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Post by jk on Sept 22, 2022 8:39:16 GMT
I originally considered launching this thread at EH but I now feel this subject is better suited to the far more active non-BB-related music section at BBT. Well, back in 1971 Jan Van Vliet wrote these lyrics for the track by hubby Don that gives this thread half its title. They made little impression -- climate change wasn't staring us in the face back then: "All you ever do is blabber 'n smoke There’s ah big pain in your window 'N all your waters turn t' rope It gonna hang you all Dangle you all Dang you all If you don’t hurry there will be no hope Why don’t you quit actin' like ah dope All you ever do is blabber 'n smoke It don’t matter where you got your start Which side of your head you wear your heart Clean up the air 'N treat the animals fair I can't help but think you treat love like ah joke Time's runnin' out 'N all you ever do is blabber 'n smoke Blabber 'n smoke Blabber 'n smoke” [ Source] Curiously, the music drags almost unbearably at times (instructions the musicians has great trouble with!) but this accurately reflects the interminable shilly-shallying during the fifty (50) years since then:
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Post by jk on Sept 24, 2022 13:36:24 GMT
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Post by Kapitan on Sept 24, 2022 13:59:20 GMT
Methinks this thread will slowly sputter to a halt under the sheer weight of its subject matter. It isn't the topic of the thread, in my case, but the lack of particularly good songs on the subject. (Even the good Captain's song that you started the thread with is a pretty bad song, I think. Though I do love the line "pain [pane] in my window.") Just my opinion, but it seems to me that most of the people who tackle serious subject matter in pop music come across as either annoyingly obvious and preachy, or clumsy a la "Student Demonstration Time" (or more fittingly for the thread, "Don't Go Near the Water").
I couldn't think of any particularly good songs specifically about climate change. If one broadens that search to pollution more generally, there are more ... but still not many. Just my opinion.
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Post by kds on Sept 24, 2022 14:05:07 GMT
Its not specifically about global warming (when would've been the term then), but Ozzy's Revelation (Mother Earth) from his solo debut Blizzard of Ozz does address the fear of humanity's impact on the environment.
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Post by jk on Sept 24, 2022 14:16:05 GMT
Its not specifically about global warming (when would've been the term then), but Ozzy's Revelation (Mother Earth) from his solo debut Blizzard of Ozz does address the fear of humanity's impact on the environment. Thanks, kds. Here you go: Those two oscillating chords (I believe E major and B flat major) in the chorus spell out a warning. That interval of an augmented fourth or flattened fifth is called a tritone, and it usually means things aren't as they should be. Am I right, Cap'n?
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Post by jk on Sept 24, 2022 14:31:34 GMT
Methinks this thread will slowly sputter to a halt under the sheer weight of its subject matter. It isn't the topic of the thread, in my case, but the lack of particularly good songs on the subject. (Even the good Captain's song that you started the thread with is a pretty bad song, I think. Though I do love the line "pain [pane] in my window.") Just my opinion, but it seems to me that most of the people who tackle serious subject matter in pop music come across as either annoyingly obvious and preachy, or clumsy a la "Student Demonstration Time" (or more fittingly for the thread, "Don't Go Near the Water").
I couldn't think of any particularly good songs specifically about climate change. If one broadens that search to pollution more generally, there are more ... but still not many. Just my opinion.
Feel free. Topic titles can be confining, if badly chosen (like this one). So yes, please broaden your search by all means.
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Sept 24, 2022 14:33:48 GMT
Norman Smith was an engineer for The Beatles and a producer for Pink Floyd. He later had a career as a solo artist, adopting the pseudonym, Hurricane Smith. He had a #3 hit in 1972 with "Oh, Babe, What Would You Say", but my favorite Hurricane Smith song is "Don't Let It Die". Norman Smith actually offered the song to The Beatles during the Help! recording sessions. He recorded a demo for the group but they passed on it. "Don't Let It Die" is a song about ecology and wildlife conservation; it went to #2 in England in 1971 but didn't chart in the U.S. The song was played on our local AM radio station and we had the 45:
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Post by Kapitan on Sept 24, 2022 14:37:32 GMT
Those two oscillating chords (I believe E major and B flat major) in the chorus spell out a warning. That interval of an augmented fourth or flattened fifth is called a tritone, and it usually means things aren't as they should be. Am I right, Cap'n? They certainly are used for tension of some sort of another, no doubt about that. Pretty odd to use major chords a tritone apart for a chorus in a rock song, too. (Obviously the more common use of tritones in rock, blues, pop, etc, is just the interval within the dominant 7 chord.) But I know the late Randy Rhoads, a brilliant guitarist with classical training, was a co-composer with Ozzy in that era. I would not be surprised if that came from him.
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Post by jk on Sept 25, 2022 20:34:38 GMT
Just one more post from me on this thoroughly depressing subject:
There has been some desolate music composed over the years. Take the Fourth Symphony of Jean Sibelius, written in his mid-forties when suffering from throat cancer and contemplating an early death (he lived to be 92). Or a work it influenced, E.J. Moeran's Symphony in G Minor, which begins optimistically but wilts as it progresses, its initially heroic themes steadily sapped of their enthusiasm (Moeran had received shrapnel to the head in WWI that was considered too close to the brain to remove).
These were utterances rooted in personal afflictions. The chilling work linked below regrettably has universal implications.
AKQA and Jung von Matt, in partnership with composer Hugh Crosthwaite and Monash University's Climate Change Communication Research Hub, used climate data to recompose Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. One of the best loved classical pieces, Vivaldi wrote it three centuries ago as an endlessly inventive depiction of each season, influenced by the rhythms of the year.
Portraying a future (2050) where the world has failed to deliver on combatting global warming, The [uncertain] Four Seasons was initially intended to put pressure on world leaders to act decisively at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in late 2021. Using local climate data for every orchestra in the world, it is the outcome of a musical design system that combines music theory with computer modelling to algorithmically generate countless local variations of Vivaldi's original 1725 composition. The algorithm alters the musical score to account for predicted changes in rainfall, biodiversity, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events as laid out in the IPCC's reports.
This is the Amsterdam variation for 2050. Here, "Autumn", normally a season for celebration, was originally ten minutes' silence, since there wouldn't be too much to celebrate with 80% of the Netherlands underwater. The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra who were to play it felt that ten minutes of nothing was unacceptable on the radio and would the "recomposers" please provide an alternative! Astonishingly, they did. Needless to say, this isn't a comfortable listen:
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Post by Kapitan on Sept 25, 2022 21:55:33 GMT
You know what just struck me as funny? While I was saying above that I generally don't much like these sorts of topical songs, I had forgotten that just over a year ago, I wrote one! In late July and early August last summer, we had horrible air quality because of wildfires burning in central Canada. I came home from a short vacation at the very same cottage I'm headed to in a few days frustrated by the air quality, and woke up one morning with the somewhat disconcerting chord progression A-F-D-Bbadd9-E7 fitting the mood. That song was "Parousia, Oh!"
Hopefully the air will be cleaner and fresher this time around.
And on another note, I thought of another song that could fit the topic well--and one that totally does NOT fit my previous criticisms. Randy Newman's excellent "Burn On." Musically and lyrically spot-on.
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Post by jk on Sept 26, 2022 7:27:49 GMT
You know what just struck me as funny? While I was saying above that I generally don't much like these sorts of topical songs, I had forgotten that just over a year ago, I wrote one! In late July and early August last summer, we had horrible air quality because of wildfires burning in central Canada. I came home from a short vacation at the very same cottage I'm headed to in a few days frustrated by the air quality, and woke up one morning with the somewhat disconcerting chord progression A-F-D-Bbadd9-E7 fitting the mood. That song was "Parousia, Oh!" Here we go. There's some great stuff on your SoundCloud page, Cap'n (said that before): soundcloud.com/the-beau-mondes/parousia-ohAnd, a great if chilling song from a youthful Randy. Thanks for that.
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Post by Kapitan on Sept 26, 2022 11:54:29 GMT
And, a great if chilling song from a youthful Randy. Thanks for that. That "Cleveland, city of light, city of magic" sounds so majestic, especially in opposition to the uneasy, eerie verses. And of course it's all Newman's sense of humor anyway, the light and magic being about a river literally aflame from the chemicals.
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Post by jk on Sept 28, 2022 19:55:48 GMT
"Water Music I", the first of these two successive tracks from Robert Fripp's 1979 album Exposure, features the following chilling words from the British academic and author John G. Bennett (1897–1974), most of which sound scarily relevant right now. I'm unable to date this fragment -- Bennett died five years before Exposure was released. (See below for a lecture of similar tone delivered by JGB back in October 1962, not '61.) "From the scientific point of view it is now very likely that there will be again another Ice Age, quite soon, in the world; that we shall have the north part of the world all frozen like it used to be, and we're beginning to have natural disasters. From the scientists' study it seems likely that we should soon begin to have these great changes in the earth's climate so people will not be able to live where they have, and the oceans will rise, and many cities will be flooded, like London, and Calcutta, and so on. These things, they say, will happen, according to scientific theory, in about forty years at the most, but maybe even quicker." And then there's Peter Gabriel and "Here Comes The Flood"... www.jgbennett.org/wp-content/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2016/07/Natural-Catastrophes-4-The-Coming-Ice-Age-22-October-1961-1.pdfmusicaficionado.blog/2016/01/24/here-comes-the-flood-by-robert-fripp-and-peter-gabriel/
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