Music
Bad Moon Rising begins with "Intro," a short instrumental featuring several guitars, described by Michael Azerrad as “a melancholic, meowing slide line playing off a delicate stack of crystalline arpeggios.” "Intro" segues into the next song, "Brave Men Run (In My Family)," named after a painting by American artist Edward Ruscha. The song begins with a single riff repeating for a minute, before Gordon murmurs “Brave man run in my family/Brave men run away from me.” The riff fades into the album's third song, "Society Is a Hole," “a one-chord hymn to big-city anomie”. Sonic Youth's use of transitional pieces in the album was inspired by their live shows, which featured either Moore or Ranaldo tuning guitars for up to five minutes while the other played slow transitory guitar riffs or prerecorded sound collages.
"I Love Her All the Time" features extensive prepared guitar by Ranaldo and the use of one chord, with a noise section in the middle; like many of the album's songs, it focuses on texture and rhythm rather than melody. The second side of Bad Moon Rising, which comprises the experimental "Ghost Bitch" (which features Ranaldo on acoustic guitar and references Native Americans' first encounter with European settlers), "I'm Insane," and "Justice is Might," expands on the soundscape concept; the songs feature repeating guitar riffs that segue from one song to the next, while Moore and Gordon mumble cryptic lyrics.
Death Valley '69, the album's closer, was the result of a collaboration between Thurston Moore and New York singer and poet Lydia Lunch.
Read more about this topic: Bad Moon Rising (album)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“I fear I agree with your friend in not liking all sermons. Some of them, one has to confess, are rubbish: but then I release my attention from the preacher, and go ahead in any line of thought he may have started: and his after-eloquence acts as a kind of accompaniment—like music while one is reading poetry, which often, to me, adds to the effect.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never got there.... I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (1926–1991)