this song about her breakup with Bill Callahan.