sadmanbarty

Well-known member
By all accounts their acid wss way stronger than ours, and at a time when it was relatively unexplored territory

I can’t hear it though. I suppose the Beatles did these things inspired by avant guard music which sound like intensity, but over all it’snot being communicated to younger ears.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Also you've got to look at the conventionality they were dealing with. They came from a world where you were supposed to record X number of tracks, X minutes long, with hummable hooks, etc.

The Beatles obviously had more leeway due to selling a gajillion records already, but I think even they couldn't go as mental as a band could nowadays.
 

luka

Well-known member
I can’t hear it though. I suppose the Beatles did these things inspired by avant guard music which sound like intensity, but over all it’snot being communicated to younger ears.

I hate this music im always banging on about hating whimsy im just trying to be sympathetic towards it, allow it it's proper context
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
By all accounts their acid wss way stronger than ours, and at a time when it was relatively unexplored territory

some of the most interesting ideas arise from anthropomorphising time or large bodies of people. reynolds did it to perfection when he said that darkcore with this collective paranoia from long term ecstasy abuse.

this music is the opposite. a whole culture's first innocent, tentative dabbles in psychedelics.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
This song somehow sounds like acid to me, it's a bit woozy and fringed with darkness, as if you're quite happy but could easily slip into paranoia and hell given a poke


for example that's incomprehensible to me. it sounds like easy listening. burt bacharach
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
It's impossible to hear this music as (some of our) parent heard it. It all sounds quaint and cliched to us. Once it was new, radical, the opposite of the society they had grown up in (the postwar gloom).

in the narrative surrounding this era 'psychadelic' is often misused really just to mean societal opposition; anti-vietnam war, being a bit arty, not being so stuffy. though some of these things might have followed from psychedelic cognitive experiences, they're not the same thing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
for example that's incomprehensible to me. it sounds like easy listening. burt bacharach

I know what you mean but I disagree. It's an example, perhaps, of what I'm talking about with the Beatles - they're taking popular forms and queering them slightly (or majorly). It's radicalism within fairly strict limits.
 

luka

Well-known member
the lewis carol fetish, beatles songs about childhood, the beatles pitch shifting their vocals to sound like child voices, etc.

There's famously an LSD reference in Lewis Carrol. I think Deluezes quotation of it is the only reference to psychedelics in his work.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
I know what you mean but I disagree. It's an example, perhaps, of what I'm talking about with the Beatles - they're taking popular forms and queering them slightly (or majorly). It's radicalism within fairly strict limits.

that's what i was saying about the seems of the world. it's all that first bit of the trip when you're unsure if you are tripping or it's just a placebo. "am i hallucinating or was it just a trick of the light?". a lot of it's working within that ambiguity. it's suggestive; nudge nudge wink wink drugs (which goes back to your thing about the secret language).
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
this airiness is arguably THE hallmark of late-60's psychedelia that hasn't really cropped up in later incarnations of psychedelia (spiritual jazz, hardcore, etc.)

 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i suppose this, which i can't see as psychedelic:


is gunning for this, which i can understand:



that vibrational quality of drugs. the world humming. om. "buzzing"
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Here's a guess of mine which is probably pretty unqualified but it is that what was radical was the disjunction of circumstance and emotion. Before, emotions in musical narratives arose from concrete causes. You fall in love = happiness, you break up = sadness. Your state of mind was determined by extrinsic events and factors.

Psychelia broke this restraint and made it possible to feel bliss without any tangible outside circumstance (Beatles). Or it made it possible to feel existential distress under normal circumstances (Syd Barrett). Instruments of emotional modificaiton now included new spirituality, mind exploration and psychedelic drugs. Freedom from the world, or real life, or whatever you wanna call it.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Here's a guess of mine which is probably pretty unqualified but it is that what was radical was the disjunction of circumstance and emotion. Before, emotions in musical narratives arose from concrete causes. You fall in love = happiness, you break up = sadness. Your state of mind was determined by extrinsic events and factors.

Psychelia broke this restraint and made it possible to feel bliss without any tangible outside circumstance (Beatles). Or it made it possible to feel existential distress under normal circumstances (Syd Barrett). Instruments of emotional modificaiton now included new spirituality, mind exploration and psychedelic drugs. Freedom from the world, or real life, or whatever you wanna call it.

fucking hell! that's jaw dropping!

very, very good.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the radio clips either end of it. "turn on, tune in". becoming an antenna. pattycakes talking about frequencies.

radio's work as central infrastructural components of psychedelic eras (pirates in the 60's and then rave era, fm radio), but are also these central metaphors. in p-funk mythology enlightenment is broadcast over the radio.
 
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