Roxy Romance

[ll-xn!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (oh...*Gregory* Taylor...never mind.)]

>Love-Hounds Digest			Thursday, May 15, 1986, 04:53 EDT
>Who is Jacques Brelle?
It's Brel. He's a French songwriter who wrote a particularly
lovely kind of bittersweet ballad. Many of his songs were made
famous by Edith Piaf. If you ever heard any Judy Collins' "Whales
and Nightengales" there is a lovely cover of Brel's "Marieke" on
it. Problem is that you've got to speak French. There are English 
translations of Brel's things, but they aren't as good as the originals
in my humble, non-Frogspeak-with-particular-aplomb opine.

>God send my ANYONE who can relate to my "abnormal" daily fix
>of Roxy Music &/or Bryan Ferry.  Jesus, I listen to Roxy soooo
>much each and every year I have to replace albums.....Guess a
>CD would be more practical, huh?
Yes, I can, though my needs aren't daily. For all our whining about
how wonderful Kate is, I'd be hard pressed to find any other single 
group of artists who so successfully redefined everything that came
after them (like Diane Arbus' use of the 2 1/4" square photograph)
quite apart from specific style (read "emphasis on style" and have
so singularly changed the face of British popular music. With the
exception of Paul MacCartney's old band. I guess that one could claim
that the Sex Pistols fall into that category, but I feel that they're
indicative of a trend rather than actually the original harbingers of
it. That's a bad thing to say here in a Kate Bush newsgroup, I guess.

Anyway, the Roxy CD is all it's cracked up to be, and clocks in at a
great time. I've only the slightest argument with their concentration
on "Flesh and Blood" period stuff, and the slightest argument with
which Brian Ferry covers they chose, but hey. The canon ain't half 
bad, and most of the important work is all there. George Melly coined
the phrase "Revolt into Style" (and Bill Nelson ripped it off) to 
characterize the co-optation of "youth culture" in the marketplace
in the "trad jazz" era. Listening to the RM stuff, I think we have
a case of "Style into Revolt...." The elevation of the surfaces of
"pop" music to a kind of self-conscious world-weary construct that has
strongly affected the whole of Britpop for the last 12 years or so.
All you young whippersnappers here cannot possibly imagine how the
first Roxy album sounded buzzsawing out of the speakers when I first
brought it home (I heard "Virginia Plain" on the BBC world service
and spent weeks looking for the record back then. Note that this makes
me visionary and cool. And old.). Between that and "Is your love strong
enough" there is a world of shift that's worthy of some serious thought.

Tim W.:
>These 80's kids remind me of the hippies of the 60's: I mean they got
>bored of fighting for their ideals and decided to join the human race,
>and they became the yuppies of today.  They all sold out pretty much to
>the machinery, and in a big way.  It's kind of sad to see these thirty-plus 
>year old cretins trying to defend their actions for becoming the way
>they did. 

Sad is the word for it, Tim. As Hannah Arendt has suggested in her
writings on the roots of Authoritarianism, the death of idealism is 
a rich ground for fascism, since the burned cynic has little or nothing
to lose. Multiply that by x00,000,000 and you've got the 80s. As for
the causes themselves, they still defy easy categorization, and still
refuse to collapse at the touch of the ideological/economic/epistemic
wand. Now we even have a really lovely set of straw men (Falwellians,
the new Right, etc.) to moan about. They're great targets, but I fear 
that they blind us to something very simple: the ease with which they
can be lumped together in a single, faceless mass allows us to believe
that they're not like us and never could be. Such a view also allows
us to neatly sidestep whatever vague dread of whiff of apprehension
we may ahve that we're not very happy with our identifications, either.
Of course, this mailing list may not be the best place for us to talk
about this in detail (I keep thinking about the extent to which Kate
Bush is a kind of modern-day apotheosis of the "Romantic Egotist"
hooked to a mass-market and a technology that extends her reach).

And the *really* interesting bit for all you youths is to wonder how
many of your peers will deal with the notion that the "realistic"
attitudes about money and influence and drive in the marketplace
require an endlessly extensible economic infrastructure that cannot
hold, and a kind of attitude about self-empowerment that may turn
out to be at odds with the vagaries of the world-where the Heathen
rage and the Unrighteous prosper (you must, of course, redefine those
terms for a secular age). The key phrase here is "diminished expectations"
and it will be interesting to see how *their* diminised exps are 
different than *mine.* End of sermon/ramble/essay, and back to the
hounding already in progress. Hi, Tim.
 
"As one who sees within a dream, and, later/the passion that had been
imprinted stays,/but nothing of the rest returns to mind,/such am I-
for my my vision almost fades/completely, yet it distills within/my
heart the sweetness that was born of it."(Dante/Paradiso,XXXIII 58-63)