What Green Day Really Wants To Be Is Yes
I've been waiting for an opportune time to say that. Now, I think I finally might have stumbled upon the right occassion: Horace's Ode 3.3. After sixty-eight lines of grandiose, mythic pronouncements and bombastic, epic-style speech-making, Horace abruptly does an about-face in the final stanza, rejecting that style as inappropriate and professing himself a disciple to a more refined poetics (one that happened to be the avant garde of the day):
"Non hoc iocosae conveniet lyrae:
quo, Musa, tendis? Desine pervicax
referre sermones deorum et
magna modis tenuare parvis."
"This is not fitting for the light-hearted lyre:
why, Muse, do you tend this way? Stubborn Muse,
cease to relate the speeches of the gods and
to attenuate great deeds into small meters."
The preceeding sixty-eight lines make a strong case that Horace does indeed want to talk about the speeches of the gods and great deeds, for all that he rejects it as hopelessly wanky and unsophisticated in this last stanza. His brief identification with light-hearted poetry here, I think, is simply an acknowledgement of the present intellectual fashion and a sort of wistful aspiration: Horace WISHES that he could write cool poetry, but is irresistibly attached to the wank.
A modern parallel? Seventies rock. On the one hand there's the school most generally represented by Led Zeppelin: serious, epic, virtuoso-showy; in short, musical masturbation completely unaware of how over-the-top it is. I feel like most of seventies rock falls into this category: from Pink Floyd to Ted Nugent to Deep Purple, and at the farthest extreme, all that proggy stuff, like Yes.
Then there's punk, which in the seventies purported to rebel against all these arena rock and epic tendencies, and instead strip everything down to raw sound. A friend pointed out to me that the Sex Pistols didn't actually achieve this objective, being bombastic in their own, different way; so I'll nominate the Ramones, dear to my heart, as the representative of this movement.
There seems to be an impulse in humanity - transcending time and space - to associate the stripped down with the cool and the overblown with the uncool. And yet, hand in hand with that impulse is the opposite one, namely that everyone just wants to be Yes, deep down. Even Johnny Rotten couldn't resist the lures of prog, as PI's nine-minute Albatross proves.
The latest initiate into this long line of Horatian wank-lovers is Green Day. They made a CONCEPT ALBUM, for crying out loud, that includes a SEVENTEEN MINUTE EPIC WITH A NAME LIKE JESUS OF SUBURBIA - the surest sign that they, also, just wish they could be Yes, even as they strive to label themselves punk and keep their cool capital. The hilarious thing about Green Day is that no one seems to have noticed that they turned prog under our very noses.
Now, I'm not saying this is a bad thing; just hilarious. Some would accuse me of being unfair, arguing that we can't make such a claim about American Idiot because it's actually very good, musically. Well, to this I would respond that I think myself uniquely well-qualified to make that claim, having been an avid prog fan years before I was a punk fan, and now appreciating both quite sincerely. When I call American Idiot a prog project, I am not exactly belittling it. I happen to think that there's a lot about prog that's very good, musically - and sometimes even exciting - and it's my contention that lots of other people feel that way, too, for all that they claim to love the raw and rarified. From the time of Horace onward, there's a reason why people kept returning to mental masturbation.
As Woody Allen once said, "Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love."
"Non hoc iocosae conveniet lyrae:
quo, Musa, tendis? Desine pervicax
referre sermones deorum et
magna modis tenuare parvis."
"This is not fitting for the light-hearted lyre:
why, Muse, do you tend this way? Stubborn Muse,
cease to relate the speeches of the gods and
to attenuate great deeds into small meters."
The preceeding sixty-eight lines make a strong case that Horace does indeed want to talk about the speeches of the gods and great deeds, for all that he rejects it as hopelessly wanky and unsophisticated in this last stanza. His brief identification with light-hearted poetry here, I think, is simply an acknowledgement of the present intellectual fashion and a sort of wistful aspiration: Horace WISHES that he could write cool poetry, but is irresistibly attached to the wank.
A modern parallel? Seventies rock. On the one hand there's the school most generally represented by Led Zeppelin: serious, epic, virtuoso-showy; in short, musical masturbation completely unaware of how over-the-top it is. I feel like most of seventies rock falls into this category: from Pink Floyd to Ted Nugent to Deep Purple, and at the farthest extreme, all that proggy stuff, like Yes.
Then there's punk, which in the seventies purported to rebel against all these arena rock and epic tendencies, and instead strip everything down to raw sound. A friend pointed out to me that the Sex Pistols didn't actually achieve this objective, being bombastic in their own, different way; so I'll nominate the Ramones, dear to my heart, as the representative of this movement.
There seems to be an impulse in humanity - transcending time and space - to associate the stripped down with the cool and the overblown with the uncool. And yet, hand in hand with that impulse is the opposite one, namely that everyone just wants to be Yes, deep down. Even Johnny Rotten couldn't resist the lures of prog, as PI's nine-minute Albatross proves.
The latest initiate into this long line of Horatian wank-lovers is Green Day. They made a CONCEPT ALBUM, for crying out loud, that includes a SEVENTEEN MINUTE EPIC WITH A NAME LIKE JESUS OF SUBURBIA - the surest sign that they, also, just wish they could be Yes, even as they strive to label themselves punk and keep their cool capital. The hilarious thing about Green Day is that no one seems to have noticed that they turned prog under our very noses.
Now, I'm not saying this is a bad thing; just hilarious. Some would accuse me of being unfair, arguing that we can't make such a claim about American Idiot because it's actually very good, musically. Well, to this I would respond that I think myself uniquely well-qualified to make that claim, having been an avid prog fan years before I was a punk fan, and now appreciating both quite sincerely. When I call American Idiot a prog project, I am not exactly belittling it. I happen to think that there's a lot about prog that's very good, musically - and sometimes even exciting - and it's my contention that lots of other people feel that way, too, for all that they claim to love the raw and rarified. From the time of Horace onward, there's a reason why people kept returning to mental masturbation.
As Woody Allen once said, "Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love."
posted by Rex at 4:20 PM
3 Comments:
Sometimes people just want something bigger than life, something that isn't stripped to its core. Something that instills a sense of fantasy and magic.
Fact: Believe it or not, it was the FRENCH who came up with the proggiest music of the 70s. That's right: Magma, the great French "Zeuhl" band, hold the crown. Can you name me another band that went so far as the invent their own language and mythology by which to convey their artistic vision, and produce not just a single concept album utilizing this language/mythology, but an entire album CYCLE chronicling whatever that mythology was about??? Well, Magma was all that, and much more. "Zeuhl", by the way, is pronounced "tsoil", and it means "celestial" in Kobaian, the language invented by Magma mastermind Christian Vander. It's the word Magma used to describe their music, and is used to this day to refer to the legion of Magma-influenced bands, such as Ruins, Koenjihyekki, and Happy Family.
Very nice. However, I think you conflated my bad music post with my prog music post (understandably, some might say). No connection between prog and politics - at least, none that I've thought of. I'm sure if I thought about it some more, I'd find some interesting connections. You can't read Horace without contextualizing him in the politics of his day.
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