Saturday 5 January 2008

Posh classical dickhead

Media-friendly orchestra conductor Charles Hazlewood analyses pop songs he thinks are ever so classical in a BBC Four series.

We can't get that here, so The Guardian kindly offered some examples of Charleseses insights:

 

Dizzee Rascal - Paranoid

Best bit: The way Dizzee rhymes "East" with "beef".

Autopsy: "I was dropping my daughter off at nursery this morning and I was listening to this. What's interesting is it starts with the chorus ("Rinse me out, use me up, cast me down, fuck me up") and that there's this rolling bass line that underlines all the verses. That makes me think of Henry Purcell, one of our greatest composers from the 17th century who was part of a time when an awful lot of music was written over the top of what was called a ground bass. The idea was that one wrote music over one recurring bass line that's on a loop and here I am listening to Dizzee Rascal and thinking "blimey there's a ground bass."

Johnny Dee on the complexities of pop | Rock | Guardian Unlimited Music

 

Sour Grapes says: It clearly didn't occur to Charles that Blimey, here I am playing foul-mouthed pop smut to my three-year-old. Wake up, Dad!

Here's a picture of Chas doing that Sorry gesture when he's cut someone up on the school run because he was too distracted by the tonic-dominant dichotomies of The Gees of Bee.