OT Musical languistics

Sally Caves wrote:
>I can relate somewhat to this.  I guess my need for music to have a strong
rhythmic undercurrent is so that I can dance, shake my fists in the air, nod
my head vigorously, sing out against it!  I also need for it to be boldly
original, though, to take some aural risks, which defeats gimmickry.  

My term for this:  it has to have "bite"

>As for
conceptual art, I've always hated the "rooms full of dirt" (sort of like the
pings and silence that I wrote about in a previous post).

The bloop-bleep school of electronic music, now I think passé due to advances in
computers. Thank god. Yet George Crumb did much the same thing, though with
conventional instruments, and it was fascinating.

>I went to the
L.A. County Art Museum (the one with the treacherous tarpits!) when I was
seventeen, along with our art history class.  There was a big room full of
dirt.  It was called "room full of dirt."  

Tarpits bite. Roomful of dirt, no bite. OTOH the Cadillacs buried in Marfa TX bite
majorly. For some reason I tend to prefer "Modern" pictorial art, while my
musical tastes run from Perotin to Pärt, with occasional stops in 50s cool
jazz, Beatles, Jan and Dean, early Beach Boys... I _am_ a Gemini, after all.

Kitsch can have bite (Keane's sad-eyed waifs, dogs playing poker) but only because
it's camp and you laugh at it. Generic flowers-n-kittykats and hotel-motel sofa
paintings just don't make it.

Maybe it has to do with what's in the artist's mind-"Hey, I'm going to do something
so ridiculous it's outrageous" as opposed to "Gee, how much can I get for
this?"

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