sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i wrote to third the other week something like “they discovered drugs in the 60's and thought that the beatles and Syd Barret were psychedelic rather than just silly and whimsical..”

the notion that sgt pepper and Arnold lane are psychedelic is such a hard concept for me to grasp.

i don’t want this to be a shit on that music thread, it’d be fruitful to unpick how the psychedelia transmits- and doesn’t- to different listeners.

i’m not talking about a love supreme or pharaoh sanders (and of course ‘tomorrow never knows’ is a very much ahead of its time). i mean the doors, pink floyd, greatful dead, sgt pepper, et al. how are they psychedelic?
 

luka

Well-known member
Im on the way to work but I think there must be a realm of whimsy within the psychedelic landscape. Spongiform rock, rubber legs, a surreal zone of helpless laughter revealed as present beneath grey surface
 

luka

Well-known member
You can see it in language. The multiple meanings that open out, the suggestive ambiguities, puns everywhere. Finnegans Wake.
 

luka

Well-known member
These are people who grew up in a world ofclassroom discipline and duty where childishness and silliness felt revolutionary. Todays childishness is compulsory and a different emphasis is required.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the 60's was the first time people were allowed to sustain childhood into their teens and early-20's. these days it's even longer. my parents are still children and they're almost 60.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
thirdform included this song in his list and i have been coming back to it quite often. for me it sounds very sonic and i can only imagine what people thought music would be like in 2020 when they had this in 1963 already. but i guess this was just an anomaly?

 

luka

Well-known member
A world of starched shirts and suet, liver and onions, woolen underwear, bombed out ruins, censorship, corporal punishment, drafty churches, tuneless hymns, stoic suffering
 

luka

Well-known member
This comes back to what I was saying about timeless values being illusory, all that counts is whats needed at the time. The decisive intervention.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think the doors are good at capturing the inflation of psychedelia, not ego loss but ego rampant. I am the prophet shaman poet king.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
It’s very much picking at the loose seems of the world music. That thing when you’re not very high, but the world around you seems more flimsy than you thought. Like a film set with nothing behind it. It’s that giggly phase of drug use rather than the full on assault captured by Coltrane in 67.
 

luka

Well-known member
And the apocalyptic (apocolypse now) quality. The rnd of time beyond time time collapsed. On the other side.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
These are people who grew up in a world ofclassroom discipline and duty where childishness and silliness felt revolutionary. Todays childishness is compulsory and a different emphasis is required.

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).

It's a bit like trying to see impressionist paintings as offensive and radical, as they were at the time.

Link doesn't work but I posted "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"

I mean you can still hear the trippiness in this, can't you? The multitracked voices etc. The nonsensical lyrics (which, again, sounds like rote psychedelic "woah man" drivel to our modern ears) - which, yes, are very childish, and smirking, but even that must have seemed exciting when the oldsters weren't in on the secret.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
What provoked jazz's switch into artiness? Was it a similar force to that which provoked rock music into artiness?

Was it something intrinsic in jazz's improvisatory nature that pushed it out into experimentation? Was it drugs? Was it some sort of European influence?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
What provoked jazz's switch into artiness? Was it a similar force to that which provoked rock music into artiness?

Was it something intrinsic in jazz's improvisatory nature that pushed it out into experimentation? Was it drugs? Was it some sort of European influence?

Very dry music theory from the sounds of it. They got bored of what they were doing and so turned to modality, atonality and all that for something new.

Coltrane was big on acid though.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Believe me I can't stand some of the stuff my dad listens to from his youth, including a large chunk of the beatles ouevre. They were condemned by their relish for experimenting and playing to fix on some terrible ideas (harpsichord solos, for example).

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

 
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