http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrMg3pY7hw
Music is a genre that endlessly steals from itself. Music is up-front about it, though. It's easy to identify references and homages in music, because our ears pick them out whether we're looking for them or not. Books and movies can steal plots and characters; sometimes we won't even notice that O Brother Where Art Thou is an homage to the Odyssey.
But musical homages insist upon being recognized. We have the 1956 Chuck Berry original, above; we have The Beatles' cover in 1963, who give the song a little je ne sais qoui; we have Electric Light Orchestra's cover in 1973, which begins with Beethoven's fifth itself. Then something was sparked; Beethoven's fifth became part of popular consciousness again, maybe. Disco artist Walter Murphy went gold with Fifth of Beethoven in 1976. Recently, a Flight Facilities remix of the disco edit.
Whenever one reads about celebrated thinkers and figures of antiquity, there's always this direct, easily traced line of descent; we have Socrates and his student Plato and his student Aristotle. We have Haydn and especially Mozart before Beethoven, and Bach before them.
It's easy to pick a figure and claim them as unparalleled genius; Bach appears to have had no predecessors; nor Socrates, nor Chuck Berry. Einstein had the same figure of genius around him; he was self-taught and self-emergent.
I would wager these chains of popular figures exist in all fields. Is this a product of human progress or simply human memory?
No comments:
Post a Comment