(warning- extremely garbled post follows)
heh was going to post this to 'music' but thought it would die a hasty death, ignored in a keruffle of grime discussion....
brecht's non-'literary' stuff- the threepenny opera, happy end, mahoganny, kuhle wampe- seem an interesting way of seeing the scraps seen in the MIA thread and others as here you have intellectuals and marxists like eisler, bb and co explicitly having some sort of dialogue with popular culture- not by pretending there are no binaries, no differences, but by throwing stuff together that ought not to make sense and working off the friction generated....this then leads to all sorts of wierd shit- the threepenny opera filtering through to des o connor doing 'mack the knife' or to all manner of esoteric agitproppery....
they're also all very funny.
but what makes them especially interesting is that they tie themselves so rigorously to a (in retrospect maybe dubious, whatever) political programme and philosophy, yet are so unafraid of being entertaining. this might be because there was an *actual* mass movement to tie themselves to- i mean the maoism of cornelius cardew or someone always seemed a little risible as their politics were so fantastical- eisler's less so as he was writing FOR a movement. but over the last 6 or 7 years there has been all manner of protests from the single issue stuff like the war or the sysematic critique of the fair trade museli and george monbiot book lot. this has, pretty much inspired no interesting music/film/whatsoever (save for documentaries) why so?
so what do people think about this stuff? am i making any sense whatsoever? does this just evoke memories of horrific drama school productions of 'the caucasian chalk circle'?
or alternatively, do people just want to talk about what the best versions of the songs are, cos i'm fine with that
heh was going to post this to 'music' but thought it would die a hasty death, ignored in a keruffle of grime discussion....
brecht's non-'literary' stuff- the threepenny opera, happy end, mahoganny, kuhle wampe- seem an interesting way of seeing the scraps seen in the MIA thread and others as here you have intellectuals and marxists like eisler, bb and co explicitly having some sort of dialogue with popular culture- not by pretending there are no binaries, no differences, but by throwing stuff together that ought not to make sense and working off the friction generated....this then leads to all sorts of wierd shit- the threepenny opera filtering through to des o connor doing 'mack the knife' or to all manner of esoteric agitproppery....
they're also all very funny.
but what makes them especially interesting is that they tie themselves so rigorously to a (in retrospect maybe dubious, whatever) political programme and philosophy, yet are so unafraid of being entertaining. this might be because there was an *actual* mass movement to tie themselves to- i mean the maoism of cornelius cardew or someone always seemed a little risible as their politics were so fantastical- eisler's less so as he was writing FOR a movement. but over the last 6 or 7 years there has been all manner of protests from the single issue stuff like the war or the sysematic critique of the fair trade museli and george monbiot book lot. this has, pretty much inspired no interesting music/film/whatsoever (save for documentaries) why so?
so what do people think about this stuff? am i making any sense whatsoever? does this just evoke memories of horrific drama school productions of 'the caucasian chalk circle'?
or alternatively, do people just want to talk about what the best versions of the songs are, cos i'm fine with that