Category Archive: Modern Music
Eurovision 2021 (Rotterdam)
The Varnished Culture had night sweats and knotted stomachs awaiting the return of the Eurovision Song Contest. On ice in 2020 due to something or other, we had only Will Ferrell’s lovely tribute to sustain us for a year. Even now, Covid’s ugly head reared and “prevented” the Australian contingent from attending Rotterdam in person. This perhaps caused Australia’s offering, “Technicolour” by Montaigne, to fall at the semi-final stage, which is patently unfair and unjust. Still, Eurovision is the byword for dazzling, iridescent mediocrity, so there we are. Our points system, you’ll recall, rates each song on ‘real world merit,’…
Continue Reading →Zappa
(Directed by Alex Winter) (2020) Frank Zappa (21/12/1940 – 4/12/1993) was a one man show created for an audience of one: himself. Obsessively writing, arranging and producing realms of material, he’d allow others to perform with him, though they were never quite good enough, and he’d suffer people to buy his records or attend his concerts, although they weren’t really hip enough to understand the work. It was either his way or go elsewhere. And his unorthodox, multi-faceted output is always interesting, even if, for example, a double album like 200 Motels turns out to be a bizarre waste of time….
Continue Reading →Beware the Jealous Guy
On 8 December, 1980, about 5 pm, a man truly ‘crippled inside,’ Mark David Chapman, posing as a fan of singer-songwriter/crypto-Jesus John Lennon, got Lennon to autograph his latest (rather patchy) record, Double Fantasy, out the front of his fashionable Dakota apartment in New York City. Lennon and his wife were on their way to record more unmemorable songs. On their return, at about 10.50 pm, Chapman shot at Lennon five times, hitting him with at least 4 bullets. Lennon, rushed by police to hospital, was DOA. Chapman was arrested without further incident and claimed that The Catcher in the Rye…
Continue Reading →Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
(dir. David Dobkin) (2020) (Netflix) If you love the Eurovision Song Contest, read on. If you hate, or are merely indifferent to it, stop reading now. No-one likes that kind of negative weirdness. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was scheduled for release in May 2020, in order to coincide with the final of the real Eurovision contest in Rotterdam this year, but the final was cancelled, tragically, due to some little pandemic or other. Who wouldn’t risk a bit of respiratory failure for the chance to see acts like this – Thank goodness that at least we…
Continue Reading →All You Need is Love
25 June 1967: “All You Need Is Love”, the Beatles’ anthem of peace, was beamed to the World via a global television broadcast from the EMI studios in London. The sheer logistical immensity of the broadcast, coupled with the over-loaded production, gave the song a certain cachet, although it is essentially a condescending, lumpen hymn to an utopian Neverland, with lyrics that are the purest dross. Yet it lingers, like a piece of old furniture one intends to put out in the hard rubbish but never does, which says something for its unabashed sincerity and heartfelt elements. Perhaps the better…
Continue Reading →