Hi
folks,
impetuous fool that I am, I'm going to come to the defence of JA, cos I'm an unreconstructed Yes fan and I DON'T CARE!
(Springsteen? overblown, distorted rubbish for me)
Any fule kno that JZA writes in a stream of consciousness style. This is not pretention for the sake of it. Any classical music fan who's ever listened to William Walton's Facade (with lyrics by Osbert Sitwell) will see a similarity in the approach.
And 'Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there' isn't cobblers -JA explains in Chris Welch's peerless biog of the band that the line came from seeing the scottish mountains while on tour. Swathed in mist around the edges, to him it looked as though they weren't attached to the ground. Anyone who has ever seen a misty morning in the mountains will have seen this phenomenon.
So it's not cobblers -just a natty one liner based on personal experience.
I'm not saying that all JA's lyrics are immediately accessible, and JA himself has admitted that some lyrics are assembled because he likes the sound of the words in phonetic effect rather than meaning, just as you might put 'wrong' notes or chords in a piece of music.
When Frank Zappa first heard Varese's 'Ionisation' he didn't know words like atonal or polytonality -what he DID think was 'I like these chords, THESE CHORDS ARE MEAN!'
So occasionally JA falls on his arse creatively -welcome to humanity. We all do it, and at his worst he's no worse than any other 'rock hero' And it's better than 'ooh baby, get on down, lick my *** and *** my ***, I'm a hard lovin man all night long' or 'Paaaaarty!" or 'Yo, bitch, I'm da mean, I got da rap fo you (until someone shoots me that is)'
And I positive LURVE the lyrics on 'Magnification'. Yes Symphonic is my all time fave DVD. Now there's musical profundity for you!
impetuous fool that I am, I'm going to come to the defence of JA, cos I'm an unreconstructed Yes fan and I DON'T CARE!
(Springsteen? overblown, distorted rubbish for me)
Any fule kno that JZA writes in a stream of consciousness style. This is not pretention for the sake of it. Any classical music fan who's ever listened to William Walton's Facade (with lyrics by Osbert Sitwell) will see a similarity in the approach.
And 'Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there' isn't cobblers -JA explains in Chris Welch's peerless biog of the band that the line came from seeing the scottish mountains while on tour. Swathed in mist around the edges, to him it looked as though they weren't attached to the ground. Anyone who has ever seen a misty morning in the mountains will have seen this phenomenon.
So it's not cobblers -just a natty one liner based on personal experience.
I'm not saying that all JA's lyrics are immediately accessible, and JA himself has admitted that some lyrics are assembled because he likes the sound of the words in phonetic effect rather than meaning, just as you might put 'wrong' notes or chords in a piece of music.
When Frank Zappa first heard Varese's 'Ionisation' he didn't know words like atonal or polytonality -what he DID think was 'I like these chords, THESE CHORDS ARE MEAN!'
So occasionally JA falls on his arse creatively -welcome to humanity. We all do it, and at his worst he's no worse than any other 'rock hero' And it's better than 'ooh baby, get on down, lick my *** and *** my ***, I'm a hard lovin man all night long' or 'Paaaaarty!" or 'Yo, bitch, I'm da mean, I got da rap fo you (until someone shoots me that is)'
And I positive LURVE the lyrics on 'Magnification'. Yes Symphonic is my all time fave DVD. Now there's musical profundity for you!
And you can
now get your ammo out and start shooting me to bits.
Dave.
>lyrics that sounded wonderful while having no real meaning (although South Side Of The Sky is apparently about the loss of a polar expedition), but more often wrote lyrics that, while also having no meaning, were thoroughly banal. He then shifted across to drippy love songs, also banal. Stick with the holy trinity of The Yes Album/Fragile/Close To The Edge. :-)
> FWIW, my two penn'orth is that JA sometimes wrote
>
> Andy T.
>