on 11/11/03 11:24 AM, Efrén del Valle at efrendv@yahoo.es wrote:
Yes, but when it comes to popular music, envelope-pushing practices are far less obvious and more difficult to grab. Burt Bacharach is one example. Brian Wilson could be another one. Unless you listen to their albums really, really carefully, it's difficult to notice there's something groundbreaking there because the easily recognizable tunes and the pop forms stand at the forefront, not to mention the time/generational factor. Needless to say, when you scratch the surface, these impressions change.
Maybe to "enlightened" ears. But to those who consume pop music, these developments are totally obvious, even if the audience doesn't know technical terms for those devices and techniques. The big reason Burt, Brian, Beatles etc have stayed in such high regard is because there's something extremely arresting going there. Call it the sound of the pioneer spirit. It's deeper than pop hooks. Most people who buys lots of Beatles records maybe don't listen to the stuff carefully in the sense that one might listen carefully to Elliot Carter, but they know there's something exciting going on that spearates the Beatles from, say, the Monkees or Sonic Youth or Steely Dan. I don't think generational means squat. I think what we're talking about here is power. Not is the distorted loud guitar sense or the Elvin Jones sense, but something more elemental. skip h