There was a great series on Channel 4 last year by some bloke who is a musicologist - explaining why The Beatles were so influential on Western popular music. I can’t remember the title for the life of me, but it was cool to see how McCartney and Lennon used meter, medieval scales, and all kinds of great stuff and brought it into popular music. What’s more amazing is that I’ve heard Paul confronted with some of this stuff, and he has no idea why he wrote Eleanor Rigby with the chords he did, etc. aside from it just sounded better that way.
And tape loops! Overdubs and stuff like that, par for the course in pop music now, but before The Beatles, those techniques weren’t used very much. I’m not a muso so I’ll bow out now. But I don’t think everything they wrote was brilliant, so I’m with you on that.
Pink Floyd? In small doses, interesting. Love the videos they have of stuff blowing up. Large does, my head starts to hurt. Many years back Q Magazine labeled Radiohead “the new Pink Floyd…”
It was our old friend Howard Goodall, in the series Howard Goodall’s 20th Century Greats. And boy, does he like Lennon/McCartney. I think he called them the greatest composers (that’s what he said, not just songwriters) of the 20th century.
He’s not the only Doper who feels this way. There was a thread some years back that had a few people who didn’t like it at all. I was shocked. Until then, I always thought that music was a “universal tonic” and people just differed in the type of music they liked. Finding out that wasn’t so kinda blew my mind.
You know, I used to dig music. Now, I don’t listen to any of it anymore.
It’s all just very “meh” to me. Every once in a while, I’ll hear something as I’m driving down the street or something that one of my friends might be listening to, and it might sound nice for a couple minutes, but I’ve no interest to track it down and/or find more of it.
I love music, but can’t stand opera in general, Wagner in particular.
I also have no love for haute cuisine. Not that I don’t like good food, of course, but I don’t enjoy paying large amounts of cash for small-nay tiny-amounts of dinner. Any meal that leaves me wanting to grab a burger afterwards is not a good meal.
I read a biography of Zappa and decided he was a dick also. My husband likes Zappa, and I know he’s well thought of by some of the intelligent people of the Dope…but I can’t understand why. Also, I keep hearing that he’s hilarious, yet apparently I’m missing the joke. Is it don’t eat the yellow snow?
Read it all. It’s by the same guy who wrote The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. But as you will see Robert Service has a serious, highly empathetic side.
Fleurette
(The Wounded Canadian Speaks)
My leg? It’s off at the knee.
Do I miss it? Well, some. You see
I’ve had it since I was born;
And lately a devilish corn.
(I rather chuckle with glee
To think how I’ve fooled that corn.)
But I’ll hobble around all right.
It isn’t that, it’s my face.
Oh I know I’m a hideous sight,
Hardly a thing in place;
Sort of gargoyle, you’d say.
Nurse won’t give me a glass,
But I see the folks as they pass
Shudder and turn away;
Turn away in distress . . .
Mirror enough, I guess.
I’m gay! You bet I am gay;
But I wasn’t a while ago.
If you’d seen me even to-day,
The darndest picture of woe,
With this Caliban mug of mine,
So ravaged and raw and red,
Turned to the wall — in fine,
Wishing that I was dead. . . .
What has happened since then,
Since I lay with my face to the wall,
The most despairing of men?
Listen! I’ll tell you all.
That poilu across the way,
With the shrapnel wound in his head,
Has a sister: she came to-day
To sit awhile by his bed.
All morning I heard him fret:
“Oh, when will she come, Fleurette?”
Then sudden, a joyous cry;
The tripping of little feet,
The softest, tenderest sigh,
A voice so fresh and sweet;
Clear as a silver bell,
Fresh as the morning dews:
“C’est toi, c’est toi, Marcel!
Mon frère, comme je suis heureuse!”
So over the blanket’s rim
I raised my terrible face,
And I saw — how I envied him!
A girl of such delicate grace;
Sixteen, all laughter and love;
As gay as a linnet, and yet
As tenderly sweet as a dove;
Half woman, half child — Fleurette.
Then I turned to the wall again.
(I was awfully blue, you see),
And I thought with a bitter pain:
“Such visions are not for me.”
So there like a log I lay,
All hidden, I thought, from view,
When sudden I heard her say:
“Ah! Who is that malheureux?”
Then briefly I heard him tell
(However he came to know)
How I’d smothered a bomb that fell
Into the trench, and so
None of my men were hit,
Though it busted me up a bit.
Well, I didn’t quiver an eye,
And he chattered and there she sat;
And I fancied I heard her sigh —
But I wouldn’t just swear to that.
And maybe she wasn’t so bright,
Though she talked in a merry strain,
And I closed my eyes ever so tight,
Yet I saw her ever so plain:
Her dear little tilted nose,
Her delicate, dimpled chin,
Her mouth like a budding rose,
And the glistening pearls within;
Her eyes like the violet:
Such a rare little queen — Fleurette.
And at last when she rose to go,
The light was a little dim,
And I ventured to peep, and so
I saw her, graceful and slim,
And she kissed him and kissed him, and oh
How I envied and envied him!
So when she was gone I said
In rather a dreary voice
To him of the opposite bed:
“Ah, friend, how you must rejoice!
But me, I’m a thing of dread.
For me nevermore the bliss,
The thrill of a woman’s kiss.”
Then I stopped, for lo! she was there,
And a great light shone in her eyes;
And me! I could only stare,
I was taken so by surprise,
When gently she bent her head:
“May I kiss you, Sergeant?” she said.
Then she kissed my burning lips
With her mouth like a scented flower,
And I thrilled to the finger-tips,
And I hadn’t even the power
To say: “God bless you, dear!”
And I felt such a precious tear
Fall on my withered cheek,
And darn it! I couldn’t speak.
And so she went sadly away,
And I knew that my eyes were wet.
Ah, not to my dying day
Will I forget, forget!
Can you wonder now I am gay?
God bless her, that little Fleurette!
And while you’re at it, google on The Cremation of Sam MccGee. It’s funny.
That horrible, horrible bottle-fuelled Celtic sentimentalism that puts it’s arm round your shoulder and slurs in your ear “Y’re me bes’ mate yer ‘re. I rilly, rilly lurve yeow” before throwing up all over your shoes.
The moment Shane McGowan lurched over into self-parody.
I’m not big on today’s music, but I still listen to the music of my generation. I haven’t gone on the Quest For Music That Doesn’t Suck in '07, but I know it’s out there. It requires more effort than I’m willing to expend right now.
Hmmm, I was never under the impression that the people singing this were stone serious. Then again I’m no familiar with their other work so I never thought it was a self-parody, per se.
Yeah, but that’s a bit of a cop-out to me. I don’t even bother listening to music I’ve heard a billion times. I might want to hear a song once a year or something like that, but I certainly wouldn’t want an iPod for access to it.
So…the whole lot of it is just chucked to the side.
I like some big band, Ella Fitzgerald, ragtime in small amounts, and bits of “jazz influence” in other forms, but jazz in general leaves me either cold, bored, or irritated.
Which is too bad, because some of my colleagues whose musical tastes I otherwise very much admire love jazz in various forms. Sadly, I just don’t get it. Which kind of bothers me, because I feel like I must be missing out on something.
Brahms - not especially bad, but severely overrated and overplayed.
Most 19th century fiction and poetry. Exemptions for Poe, Coleridge, London, and Verne. Bonus hate for Dickens.
Pynchon and Joyce.
Nabokov.
Asimov - readable but overrated.
Clarke.
Pretty much all Western art between Rembrandt and today. Exemption for Goya.
Miller, please do yourself a favor and pick up “The Sirens of Titan”. I’ll happily admit that much of Vonnegut’s writing is crap, but this one is as funny as the better Pratchett novels. “Mother Night” and “Cat’s Cradle” are also worth reading.
These are bands whose music bores and depresses me, so I cannot fathom the appeal. Kurt Cobain wrote music that will stick in my head, and if that was his goal–well done. But then I have a song I loathe stuck in my head. I feel like most Nirvana songs, if played at just the right volume, would get neighbors pounding on the ceiling shouting, “Learn to get along and agree to disagree.”
Jim Morrisson’s voice sounds like a constant yawn, and has the typical effect on me. The “time to entertain” was through the moment the song started.
When I walk into a room and hear a song by either of them, I cringe and start humming the last song I heard, just to block it out. It doesn’t help that Light My Fire is a song that lasts for three days.
I like Peter Griffin’s take on The Godfather. “It insists upon itself.” (Note: I have not yet seen The Godfather, so I can’t agree or disagree with this.)
I don’t see what’s so great about
*The English Patient. An hour in and new characters are still being introduced? Can you get around to introducing a point or something? Yeah, the desert shots are majestic and scenic, but I’m watching this movie for a story, not a pretty picture. (I’ll give the book a try. I have a feeling the movie was trying to capture things that can only be expressed in text.)
*Bob Dylan. I woke up to a bagpiper playing at the Sunrise Service across the street from my friend’s house Easter morning and I thought he was playing his new Dylan CD. Although I will say that he (Dylan, not my friend) can sure write some great songs. He just shouldn’t sing them.
*Harry Potter. Why are so many people obsessing themselves into convulsions over this series?
I have one huge “I just don’t get it”: rap/hip hop music.
I also find I have no interest in country music.
Also, I’m yet another who generally has no use for poetry, but I do have an exception: haiku. I find myself enjoying a well-written haiku when I happen to run across it. I think I appreciate that due to how they are constructed a haiku has to be very short and get right to the point. But any other form of poetry simply does nothing for me.