a lot of stuff that gets retroactively adjudged to be ahead of its time, or farsighted... it isn't really. it's completely abreast of its time
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There is something so delicious, so sensually pleasing, when you come across a thinker whose ideas fit – not your own ideas, but impulses th... -
Sabbath = the great deaf-spot (auditory and ideological) of the Last Waltz/Stranded generation of rockwrite Every generation of rockwrite h...
I just came back from the pub and put on Kinky Afro, and my beloved canine, named Dog Number 4, immediately jumped up and started licking my nose in joy and fraternity. What a brilliant dog,
ReplyDeleteAh!
DeleteThis is a radical thought, and possibly nonsense, but permit me a fanboy's indulgence: you're coming out with a book on dream pop. Were the Mondays, in Shaun Ryder's surrealism and their embrace of recherché forms, at least vaguely dreamy?
DeleteI think there's an argument there, at least.
Dog No. 4's just wandered over for a cuddle as I put on Bruce Springsteen's cover of Dream Baby Dream.
DeleteYou will be delighted to learn that Happy Monday do make an appearance - not a massive one, but they are in there - but it is more under the category of "slacker" than "dreamer". Although spending your days tripping your balls off is a kind of dreaming, so there's that.
ReplyDeleteI think there's something fairly gritty about Shaun Ryder's lyrics, so in that sense not really like Cocteau Twins and such. But yeah they have a dreamy quality in their sound sometimes.
"Fairly" gritty? How coarse does a band need to be? Well, at least the stage theatrics of Bez were more palatable than those of GG Allin.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, there's a leap between the surrealism or Shaun Ryder, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan etc., and the sheer absence of meaning to Elizabeth Fraser's lyrics. However, one must consider that Cocteau Twins really suffer from diminishing returns when listening to several songs in a row. It's a form of music that resists analysis, and thus can't persuade beyond the initial curiosity.
Can you elucidate Simon? How does your dictum apply to, for example, a tune that is often cited as being 'ahead of its time': Cat Stevens' 'Was Dog a Doughnut' - ? Is it abreast of its time in anything other than purely muso-technological terms?
ReplyDeleteI can't remember what originally prompted that thought - I thought I would just leave it hanging there
Deletei think it is rather often the cases that groups praised for being ahead of their time are actually a summation of existing and then-current trends. Eno said that about the Beatles - perhaps unfair in some cases (Tomorrow Never Knows is a leap into tomorrow) but there's something to it.
Some groups are actually the cusp point where quite long established undergrounds trends break into the mainstream.
However that Cat Stevens song is an example of genuinely being ahead of its time - but also of getting no credit for it at the time, because no one noticed, on account of it happening on a Cat Stevens record. The Cat Stevens fans would dislike or be mystified by the track. Sometimes a record can be too far ahead of its time to reap any benefits at all, except much later for your nerdo-cognoscenti types