A spin-off of the MLK-Statue thread:
any examples of (ideally subversive) or weird elements in art that are not always clear or easy to detect?
Like here:
Assuming we’re not limited to the visual arts, my first thought is the Beatles’ song “Girl”, in which the backing vocals consist of Harrison and McCartney repeatedly singing the word “tit.”
mmm
Remember this poster? I think about a dozen people in my college dorm had it on their wall:
Most people were completely unaware, as was I until someone pointed it out to me, that there’s a roach (joint) in it.
Can you find it? I circled it here.
In The Doors’ song, Riders On The Storm, there’s a ‘whisper track’ running through most of the song. Jim Morrison whispered the lyrics and throughout the song, the main vocals get quieter and the whisper gets louder. I don’t know how well known that is, but I never noticed it until it was explicitly pointed out to me.
I was going to link to the regular version of the song so you/everyone could listen to it for themselves. But then I found a version with the main vocals removed so it’s only the whisper track and it’s mostly what you’d expect. What, at least for me, wasn’t expected was how different this version sounds with the main vocals left in and the whispered vocals removed. That whisper really adds a lot of depth to the song.
Dimitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.
He had been denounced for his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
including by a review possibly written by Stalin himself (Stalin was at the performance, and angrily walked out).He was on very shaky ground, as offers to perform his work dried up. Family and friends were sent to the Gulags. He started work on his Fourth Symphony, but abandoned it.
He wrote his Fifth Symphony and managed to get it performed. It was a sensation and the party leaders praised it, saying he had returned to socialist values. He was back in favor.
But the public saw it as an attack on the system, the heroic themes parodies of the bombast of dictatorship. Its themes are also oppressive (think the imperial march from Star Wars in weight), an attack on Stalin’s oppression.
Lady Gaga’s song “Poker Face”?
Eh, is there an interview where Lady Gaga actually says that is true and those are the lyrics? I’m not saying that isn’t the case here, but people hearing lyrics wrong and claiming them to be sexual is so common.
Honestly, “poker face/poke her face” really isn’t that much of a stretch, especially when you consider the venerable history of “Liquor in the front, poker in the rear”.
There’s this:
When Lady Gaga was playing at iHeartRadio Wango Tango in 2009, an annual day-long concert held by KIIS FM, she admitted the radio station, one of the only ones to censor her lyrics for the song, was correct. She said: “KIIS FM is the smartest radio station in the whole world and I’ll tell you why. Because this song, it got played all over the world on tens of thousands of radio stations, but KIIS FM was the only one that said I had to censor my lyric because they thought I might be saying something bad.” And out of all the radio stations in the world that played this record over and over, KIIS FM was the only one that was right and caught on.”
That is a painting that contains only weird element which was typical from Dalí.
Welp, can’t unhear that now. I mean, I’m aware of the ‘poker’ jokes, I just never put it together with this song.
Another one is Whenever, Wherever, by Shakira. The second verse has the line “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble / So you don’t confuse them with mountains”.
My work here is done.
But did you ever notice his self portrait in The Persistence Of Memory (the one with the melting clocks)?
The white ‘thing’ the clock on the right is draped over is him, or someone anyway. You can see his eyelashes on the left of it and what appears to be part of his mustache to the right of the clock and sort of put together a face from there.
https://blog.singulart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/the-persistence-of-memory-1931-1024x778.jpg
Dalí was creating AI generated art long before AI was creating art.
That’s not what people think she’s singing. From my first link:
The real Poker Face lyrics?
Po-po-po-poker face / fu-fu-f*** her face (Mum-mum-mum-mah)
Po-po-po-poker face, fu-fu-f*** her face (Mum-mum-mum-mah).
If she’s not actually singing that, then the only other explanation is that she is selectively sloppy with her pronunciation, slurring a plosive ‘p’ into a fricative ‘f’ and a long ‘o’ sound into a short ‘u’ sound, and that it’s merely a remarkable coincidence when she does both those things as a sequence.
I was more addressing the notion that finding things in songs “sexual” was sometimes a stretch. The point is, even if she’s not making it “fuck her face”, it’s not a stretch to see this line as sexual.
Michelangelo- The Creation Of Adam
The cloud of cherubs/puttees behind the Lord looks suspiciously like a human brain. Mikey dissected human cadavers and put proof on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
Stereolab’s “Miss Modular” does the same thing with the phrase “do me.”
I’m terrible at reading into things like that or finding any kind of symbology in art (including movies/tv/books), unless it’s explicitly pointed out to me. I never would have seen that, however, I found this on wiki:
Here’s a picture to reference.
Portrayal of the human brain
In 1990 in Anderson, Indiana, physician Frank Meshberger noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the background figures and shapes portrayed behind the figure of God appeared to be an anatomically accurate picture of the human brain.[15] On close examination, borders in the painting correlate with major sulci of the cerebrum in the inner and outer surface of the brain, the brain stem, the frontal lobe, the basilar artery, the pituitary gland and the optic chiasm.[15][16]
Portrayal of the birth process
Alternatively, it has been observed that the red cloth around God has the shape of a human uterus (one art historian has called it a “uterine mantle”[17]) and that the scarf hanging out, coloured green, could be a newly cut umbilical cord.[18] In 2015 a group of Italian researchers published on Mayo Clinic Proceedings an article where the images of the mantle and the postpartum uterus were overlapped.[19] According to Enrico Bruschini (2004), “This is an interesting hypothesis that presents the Creation scene as an idealised representation of the physical birth of man (“The Creation”). It explains the navel that appears on Adam, which is at first perplexing because he was created, not born of a woman.”[20]
Portrayal of Eve’s Rib
Additionally, Deivis Campos notes in Clinical Anatomy Journal that the left side of Adam’s torso contains an extra concealed rib.[21] Due to Michelangelo’s in-depth knowledge of human anatomy, he insinuates that this rib outline is intentional, and represents the rib of Eve.[21]
Campos suggests that this extra rib inclusion was a way for Michelangelo to represent Adam and Eve being created side by side, which differs from the Catholic tradition that states Eve was created after Adam.[21] There is significant evidence that Michelangelo radically disagreed with many Catholic traditions and had a tumultuous relationship with the commissioner of the ceiling, Pope Julius II. Thus, Campos suggests that the rib inclusion was an intentional way to slight Pope Julius II and the Catholic Church, without having to admit fault, as very few people knew anything about human anatomy at the time and could challenge the piece.[21]
I think in my head, I had likened it to the shell from Birth Of Venus, but I can’t say I’ve ever given it much thought.
There’s a “fuck” in the Beatles’ Hey Jude, but it was due to a mistake. Paul says “fucking hell” when he doesn’t hit the right keys.
But in other Beatles’ songs the subversive elements are more intentional: in the song Girl, on Rubber Soul, they sing “tit tit tit…” as background vocals, and the phrase “chicka ferdy” in Sun King, from Abbey Road, is childhood slang meaning “fuck off.”