Monday, February 14, 2011

Unfinished Music

After my comments expressing disappointment that Yoko Ono spent so much time diverting her attention away from creative avant-garde art once she married John Lennon, I thought it would be worth going back and listening again to the experimental "Unfinished Music" albums the two of them released in the late 1960s.  Here's the beginning of Two Virgins.  I have to say, I still don't get this.  I listen to a lot of far-out experimental music and enjoy and respect a lot of it.  But Two Virgins, as far as I can tell, is basically just Lennon and Ono faffing around.  I do appreciate, though, the notion of ridiculing the culture industry (and perhaps, even the public, a la P.T. Barnum).  Perhaps it's more than a coincidence that this album was released in the same year that Stanley Cavell published his essay "Music Discomposed," in which he postulated that "the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary music"...

No comments:

Post a Comment