Skip to main content

Queen - All Dead, All Dead

Because music is a language that puts structures and written forms into play within a homologous relationship with other forms of expression, the relationship between music and politics cannot be understood solely based on the esthetic criteria of musicology, or the historic or cultural criteria found in the way sociology studies how music is received.

Music, as a cultural product and symbolic form, is part of social life. “As organized sound, it expresses aspects of the experience of individuals in society.” As shared experience, music mobilizes and unifies groups, contributes to their movements and accompanies celebrations and rites. It excites to violence and combat, as it does to fervor and effusion. In short, it reveals social and political processes that are, as Rousseau observed, “capable of acting physically on the body.” Yet these very characteristics also present the enigma of music, which seems neither to want nor to be able to say anything. While all social and cultural activities are made up of meanings wherein language is the code and norm, music, though manifestly social and expressive, seems devoid of any actual semantic capacity to feed the active and informational dimensions of a statement. This is the paradox within music’s very expression: without referring to any visible image of the world, music nonetheless reveals something about the world, and, free of any referential ties, its language depends on something other than itself.
Source: Music and Politics: The Language of Music – between Objective Expression and Subjective Reality by Jean-Marie Donegani


Queen - All Dead, All Dead
  • On Queen's sixth studio album News Of The World
  • Released 28 October 1977
  • Written by Brian May

"Brian May stated in an interview that "We'd already made a decision that...[after] A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, we wanted to go back to basics for News of the World. But it was very timely because the world was looking at punk and things being very stripped down."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Psychotic Reactions - Skip To My Lou

It expresses the emotions of angst, anger, and lust in some of the only ways that are accepted by society. The history of this edgy music genre dates back to the 1950s. It was formed by a combination of the blues, gospel music, and country. Throughout the decades, rock ‘n roll has evolved and become famous for being the genre that’s continued to push the boundaries of music, and, sometimes, the cultural boundaries of society itself. In the 1950s rock ‘n roll could be defined as rhythm and blues. In the 1960s it was partial to new musical styles such as folk rock and soul. And in the 1970s hard rock was born. From the 1980s to the present, technology has had an enormous impact on the music industry. Good taste is the enemy of the revolution. This remark epitomizes the spirit of rock ‘n roll. You’re not expected to conform, you’re expected to be yourself… no matter what anyone thinks. You are admired deeply for expressing emotions such as anger, heartbreak, and sadness through music in a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Pat Moran Quartet - Come Rain Or Come Shine

The very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid to late 20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still segregated education system. Partly as a result, the music has become inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it, young Black Americans, poorer people and others at the societal margins. Of the more than 500 students who graduate from American universities with jazz degrees each year, less than 10 percent are Black, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by DataUSA. In 2017, the last year with data available, precisely 1 percent of jazz degree grads were Black women. The education is the anchor... We should be questioning our education system. Is it working? Is there a pipeline into the university for indigenous Black Americans to play their music, and learn their music? I don’t think that exists. Source: Jazz Has Always Been Protest Music. Can It Meet This Moment? by Giovanni Russonello The Pat Moran Q...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kenny Dorham - Like Someone In Love Take 2

In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable as white audiences began listening to blues. Blues came into its own as an important part of the country’s relatively new popular culture in the 1920s with the recording, first, of great female classic blues singers and, then, of the country folk blues singers of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and Texas. The first copyrighted song was in 1912, the Dallas Blues. As huge numbers of African Americans left the South at this time due to failed Reconstruction, dismal economic conditions, oppression in the South and the hope of better treatment in the North between 1915 and 1940s, the blues went with them, and settled in the urban centers of the North, especially Chicago. A more urban, electric blues developed as a result, which eclipsed the rural blues of the South and eventually became both rock and roll and what would become known as rhythm and blues. Blues fell somewhat out of popular favor until the l...
Post a Comment
Read more