roachboy

i'm in general not a fan of musicals, not because i dislike the form in principle, but more because i dislike that perky making-little-stars-with-your-hands and hoofing across the stage while singing like ethel merman approach that seems to have infested american musicals since god knows when. and i reserve a special place of hatred for gilbert & sullivan. oo yes, best not to get me started about that.

but i liked moulin rouge as a film.
and hegwig and the angry inch.
i like the idea of liking rocky horror. i've tried. god knows, i've tried.
i still have most of jesus christ superstar memorized but cannot for the life of me remember either how or why that happened.
i was in and directed productions of godspell so at this point would rather drive tacks into my forehead than listen to anything connected with it, and this after many years.


i like one line of one song from the music man (i say we've got trouble/right here in river city/with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for Pool.)
the sound of music has prompted suicidal ideations in the past. white people bellowing in the mountains. good christ. but there is a mi'ike film that makes fun of the sound of music---happiness of the katakuris---that i think is great.

does rock-n-roll high shool count as a musical? does wild zero?

oklahoma. loathe it.
there are other ones that i hate too. carousel....can't remember.

south pacific once or twice reaches levels of cheese that transcend its obviously vile self. but i'd rather dispense with the rest of it and just listen to les baxter or esquivel or yma sumac.




similar with opera---i like the idea of opera more than i like most opera. and wagner, whom i hold responsible for creating vast seas of mucous in the form of opera, is i hope roasting in the same cauldron as gilbert and fucking sullivan.

but i kinda like earlier opera--dido and aneas, the magic flute, don giovanni.
and more recent stuff---berg's woyczek (i have a weakness for berg despite the romantic flourishes and overall german-ness).
my favorite opera-ish things aren't conventional operas at all...the works of harry partch, a lot of robert ashley's stuff for example. wholesale breaks with the ludicrous (to my mind anyway) approach to voice characteristic of opera from at least gluck and verdi onward. closer to speech. and with ashley anyway, tons of cool tape manipulation.

despise philip glass, though. just despise his music. he's probably a perfectly nice guy, though. it's just a vast sea of blah blah blah. prefer steve reich, even his more recent stuff (which isn't as cool...something happened at music for 18 musicians) or terry reilly. or the fan in my living room (which was cool until it broke). but i digress.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite