George Martin, the Fifth Beatle, Dead at 90

[blutto]

Re: Re:

Seemed like a nice chap.
I just don't get the beatles . Fair enough they had some good songs but its all very nice sounding. It has no edge to it.
Lets face it in the late 60's everybody was in Hendrix's shadow.

....really don't want to be the bearer of bad news but there was a great big world outside of rock'n'roll ...not to say that Hendrix wasn't a pretty good player or that rock music wasn't important but it was a pretty narrow product category ( just to put this into perspective....at the height of "rock's power" the pet food industry was 4 times a big as the music industry...)....so maybe in the confines of one's parent's basement or in some dingy club Hendrix was a god, but in the real world he was just the latest cog in the star making machinery..

...so speaking of revolutionary music with an edge what do you think of Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor ?....or the musical giants of hard bop who laid down the foundation that Hendrix worked from like Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker or Sonny Rollins...

Cheers

But economic scale is not the same as cultural and aesthetic affects and significance. Even if a lot of those energies were only repurposed as new forms of capture in the service of further economic ends and the celebrity machine.

Enough time has passed that I now appreciate all the people you list--I can listen to it for what it is and not be reminded of overly serious and precious geezers sitting in Greenwich Village basement clubs arguing that the world begins and ends there.

Who's to say what the reach or aesthetic suspensions and transformations of instrumentalized power might actually be?

....was just trying to put the everybody reference into a perspective where the attendant hero worship isn't a blinding light....

Cheers

 

[aphronesis]

Oh, I know. I just think the qualitative differential is equally important. Clearly there were many in the 60s who didn't get hep. We saw how that swung back around.