USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

[Kepler]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

I'm here to report that Parsifal is as close to unwatchable as anything when one is literally stuck inside fearing death.

I love slow. Holy f-ck Parsifal is SLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

No wonder Mark Twain summed it up as "a singer (who isn't even Parsifal -- ed.) spends 4 hours on the point of death while everyone he talks to expires from boredom." This is a both factually and spiritually perfect summary. There's a moment near the end when he sings, "Madmen, would you have me continue to live?!" He speaks for the audience.

I'm not saying it's bad. It's not good or bad, it just is, like a brick. I'm saying the only reason paint drying doesn't have more action than Parsifal is the paint probably isn't anti-Semitic.

Also: the MacGuffin is the Spear of Destiny,



and Constantine did that way better.

Note: the Grail Knights in that picture are not dead. That would have been exciting. They're just lethargic. I am not kidding, they aren't even asleep. They're just logey.

Here's a modern review. Note: it has spoilers. Parsifal premiered 150 years ago, so you've had enough time to see it.

Tomorrow it's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and it better have full frontal nudity.

[Slap Shot]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Glass Animals – Toes
Dead Man Winter – Destroyer
The Clash – Rudie Can’t Fail
Joe Crocker – Cry Me A River
Lucinda Williams – You Can’t Rule Me
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down – Temple
INXS – Don’t Change
Aretha Franklin – Love The One You’re With (Live)
Billy Bragg – I Keep Faith
The Rentals – Friends Of P
Ben Harper – Ground On Down

[MissThundercat]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Oh Twitch...

[Kepler]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Bounce rock skate roll

[Jimjamesak]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Bounce rock skate roll

Thought you were going with this...

[Kepler]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

OK, today was Die Meistersinger, and it was about as far from Parsifal as parsible nyuck nyuck.

That's a triple threat joke, because DM is a playfully clever meta-lesson about singing and poetry and capital 'A' Art, and it's also, and I swear I'm not kidding, up tempo. The plot is fun and moves along, the characters are great, and they even chat and flirt (in church!) and joke and do pratfalls. Wagner wrote a RomCom, and it works!

First off, and this is IINM unique in the entire Wagnerian canon, nobody dies. One character does get the ever-loving sh-t kicked out of him (and it's problematic because he's the ur-Jewish stereotype and villain), but nobody gets run through by a holy lance and nobody pines away for lost love until they melt into a pool of tears. There are also no magic water fowl.

If you are brand new to Wagner I recommend DM as the ideal starter. It's even short -- for Wagner -- at a shade under 4:30, which is basically a 10-inning Yankees Red Sox game on ESPN. Only, in this one, the good guys win.

Tomorrow is Der fliegende Holländer, which is the last stop before I begin SPEAR AND MAGIC HELMET.

The story so far:

1. Tristan und Isolde: 10; austere, romantic, the most beautiful music ever written, one of the maybe six justifications (tops) for humanity to have existed
2. Lohengrin: 7; lovely, fantastical
3. Tannhauser: 5; erotic, bizarre
4. Parsifal: 2, inert, interminable
5. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: 9; good humored, bourgeois, pleasant

To go:

6. Der fliegende Holländer

Der Ring des Nibelungen (all 15 f-cking hours of it):
7. Das Rheingold
8. Die Walküre
9. Siegfried
10. Götterdämmerung

after which I won't be afraid of the virus because either I'll be dead or I won't be afraid of anything ever again. That's not a knife; look at this sheet music.

[Kepler]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Finished Der fliegende Holländer in a brisk 2 and a half hours. Disappointingly, I could not find a performance of the Dutchman on the internet with English subtitles, so I watched a version without subtitles and kinda figured it out as I went along.

It's not subtle.

Besides being about 40 percent shorter than the typical Wagner opera this is also much more straightforward. The secondary "complicating" plot arc feel like it's tacked on for dramatic purposes and only two characters (the Dutchman and his doomed girl Senta) are multi-dimensional. The soprano in the performance I watched was a shrieker and I don't know if that's just her or whether Wagner wrote her that way and became more sophisticated in his music as he went along. This is the earliest of his 10 "mature" operas. (He wrote his first juvenile opera when he was 12 and I have wasted my life.)

By Operabase's numbers, Dutchman was the most-performed of Wagner's operas last year, proving shorter = better, or at least cheaper to mount. Here is the cardinality of the Wagnerian corpus among the most performed operas last year (#1 was Mozart's The Magic Flute):

17. Der fliegende Holländer
36. Das Rheingold (Ring 1)
40. Die Walkure (Ring 2)
41. Tristan und Isolde
45. Parsifal
49. Lohengrin
55. Tannhauser

I get the impression that Der fliegende Holländer is the least-regarded of Wagner's major works by opera scholars. It is certainly the least Wagnerian -- it feels like it could have been written by any Teutonic or perhaps even any Anglo-Saxon composer. The highs are still pretty high, though. The Overture, which you know though you don't know you know, is fantastic in full symphonic heavy metal and the best musical phrasing of the sea I have heard this side of Peer Gynt*. A music professor in college told us it's a three-way death match between brass, wind, and strings with percussion egging them on to kill each other, and it works even better when there is genuine bad blood among the musicians. In other words, it's a hair band anthem. The sea scenes and the ghost ship give set and lighting designers the opportunity for some impressive and trippy special effects.

Later tonight I will start on Elmer and Bugs. I'm going to take bite-sized chunks this trip -- I've tried single sittings of the Ring before and it has Not Gone Well (think a marathon where you're p-ssing blood by mile 7).

* Holy sh-t, that is a fast version. That must be accelerated.

[LTsatch]

Hadn't listened to Nirvana in awhile and figured I'd roll through the whole studio catalog. Currently halfway through Bleach.

This YouTube video of Nirvana was recorded 5 days before Nevermind dropped, there were about 100-150 people at a small nightclub called The Moon in New Haven. https://youtu.be/a-0sr5k6jPw

[MissThundercat]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

A lot of Kesha. I've been in the mood dance and drink lately, so "before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack... cause when I leave for the night I ain't coming back...."

[solovsfett]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Beauty Pill are a great band, they released a new song and video today: https://youtu.be/jBV6htzVqS0

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

This YouTube video of Nirvana was recorded 5 days before Nevermind dropped, there were about 100-150 people at a small nightclub called The Moon in New Haven. https://youtu.be/a-0sr5k6jPw

Nice.

I've also heard the first-ever performance of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" thanks to the Hype documentary and YouTube.

[Kepler]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Nice.

I've also heard the first-ever performance of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" thanks to the Hype documentary and YouTube.

That documentary is great.

[Kepler]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

So, Das Rheingold is super. Fascinating plot, lots of action, witty repartee, and in no particular order: gods, nymphs, gnomes, dwarves, giants, a dragon (sort of) and a really spooky primordial Earth Goddess who warns anybody who'll listen (i.e., nobody) that this isn't going to end well.

Also: Tolkien stole everything, if not from this then from the common source material.

Solid 8, not hurt by the fact that the Freia in my performance was ridiculously lovely and erotic (Carmen Reppel), not something one typically gets in a role requiring that much horsepower.



Fig. 1 No means no, boys.


Tomorrow is Brünhild & Her Sisters. Someday this war's gonna end.


Fig. 2 The OG herself.

[rufus]

This YouTube video of Nirvana was recorded 5 days before Nevermind dropped, there were about 100-150 people at a small nightclub called The Moon in New Haven. https://youtu.be/a-0sr5k6jPw

When I saw Smashing Pumpkins, after Mellon Collie had come out, Corgan mentioned onstage how the last time they came to my area, they played to like 5 people in a small club. I had never heard about that show.

Although I did get to see Screaming Trees in that same small club maybe a year or two before this. Maybe 30-40 people there.

[Kepler]

Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

I just found the entire basis of Prince's career: Heartbreaker by Zapp.