Word: rice
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Greatest Story? To a large extent, Webber and Rice share Judas' doubts. "It happens," says Rice, "that we don't see Christ as God. but as simply the right man at the right time in the right place. It is a great and inspiring story, though." Shorn of the Resurrection, of course, the Passion and what preceded it are something less than "the greatest story ever told." Perhaps that is why Webber and Rice, both of whom were brought up in the Anglican Church but eventually rejected it, have not worked too hard in Superstar...
What Webber and Rice seem certain of is that Christ was a profoundly humanitarian radical thinker, not unlike Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Near the end of Superstar, the authors invite comparisons between radicals, old and new, using the voice of Judas, who appears this time as a kind of 20th century Everyman, not in a flashback, but in a 2,000-year flash-forward...
Whatever the reaction to Superstar may be, Webber and Rice have fused words and music into such a convincing narrative style that rock may never be quite the same again. Webber's clever sounds and rhythms (such as Latin, soft rock, ragtime, Prokofiev four-step) not only do not drown out Rice's words, but actually show an awareness of their syllabic structure. Just imagine, listening to rock and understanding the words too. The musical depiction of Christ (Ian Gillan) is far too neutral to capture either a man or a myth. But Mary Magdalene (Yvonne Elliman...
Superstar occupies the same assimilative position in the pop world that Ginastera's Don Rodrigo does in serious opera. Webber and Rice do not outdo the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Prokofiev, Orff, Stravinsky or any other musical influence found in their work. But they have welded these borrowings into a considerable work that is their own. Tommy (TIME, June 22) was the first, flawed suggestion that rock could deal with a major subject on a broad symphonic or operatic scale. Superstar offers the first real proof. William Bender
Designed to scare off rice-eating sparrows. Japan's scarecrows are being replaced by smelly chemical repellents and automatic noisemakers. Kataoka believes the modern substitutes work no better than the time-honored field dummies. Moreover, he says, the decline in scarecrows is a blow to rural charm. "Scarecrows," he declares, "are the final remains of our ancestral sense of aesthetics-delicate without being pretentious, colorful yet never loud...