Style
Byrd was the group's leader. He stated his aesthetic aims for the band and album were to have an avant-garde political/musical rock group with the idea of combining Electronic sound (not electronic music), musical/political radicalism and Performance art. During the 1960s, Byrd was drawn to the leftist Communist Party group, explaining that it was "the one group that had discipline, an agenda, and was willing to work within the existing institutions to educate and radicalize American society." The song "Love Song for the Dead Ché" reflects these ideas. Columbia Records originally wanted this title changed due to its political implications. Byrd suggested "Julius and Ethel Rosenberg" as a replacement title if the original title had not been taken.
The album is littered with references to Byrd's obsession with old-time American music such as the dixieland jazz intro on "I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar". "The American Metaphysical Circus" also starts out with no fewer than 5 layers of sound being heard in a collage. A calliope playing "National Emblem", a ragtime piano playing "At a Georgia Camp Meeting", two marching bands playing "Marching Through Georgia" and "The Red, White and Blue" switching between left and right channels. The other two tracks are of electronic sounds.
Read more about this topic: The United States Of America (album)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1994)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)