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Author Topic: Avant Garde  (Read 1715 times)

Greg

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Avant Garde
« on: March 12, 2019, 07:02:59 pm »

Yoko is supposed to be an avant-garde artist, but I was thinking this tonight.


This influence didnt really translate into John becoming more avante garde much as far as his own stuff goes.  His Beatle work or solo records.


But before her he was really on the cutting edge of transforming a genre.


After her...Rev 9 and the few co-projects with her.  That was it.  It seems like he didnt embrace it much other than that.


Im prob wrong on this, but thats what Im thinking now.
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Mervap

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Re: Avant Garde
« Reply #1 on: March 13, 2019, 01:49:18 am »

It seems that after JL and Yoko got together, he treated his life more as performance art....with the guise of activism thrown in.. Not necessarily avant garde.....
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Greg

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Re: Avant Garde
« Reply #2 on: March 13, 2019, 06:27:34 am »

Great points.


And I neglected to mention Utopian Natl Anthem.  That could count I suppose.
(I sing it to myself all the time.)
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Mervap

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Re: Avant Garde
« Reply #3 on: March 13, 2019, 06:30:00 pm »

It does count....and I am singing it now....  ;)
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Greg

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Re: Avant Garde
« Reply #4 on: March 14, 2019, 07:03:45 pm »

Hope youre not in a library.  Theyll want you to keep it down.
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Keri

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Re: Avant Garde
« Reply #5 on: September 10, 2021, 04:16:48 am »

I'm a bit late coming to this discussion, but I like the idea of rediscovering old threads.

How do we take the term Avante Garde? Do we mean experimental? If so a lot of Beatles music was that, but usually it is interpreted as not following standard structures. In music it might be that it doesn't follow harmonic and melodic patterns. So Two Virgins was Avante Garde in that sense. Yoko did a lot of happenings events, so they were art theatre almost, rather than having aesthetic qualities.

John's music after meeting Yoko was I think less musically inventive than his music with the Beatles, even the jarring Plastic Ono Band seems musically more simplistic and even lyrically he became more straight forward and less poetic, the subject matter was more obvious and a lot of the time it was directly about John and his relationship with Yoko. Intense but not necessarily astute.
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Mervap

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Re: Avant Garde
« Reply #6 on: September 12, 2021, 08:22:08 am »

John said in later interviews, from around 1968 and later, that all art is somehow self referential. It seems that around that time, he ceased trying to "create" things and began "reporting" them. Admittedly, a lot of his earlier work was indeed self referential, but it seemed to be more of an unconscious thing.
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Keri

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Re: Avant Garde
« Reply #7 on: September 15, 2021, 06:40:03 am »

I'm personally very dubious about the whole self referential thing, I have greater sympathy for Keats "Negative capability" where the self is forgotten and the imagination can invest itself in anything. Shakespeare is a great example of that, which is why no one can use Shakespeare's plays to get information on his life. And Lennon's work on Sgt Pepper is a great example of that Lucy was inspired by his sons painting Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite a Circus poster, A Day in the Life things from the newspaper Good Morning Good Morning a advertisement. From these he created songs that felt universal. Conversely the Ballad of John and Yoko could almost be a Newspaper article. I think John was better off when he didn't have a theory of art than when he had this idea that art was self referential. For that reason I'm wary of Lennon's own appraisal of a lot of his songs that he did in 1980.
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