Music You're Listening To:

[Joods]

Whatever the DJ is currently playing.

[Rev. Rye]

In my recent short story about Vase De Noces: The Musical, I point out that, while a lot of the music is the sort of varying combinations of jazz/rock/neo-classical influences we've come to expect in Broadway musicals, it goes into other areas that other musicals rarely do, and for good reason.

Artemyev's "Meditation" from Stalker

The entire play has music playing over it. When it's not part of a musical number, it shifts gear, and the traditional pit orchestra gives way to a trio of synth, shakuhachi, and electric bouzouki. It sounds like the music from Tarkovsky's Stalker, and, when this trio is playing, there is no dialogue. It simply beggars the imagination to contemplate the state of mind that made Pinkie Brown think this was a good idea. To be fair, the music is far more listenable than the electronic music composed for the actual film.

Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beate Vergine

Even stranger is that, once per act, first after the farmer seduces the pig in Act I, and then after he lynches his human-piglet children and the mother sow kills herself in Act II, a choir comes onstage and sings a short piece from Monteverdi's Vespero Della Beate Virgine (specifically “Laetatus Sum” and “Lauda Jerusalem”) while stock footage rolls of chickens just standing around and doing nothing, and then, scatter as quickly as they arrived, not interacting with the farmer (or the pigs) at all.

Wesley Willis' "Suck a Cheetah's Dick."

In revenge for their deaths, their ghosts haunt the Farmer. But he has an ace up his sleeve: he talks about creating tea from his own feces and urine, and this is enough to make the ghosts fly away. The orchestration for this song comes from the demo for one of the keyboards. I could have listed this as being among one of the relatively few bits half-assed for the show, as others have done, but it's really not.

About 15 years ago, I discovered an artist named Wesley Willis, and, underneath his simple music (which usually involved him shouting over the demo of his keyboard) was an extraordinary story. Willis suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and believed he was being tormented by the demons Heartbreaker, Nervewrecker, and Meansucker, who would give him psychotic episodes while riding the bus. He worked through it all with his music, and, while he often did relatively wholesome songs like “Rock N Roll McDonald's” or “Merry Christmas”, he often did songs with titles like “Suck a Cheetah's Dick” or “Suck a Caribou's Ass.” These were apparently written specifically to get those demons to leave him alone for a while. I can only assume they worked, even for a time. So, having the Farmer use a similar style to Wesley Willis to disgust them by seeing him go all corprophagic so they'll go away... it actually makes sense. From what I've been able to gather about the actual film, it actually does a better job of explaining WHY he actually does this. And it certainly explains why it ends with the Farmer saying “Rock Over London, Rock on, Broadway! McDonald's, I'd hit that!”

[Angrboda]

Listening to a playlist of popular Christmas tunes on Spotify.

[Deesse23]

[Angrboda]

[The Valkyrie]

Someone suggest some music to cheer me up, please.

I said "goodbye" to one of my buddies this morning. Not expecting him to be alive when I get home...

[Angrboda]

Someone suggest some music to cheer me up, please.

The whole album is really good. A Merry Little Christmas, Lounge Noir.

[Marozz]

[Angrboda]

[Clueless Morgan]