[UA] Music for Unknown Armies

[The Reverend]

>Eh, taste in music is very personal, and what works for one person (or one
>group) may not have the same associations for another.  I mean, you can't
>go wrong with Holst's "The Planets" or Orff's "Carmina Burana" (unless
>you're a Highlander movie, I guess).  But I can imagine using everything
>from Led Zeppelin's "In the Evening" (which I'm listening to right now) to
>"Kerosene" by Big Black.
snip

Well, as a long time lurker, I've been following this thread with interest, 
and have been wanting to chime in on with my comments on Big Black, but 
unfortunatly I've been beaten to the punch. The fact that one of the 
designers feels the way I do about them at least affirms that I'm not 
totally of in left field, but I think that Big Black is probably the most 
UA-ish bands ever, with "Songs About Fucking" as the most UA-ish album of 
all. The song, "The Model," (a Kraftwerk cover,) could be related to the 
archtype of the WECHBY, and "Precious Thing" is just a flat-out mantra of 
obsession and possesion. But a lot of their other songs are about small town 
wierdness, wierdness in general, the mafia, and middle-American machismo. 
"Kitty Empire," about a man who keeps hundreds of cats, dances around naked 
and listens to bizarre music, "The Power of Independent Trucking," concerns 
the archtype of the hard-livin', hard-screwin' male trucker. Songs from 
other albums, Like "Hammer Party," which tends to be more about violence, 
also has songs like "Steelworker," chuck full of ravening macho sensibility. 
"Rich Man's Eight Track Tape," has "Bad Houses," about the compulsion, 
against our better judgement, to engage in activity that demeans us. 
"Stinking Drunk," about the thrills of getting wasted, of course, applies to 
boozehounds. Just about all of their songs contribute to the feeling of UA 
for me, although I have yet to use them in a session. A neat bonus with this 
is that in the liner notes you often get a little paragraph that talks about 
the song and elaborates on its themes. For my money, I can't honestly think 
of a band that embodies, for me at least, the feeling I get reading UA.

>-G.
>It's like the world is a fat man and my wallet is a bag of chips.
>
>http://www.thehungersite.com/index.html

-Roger
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