Word: aural
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ROCKY IV contains few elements of a traditional film. Instead of a movie, Stallone has created a visual and aural experience design to bombast and overwhelm the viewer's senses. All the blows have been amplified and run through some electronic thingamajig to produce a sound much akin to a pack of wolves attacking a square mile of sheet metal. Clips from the earlier three movies fly past with the incredible rapidity of a flurry of Marvin Hagler haymakers to the pounding strains of "Burning Heart" by Survivor. The audience has to weather flashing lights, smoke, flags, flying drops...
...fronted by a Frenchman, the Stranglers used to thrash harder and scream louder than almost any other band. But Jean-Jacques Burnel, the vocal power behind the band, anticipated the swing of the gustatory pendulum on their album, IV, alienating some of their hardcore spikes-n-nails support. Aural Sculpture, the Strangler's latest, completes their metamorphosis from outraged punk outcasts to ingratiating pop insiders...
...challenging work, but its challenge is not intellectual; the inherent intellectual content is, by design, minimal The challenge, rather, is for the audience to suspend its accustomed intellectual response to drama, to treat the text more as music than as literature, and to respond to the visual and aural stimuli of the work as they would to a dreams viscerally, emotionally, or even intellectually, according to their own lights...
Women, especially women seeking public office, have been allowed a very narrow range of acceptable behavior. A woman candidate must be neither too sexy nor too severe, too young nor too old. Her voice must be modulated into an aural approximation of the dress-for-success suit. Otherwise she will be thought - God forbid - too aggressive. She must seem tough enough to stand up to the Soviets without being tough enough to frighten Freud...
...audiovisual confrontation. Why should sound alone be enough when sight is only as far away as the TV set or the video machine? Whole generations have had their brains fried with a cathode ray tube, a condition that creates a certain impatience and shortness of attention when limited to aural input. Posterity can rest easy-as Billy Joel points out, "Beethoven didn't have no videos, and he's been hanging in there"-but for rockers, popsters and soul brethren, video will be the way to keep time with the future...