On Sun, 8 Dec 2002 00:25:43 +0100 (CET) Efrén del Valle <efrendv@yahoo.es> wrote:
What I'm really questioning is the radicality of the music there, which isn't that obvious. That understood (and probably agreed by most of the people here), what I'm wondering is what the term "Radical" is really applied to. The music? Anyone with a bit of common sense will hardly find something really radical in those 70 plus releases. There's also the possibility that Zorn thinks that the general tone of those releases is radical in some way or another. I can't share his opinion, though. If the author of "Locus Solus", "Execution Ground" and "The Classic Guide to Strategy" finds Erik Friedlander, Jenny Scheinmann or Sephardic Tinge radical, then I must be missing something.
Here, as so often when this issue has been talked to death in the past, we keep seeing a clear gap in definition between the people posting from Europe and from the US. It's become pretty obvious that the word "radical" has far more exact meanings to the Europeans, with suggestions of a quite particular political stance. Here in the US, the term is used more loosely. I've often heard it used to refer to skateboard design and haircuts. When you relax into the definition of the term as it is used in the place where, after all, the series originated, the title becomes far less of a problem. I also suspect that the definition of what Zorn includes in the series may have drifted over the years: while he may have had some more strict ideas early on, these ideas may have loosened, to the point where the title is a quite effective marketing ploy which he'd be a fool to drop. After all, would we be discussing so often a series named "Kinda Interesting Music Mostly By Jews"? But we've said all this before, too.
Put simply: If you choose the image of a cut-off head on a plate for one of your album covers, do you really think nobody will ask why? Although different examples, I think that the same applies to RJC.
And this proves that it is effective: people are indeed asking why. But apparently some people happen to have more trouble letting the question remain open than others do. -- | jzitt@josephzitt.com http://www.josephzitt.com/ | | GPG: A4224EFA http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt/ | | == New book: Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems == | | Comma / Gray Code / VoiceWAVE Silence: the John Cage Discussion List |