The dog days of summer always abound with UFO sightings and other strange phenomena, the hot temperatures obviously creating interesting things in people's brain activity. So, it's only too fitting that there is now this fresh article on the alleged connections between the latest hot pop sensation Lady Gaga (who to me seems merely re-hashing the electroclash craze of the early naughty noughties; in the footsteps of Peaches et al.) and the Illuminati, an ancient secret society supposedly pulling the strings of this world. And this is what the article claims:
The symbolism surrounding Lady Gaga is so blatant that one might wonder if it’s all a sick joke. Illuminati symbolism is becoming so clear that analyses like this one becomes a simple exercise of pointing out the obvious. Her whole persona (whether its an act or not) is a tribute to mind control, where being vacuous, incoherent and absent minded becomes a fashionable thing.
My favourite Bollywood film music collections so far have been Indiavision (2005) and now Bollywood Funk (2000, on UK's Outcaste Records).
More groovy Hindi weirdness from the 60s, 70s and 80s; with blaxploitation film wah-wah guitars, analogue synths, big orchestral interludes, the sugar-sweet vocals from the playback singer legends like Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar, and some feral yells and insane laughter!
Film clips to some of these tracks found from YouTube:
Finnish TV channel MTV3 has listed under its Kaikkien aikojen parhaat sekunnit ("The best seconds of all time") a series of video clips of Finnish TV commercials from the 1950s to the present day. The slick Shell commercials (see also this) with their cool fashion models and the baritone voiceover from Kaj Gahnström are still well remembered, and I wonder if the unabashed eroticism of Vivante shampoo commercial would pass the censorship today...? Tupla-City was a light-hearted Western film pastiche for Tupla chocolate bars. Helsinki's Ajatar store represented the height of 70s Finnish fashion (with now politically uncorrect fur hats, too). Finnhits was the massive phenomenon of iskelmä light pop collections of the 70s and the late pop star Irwin Goodman advertised Jenkki bubblegum. Väinö Purje advertising the meat selections of the K-kauppa grocery store chain surprisingly became a big star in the Soviet Estonia (where ordinary citizens didn't exactly eat wienerschnitzel every day), where Finnish TV broadcasts could also be seen.
Today it's been exactly forty years since 'Strawberry Fields Forever', the most adventurous single of The Beatles, written by John Lennon (and also being my own personal favourite in the band's all recorded works), was published in the UK (in America it came out a couple of days later, 17 February 1967).
Backed by Paul McCartney's 'Penny Lane', this "double A-side" single gave some foretaste of what was to come with the band's June 1967 album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band, which is considered a landmark in the development of pop music in general, though many Beatles fans still argue whether as complete albums Rubber Soul (1965) or Revolver (1966) are even better ones. (Personally, I think none of these albums are totally immaculate works, each having their uneven parts and maybe some not-that-memorable songs alongside some undeniably classic tunes, so instead of naming just one album over the others, I'd just vaguely choose the band's general creative output somewhere in between 1965 and 1967 their best, of representing their "Golden Era".)
An important musical reference to The Beatles in these days was musique concrète; especially Paul McCartney was interested in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1968 Lennon would create, with assistance from Yoko Ono and George Harrison, his own (in)famous concrète piece 'Revolution No. 9' for the band's White Album. ('Carnival of Light', another experimental piece from the band still remains unpublished.) The Beatles and their producer George Martin had already experimented with the possibilities of "tape music" when creating for Revolver'Tomorrow Never Knows' (my second favourite Beatles track, probably), a baffling but also rhythmically grooving piece based on the adaptation of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" in a psychedelic tripping guide by Timothy Leary et al. The sonic achievements of the band and Martin were not less remarkable when remembering Abbey Road's studio still used four-track recording techniques, already primitive in comparison to Stateside studios having 16-track recording consoles at their use.
Starting with an an eerie flute-like mellotron phrase intro on the left channel and Lennon launching his drowsy-sounding reading, 'Strawberry Fields Forever' is sound-wise like a whole symphony condensed into four minutes. Accompanied by Ringo Starr's concise martial drumming breaks, a mêlée of pseudo-Indian music played with such instruments as swarmandel, trumpets, sawing cellos, guitars and bass stereo-panning in between the channels, this is rather a collage of sounds and music carefully assembled together in studio than any straightforward band "song". The eerie atmosphere in Lennon's vocals is not lessened by the fact that the released version of 'SFF' is put together from two different takes of the song, both in different tempos and keys, carefully joined as one by George Martin and recording engineer Geoff Emerick with elaborate tape playback speed changes, also pitch-shifting the vocals in the process.
The song which John Lennon wrote in Almeria, Spain -- while filming How I Won The War in late 1966 -- is lyrically as if a kaleidoscopic Zen riddle, full of psychedelic non sequiturs; a sort of existential search for an elusive identity, when reality is just a game through which we wander with our eyes closed, no one sharing exactly the same wavelength (or in Lennon's words, "my tree"), and all we see being but an illusion, though in the end it may all turn out well, with all "working out" -- so why worry? As Hassan-i-Sabah allegedly put it in 1124: "Nothing is real, everything is permitted". All said, your own interpretation of this song is as good as mine.
What makes this particular piece of music -- probably ancient history for today's hipper-than-thou clubbers, fanboys and DJs chasing after those latest rare pieces of vinyl of dubstep, grime and [here the name of any other fashionable here-today-gone-tomorrow genre of dance music] -- still relevant for the jaded "heard-it-all" ears of 2007, then? Technically, 'SFF' is one of the prime examples of pop's early era of "studio-as-an-instrument", paving way for all the later innovations in the techniques of electronic music and sampling; for such genres as dub reggae, disco, hip-hop, electro, techno/house, you-name-it, and the whole remixing culture. Of course, The Beatles were not the originators of these techniques but when popularizing these with their works, they influenced just through the sheer volume of their international mass appeal countless musicians and record producers around the world. It's an old cliché that if The Beatles had come into existence in our own days, they would have eagerly embraced the possibilities of synthesizers (they did include the Moog synth on their Abbey Road album of 1969), samplers and modern music software. Instead, creating their works in technically far less advanced 60s, they had to rely on the studio techniques of their own day, still very primitive from our post-Pro Tools perspective, and invent their own ways as they went along.
As to the band's cultural influence for the younger generation, today it's easy to deride The Beatles. When the nihilist mindset of such genres as goth, industrial and metal have made such dark subject matters as suicide, (mass) murder and self-mutilation appear "cool" and even appealing, the band and their naive era of flower power and universal love just appear laughable for today's "faster-harder-louder-darker" kids. And while The Beatles still keep making regular appearances on the covers of such "dadrock" magazines as Mojo and Uncut, assuring sales among the members of older pop generations getting nearer their pension days, it's just totally uncool to confess even any distant admiration for the band; a fact further confirmed by the band's record label EMI and their milking The Beatles' output to death with such cynical compilations as The Beatles 1 of 2000. (Love, the recent "mash-up" album of the band's songs -- "remixed" by combining together elements from different Beatles songs originally having nothing to do with each other -- could at its best called just "interesting", thinly disguising the fact of it being basically only another "Best of" record. Momus, a cult artist and an avid cultural commentator in his own right, was not as merciful as your present writer, though, instantly dismissing Love in his blog as "remasturbation".)
Anyway, even if we discount all that cultural burden created both by the nostalgia market and the drastically changed tastes and values in music and culture since the 60s, it's still hard to assess The Beatles as "just another" band or musical artist than as a wide cross-cultural "phenomenon"; the approach which probably does gross injustice to everyone involved.
It seems the 1960s were very different times compared to ours: the times when people still honestly believed in utopias, actually thinking that such things as the "world revolution" (or for those less politically inclined, not less than "heaven on Earth") were on their way. Despite the war in Vietnam, racial struggles or the threat of imminent nuclear war, for a lot of people everything just seemed to point to that direction: music, fashion, politics and the prevalence of mind-altering chemicals, opening new and unforeseen vistas. Experimentalism was considered a virtue everywhere. It all faded away very soon as the general disillusion set in and the world turned from day-glo to something even darker and grimmer than it had been in the monochrome pre-halcyon days of the 1950s and early 60s. Post-9/11, and it seems we are returning all the time closer to the dark ages of the medieval world of bigotry, zealotism, political and economical feudalism, even torture. More than ever, we must rediscover the seeds of hope, humanity and spiritual rebirth. Examine such works as 'Strawberry Fields Forever' -- really in some sphere of its own; outside of time, any time -- and you will constantly find those there.
Let me take you down, cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields Nothing is real And nothing to get hung about Strawberry Fields forever
Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out It doesn't matter much to me
Let me take you down, cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields Nothing is real And nothing to get hung about Strawberry Fields forever
No one, I think, is in my tree I mean, it must be high or low That is, you can't, you know, tune in, but it's alright That is, I think it's not too bad
Let me take you down, cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields Nothing is real And nothing to get hung about Strawberry Fields forever
Always, no, sometimes, think it's me But, you know, I know when it's a dream I think, er, no, I mean, er, yes, but it's all wrong That is, I think I disagree
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields Nothing is real And nothing to get hung about Strawberry Fields forever Strawberry Fields forever Strawberry Fields forever
I told you last August about Peter Watkins' 1967 film Privilege, lamenting the poor distribution status of this cult sci-fi film about the connections of pop music and fascism. Now one of those friendly YouTube pirates has brought this rare film online for everyone's watching pleasure, and this is what this person writes as accompaniment to the film:
"Privilege, a cruelly compelling, often brilliant film ... the real star ... is director Peter Watkins, only 31, who must get credit for this acidly anti-establishment film ... the quasi-documentary touches he mastered on BBC money are sharply and effectively in evidence. And in his first full-length film, he shows he can use color with startling success. No doubt about it: Watkins is on his way.' (Playboy)
'This is a bitter, uncompromising movie, and although it isn't quite successful it is fascinating and important. Watkins made a mistake in bringing the newsreel techniques of The War Game into a narrative film, where a director should be able to make his point with his story, the performances and the photography. Still the movie isn't a failure so much as an interesting episode in the career of a director who I think will eventually be ranked with Fellini and Bergman.' (Roger Ebert, Nov 1st, 1967)
The national cinema circuit in the UK, J. Arthur Rank, refused to show this "immoral and un-Christian picture which mocked the Church, defied authority and encouraged youth in lewd practices". Universal Pictures withdrew the film after brief screenings in a few countries, and the film has been rarely shown since - very occasionally on TV. Universal Pictures in Hollywood even refuse to let the director rent or buy a copy of this film, even on VHS.
(I apologize for the godawful picture quality, it's the only version of the film I got, since Universal still refuses to give this film a PROPER DVD-release... So please see this as a chance to watch this rare film!) ..."
Before the current Tempest vs. Timbaland case, claims of plagiarism go a long way back in music. Here are some (and more or less random) brief examples from the history of popular music, though these are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg of all the cases where an artist or his/her record label has claimed someone else has stolen his/her music... In the current day of "postmodern", "retro" type of pastiche pop where "ironic" references and "appropriations" (or "homages") abound everywhere, maybe it's harder to speak about plagiarism in any traditional terms, so it's interesting to see how our ideas about this will change in time.
The Kinks successfully sued The Doors for plagiarizing their 'All Day and All of the Night' to 'Hello, I Love You' in 1968.
'Black Knight' (1970) by Deep Purple sounds very much like 'We Ain't Got Nothing Yet' by The Blues Magoos (of Nuggets) fame. Actually, Wikipedia says: "The riff to Deep Purple's 1970 'Black Night' single was closely based off the riff to Ricky Nelson's 1962 'Summertime' (Deep Purple have said this themselves). In fact, the riff is a popular one to borrow. In 1966/67 the Blue Magoos had 'We Ain't Got Nothing Yet' around the same time that Status Quo had own their version. But the riff seems to stem back to Ricky Nelson's 1962 rock version re-working of the old George Gershwin standard 'Summertime'".
George Harrison was sued for plagiarizing 'He's So Fine' by The Chiffons for his song 'My Sweet Lord' in a long-lasting law suit which started in 1971. Harrison was ordered to pay $587,000 to Bright Tunes Music (the owners of the song's copyright) in 1976, after a judge found him guilty of "subconscious" plagiarism. The Chiffons would later record 'My Sweet Lord' to capitalize on the publicity generated by the lawsuit.
Led Zeppelin used a riff from 'Taurus' by Spirit for their best-known song, 'Stairway to Heaven'. Spirit's guitarist Randy California was reportedly just happy to let Zeppelin to use the riff. Led Zeppelin was often also accused of using old blues songs uncredited as the basis of their own tracks. Also Bob Dylan has been accused along the years of "appropriating" old songs for his own tracks.
All unsold copies of 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), the 1987 debut album of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (a.k.a. The KLF) were ordered to be destroyed by the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, following a complaint from ABBA; the JAMS having sampled large portions of ABBA's 'Dancing Queen' for the track 'Queen and I'.
De La Soul was sued by The Turtles members for featuring an uncredited sample (the intro to The Turtles' 'You Showed Me') in the song 'Transmitting Live from Mars' on De La Soul's 1989 debut album. This was one of the first court cases over sampling music.
Negativland issued in 1991 a single called 'U2', featuring parodies of the group U2's well-known song 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For', including kazoos and extensive sampling of the original song. U2's label Island Records sued Negativland and most copies of the single were recalled and destroyed.
For their 1997 track 'Bittersweet Symphony' -- using a licensed sample from the Andrew Oldham Orchestra's version of 'The Last Time' by The Rolling Stones (1965) -- The Verve (UK) was sued by ABKCO Records of Allen Klein, which owns the rights to The Stones' 60s recordings. ABCKO claimed The Verve had used "too much" of the sample. The matter was eventually settled out of court, with copyright of the song (which lyrics were written entirely by The Verve vocalist, Richard Ashcroft) reverting to ABKCO and songwriting credits to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Stones.
Splank of Zombie Nation had to pay an undisclosed amount to David Whittaker, the programmer who wrote the original music riff to 80s Commodore-64 computer game 'Lazy Jones', which was used as the basis of Zombie Nation's 1999 hit 'Kernkraft 400'.
It is now claimed that Janne Suni a.k.a. Tempest a.k.a. Damage, a Finnish demoscene musician/graphic artist (who has also done cover art for Jyväskylä's Rikos Records), has had 'Acid Jazzed Evening', one of his tracks, blatantly ripped by the well-known hip-hop/R&B producer Timbaland on Nelly Furtado's song 'Do It' for her album Loose.
The said track is from a Commodore 64 conversion of an Amiga .mod file made by the Finnish demoscener Janne Suni. The track was entered into a music competition at Assembly 2000, a demo party held in Helsinki, Finland in the year 2000. Tempest's entry 'Acid Jazzed Evening', a 4-channel Amiga .mod won first place in the "Oldskool Music" competition. According to Scene.org the song was uploaded to their servers in 2000, long before the release of the song by Furtado. A video which claims to show proof of the theft was posted to YouTube on January 12, 2007. It's yet unknown whether Janne Suni will ever be able take the case to the court, the prospects of winning a court case against a major record label-backed international celebrity artist being very slight; not to talk about any astronomical expenses involved in losing a case like that.
I remember the Jaguar case caused a very angry response in dance music community towards Sony/BMG and generated lots of negative publicity, so similarly I think now only a massive media exposure and pressure from fellow musicians/music fans/journalists etc. all over the world might help Tempest/Janne Suni getting his due compensation here.
As it was pointed out in media articles above, any court case against Timbaland and his multinational record label (with their mighty army of highly-paid corporate lawyers; just remember the OJ Simpson case...) would probably be lost (as said, not to talk about another additional injury caused by the case's expenses) by Tempest or anyone representing him. So it seems to me some sort of out-of-court settlement would be the only realistic outcome here.
Caetano Veloso -- one of the most important names behind the late-60s Brazilian musical movement Tropicalismo (a.k.a. Tropicália) -- writes in his 2002 autobiography Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution in Brazil (originally Verdade Tropical, 1997) about avantgarde and its problematic connection with popular music:
"In 1968, Augusto [de Campos, a 'concretist' poet friend of Veloso since the 1960s] was impressed with Paul McCartney's declared enthusiasm for Stockhausen. Yet in the years that followed, as he was listening to the sweet and spineless pop produced by Paul -- music whose transgression was totally programmatic and digestible following the spectacular growth of the pop market after the Beatles -- a man like Augusto, one can only imagine, must have been filled with boredom and distaste. He must have felt the same toward pop music, MPB, and the tropicalistas. Sooner or later we, the tropicalistas, in more or less noble ways, depending on the individual case, would show signs of the essence of our chosen activity, which has always consisted in producing banal songs to compete in the market. (And in Brazil the growth of this market means an advance on the national scale.) Augusto keeps on fighting for unpopular music: Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Varèse, and Cage -- and also Giacinto Scelsi, Luigi Nono, Ustvolskaya, etc. The stubborn unpopularity of the most inventive contemporary music is truly a mystery. Augusto's flash of euphoria when he heard of McCartney's (ultimately undeveloped) interest in Stockhausen in 1968 represented a fleeting hope of deciphering this enigma. Produssumo, as I said earlier, was a word invented by another concretist poet, Décio Pignatari, to define a period in which avant-garde ideas had a place at the top of the pop-rock charts. One of the most stimulating problems of the avant-garde, and a problem that makes some of the most stimulating artists run from it like the Devil from the cross -- is its dubious position with regard to its intrinsic ambition to become the norm. I have recently heard Arto Lindsay say that the musicians and producers of the trendiest vogue in dance music (techno) are voracious consumers of precisely the kind of music heroically defended by Augusto. These young people are listening to Varèse and Cage, to Boulez and Berio. And, says Arto, they don't talk about anything else. What should we make of this? In the seventies, there was already an outcry of very conservative (and very useful) voices protesting 'modernism in the streets.' But will the collective ear adjust itself to postserialist or postdodecaphonic music? And what kind of world will it be, when such music sounds like music to 'everyone's' ears? I myself can't say exactly why Webern's music (especially the most radical pieces) has always seemed to me indisputably beautiful. Might the techno-dance kids be an embryonic minority? What will happen to the tonal ear as we know it if unpopular music's failure with the public at large is overcome? When I first saw MTV in New York, I wrote an article entitled 'Vendo canções' (See and Sell Things), in which I ask more or less superficial questions but still point in the same direction. The procedures of avant-garde film, which were trashed by serious and commercial cinema alike, had finally found refuge in those snippets of rock 'n' roll film, which were at once erratic illustrations of the songs and ads for the corresponding records. Now I can't stand to watch rock videos for very long: the excess of images labouring to seem bizarre bores me, especially at the speed the editing presents them. But the question remains: don't the references to Un chien andalou, to Metropolis -- and the undying kinship with Cocteau's Blood of a Poet -- appear in a rock video exactly as Mondrian's designs flash across the skirt of a prostitute? Are 'modernisms' and 'avantgardes' only now beginning to lose their right to such labels?"
I was just lazily channel-surfing one night when I spotted this video by a UK band called Kasabian, supposedly one of those fashionable post-Britpop acts now championed by England's indierock Bible NME.
This song sounded to me like a sort of combination of early 70s glamrock's stomping boogie beat with the pyrotechnics guitar psychedelia of late 60s; with even some organ sounds in the middle eight reminiscing of Pink Floyd's 'One of These Days'. The Kasabian video itself could be called quite Beatle-esque, with its rotoscope animation and UV light/day-glo colours reminiscing of the 1968 cartoon film Yellow Submarine, and the singer even wearing a sort of 19th century military jacket donned by The Beatles members (and Jimi Hendrix, too) during their Sergeant Pepper era. Add to this some Jackson Pollock abstract expressionism paint splashes also favoured by The Stone Roses.
My ongoing gripe has been for a long time that rock these days seems to be merely some retroist nostalgia pastiche trip whereas once that genre of music could even be called genuinely futuristic. Not futuristic in the science fiction sense of having such imagery as robots (the number one cliché in electro), faster-than-light spaceships and so on, but being futuristic music in the sense that it looked joyously into the future and tried to create something totally new by the very way it was conceived, arranged and produced. 'Strawberry Fields Forever' by The Beatles in 1967 or Giorgio Moroder's production for Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' about ten years later were in this sense futuristic music for their own eras. Whereas a band or a musical act in 2007 trying to emulate the sounds of George Martin's productions for The Beatles or Moroder's proto-Italodisco would be helplessly retroist. So, even if I could enjoy a track by a current band like Kasabian as a clever and well-executed retroist pastiche of my favourite yesteryear bands, my enjoyment can't be totally and thoroughly honest and unreserved. Well, I'm totally aware that my personal quest for that genuine futurism in today's music is just completely naïve and not a little bit Quixotic.
Could such genres currently in vogue as grime or dubstep offer me that elusive sense of being honestly "future music", then? There was a time when even the most blatant chart pop bands could at least pretend they had some sort of social agenda in their music, but these days it's very hard to find anything like that in the psychopathic drive-by shooting fantasies of hip-hop and the empty bling-bling hedonism of R&B: for example, Lethal Bizzle's grime classic 'Forward Riddim' includes such lyrical strokes of genius as: "Killa killa real deal/Niggas know the real deal/Don't care how you feel/I will be cockin' back my steel straight/Bullets bullets run run/Fire fire bun/If you don't like killa killa/Nigga you can suck your mum". But well, you can't really blame the mirror for only reflecting its environment, can you? (Probably with grime and dubstep I would be more interested in sounds and production, anyway, than whatever lyrical content they might claim to have.) Once people actually thought they can change the world with music. From a traditional leftist-Marxist point of view there seems not to be much room for any social commentary in the early 21st century music, which is rather emphasizing the instant emotional gratification than creating any uneasy questions in a listener.
Modernism prevailed in architecture since the post-First World War era, in the visions of such people as Le Corbusier, Bauhaus and Functionalists; and by the 1960s this ascetic approach had developed into the minimalist, massive and menacing -- at its worst even post-Stalinist totalitarian -- style of the slabs of concrete, in what was called "Brutalist architecture". Combined with the technocratic city-planning, often manipulated by greedy and corrupt real estate deals, this was the style that prevailed all over the world, as the architecture of earlier eras was often ruthlessly erased and demolished to give way to the box-shaped steel and concrete office buildings and suburban apartment houses of element blocks. (My own hometown Tampere can well be called another example here, when several "wars" were waged over in the 60s and 70s to save such idyllic late 19th century/early 20th buildings as the City Hall or the Old Market Hall, threatened by an impending demolition in the hands of technocratic City Fathers.)
This autocratic dogmatism of Modernism/Brutalism was now challenged by architects who respected more the organic, evolutionary aspects of the city. Perhaps the most inventive and influential thinkers in this vein were the members of Archigram, a group of British architects that got together in the early 1960s through the Architectural Association in London; comprising Warren Chalk, Peter Cook (no relation to the era's famous British comedian of the same name), Dennis Crompton, David Green, Ron Herron and Michael Webb. Archigram's ideas were expressed in imaginative, often playful fantasy projects and colourful collages in "pop" spirit, which were published on the pages of their eponymous journal launched in 1961. Many of Archigram's designs were actually never meant to be realised as finished buildings, only as joyful simulations of what architecture could perhaps be in some possible but distant future, such as Roy Herron's "Walking City" of 1964: with an outlandish idea of a city that could be moved on its mechanical legs from one area to another!
Archigram were influenced by science fiction, comic books and other popular culture, engineering, and generally taking ideas from outside their own medium to find new approaches for architecture. In Amazing Archigram 4 Zoom Issue of 1964 Warren Chalk wrote: "In this second half of the twentieth century, the old idols are crumbling, the old precepts strangely irrelevant, the old dogmas no longer valid. We are in pursuit of an idea, a new vernacular, something alongside the space capsules, computers, and throw-away packages of an atomic and electronic age".
Bibliography:
Peter Cook (ed.): Archigram (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, ISBN 1568981945)
Simon Sadler: Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (The MIT Press, 2005, ISBN 0262693224)
Several cultural critics have pointed out the connections between rock music (+ pop music in general) and fascism. Rock has always prided itself as a music of freedom and personal expression, but when one starts to think about it, there are not really so many differences between gigantic stadium rock concerts and Nazi events like Nuremberg Rally; with their massive stage settings, the hypnotic, stomping rhythms; power trips for the masses making the rapturous fans raise their fists in the air... Fascism makes use of the underlying frustrations (social, economical, political, sexual), inhibited aggressions and latent violence mass society tends to create in its members -- the same fuel which can also be found behind rock's emotional energy. Drawing such comparisons even closer to the point, one such charismatic rock star as the late Freddie Mercury of Queen was called by his detractors "the Adolf Hitler of rock'n'roll". One can only ponder all the potential there to mass control and manipulation.
Peter Watkins' 1967 film Privilege, starring Paul Jones (of the band Manfred Mann) and Jean Shrimpton (a "supermodel" of her own era), is a dystopian tale about a near-future pop star whose success is exploited for their own means by the powers that be. A totalitarian government and church well understand the importance of Steven Shorter (Jones), an extremely popular singer, to their own efforts of mass control, pacifying the youth dissent and religious domination.
"Aren't you using this young man to further your own agenda?" a clergyman in the film is asked. He replies: "Well, in the middle ages the church used the inquisition to further our own agenda, and we think this is a lot less painful!"
Rock's undercurrent of violence is also exploited by the film's fascistic government: in one concert sequence, the crowd watches Shorter sing a plaintive plea for love and understanding while locked in a cage surrounded by police officers armed with clubs. It is said that at least one scene in the film was copied by Stanley Kubrick for his Clockwork Orange.
Filmed in a quasi-documentary way, Privilege was Watkins' only British feature film, and it was both a commercial and critical flop in its time. Privilege has since gained a cult film status, though, even if seeing it these days can be extremely difficult, only semi-bootleg DVD or video copies being available at the moment. (For me, this is another one I have liked to see for years but haven't, because of this poor distribution status.)
Peter Watkins (born 1935) is known for such controversial film works as The War Game (1965), which with its disturbing scenes depicting the effects of nuclear war was banned by BBC. The Gladiators (1969) was filmed and distributed in Sweden, being another bleak sci-fi satire, this time foreseeing the so-called reality TV phenomenon, when the world governments decide channel man's aggressive instincts to a more controllable manner and start televised contests (with sponsors and commercials) between teams of selected soldiers from each country.
Diabolik is an Italian comicbook character, a super-villain created in 1962 by sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani. Diabolik's partner in crime in these amoral adventures is the ultra-cool Eva Kant (reminiscing in these comics somehow Kim Novak of Hitchcock's Vertigo). Some issues of Diabolik were published also in Finnish between 1975 and 1978.
The acclaimed Italian horror director Mario Bava directed in 1968 a stylish movie adaptation called Danger: Diabolik -- starring John Phillip Law (of Barbarella fame) and Marisa Mell -- which has reached a cult film status.
Klein, who has a reputation of a mean operator, is no stranger to controversy himself: as his capacity as the manager of both The Rolling Stones and The Beatles (after the death of Brian Epstein), Klein eventually managed to alienate both bands and their inner circle. Court cases ensued. As for Jodorowsky's films, Klein has sat for years on them, refusing to give rights to their distribution in any format. (And I heard that he also owns the rights to ? & The Mysterians' music, which is the reason their classic '96 Tears' won't be heard on CD!) Apparently, an agreement has now been made.
As for the films themselves, it's quite hard to give a comprehensible description of any of them. Think of Luis Buñuel's surrealism combined with the exuberance of Federico Fellini, with some David Lynch thrown in, and you are not nearly anywhere close. El Topo could be faintly called a psychedelic spaghetti western with mystical, occult and grotesque overtones. This cult film gave an initial spark to the "Midnight Movies" phenomenon, receiving praises from such people as John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The Holy Mountain is even a deeper mystical quest, featuring at the end of it an example of the Brechtian "breaking of the fourth Wall" when the protagonists find out they are characters in a movie: "Lights -- camera -- this is Maya". Fando y Lis, Jodorowsky's first film incited a riot at Acapulco film festival 1968, and the director was nearly deported from Mexico for his troubles, echoing the experiences of another lover of controversy, Luis Buñuel.
Jodorowsky also worked for the planned mid-70s version of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic Dune. H.R. Giger, best known for Alien, was supposed to create film's designs. This version eventually fell through, and Dune was finally filmed by David Lynch in 1984 -- becoming the biggest flop of his career. Alongside his film career Jodorowsky is also known as the scriptwriter of Jean "Moebius" Giraud's Incal comics, another feast for the fans of Jodorowsky's psychedelic-mystical style.
And finally, here is info about Jodorowsky's planned "metaphysical spaghetti gangster film", King Shot, starring Marilyn Manson and Nick Nolte and to be filmed in Mexico.
"The only performance that makes it, that really makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness."
Woe on all you Finnish people who missed this one, shown last night on MTV3 channel.
This nasty and pervy cult flick grinds Jorge Luis Borges, Hassan-I-Sabbah (the mythical predecessor of Osama bin Laden and the founder of the sect of Assassins/Hashishins), the Kray Twins (the notorious gangsters of the 1960s London), magic mushrooms, mixing up of gender identities and psychedelic decadence into one ugly and beautiful cut-up carnival, à la William S. Burroughs. Alongside these references there are also visual tributes to such artists as Francis Bacon. A psycho-sexual mindfuck of the highest order, courtesy of the late Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (who later on directed more cult movies: Walkabout, Don't Look Now and David Bowie's finest film moment, The Man Who Fell To Earth, among them).
Among those visually striking scenes there's one particularly disturbing where we see a bullet making its way through the brain, only to end up to a photograph depicting Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian master of literary labyrinths, whose works heavily influenced this movie.
The controversial Performance was originally filmed in 1968 but only released in 1970. It is said that the sex scenes between Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton got so heavy that the scenes cut from the theatre version were shown with great success at an adult film festival in Amsterdam.
Mick Jagger's own music video-like performance (sic) of 'Memo From Turner' is particularly memorable. (Hmmm, might this be one potential future cover version for Kompleksi...?)
Memo From Turner (Jagger/Richards)
Didn't I see you down in San Antone on a hot and dusty night? We were eating eggs in Sammy's when the black man there drew his knife. Aw, you drowned that Jew in Rampton as he washed his sleeveless shirt. You know, that Spanish-speaking gentlemen, the one we all call Kurt.
Come now, gentlemen, I know there's some mistake. How forgetful I'm becoming, now you fixed your business straight.
I remember you in Hemlock Road in nineteen fifty-six. You were a faggy little leather boy with a smaller piece of stick. You're a lashing, smashing hunk of man; Your sweat shines sweet and strong. Your organs working perfectly, but there's a part that's not screwed on.
Weren't you at the Coke convention back in nineteen sixty-five? You're the misbred, grey executive I've seen heavily advertised. You're the great, grey man whose daughter licks policemen's buttons clean. You're the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine.
Come now, gentlemen, your love is all I crave. You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing, laughing in my grave.
When the old men do the fighting and the young men all look on. And the young girls eat their mothers' meat from tubes of plasticon. Be wary of these, my gentle friends, of all the skins you breed. They have a tasty habit -- they eat the hands that bleed.
So remember who you say you are and keep your noses clean. Boys will be boys and play with toys, so be strong with your beast. Oh Rosie dear, doncha think it's queer, so stop me, if you please. The baby is dead, my lady said, "You gentlemen, why you all work for me?"
I'm well aware that Bollywood (India's extremely proficient counterpart to Hollywood) was in vogue among hipsters (or the people who think they are those) already a couple of years ago, but I only got really into Bollywood's amazing soundtrack music, when I found from local library Metso this 16-track compilation of Indian film music from the period of 1966-1984.
Indiavision (2005) is a French-compiled selection of those weird and wonderful Bollywood film composers and singers. What fascinates me in these songs is how they take influences from Western film and popular music (rock, pop, psychedelia, disco...), mix them with their own musical heritage and instrumentation, and turn them into something that is simultaneously innovative, strange (at least to our Western ears), funny and beautiful.
Among sitars, tablas and Western-type of film orchestras with strings and brass you can hear spiky 60s and early 70s type of wah-wah pedal guitars and even some analogue synthesizer sounds. The songs are in Hindi but every now and then include some suitable catch phrases in English. Most bizarre this is in 'I Love You' by Usha Iyer and Asha Bhosle, where the lyrics "I really love you / I really do" are combined together with a cheery "Hare rama, hare Krishna" mantra; then at the end of the song one of the singers asks in hipster English: "Can we go a little faster, man?", receives an affirmative "Yeah!", and the tempo of the track duly speeds up.
Strange tempo changes are not the only things making this not too similar to Western pop; the songs often consist of various parts of different styles which follow each other in a surreal, even dream-like logic (just like the plots of most Bollywood films). These songs in their style, making one think of late-60s psychedelia, go somewhere beyond cheap exotica or "world music" styles. Like Brazilian Tropicália, this is truly a sound of international fusion of taking Western styles and mutating them with home-grown influences into something new and amazing. Since this compilation stops already to the year 1984, I can't tell how Indian film music today is, but if they keep following the tradition at display here, it really must be something to check out.
The 1982 film Tron -- which was a pioneering work in using computer graphics extensively in mainstream cinema (and with Wendy Carlos' musical score too) -- is these days considered a proto-cyberpunk classic. Here is a mash-up video of Tron and Depeche Mode's 'Suffer Well'.
