Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: The Mellotron Group

I would probably agree re rock in general and prog rock in particularon the basis that (1) most people cannot sing, especially those whothink they can, and (2) singers generally need lyrics and lyricsgenerally mean some of the worst cod poetry you'll ever encounter thisside of William McGonagall. The number of rock musicians who can peneven reasonable lyrics is limited to roughly the number of digits onemay expect to encounter on the furthest end of your rightmost upperlimb, and most of those only enjoy such a reputation on thebasis of one or two things they have done, rather that on their entirecanon. One might be tempted to argue against this by saying that evengreat poets had their off days, but I think that statistically theevidence leans towards the side of rock music lyrics having beenwritten by what appears to be the early product of the celebratedinfinite number of monkeys with a similar quantity of typrewriters.

However, I'd completely disagree about 'any musical act of any kind' asearly choral music is about as good as music gets. That the libretto isvoiced in Latin helps this all along somewhat as the meaning of whatthey are singing about is not clear. For all I know, the gallous MrByrd might be causing his choirsters to sing something like

Yeah God, isn't he great?
Yeah.
No but seriously. He is.
Look at what he did.
Probably.
Yeah.
Fucken great dood.

but we are all left in the dark due to the fact that on the page atleast it reads like the Rosetta Stone.

Mike



steve_tebble wrote:

Mike Dickson recently said:

"I still think that my abiding fondness for King Crimson lies in the
fact that their best work was always done when the singer simply shut
up and let the rest of the band get on with it."

Surely that applies to any prog rock band, indeed any band, indeed any
musical act of any kind since primitive man first invented the art form
we call 'music.'

Discuss.