Why be so hard on The Doors? The band had real musicians,
Morrison had raw talent (theatrical, not musical) and their
lyrics were no more pretentious than those of their
peers
-- the other great bands. Bashing a bunch of youngsters who
were beginning to learn their craft, particularly when
compared to musicians with long careers and lots of practice
on the road, seems misguided.
In my view, "pretentiousness" occurs when the material
exceeds the musical ability of the group. This happened even
to The Beatles (sacred pop icons, but far more inept
musicians than The Doors).
A local radio station decided to have an all-Beatles set that
lasts several hours. I listened to it once and was appalled
at how primitive and silly a lot of those songs are.
The great bands were those that could play good music,
including improvisation, not just "songs". The Doors is one
of those bands (with the Grateful Dead, Cream, the various
combinations of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and their
bands, et a few al.). I think music should be separated from
pop culture (at least for musical analysis).
Now to Ellroy: his literary ambition may exceed his writing
ability --I don't know for certain, for "literary",
"ambition" and "writing ability" are abstract terms. But he's
shown that he's a superb writer of violent, terrifying tales
of greed and corruption. You can't take that away from
him.
Best,
MrT
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 15 Sep 2003 EDT