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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Re: Big star shines dimly |
| Date | Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:53:30 -0400 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Seaman" <seamand@upmc.edu>
> But, then there's Big Star. I have all of their albums, and listen
> to them
> occasionally (very occasionally, like, say, a few times a year
> maybe?) But
> I don't see the extreme attraction that they hold. I like them, but
> I don't
> swoon over their lyrics, I don't strongly identify with their
> attitude, I
> don't get chills and goose bumps over their melodies, I don't hum
> their
> songs or play them in my head while I'm on the street, I don't feel
> like
> they are singing just to me, I don't frequently desire to pull their
> CD out
> of the stack and into the player, I don't them in the top echelon of
> classic
> early 70s rock/power pop artists (IMO Badfinger, Raspberries, Cheap
> Trick,
> Todd Rundgren, and maybe a few others) -- I guess I DON'T "get"
> them.
But that's not a fault in yourself that needs to be corrected, and
you're not somehow in the wrong for not feeling this way. There's
nothing to "get" here. Big Star don't do it for you. That's cool.
Personally, with the exception of "Go All the Way," the Raspberries
leave me absolutely cold, but that hasn't caused me to lose any sleep.
Frankly, based on your list of the top echelon folks, it doesn't seem
that surprising to me that Big Star's not your cup of tea. There are
two factors that link all four of those artists you listed: an obvious
diehard love of the Beatles and a commitment to polished songcraft. I
don't doubt that Alex, Chris (especially Chris), Jody and Andy were
Beatles fans -- it's hard to imagine a pop-oriented musician of their
generation who wasn't -- but I never get any sense that Big Star
wanted to sound like the Beatles. It's hard to find individual songs
of theirs that you could point to as being "Beatlesque." (Jody's "For
You," his contribution to THIRD, comes to mind as a kind of
McCartneyish ballad of domesticity, but that's all that's coming to
mind.) And contrary to Douglas Wolk's statement about "craft" being
important to Big Star, they often wrote songs on the spot in the
studio ("Mod Lang," "Kanga Roo," etc.) and greatly favored an
extremely rough and ready "live" sound on record. Even Todd
Rundgren's completely solo records sound really clean and crisp in
comparison to the much muddier #1 RECORD and RADIO CITY, and there are
parts of THIRD that are downright lo-fi.
Add in that their songwriting quite often deviates from the
traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure (for every "September
Gurls," there's a "Holocaust," and even a song as immediately
appealing as "Feel" is structurally pretty odd) and their lyrics only
occasionally work the traditional boy/girl (or, in Chris Bell's case,
boy/boy) angle and it's pretty clear that Big Star were a pretty
unique band, especially for their time and place. If a non-fan was
feeling cantankerous, they could fairly persuasively argue that it's
primarily the fact that so many Audities-friendly artists since have
taken a page from the Big Star playbook (The dB's, Game Theory/Loud
Family, Teenage Fanclub, Posies, etc.) that Big Star are elevated to
such a level today. It's kind of like the power pop version of what
Brian Eno said, famously, about the Velvets: it's not that very many
people listened to Big Star, it's that everyone who did formed a band.
S
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