Godflesh Superstar
Listening to quite a bit of Justin Broadrick’s more recent project, Jesu, at the moment…anyway, this works quite spectacularly well:
Listening to quite a bit of Justin Broadrick’s more recent project, Jesu, at the moment…anyway, this works quite spectacularly well:
January 14th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Here I’m not sure how to read the parody: is it in juxtaposing the cheerfulness of the original with the sobriety of the music, a sarcastic commentary in other words, or is it in a ‘’straight” embrace of both planes as meaningless (a kind of a ”positive nihilism”?). The sound, as in Xashtur, is rich and spacious, but I think the statement is kind of like the post-1968 leather gay district – in the last phases of retroviral therapy. I’m afraid it could drown under the weight of complications.
January 14th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Oh dear, Generation Gap Plus! How many chords? Three altogether, with two most of the time, why bother with the Dominant since that’s in the visuals. Plenty of sub-dominant and some slight suggestion of the supertonic and a mediant if you want to call that C Minor. Hardt & Negri meet Jerry Ragni and do ‘Hair’ on the fax machine.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Thanks for that darling but I was hoping his Lordship might share his own opinion, however he might be dissatisfied with his Parody Oscar performance at the moment.
January 15th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Mostly I think it’s just amusing when the jerking movements of the dancers in the clip synchronize with the music, which is coincidentally very close to the original number in tempo. The fact that the band is called “Godflesh” and that the clip is from “Jesus Christ Superstar” is also quite funny. I don’t know quite what to make of the resulting spectacle; it’s a bit sinister…
January 15th, 2008 at 11:53 am
I don’t know quite what to make of the resulting spectacle; it’s a bit sinister…
I think in the parodic idiom of the previous decade you would make this like John Waters’s HAIRSPRAY – simultaneously reveling in the trash and ridiculing it. The way you describe it the parodist here is approaching the New Agey trash with a straight face (hence the ‘’sinisterness”). It is a very masculinist and hard approach to the subject, my dear Dominique. On the other hand you could read it as if the parodist retroactively colonized, appropriated the idiom of the original and is now controlling it ”from the inside”. Or maybe we could say that instead of SUGGESTING a meta-level this parody has collapsed the meta and the concrete, so that a meta-meta is generated by the resulting Moebius strip.
January 15th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Darling, you’re just too complicated, and probably cannot get through certain social evenings as a result of demanding people talk about Moebius strips all the time. You know, there are also the ‘biting animals’ of the Book of Kells. They are not precisely Moebius Strips, even though they do engage in inverted behavior, resembling certain actual diseases that occur in the aged. I didn’t even know this was supposed to be a parody. I saw parody in a much more diagetic way, i.e., occurring from the inside of the Parody Center, and with a trademark.
Dominic, thanks for pointing out that that’s ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, which I’ve never seen, but once had to accompany an ambitious and moderately talented singer who claimed to suffer from penis envy (first time I ever heard the term) in that dreadful ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ song from it. It looked a lot like that old Coca-Cola ad with the tune ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing…in Purr-fickt Har-Mo-Neee…I’d like to buy the world a Coke…and keep it Com-pa-neeee….Coca-Cola isssss….Coca-cola issss….’
I kept thinking it looked contemporary because they had chosen this especially lightweight Jesus, I don’t know–is this, like, when 2 weeks later Jesus comes back down to see his disciples for awhile. I always thought that sounded even more spectacular than the resurrection. I guess I can’t see how it’s sinister, if they use something the Lloyd Webber canon.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Darling all I really wanted to say is that these dancers are dancing to the tune now dictated by the neo-heavy metal band rather than Andrew Lloyd Webber which is a direct , corporeal, intervention on the very fabric of the parodied piece, a BUGGERY if you will, instead of being ”a reference to” or ”a wink” and this makes it different from 1980s and 1990s stuff, that’s all. However since when you get deep under the skin of the other like that there’s a risk you’ll never be able to get out anymore, and this is what I mean when I say that these lines of flight will probably end up commodified like most other forms of protest.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
‘now dictated by the neo-heavy metal band rather than Andrew Lloyd Webber’
I think the neo-heavy metal band sounded much like Lloyd Webber, who always seemed to have trouble with the modulation exercises, so he just wrote things that sound like backwoods hymns, little more than Sacred Harp, but with the parallel fifths and octaves suppressed.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
a direct , corporeal, intervention on the very fabric of the parodied piece,
The original had no fabric, so there was not much to parody.