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Moldy Rutabaga
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Location: Ansan, Korea
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 Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 1:28 am Post subject: |
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Cool piece of trivia! I would never have expected a Pink Floyd solo on that piece of drivel. McCartney can be great at times, and make a Hallmark card wince at other times.
Just for fun, I've included something I wrote myself. Feel free to disagree.. or take your money back!
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Jim Morrison
If you didn't need more proof that the generation of the sixties was the most smug and self-absorbed ever to exist in western civilization, look at the cult of personality which has grown up around this pretentious poser whose major claim to legend status was dying, the smartest career move Morrison ever had.
When I was a boy, The Doors were still laying around record stores at the back with the locomotive sound-effect records, and only the most bizarre programming tastes would cause a radio DJ to inflict them on a public which could still remember from personal experience that about the only interesting thing about their concerts is that usually Morrison, once his acid-fuddled mind could dimly grasp that people were beginning to leave, would take his pants off. This would have the thankful effect of shortening the concert with his arrest inasmuch as it let Morrison feed his ego by showing the world how it wasn't ready for his art and his I'm-such-a-rebel posturing.
Now, a more cynical generation recognizes that much of what was recorded in the sixties was navel-gazing crap, and that Woodstock is about drunken partying in the buff rather than making some grand philosophical statement about peace and love to be repackaged later on late-night CD commercials. Perversely, however, time has given groups such as The Doors a respectability they never deserved. A normally otherwise intelligent friend of mine told me the other day that he had accidentally omitted visiting Morrison's grave when in Paris. It's a shame he wasted all that time on the Louvre.
How did these toneless boobs achieve this untouchable status? Let us peruse some of their music to discover what originality and musical statements they left as a mark on our collective consciousness.
Morrison sings, using two pitches:
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on....................... (building anticipation)............. fire.
At this point, backed up by the rhythm-impaired drummer who had probably fallen asleep while listening to Morrison's delivery, which has all the vocal excitement of someone reading out an ingredient list for a box of pancake mix, the keyboardist spends the next six minutes on a meandering solo which sounds as though someone is bouncing pool balls off the organ keys. One is almost grateful when hearing Morrison's attempts at poetry sans music, even if the words are embarrasingly pretentious and have as much profundity as dollar-store greeting cards.
But, hey, it's The Doors, man; the Lizard King. And The Tea Party is The Doors of the 90's. Except that The Tea Party write complex music using unusual musical instruments with lyrics taken from classical mythology, whereas Morrison sings "Break on through to the other side" forty-six times in one song, backed by a guitar hook which sounds like every 80's beer commercial ever made. No wonder The Tea Party hates the comparison.
Bob Dylan
Why? Why? Why? Why did this man become a star? What sort of cosmic burp led both Bob Dylan and Dan Quayle to become famous on the absolutely most slender of qualifications? What on God's green earth am I missing? Am I the only one who doesn't get it? Let us review Mr. Dylan's claim to being, as I'm told, one of the most important cultural and musical influences of the twentieth century.
Voice: The sound of a dying vacuum cleaner morphed with Fozzie Bear with a throat cold.
Music: Three guitar chords combined with the sound of a harmonica which sounds as though it was run over by a truck.
Lyrics: Bad beat poetry littered with hopelessly dated expressions, all discussing a social situation relevant to those who lived in a certain social class in a certain American suburb in a certain period of the 60's (about eight people).
So what we have is the music of someone with warbling, irritating voice playing repetitive music with hack lyrics about issues no one below forty cares about. Sounds like the voice of a generation to me. This wouldn't be so bad if Dylan was like Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits or some other folk artist who has a small, loyal audience who doesn't force them on everybody else. No: we have Dylan, man. And no one gets to criticize him because his lyrics are poetry.
Bullcookies. There are many musicians who write thought-provoking lyrics or paint visually complex scenes with words, or connect aurally interesting phrases: Paul Simon; The Moody Blues; Genesis; Live; Pearl Jam; REM; U2 (as pompous as U2 is). There are many others. So who are these people who listen to someone who sounds like a German shepherd with stomach gas?
Hint: the same people who insist that a hundred-dollar bottle of French wine tastes better than the ten-dollar house wine you think is perfectly fine. The same people who lounge around in coffee bars wearing kerchiefs and discussing third world politics. If you tell them your misgivings about the entire Bob Dylan iconography, they give you the 'You-obviously-just-don't-understand' look and recite some bumpf about Dylan being the intellectual voice of the sixties because, well, because he's Dylan, that's all.
Sorry; I have two degrees in the humanities, and I'm not going to be told I don't understand. Most of us are too intimidated to say that the emperor has no clothes. I'm going to be the heretic: rock music in the 90's and now is generally better than that of the 60's, and there are performers now better than Dylan ever was. I know friends who actually saw the man in concert in '97. The concert was apparently Dylan stumbling through his set, and slurring his words into an even more raspy, toneless mess than usual. My friends say he was stone drunk. How could they tell?
Other Bands That Irritate Me
Bon Jovi
Alright, some of you are telling me: this is too easy a target. But I'm not so sure lately; whenever there's a dry spell in the music industry, we get a nostalgia wave attempting to immortalize otherwise embarassingly forgettable music. This particular group is starting to enjoy respectability as one of the classic 80s rock acts, and I can hardly wait for In Sync to be lauded in 2026 as a classic 00s boy band. It almost makes me hope I'm not around to see them play 'unplugged' concerts to politely-clapping seated audiences and have commentators write windy theses about how their lyrics were the formative voice of that generation.
I'm not sure anyone can ever claim any sort of high seriousness about Bon Jovi lyrics, because after some 15 years I'm still waiting for Bon Jovi to actually write some of their own lyrics instead of ripping them off Hallmark cards. Listen to any Bon Jovi song, and discover that they are merely a long list of tired cliches strung together into teen-pleasing sequences: "Shot through the heart (1), and you're to blame (2), you give love a bad name (3)"... and we're still in the first verse. Even the album title would reflect the poetic depth of a road sign if it weren't a road sign: "Slippery When Wet". It doesn't get better with later albums, containing such innovative and original titles such as "I will love you always.. baby" (sample: "See, I've always been a fighter, but without you I give up"-- say, isn't that from King Lear?).
The most maddening aspect of the band is their continued success from riding one cliche bandwagon after another. When Cinderella and Poison recovered from their syphilis treatments and went back to their old jobs as lube mechanics and streetsweepers, Bon Jovi had already realized that the party was over for bubblemetal, that over-packaged, over-hair-sprayed, safe, non-threatening version of heavy metal designed by record company committees for 15-year old girls. Seeing that country nostalgia was the latest big thing, the band began mining the rich cliche hoard of cowboy imagery with--gag--"Shot down in a blaze of glory". I'm not sure what's worse: Dylan & Morrison's faux-art lyrics, or the formulaic vacuity of "I'm a gambler and a lover" backed up by sampled 'cowboy sounds'.
Pink Floyd
Yes, they're great. Yes, they're progressive rock originators and they write intelligent music for adults. But I've heard bleeding "Another brick in the wall" 426,315 times since 1979. May I please listen to something else for a while without bending down in homage to them every fifteen minutes? |
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| The Sound of Silence |
It's a song that I dislike in secret, because it seems to have so much gravitas, and yet it's a song with no real it in it. What is it actually about, or is it just trendy, pop-psych phrases stuck together?
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| Kokomo by the Beach Boys. |
Well, the lyrics are stupid. But I don't think it's such a bad song; how many people write theses on I Got You or Louie Louie?
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| From a Distance by Bette Midler. |
I just hate her cheesy, warbly voice.
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| Sunglasses at Night |
His I'm-such-a-rebel spiky hair makes me imagine Billy Idol's little brother who keeps trying to tag along. I'm just bitter after hearing sixteen other Corey Hart songs from the eighties with the same Casio-keyboard sound and Corey's tuneless whoaaaas thrown in whenever he can't think of a lyric.
Glad they included that pompous, fruity, bloated bag of over-reverbed violins, Meatloaf. I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that. Ten minutes, and he won't tell us WHAT YOU WON'T DO, DAMMIT. What? Take a bath? Get a modern haircut? Sing in a less constipated voice?
Where's Bon Jovi? Too easy a target?
By the way, in twenty-five years, has Bryan Adams ever written a song where he doesn't yell YEAHH before the guitar solo begins?
Ken:> |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 7:52 am Post subject: |
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| Guess you had to be there. Your first two critiques are pretty far off. Possibly an example of what happens when you take the music out of the context it was written in. For exmple, "dated expressions"?? Do you mean they were dated even then, or are you seriously judging music from the 60s by the times you live in forty years later? Age? (Not being insulting; would help me understand your post.) |
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Moldy Rutabaga
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Location: Ansan, Korea
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| Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 9:34 pm Post subject: |
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Don't take it too seriously-- hehe-- if posters are annoyed that I criticize Dylan they will only prove my point that he's too much a sacred cow.. 
Some of the lyrics seem dated from a 2005 perspective, and some of them seemed cheesy when I was a little boy in the mid-70s (a clue to my age!). "Everrybuddy muust get stooned" doesn't sound poetic to me.
Dunno about the Doors either. I am old enough to remember when they weren't considered legends. Morrison didn't become an instant icon the same way Kirk Cobain seems to have after death.
Ken:> |
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