(Untitled)

[pipetti]

Plenty of disgusting media exploitation of the shooter, his family, the victims, their families, their friends. Lots of hindsight about how people were so concerned about the shooter when he was being quiet and a loner on campus. Whatever happened in his life is no excuse for shooting others, but are you really buying the stories of some of these

Comments

[pipetti]

People have been throwing themselves into the performance and sweating up a storm ever since there was rock, and even some of the bandleaders before that were way into it (cab calloway comes to mind, but i'm sure there are better examples.)

Yeah, the Shocking Blue video is shockingly stiff, and there are plenty of performances from every decade since then where I wonder why the people don't seem to be really into singing the song, or playing their instruments. At first I thought it was because they were european, that band, or maybe they were just so darn stoned that they thought they were being more expressive than they really were. The other videos I saw, from the 80s and the 00s, that lead singer was always sort of reticent, even on stage in concerts before an enthusiastic audience.

James Brown, Elvis, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Heart, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and lots of rockers since, made live performances a big deal and did plenty of sweating and never seemed bored, ever. Well, Patti might have appeared bored a couple of times before she cleaned up her uh, personal chemistry, but not now. And sometimes in videos where rockers were only playing to a camera it seemed like they were supposed to look bored, although the people producing/directing the video might have been hoping it would look worldly and hip, or just in some cases hoping the performers would not fall over until the shoot was complete.

Rickie Lee Jones really throws herself into both how she performs, and acknowledging the audience, but it was always like she was sort of having to do it in slow-motion, even during the uptempo numbers. I guess she's not really a "rocker" though.

Definitely though, there was a style in the seventies of pretending to be too hip to care, or too jaded to really be present while performing. Although some of those performers would only have been considered "rock" in the broadest sense of the genre. Like the sense that the public library uses it in. Bowie went through that during some of his 70s personas which is the decade where he had the most numerous different stage and studio personas, in that during the sixties and ever since the beginning of the 80s he was pretty much trying to convince us that he's just David Bowie. Klaus Nomi was sort of always like that, but his performances also had that other aspect, of not necessarily acknowledging the audience because he was supposed to be sort of other-worldly.