Swan Pop/Bubblegum Song
The song "Beach Baby" was ginned up in 1974 by a British studio band called The First Class. It's an overorchestrated, bubblegummy Beach Boys knockoff, but it's cute. I wouldn't mention it here except that it straight-up steals the famous theme of the last movement of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, which is kind of awesome.
If you doubt this at all, skip to three minutes into Beach Baby and listen how they actually give the theme over to a French horn. The Sibelius theme is about 1:20 into the movement, by the way.
Beach Baby is no Love Supreme, but hey.
Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, I might add, is just as popular and listenable now as it was in 1974.
* * * * *
[sounding angry] "Because I'm fun, that's why. I'm more fun than you!! Every fucking time I [incoherent from here on out]"
Oh, other people's cell phone conversations.
5 Comments:
This immediately leaps into the Top 5 of my favorite of mild interest blogposts of all time. Where and how did you find this?
The old-fashioned way. It showed up on the new ladyfriend's iTunes library, and then I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Let me get this straight: you saw the tune on her iTunes library, you learned about the band on Wiki, but what caused you to actually listen to the song?
I meant I heard the song when it came up on iTunes. It was playing music on shuffle.
That is pretty great. A little bit of cursory googling turned up a few other posts/ web comments quietly making the same point; this one also points out a similarity I've been aware of for a while between the Sibelius theme and the "Floe" movement of Philip Glass' Glassworks (though in a transposed, less horn-centric, not-quite-as-obviously-a-knockoff settting). I've sometimes thought of the Glass movement as a sort of illustration of having Sibelius' 5th stuck in one's head. Though since Glass wrote it in the 1980s maybe it's actually a depiction of the mind's-ear damage wrought by Beach Baby.
I also think that Salonen clip on YouTube might be the Beach Baby of performances of the third movement of Sibelius' 5th, based on the perhaps overly indulgent tempos and, much more so, on that cheesy curtain pullback. I was hoping that, rather than that painting, it would reveal a huge print of one of those photos of Sibelius in his old age, in his alcohol-damaged Colonel Kurtz/ Uncle Fester phase.
Post a Comment
<< Home