Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EVERY ART has its social commentator. Comic strips have Doonesbury and music has Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. Listening to a Scott-Heron/Jackson album is an educational experience unrivalled by the "education" obtained from such sources as the makers of Dow Bathroom Cleaner, your local Emmy-award-winning eyewitness news team or your favorite daytime game show. It's an experience that gives insight into answers to questions the game show wouldn't ask or events the news team wouldn't cover. It's really a musical eyeglass cleaner...
...striking thing about this album is that, despite its comic appearances (for instance, the gloriously cheesy cover photos), it does not come across like Saturday Night, or Animal House, or even the National Lampoon's Lemmings. The music itself is, for the most part, surprisingly straightforward. With the immediate intention of recording the September concerts, Belushi and Aykroyd took the opportunity to assemble a band of stellar musicians who would back them up in thoroughly professional style. Their collective sound virtually overshadows the few attempts at genuine comedy, although this remains strictly a good-time album if there ever...
...fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda posters as crude as comic strips; hundred-year-old eggs and gunpowder; opium dens and Buddhist pagodas; the imperturbable mandarin sage and the fanatical archcriminal Dr. Fu Manchu...
DIED. Willard Mullin, 76, illustrious sports cartoonist whose incisive, comic pen-and-ink drawings appeared in the New York World-Telegram and such magazines as LIFE and the Saturday Evening Post for more than three decades, and who created the Brooklyn Bum, a grizzled, cigar-chomping caricature of the Brooklyn Dodger baseball fan; of cancer; in Corpus Christi, Texas...
Working as producers and occasional writers for the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller brought strings to rock, turned out soaring lyric ballads that remain unsurpassed. As writers and producers for the Coasters, the team gave goofy high spirits and tough sidewalk irony to songs that were essentially comic melodramas in miniature. They also provided a musical definition of rock that still works as well as any: "You say that music's for the birds/ And you can't understand the words/ Well, honey, if you did/ You'd really blow your lid/ 'Cause baby, that is rock...