Tue 14 Jul 2009
The devil’s music
Posted by bitterandrew under Culture, Music
[3] Comments
There’s nothing like the letters page of an old news magazine for capturing the musty funk of zeitgeists past. This is why I found myself spending a good portion of yesterday afternoon reflecting upon the wisdom offered by the reader missives published in Time Magazine during the opening weeks of 1982.
As could be expected, Cold War rhetoric dominates the proceedings — calls to nuke Russia in support of Polish shipworkers, accusations that nuclear freeze proponents were Kremlin moles, general “better dead than Red” boilerplate — but I found myself more interested in this forgotten lament concerning contemporary trends in music:
Heaven forbid a blip-tone work its way into the rich analog atonality of experimental music for highbrows. What’s next, pop stars composing a score for Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin?
Horrors!
Reading Foldes’s rant against electronic music triggered an odd sense of deja vu. I was convinced I had encountered this argument and attitude several times before, but it took a little time for me to realize where — in the letters column of every issue of Creem, Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, or Spin published during that era…
Rockism. It’s not just for rockers anymore!
Recommended listening: V. Mescherin Orchestra – On the Kolkhoz Poultry Farm (from Easy USSR, Vol. 1, 2001)
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As the creator of the “Soviet lounge” microgenre, Vyacheslav Mescherin acted as a strategic counterweight against Delia Derbyshire and Raymond Scott in the synthesizer race between the Free World and the Eastern Bloc.
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July 14th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Mr Virtuoso would have no doubt been overjoyed to see the League thrown off a support slot on a Talking Heads UK tour for suggesting they wouldn’t actually be on stage for the performances, that their place would be taken by backing tapes and a slide show, and that they intended to view the show as members of the audience.
But as we all know, Dare is a fantastic experience.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
“the inherent gravitas of rock ‘n’ roll music”
I’m tempted to say that if your rock music has “gravitas” you’re doing it wrong…
July 14th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
But, dude, “Stairway to Heaven” is the deepest work of art mankind ever created!
(Or an overrated bit of wank about some rich woman.)