User:Happytimes/VFD/Hildegard von Bingen
Hildegard von Bingen (known during her life as "Hildegard von Bangin') lived a very long time ago - a hundred years, we'll say. It was medieval times. She is best known today as the second best-selling female musician of all time (behind Mariah Carey as of 2015).
Life[edit | edit source]
Like so many women of her time, Hildegard was born. Her parents donated her to a monastary, where she spent most of her time kneeling in prayer, with occasional bouts of sitting in prayer.
At the age of 41 she received a vision from Kishar, a Mesopotamian goddess who had nodded off around 1500 BC and wasn't aware that women didn't get to be deities anymore. Kishar apologized for the disturbance and sent Yahweh, who inspired Hildegard to write early psychedelic music. Most notably she wrote an early draft of All Along the Watchtower but was not alive to sue for copyright when it was rediscovered by Bob Dylan.
Hildegard continued receiving visions from Yahweh until he grew tired of her constant grovelling (grovelling was very popular in the Middle Ages), whereupon he sent an angel wearing a big white beard in his place. The best evidence indicates that Hildegard never noticed the difference. The angel gave her more music and also inspired her to write learned texts such as Liber subtilatum (Latin: "The Subtle Bark of Atum") and history's first recorded graphic novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Latin: "Our Bodies, Ourselves").
Hildegard died in 1493, killed in the famed shipwreck of Ernesto de Borgnine.
Hildegard's influence[edit | edit source]
Today Hildegard is best remembered for the over one hundred albums she recorded in her lifetime. It is difficult to give a precise number for how many albums she sold as Billboard magazine would not be invented until shortly after her death, largely in response to her influence. It is widely believed, as mentioned above, that she is the second best selling female musician of all time, surpassed only by Mariah Carey.
She was the creator of psychedelic music and was also the first to push psychedelica towards metal, well before Black Sabbath or even Steppenwolf. Rudolf Schenker of the Scorpions has explicitly referred to her influence, saying "Ich liebe die Borke" in a 1974 interview with Rolling Stone.
She is also sometimes cited as a role model, a powerful and intelligent woman of the Middle Ages, by feminists who don't have their heads up Michel Foucault's cunt and so actually know some history.