Word: sounding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Terence, 21, lack a sense of humor. This cycle of rock songs is an explosion of surprises, blending fey whimsy with just plain loony-bin clowning. A country corn put-on called I Been Spending Too Much Money at the Fair is a hilarious frontal attack on the Nashville sound...
...songs are complete stories with something well-identified happening in the course of the song. Putting a story to music does not automatically make an opera. Only if the music has been molded to the story in such a way as to clothe its meanings and its actions in sound does one have an opera. The key concept here is that of giving each musical sound a sense as well. The Who have written several exploratory operettas in which their deliberate purpose has been to attempt to convey meaning through abstract sound. This is a considerable undertaking...
...accompaniment. It is clear that this break and pause represents the boy falling in love, and in the very next verse he proclaims his love. Just after the interlude and before the song swings into gear again, Townshend plays an ominous sinister grating wail on his guitar, a sound that apears for the first and only time on the record here. This is a presentiment of what we are to learn next which is that his love is doomed and so the falling in love was a disastrous mistake...
Then afterwards when the boy is told of the impossibility of the love there is a frightful guitar burst by Townshend again conveying, as intended, to me that bitter and desperate feeling of being crushed in boyhood. Obviously this is not to say the sound on the guitar would have automatically reminded one, if suddenly heard, of childhood grief but simply that one must ask, given an assigned context, did the music fit it or not, which is the universal challenge of opera, and its universal glory when it succeeds...
...record reveals that the second last time the chorus says 'Dum Dum Dum Dolay' someone says in a nasal voice over the Dum Dums 'Please don't come too late.' What the Who were trying to do was to approximate a specific meaning-phrase by a seemingly meaningless sound. If all had gone well the hypnotic chants of Dum Dum Dolay should have created the feeling of expectation that the following line 'I'm gonna show you why they call me lightning' depends on. In this case it probably didn't work...