The following is an excerpt from a lecture titled The Geography of Sound by David Thomas, the former leader of the band Pere Ubu:
Ike Turner's Rocket 88 from 1951, frequently cited as the first out n out rock n roll recording, is about a car and a car is about space. The car is a form of poetic meter, only suburbanites and soccer moms think of it as transportation. A windshield frames the Big Out There in wide-screen, cinemascopic proportions while the car has a radio that frames a broadcast signal which in turn frames a recording which is in itself a complex of frames within frames, wheels within wheels, and all the while you yourself in either of the heavily symbolic roles of Driver or Passenger are navigating across a no-doubt wacked landscape from within this resonating soundscape frame-container and all the scales are fracturing very artistically and the gyroscope of your sixth body sense is flipping around getting pleasantly confused as to what exactly is the distinction between internal and external geographies... and that's what they used to call "Cruising." And in Old America the real artists did not work with marble or paint or even cine film, the real artist was a slob with a pint of oil and a set of spark plug wrenches.
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2 comments:
Ike Turner? I had no idea he was recording so early.
Oh, lordy, just ask Ike: He'll tell you it he himself that invented Rock and Roll. According to Wikipedia, the distorted electric guitar was the result of an amp, dropped just before the song was recorded.
Man, Pere Ubu: Rock for the Critical Theorist, huh?
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