T-Rex

I love T-Rex! I had their "Electric Warrior" album on cassette tape. I was around 14 at the time, and we'd camp out on summer nights and listen to that over and over again. Over in the United States, that song "Get it On" was retitled "Bang a Gong." I love almost every track on that album.

Odd you should mention the connection between Dire Straits and the Rolling Stones. Yesterday I was out for a run and I was listening to "Monkey Man" on the MP3 player. At the tail end of that song there's this guitar groove that made me think, "Hmmm ... that sounds a lot like what Knopfler does. He probably picked it up from the Stones." Music is all one continuous connection, all the way back to the first caveman who beat a stick on a log. "Uggh. Good beat. Uggh. Gimme woman!"

In the movie "School of Rock" (with Jack Black) -- a so-so movie, but it had its moments -- he does a chalkboard talk to the kids about the inter-relatedness of rock music. I'm sure there's been more studied treatments of it, hasn't there? For instance, I know the Rolling Stones were heavily influenced by U.S. black rhythm and blues. The Beatles were influenced by Elvis, who in turn was influenced by the black R&B and the hillbilly music of his youth. I've read that black blues in the United States, which emerged in the very early parts of the 1900's, was a product of the fusion of African rhythms and Irish music by slaves in the islands of the Caribbean. (As was VooDoo ... which is, I understand, a fusion of African and Irish paganism. The Irish connection comes in because I understand Oliver Cromwell pretty well routed Ireland, selling a good many women and children into slavery, mostly down to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.)

Where is music going now? If you chart the progression from a high level, we saw the pop of the 1960's turn into the heavier rock of the early 70's. Much of that music was utterly undanceable, so out came a better dance beat, which turned into Disco. The reaction to that was the anti-Disco, punk. Punk expended itself in a few years and then electronic pop emerged in the 1980's. After a bit of that, the grunge movement started as a reaction to the slick, over-produced nature of much of the music from the mid-80's. Grunge started to peter out after a bit, and then I'm not sure what happened. "Hip-Hop" came in -- whatever that music style really is -- and now it's just all over the place.

Thoughts?