#classic music radio

[dollarstoreartsupplies]

okay so steph is definitely a music purist?

we can all agree on that right? like she's a 'said she was born in the wrong generation in middle school' fleetwood mac, david bowie, the mamas & the papas, niche modern indie artists and also chappell roan kind of music listener. obviously. but.... i dont think we've really considered pete's music taste?

pete, who is a science, left-brained kind of kid, so he probably does not actively go out to look for music and is instead just provided music by the people around him?

pete whose older brother is theodore spankoffski and so his earliest and most fond and nostalgic music influences from his childhood would have come directly from ted's cd collection???

basically what im saying is peter spankoffski has the most trashy, early 00's ke$ha, black eyed peas my humps era, all american rejects ass music taste in the world

that boy had bowling for soup's 1985 memorized at age four, his guilty pleasure music is hollywood undead's everywhere i go, ted did his first decent person move in years when pete came out as trans as a kid and stopped listening to grow a pear by ke$ha and pete forcibly made him play it because it's a bop

and then his only friends are a weeb and a theatre kid.

steph gives him the aux cord on a date to be nice, as a sign of trust, and is blasted in the face with the most uncurated mess of j-pop, sondheim, weezer, and like... owl city's fireflies and that's just a fact

[soundsof71]

Japanese Breakfast: Michelle Zauner at Radio City Music Hall, NYC, December 31 2023 by Maria-Juliana Rojas, my edit of original via rollingstone

[somos-deseos]

Maëlys de Helena Silvera.

Canción: Someday Sweetheart de Benny Goodman.

[sweetnnaivete]

thank god james has a bunch of music-loving friends because otherwise his music taste would be such ass

[little-blue-heart]

Jensen Ackles - Born to be a rockstar!

[bebop-station]

Shostakovich and Aziraphale

I was thinking (and talking to @balance-of-probability endlessly) about the choice to have Shostakovich's fifth symphony feature so heavily in S2 ep 1, and how it struck me as a little odd as there are a bunch of composers Aziraphale loves mentioned in the book and Shostakovich isn't amongst them.

Backstory: In 1934, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk premiered to huge popular acclaim, which was very briskly walked back in 1936 after the Stalinist newspaper Pravda published an article denouncing it.

Actually more than denouncing it, condemning it. It wasn’t credited but was authored by a guy called David Zaslavsky who was almost definitely scribing for Stalin himself. Lady Macbeth was banned in the USSR until 1961.

Anyway by 1936 Shostakovich had written his fourth symphony, which he withdrew from public performance until 1961 because it was more of the same thing that had made the Soviet leadership cancel Lady Macbeth – it was unconventional, anti-patriotic, and indicated that Shostakovich was a “bourgeois formalist”.

So he shelved it and started working on Symphony No. 5 which is, on the surface at least, Soviet as fuck. And that’s what we hear Aziraphale listening to in S2E1.

(Sidebar this story is told in Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time which is either a literary wank soup or a masterpiece depending on how cranky you are when you first read it)

So basically what Dmitri Shostakovich did in those years between the fourth and fifth symphonies was something that might be familiar to S2E6 enjoyers/agonisers: he decided to toe the party line.

Kind of.

Listening to the finale of the fifth symphony (and if you want to listen along it’s the recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, it’ll be called something like Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47; iv. Allegro non troppo) without the context of the rest of the symphony or in fact Shostakovich’s life is like ah yes that’s a bit of a Soviet battle anthem let’s march into Leningrad or whatever.

But it is, as critics have increasingly understood in the years since Shostakovich demurely described it as “a Soviet artist's no-nonsense response to fair criticism”, dripping with irony. This man reviled the Stalinist line on art and life – he takes the Soviet anthem and turns it into a sort of fucked up evil clown march. The whole thing gives me this vibe:

(gif from @goodomensedit)

There’s a lot of stuff about that time in Shostakovich’s life that is extremely hard to verify. There’s a “memoir” which is for sure at least partially fabricated called Testimony in which there’s an alleged quote from our man saying that final movement is a parody, that “it's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing", and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing"."

Whether or not Shostakovich said that (some of his friends who outlived him support that reading, including Rostropovich who conducted a bunch of his work) you can definitely hear it in the piece and you can definitely see how it gives us a clue into the decision Aziraphale makes at the end of the season.

What Shostakovich had to decide back in the 1930s was whether he would a) flee to somewhere like the US, where many other artists targeted by Stalin went; b) stay and become a public nuisance, leading almost definitely to an off-the-books execution; or c) become a party-approved Soviet Artist and hope for change. Even nudge it along in a subtle way. Even get on the inside and work to bring it down. We don’t know how true that was for old mate Dmitri and we don’t yet know exactly what Aziraphale has planned. But yeah:

tl;dr: Shostakovich 🤝 Aziraphale

          Staying inside a rancid and destructive militarised culture in the hope that it can change

[aeolianblues]

Also! Guys I'm doing a 2004 special on my show tonight, in fact, it's not really my show anymore. We're combining two shows together to have a 3-hour chunk block of just 2004 music!

[lynchianightmare]

Don’t you hate it when you are writing songs and you allow your unconscious feelings to emerge…

And then you find yourself having written a song about a minor called Benny?

#Haven’t we all went through that?

Ps: Don’t we all love Roger’s sunglasses era? Who doesn’t love hiding their insecurities and traumas with a big pair of glasses?…

[timdrakesbussy]

SDV Bachelors and Three Songs I Think They Would Listen To

Bachelorettes here.

(For context, I always see them set in the late 90s so I won't be putting any songs from the turn of the millennium onwards. Also these are my opinions so feel free to disagree or add your own headcanons but be respectful.)

Alex

Gigantic - Pixies

Well I Wonder - The Smiths

Orange Crush - R.E.M.

Elliott

Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky

Fantasy on Polish Airs, Op. 13 - Chopin

Transcendental Étude No. 4 - Liszt

Harvey

La vie en rose - Louis Armstrong

I've Got a Crush On You - Ella Fitzgerald

In a Sentimental Mood - Duke Ellington

Sam

High Speed Dirt - Megadeth

Bleed The Freak - Alice in Chains

Something I Learned Today - Hüsker Dü

Sebastian

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything - Bauhaus

Violet - Hole

Strangelove - Depeche Mode

Shane

The Wizard - Black Sabbath

Sinner - Judas Priest

Remember Tomorrow - Iron Maiden

[jarofalicesgrunge]

Bon Scott - AC/DC concert in Cleveland, Ohio July 28th 1979.

📸by R. Alford

[audreyhepburninblackandwhite]

Audrey Hepburn at the Radio City Music Hall during the New York City premiere of their movie Robin and Marian on 15 March 1976

[stone-cold-groove]

Wings’ Wings at the Speed of Sound teaser ad - 1976.

[zealfruity]

Consider:

Crosshair and his Elite Squad in their ship heading back from a mission.

Crosshair is always in charge of the aux:

CRAAAWLING IIIIN MY SKIIIIN!!!

“Sir, could we change the mus-“

Crosshair turns the volume up.

The next song comes on. It’s Bring Me To Life by Evanescence.

Crosshair is mouthing the lyrics under his helmet. The stormtroopers wonder if this job was just one of the circles of Hell.

[sick-sad-little-world]

A little reminder... this is what Chris thinks when you call Soundgarden "classic rock":

Classic rock is the Beatles, Stones, and Zeppelin. It's "Freedom Rock." It's the original Woodstock lineup.

It's NOT Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, or any other band that played Lollapalooza or appeared on 120 Minutes. That's alternative rock. "Classic alternative," if you must.

But, they're not "classic rock." Please, stop tagging them "classic rock."

And, no, I don't care that Superunknown is gonna be 30 years old next March.

[lilabearr]

Jim Morrison *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ