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

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

solovsfett said:
How is Marry Me? MassSeduction? I’m way behind on music now. My last St. Vincent purchase was Strange Mercy and I love that one too. But not as much as Actor...not yet anyway.
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Marry Me is okay; it's her debut. Her self-titled is very good, Bowie-esque. Masseduction is a little more futuristic, but Pills, Los Ageless, and New York are all tracks you should listen to.
 
Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

Kepler said:
Holds up? I assume so. That is a group that is stronger in retrospect. Of all the hype of that scene they were the real deal.
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Yes, mostly. Except for "Aneurysm" the second half of Incesticide is not my thing, but the rest of the catalog holds up.
 
MissThundercat said:
Marry Me is okay; it's her debut. Her self-titled is very good, Bowie-esque. Masseduction is a little more futuristic, but Pills, Los Ageless, and New York are all tracks you should listen to.
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Oops, yeah, I have the self-titled one as well. I’m going to order Masseduction on vinyl next week. I love the Bowie vibe she was headed toward on the S/T lp. I still feel Annie Clark is incredibly underrated.
 
Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson

I'm using the enforced chair-sitting of WFH to go through the Wagnerian operas, all from Bayreuth. So far I've done Tristan, Lohengrin, and Tannhauser. Next up is Parsifal.

The plots are very, very silly. There are numerous enchanted swans. Also lots of sex. But the music is sublime and the characters are wonderful.
 
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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,

<img src="https://www.newyorklatinculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Parsifal-Ken-Howard-Met-Opera-850.jpg" height=300>

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.
 
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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
 
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.
 
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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.
 
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FadeToBlack&Gold said:
Hadn't listened to Nirvana in awhile and figured I'd roll through the whole studio catalog. Currently halfway through Bleach.
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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
 
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...."
 
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