nightspore
Group: Members
Posts: 4770
Joined: Mar. 2008 |
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Posted: April 18 2008, 10:18 |
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Quote (Alan D @ April 18 2008, 05:25) | I take your point about Dylan, too. Despite being a child of the 60s, I couldn't bear Dylan for years and years. Then one day about 1999, I walked into a CD fair, and 'Masters of War' was being played - but it was like no version I'd ever heard before, being sung by what seemed to be a voice from some far-off place, broken but deeply affected by time and experience. It turned out it was a 1998 live bootleg recording. I bought it then and there, and fell headlong into Dylan's box (just in time for his magnificent tour of the UK in 2000, thankfully). Yet all those years in between I hadn't been able to summon any interest.
So we can never know what's round the corner. I suspect I'll be putting on Amarok (and gritting my teeth in anticipation) for a long while yet, because the rewards, when you finally get into one of those boxes (if you have reason to think it could be a good one), can be so great. |
We may have to agree to disagree about Dylan, Alan. I accept that many of his lyrics stand as poetry - and I think it's his lyrics that posterity will mainly remember. In all of the songs of his I know - and that's most of them; my brother is a Dylan maniac - there's a great disparity (an irony, really) between the complexity of the words and the simplicity of the music. (I should own here that I'm from a classical background, where it's expected that the music and the words should bounce off each other). Mike makes a similar mistake in his setting of Hiawatha: there's nothing in the music to reflect what's going on in the words.
I didn't read early enough in the thread to read what you were saying about Amarok. I can understand your view: noise is noise, irrespective of whether the pieces between are typically melodic Oldfield, which, of course, they are. I think many like the sheer derring-do of putting noise on a music album, and I can understand that too. Try listening to Stockhausen's "Sirius" (which is a kind of electronic science fiction opera) and even the most extreme of Mike's musique concrete will sound quite melodic!
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