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:
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As for the terms good and bad, they indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things with one another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him who mourns; for him who is deaf, it is neither good nor bad.”
—Baruch (Benedict)
“The music stopp’d, and I stood still,
And found myself outside the Hill,
Left alone against my will,
To go now limping as before,
And never hear of that country more!””
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)