Bathos in music

SPLISH SPLASH

http://www.last.fm/music/Blur/_/This+Is+a+Low

bathetic.

lock thread

ban you

http://superdairyboy.com/pictures/rocket_usa/Bozobopbig.jpg

That thing I posted about Black Eyed Dog by Nick Drake the other day.

where's that old thread in which Sinkah says similar of 'Teenag Dirtbag' by Wheatus?

have you listened to mahler yet, louis?

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:xzNtY3I9jSQJ:www.harvardindependent.com/ViewArticle.aspx%3FArticleID%3D7917+MAHLER+BATHOS&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=uk

don't worry, i haven't forgotten!

do read that article tho!

When did bathos stop having negative connotations?

that's what i was wondering.

xpost to frogman: I just did! Makes it sound awesome!

Bathos here isn't when a song disappoints you when it was ostensibly aiming for something higher (I can think of NUMEROUS instances but it wouldn't make a particularly interesting discussion), but when a song deliberately crafts itself to give one a sense of loss and failure, emotionally shattering rather than breaking the spell. It's a well-known literary device.

I've just thought of the best example yet: Suede's 'Daddy's Speeding'. As the song, a quiet, haunting ballad, builds up in its final act into a cataclysmic guitar-solo (complete with engine-noises), the lyrical prophesy 'he crashed the car' is fulfilled when at the point at which you'd expect the solo to completely blossom, there's a loud crash, followed by dissonant, far-away piano tinkles and then, even more effectively, a downbeat, bluesy and incredibly quiet guitar-solo fading out amidst the wreckage. It's an incredible song.

*double use of 'incredible/incredibly' = BAD, repl. 'incredible song' with 'wonderful effect'.

That bit at the end of "Save Your Kisses for Me" when it turns out he's singing to a bairn.

Louis, I really don't want to be a dick about this, but that's not what bathos means. At all.

wiki sez:
"More strictly speaking, bathos is unintended humor caused by an incongruous combination of high and low. If the contrast is intended, it may be described as Burlesque or mock-heroic."

Now could the marching band in the last movement of Beethoven's 9th adequately be described as either of those? It's kind of bugging me now.
It's sort of, "sublime bathos" to my mind. Same with much of Mahler.

xpost: When a song abandons its seemingly heroic course, falling instead into quaint or ridiculous failure, that's the effect I mean. Perhaps using the word 'bathos' as a blanket for 'anticlimax' is a bad habit, but it's more or less what I mean. The only difference is that the instances of which I speak are mostly intended.

Yeah i don't think those are example of the bathetic, lou.

A genuinely amazing example of this, in fact, actually uses a comical final act for non-comical purposes; Beck's 'Steal My Body Home' moves from a freaky drone-hillbilly psycho lament into a good ol' hoedown, but the switch is so incongruous as to render the final part absolutely terrifying.

ach, maybe I should have just called it 'anticlimax'

you know what's fucking incredibly extremely nightmarishly bathetic (and not using louis' definition of something happening that lets you down somewhere along the course, but rather the more common definition)? the bee gees' ODESSA.

THAT'S A GOOD ALBUM.

Oh I agree.

Bathos is more like a Rock Tribute to the Survivors of the Holocaust.

but also a true horror.

x-post

"I Shot John Lennon" for the win.

okay but i thought we were going with conventional terminology here!
how can something "nightmarishly bathetic" be good? surely that album transcends concievable (and pre-and-post Odessa) and typical BeeGees mawkishness?

xp a true horror! okay this is tickling me now

mcgonagall

Maybe "The Bewlay Brothers" is an example of bathos deployed to good ends.

xpost

The thing is she's uncannily accurate as a fake McGonagall, I assume completely by accident, which adds to the wonder of it.

the word "irony" is the elephant in the room here

Odessa is like nightmarish bathos in support of surrealism's lack of direct or genuine meaning rather than unintentional bathos resulting in something funny. I think that's an OK use of the term, no? I'm not sure how else you would characterize the aesthetic of that album.

mm. how about earnest, visionary and overreaching. perhaps you couldn't call that an aesthetic! romantic, pathetic in a nineteenth century sense.
surrealism is a good thing to bring in here tho.

surrealism is either done in complete knowingness, or by surrendering yourself to the artistic direction of other levels of the mind/psyche.
the bee gees work/aesthetic on odessa seems fully intentioned to me.
like a full-blown romance.

earnest and visionary and over-reaching but ultimately really lacking in the actual human content that normally fills a work of romanticism, too. so, to me, that's where surrealism comes in. you're absolutely right about surrealist technique, but i wrote this m.a. thesis about psychedelic music in general having a lot to do with the aesthetic of surrealism in spite of the fact that it was almost all intentioned.

"earnest and visionary and over-reaching but ultimately really lacking in the actual human content that normally fills a work of romanticism"

like sgt.pepper then, maybe. but isn't this a generalised definition of "popular art" in whatever form, that it's direct and powerful, but perhaps doesn't have the "depth" of "high art" when given greater scrutiny? (nb i am not saying this. also apologies for the scare quotes). many critics used to profess this distinction, and mark the division between "high and "low" art with bathos.
ironically of course, bathos means depth.

well, surrealism's depths are other-worldly rather than worldly i guess, so that's another good reason to use the term!

(the term "bathos," i mean)

you know, if you're looking at it in terms of a surreal aesthetic, there's really no reason to call odessa "over-reaching." i don't think it misses any of its marks at all.

when a song deliberately crafts itself to give one a sense of loss and failure, emotionally shattering rather than breaking the spell

This is plain ole pathos. The effect you want is pathos. But you want to get there through methods usually associated with bathos. At least I think that's what you're looking for. If so, check out practically any track on the first Roxy Music album.

And where exactly does "Steal My Body Home" turn into a "good ol' hoedown?"

the misunderstanding of the term "irony" is the elephant in contemporary culture

go on

Irony is actually more akin to sarcasm, isn't it?

And yeah, I think Louis was looking for some kind of pathos/bathos hybrid that might not have a name yet.

converge - last light.

it builds itself up in the most soaring, gigantic, explosive way then deliberately runs itself out of steam. in fact the climax promises to be so big, it has to run out of steam gradually, like someone sticking a pin in a lilo.

If so, check out practically any track on the first Roxy Music album

An album I hold very dear! The most obvious example of this is Sea Breezes, a quiet, meditative four-minute song somehow advanced rather than sabotaged by the absolutely ridiculous final section (the use of guitar solos has been almost universal to all the examples I've named; I don't usually like them, but they have a big role, it seems, in shifting the dramatic focus and weight of a song).

What else would you call the last minute and a half of Steal My Body Home? "Freaky circus hoedown" would be my most honest approximation.

why do you keep changing your name, lj

i thought you were the table is the table

hahahaha, you're not the first!

not the first to question why you keep changing your name or to confuse you with the table is the table?

I didn't say that! You must be confusing me with someone else.

-- Just got offed, Monday, 18 June 2007 21:22 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

oh i'm sorry! it was "the table is the table." sorry louis.

-- Tim Ellison, Monday, 18 June 2007 21:31 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

Weirdly, I also always mix up louis and table is the table. And also sometimes HI DERE, even though I know HI DERE is D&n P3rry.

-- Hurting 2, Monday, 18 June 2007 21:34 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

ha!

for me it's probably less related to the content of the posts, and more because it sounds like the kind of name you'd come up with :)

i think i used to confuse you with noodle vague and latebloomer as well. but that was WAY back in the day

"Irony is actually more akin to sarcasm, isn't it?"

Yeah my post, which lfam may or may not be criticising i don't know, was a prelude to a thought which i was going to enlarge on, but couldn't be arsed last night. Basically intentional irony may help to refine the perception of bathetic musical passages. Take (again)one of the ultimate examples, the marching band in Beethoven's 9th. That was seen as farcically bathetic by many listeners in his day. Now it's clearly pretty sophisticated, so we can rule out unintended bathos.
It's ironical, but in what sense - not savagely ironical, not merely gentle/affectionate; it's a sort of elevated irony, producing a "sublimely bathetic" effect. This, too, is the origin of Mahler, a master of irony and intense romantic feeling simultaneously.
Mahler was held at arms-length for at least fifty years by audiences/critics/performers for percieved "vulgarity". A modern, ironical sensibility perhaps. It was the ironical juxtapositions, obviously one of the key features of bathos, that people couldn't handle. Certainly "burlesque" and "mock-heroism" are good keywords for many passages in Mahler. But that section in the Beethoven 9th is more ambiguous. Bathetic in a good way, but not burlesque or mock-heroic. Hence the need to bring in irony/ironical juxtaposition. Pope also being a master of irony, on many levels though, and frequently directed at his own poetic stance and general philosophy (which the artist recognises is inadequate while he cudgels others with it). He always was essentially critiquing himself anyway, i think.

I would think a lot of Louis's examples involve ironic/pathetic juxtaposition.

Two more undeveloped thoughts:
it's perhaps a lot harder to identify bathos in music than it is in rhetoric.
And: MacArthur Park.

What else would you call the last minute and a half of Steal My Body Home? "Freaky circus hoedown" would be my most honest approximation.

It's so not a hoedown, most definitely not a good ol one. A hoedown implies a raucous party. That's not what this is. And the two sections of the song, while different sonically, still sound similar in feel - luded-out trip-hoppy.

Great song, though. And right on re: Roxy.

the burp at the end of "blitzkrieg" on metallica's "kill em all"

I dunno re: SMBH, the last minute thirty always gives me the feeling of some bizarre redneck ceremony, some celebration of perversity, whose clumsy, slightly out-of-tune major chords challenge the morose meanderings of earlier on and yet increase their absolute horror (i.e. "some people are enjoying, revelling in this fearful scene!").

pretty much the entire zappa catalogue

Good example of bathos:

In the (really shitty) play I just saw my brother in, there's a super-serious, super-tense, near-climactic scene in which two couples are in their respective houses having simultaneous arguments about why the respective fathers won't go see their respective murderer sons in prison. In the middle of this, one of the mothers says to her husband "I don't care if you're mad enough to eat the asshole out of a donkey!"

Sounds like a production of one of the Virginia Tech dude's plays.

!

One of the main characters is a school shooter. (he befriends his black cell mate and becomes *racially conscious*)

Roman a clef?

Ha.

It also involves soliloquies in spoken word style.

Kevin John OTM upthread. "Bathos" is a dis, not a compliment!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbnPkK76Ask

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHJsdva4oo

the very definition of this bathos thing is the last part of the song 'who cares' by unwound, where it builds up ominously and suddenly segues into a totally non-descript, light-hearted sample from some kind of 50s jig. and it comes at the end of an enormous album.

British Sea Power, "Canvey Island", from 'Do You Like Rock Music?"

On Canvey Island, 1953
Many lives were lost
With the records of a football team