Showing posts with label MIGHTY BOOSH. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MIGHTY BOOSH. Show all posts

Sunday, January 14, 2024

"transplendent!" (the ghastliness of rock, #2 of ?)

Loads of suggestions of rockhorror lampoons in the comments box of the previous post on the ghastliness of rock. I'll get to those in a sec, but first, a couple of doozies that came to mind. 

Here's Woody Allen, or his Annie Hall stand-in, Alvy Singer, encountering rock culture in its full mid-70s pomp, via a date with a Rolling Stone reporter.


Exaggerated for comedic effect, but reflecting Allen's true feelings about the fatuousness of rock and the rock generation.  He's such a fogey, he's into the previous generation's music, jazz: but not even bebop, it's pre-WW2 jazz, as used incessantly on his soundtracks and which he even plays, in a jazz revival band. 

(C.f. that other fogey, Terry Zwigoff, who makes his own poke at rock with the Blueshammer scene in Ghost World

Also possibly counting in this category, the scenes involving Annie Hall and the Paul Simon character, the record producer, in a nightclub and then at the oh-so-LA party. 



And then another rockphobic scene - from Hannah and Her Sisters, when Woody's Mickey goes on a date with Dianne Wiest's Holly (Hannah's directionless, trend-hopping sister) and is exposed to punk rock.  


Are there any other scenes like these in the Allen uuurv? 


Okay onto the suggestions: 

Phil Knight points to this 


But isn't Richard O'Brien a genuine fan of rock'n'roll?

Phil also points to this scene as an example of the outsider wandering befuddled into the mystifying youth culture 


Ah, I know people who could discourse - have discoursed - at length about the significance of that one scene! (Funnily enough I'm reading a whole book about Blow-Up at the moment).

I'm not sure that is exactly what is happening there - after all, the photographer is pretty with-it (he plays a jazz record in the scene with Vanessa Redgrave at his pad but he's right in the thick of the young culture, fashion, etc). One of the things the scene does is some character-revealing: how competitive and predatorial he is by nature, so that he has to fight for the broken remnant of the guitar, eventually wresting it out of the hands of the Yardbirds fans... but once he's got it and got it outside the club, he loses all interest....  drops it in the street. The other thing is the idea of society breaking up in micro-cultures that are completely unfathomable to the rest of society: the talismanic aura of the electric guitar fragment means nothing once outside the club... it's just a bit rubbish in a London street. 

But Blow-Up as a whole, probably does fit the syndrome - not so much "rock ghastliness" but the whole Swinging Sixties, mod Britain moment viewed with an outsider's cold eye, seeing only emptiness, meaningless pursuit of sensation, decadence, a society breaking apart. (Antonioni was a Marxist, if hardly a crude one). 

But Blow-Up is also about 6 or 7 other things.  It's probably my equal-first favorite film alongside Performance and Walkabout.

Phil also digs up this amazing encounter between Norman Wisdom and The Pretty Things and assorted pretty things of the psych Sixties


And he also mentions The Tubes - who probably satirised rock and rock-values in multiple ways and points ("White Punks On Dope") but most famously lampooned the excess of peak-pomp Brit rockstardom with the character of Quay Lewd







The Tubes also had a punk spoof as well, if I recall right. Ah, Stevee finds a latterday version of it



Stevee suggest this Quincy episode for punk piss-taking 


and an episode of CHIPS for similar 



And also brings up Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias - they were part of the hippie bohemian scene in Manchester, if I recall right, and took the piss out of everything, from Status Quo denim boogie to reggae to punk with the Snuff Rock EP (and also stage play?)



On the subject of punky piss-takes there's a whole episode of The Goodies, "Punky Business"




Ed remembers Not the Nine O' Clock News having a go at the New Wave



And also this



And the Comic Strip's metal spoof Bad News, which I always thought came a poor second to Spinal Tap 




One of the problems with metal parodies is that metal is a genre that advances through self-parody. 

Also, no matter how silly or excessive or preposterously posturing and theatrical you make the parody, there is always an actual real example of a metal band that surpasses that..  It's a bit like wrestling, maybe. 


Tyler points to this episode of Dragnet, not so much about rock per se as about acid and hippies


and to this film I never even heard of - Otto Preminger's  hippie satire Skidoo (entirety watchable here)




There's probably a load of hippie-satirising scenes in movies, or at least scenes that have a movie-world outsider's simulation thereof. This one from The President's Analyst sprang to mind (another of my favorite films): 




Ah, well, in a way, the entirety of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, is a kind of outsider's spoof on the music industry and groovy rock bands of the late Sixties.  Yet another of my favorite films. 







Stylo offers another piss-take of Old Grey Whistle Test, from later on than the Rutland Weekend Television lampoon



And this brief Brass Eye send-up of glam rock 


That reminded me that Mighty Boosh is full of this kind of thing (as was Noel F's terrible solo follow up series). But it's done affectionately, there's none of that visceral feeling of distaste and contempt that you get with the Woody Allen types. 







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