Fear of Music

[Wes]

Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American girls through the pathological, nerve-irritating sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras.

• Illinois Vigilance Association

 

[Wes]

“As irritating to the nervous system as the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom!”

- comment on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at its Paris premiere

 

[Robin L]

"We went to the Opera to hear music of the vanguard, Maximilian by Darius Milhaud. We clutched our chair. But we were hurled out of it by such a hurricane of wrong notes that we found ourselves, half dead, on the stairway, without knowing how we could fall down quite so far. The composer knows the grammar, the spelling and the language; but he can speak only Esperanto and Volapuk. It is a work of a Communist traveling salesman."

 

[Robin L]

"A regular Friday audience, 90 percent feminine and 100 percent well-bred, sat stoically yesterday through thirty minutes of the most cacophonous world premiere ever heard here -- the first performance anywhere of a new Violin Concerto by Arnold Schoenberg....Yesterday's piece combines the best sound effects of a hen yard at feeding time, a brisk morning in Chinatown and practice hour at a busy music conservatory. The effect on the vast majority of hearers is that of a lecture on the fourth dimension delivered in Chinese."

 

[Fregly]

I fear Autotune.

 

[Robin L]

The set, recorded live, starts out with an introduction by John Sinclair, “Minister of Information” for the “White Panthers,” if you can dig that. The speech itself stands midway between Wild in the Streets and Arthur Brown. The song that follows it is anticlimactic. Musically the group is intentionally crude and aggressively raw. Which can make for powerful music except when it is used to conceal a paucity of ideas, as it is here. Most of the songs are barely distinguishable from each other in their primitive two-chord structures. You’ve heard all this before from such notables as the Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Kingsmen. The difference here, the difference which will sell several hundred thousand copies of this album, is in the hype, the thick overlay of teenage-revolution and total-energy-thing which conceals these scrapyard vistas of cliches and ugly noise.”

 

[Robin L]

 

[Robin L]

“The whole album is a shuck – despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream cliches that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master’s tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other’s musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch – just like Cream! But worse.”

 

[Robin L]

Apropos of Nothing: The Review That Got Lester Bangs Fired From Rolling Stone (of-nothing.blogspot.com)

 

[Robin L]

" . . . Besides which, any record that sends listeners fleeing the room screaming for surcease of aural flagellation or, alternately, getting physical and disturbing your medications to the point of breaking the damn thing, can hardly be accused, at least in results if not original creative man-hours, of lacking emotional content. Why do people got to see movies like Jaws, The Exorcist, or Iisa, She Wolf of the SS? So they can get beat over the head with baseball bats, have their nerves wrenched while electrodes are being stapled to their spines, and generally brutalized at least every once ever fifteen minutes or so (the time between the face falling out of the bottom of the sunk boat and they guy’s bit-off leg hitting the bottom of the ocean). This is what, today, is commonly understood as entertainment, as fun, as art even! . . ."

 

[sergeauckland]

When I was a boy, I was taken to hear a Stravinsky concert, Rite of Spring I think.

We sat down, the orchestra came in, sat down, started tuning up, the continued tuning up for 45 minutes until everyone applauded.

Bizarre.

And why does so much contemporary classical music sound like someone dropping a piano down the stairs....

S

 

[Robin L]

When I was a boy, I was taken to hear a Stravinsky concert, Rite of Spring I think.

We sat down, the orchestra came in, sat down, started tuning up, the continued tuning up for 45 minutes until everyone applauded.

Bizarre.

And why does so much contemporary classical music sound like someone dropping a piano down the stairs....

S

 

[Kal Rubinson]

When I was a boy, I was taken to hear a Stravinsky concert, Rite of Spring I think.

When I was a boy, this was one of two classical recordings in our household. I loved it.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

How about Piano Smasher?
Blue Man Group

 

[Thomas savage]

“As irritating to the nervous system as the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom!”

- comment on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at its Paris premiere

https://bimotglobal.co.il/en/portfolio/yang-li-ping-the-rite-of-spring/

The last performance i saw before all the madness ...

 

[sergeauckland]

How about Piano Smasher?
Blue Man Group

Sounds better than Stravinsky!

S

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Sounds better than Stravinsky!

I like both of 'em.

 

[mhardy6647]

So -- I feel like I am bringing a knife can opener to a gunfight, but, off the top of my head, I can think of one bon mot that has stuck with me lo, these many years.

Steve Simels (my favorite rock critic, BTW, and not coincidentally) opined of Warren Zevon's live album Stand in the Fire. "It'll kill your house plants."
He meant that in a complimentary way -- I am pretty sure.
I bought a copy pretty darned quickly.
It is a pretty good record, too.

(no houseplants to kill in the basement of our erstwhile domicile in MA, so it was OK to play ol' Warren down there from a CD)



PS Steve Simels is still out there http://powerpop.blogspot.com/

PPS Somebody had to do it -- and I am nothing if not master of the depressingly obvious...

 

[somebodyelse]

No mention of the PMRC and the Parental Advisory stickers?

 

[mansr]

No mention of the PMRC and the Parental Advisory stickers?

And then there was that time the FBI spent years trying to make out the Louie Louie lyrics, assuming they had to be obscene.