http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131125-do-the-velvets-beat-the-beatles
“The Velvets merged low and high art that disdained the middle, and made it cool to be not just different, but to amplify those differences. Cale called it “a theory of stubbornness”.
Theory of stubbornness. I love that. Most everything good was once created by somebody who pissed a lot of people off, who shocked them, who failed to comply with “obvious” standards.
All Elvis did, to repeat a cliche, was make the innovations and shocking behavior of blacks acceptable–after a time, to be sure, but there he was on stage and eventually on Ed Sullivan–to white people, which is to say the world. He had a fantastic voice, to be sure, but he wasn’t the only one.
I’m drinking a few beers, chilling out, and trying to understand, to feel, what made the Velvet Underground so influential.
It’s so hard, decades after the fact, to hear music as it would have been heard when first played. It’s so hard to really GROK “influence.”
I have never, to take another example, REALLY understood Bebop (some of the comments on some of the videos I watched actually referenced Bebop, but I don’t know what their context is; my own is that I have tried to GET this music, and took a class in college on jazz history), as it was understood at the time. I don’t like it. I don’t like Charlie Parker. But to understand it in CONTEXT is, I think, to hear it very, very differently.
These are imaginative exercised I will never be able to do properly. This is what I am choosing to do tonight though while knocking a few down.
“The Velvets merged low and high art that disdained the middle, and made it cool to be not just different, but to amplify those differences. Cale called it “a theory of stubbornness”.
Theory of stubbornness. I love that. Most everything good was once created by somebody who pissed a lot of people off, who shocked them, who failed to comply with “obvious” standards.
All Elvis did, to repeat a cliche, was make the innovations and shocking behavior of blacks acceptable–after a time, to be sure, but there he was on stage and eventually on Ed Sullivan–to white people, which is to say the world. He had a fantastic voice, to be sure, but he wasn’t the only one.
I’m drinking a few beers, chilling out, and trying to understand, to feel, what made the Velvet Underground so influential.
It’s so hard, decades after the fact, to hear music as it would have been heard when first played. It’s so hard to really GROK “influence.”
I have never, to take another example, REALLY understood Bebop (some of the comments on some of the videos I watched actually referenced Bebop, but I don’t know what their context is; my own is that I have tried to GET this music, and took a class in college on jazz history), as it was understood at the time. I don’t like it. I don’t like Charlie Parker. But to understand it in CONTEXT is, I think, to hear it very, very differently.
These are imaginative exercised I will never be able to do properly. This is what I am choosing to do tonight though while knocking a few down.