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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down

 







That track has an incredible atmosphere. While Cher actually had the original hit with it in 1966 (written by Sonny Bono), Nancy Sinatra stripped it down that same year for her album How Does That Grab You?, completely transforming it.

Instead of Cher's mid-tempo, multi-instrumental pop production, Nancy’s version features just her vocals accompanied by Billy Strange's haunting, tremolo-heavy electric guitar. It turned a nostalgic pop tune into something deeply melancholic, cinematic, and stark.

Decades later, Quentin Tarantino famously revived her version by placing it over the opening credits of Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), cementing its status as a timeless piece of moody Americana.


The "60s Noir-Pop" Sound Landscape

If the combination of minimalist electric guitar, heavy tremolo, and haunting vocals hits the spot for you, this specific micro-genre—often called Cowboy Noir, Desert Rock, or Pop Noir—has a rich history.

Here are the essential tracks that share the exact DNA of "Bang Bang":

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood – "Some Velvet Morning" (1967): The ultimate psychedelic country-goth track. Hazlewood's deep, booming baritone contrasts perfectly with Nancy's ethereal vocals.

Link Wray – "Rumble" (1958): If you love Billy Strange's guitar tone on "Bang Bang," this is the blueprint. It is a slow, menacing, instrumental track that relied so heavily on distortion and tremolo that it was actually banned on several US radio stations for sounding "too violent" despite having no words.

The Walker Brothers – "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" (1966): Melodramatic, dark, and grand, driven by Scott Walker's incredibly deep, brooding vocals.

Lana Del Rey – "Million Dollar Man" or "Ultraviolence" (2014): Modern alternative music's most direct descendant of the Sinatra/Hazlewood aesthetic—cinematic, tragic, and heavily stylized.




Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Are Made For Walkin' (Official Music Video)

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