BBC Music Magazine keeps getting dumb and dumber

A short while ago I came across the blog "Slipped Disc" by longtime music commenter Norman Lebrecht. In a recent short blog he examines (while certainly also dismissing as ridiculous) BBC Music Magazine's breathless announcement of the "50 people who changed classical music...forever" (wow, the dot-dot-dot, is that supposed to make it more amazingly important- a "wait for it" moment for the classical crowd?). As Lebrecht states, this is more about selling magazines than anything- but it really is such insulting, silly drivel. And why isn't Justin Bieber there somewhere? After all, you know this sequence will play out in history:

Step #1: Bieber, for God only knows what reason, visits the Anne Frank House. Apparently overcome with emotion, he experiences  a moment of spiritual clarity wherein he divines that "Anne was a great girl" and that she would have been a "belieber" if she were alive today.

 

 

Step #2: A young person, inspired by Bieber, decides to research music of Anne Frank's day- wholeheartedly searching for someone to "beliebe" in from back in those charmingly gritty retro black-and-white days. At first totally ignorant of musical history before the year 2010, he/she eventually discovers Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (composed and first performed in the Gorlitz prisoner camp)  and becomes inspired to pursue a career as a great composer- hopeful of uniting Messiaen's palindrome and additive rhythms, chromatic durations, bird-calls, etc with Jehovah-inspired auto-tuning and the brilliant rhyme schemes of Bieber and Busta Rhymes in seminal works such as Little Drummer Boy (see way down below for full lyrics and try not to get too dizzy from the white-hot brilliance). Did you know these "rhymes" were possible? Well maybe not for simple folks such as you and I, but in the world of beliebers they are:

Playing for the king, playing for the title
I'm surprised you didn't hear this in the bible
I'm so tight I might go psycho, Christmas time so here's a recital
I'm so bad like Michael, I know i'm still young but I go, I go
Stupid, stupid, love like Cupid, I'm the drummer boy so go (go)

And later: 

Now lemme get straight to it, yo.
At the table with the family, havin dinner,

Blackberry on our hip and then it gave a little flicker.
Then I took a look to see before it activates the ringer
came to realize my homie Bieber hit me on the Twitter
Then I hit him back despite I had some food up on my finger,
sippin' eggnog with a little sprinkle of vanilla,
even though it's kinda cold, pullin out a chinchilla,
Bieber hit me back and said, "Let's make it hot up in the winter."
I said "Cool." Ya know Imma deliver

Step #3: After a number of years of epic struggles with the forms and models, the young composer succeeds in creating the greatest new musical form of all-time, thus creating a new Bieber musical world order. 

Anyhoo, here is Lebrech'ts take on the BBC matter- and maybe you can peek here and there and try to figure out who all these folks are in the illustration- and yeah also, where is Arthur Fiedler or Leroy Anderson, dammit?!

Jesus Christ and Charlotte Church: the ‘saviours’ of classical music

 January 15, 2013 by Norman Lebrecht

Among the silly lists that music magazines publish in a desperate bid to claim readers’ attention and raise their blood-pressure, none in recent memory has been sillier than ’50 people who changed classical music… forever’ in the February issue of BBC Music magazine.

About 45 [personally I don't think it's even close to 45- PC] of the changers and saviours are obvious names. The rest are provocations, Jesus gets included with the rather tame excuse of ‘imagine life without Handel’s Messiah’. And Charlotte Church is there because she inspired ‘the mother-and-father of all bickering over what constitutes ‘classical’ music.’

Oh, really? Much of Handel’s Messiah uses Old Testament texts, not much Jesus there. And few remember or care what Charlotte, the Jackie Evancho of her day, got up to when she was 12. No one, surely, takes these lists seriously.
The more so when BBC Music has omitted from its transformational 50 the two opera singers who invented the cult of celebrity, Maria Malibran and Jenny Lind. Not to mention the founders of the conducting profession, Hans von Bülow and Artur Nikisch. Or Gustav Mahler, who introduced irony and spatial awareness to the symphony. Or Charles Ives who proposed polystilism. Or George Gershwin, the first crossover composer.
It does, however, include Donald Grout.
How silly is that?

PC here again, and here you are, friends, the entire lyrics to the Bieber/Rhymes Little Drummer Boy- sure to put you in the Holiday spirit once the season rolls around.

Come they told me, pa rapa pum pum
A new born king to see, pa rapa pum pum
Our finest gifts we bring, pa rapa pum pum
To lay before the king, pa rapa pum pum
rapa pum pum
rapa pum pum
Rum pa pa pum rapa pum pum pum
Yeah I'm on the drum, yeah i'm on the stand drum
Yeah i'm on the beat, coz' the beat goes dumb
and I only spit heat coz' i'm playing for the son
Playing for the king, playing for the title
I'm surprised you didn't hear this in the bible
I'm so tight I might go psycho, Christmas time so here's a recital
I'm so bad like Michael, I know i'm still young but I go, I go
Stupid, stupid, love like Cupid, I'm the drummer boy so go (go)
Little baby, pa rapa pum pum
I am a poor boy too, pa rapa pum pum
(gather round the mistletoe real quick)
I have no gifts to bring, pa rapa pum pum
(matter of face, lets gather round the fire place
its 'bout to get hot in here!)
Thats fit to give our king, pa rapa pum pum
(people what up? Yeah, yeah, yeah)
rapa pum pum
rapa pum pum
Busta Rhymes:
Now lemme get straight to it, yo.
At the table with the family, havin dinner,
Blackberry on our hip and then it gave a little flicker.
Then I took a look to see before it activates the ringer
came to realize my homie Bieber hit me on the Twitter
Then I hit him back despite I had some food up on my finger,
sippin' eggnog with a little sprinkle of vanilla,
even though it's kinda cold, pullin out a chinchilla,
Bieber hit me back and said, "Let's make it hot up in the winter."
I said "Cool." Ya know Imma deliver
let's collaborate and make the holiday a little bigger
Before we work I gotta get this off,
see the other family members and drop gifts off.
Then I'm headed to the studio cause ain't nothing stopping how
you know we bout to turn it up and really get it poppin now
People everywhere and all our Twitter followers,
"Merry Christmas, Kwanza, happy Hanukkah!"
Mary nodded, pa rapa pum pum
The ox and lamb kept time, pa rapa pum pum
I played my drum for him, pa rapa pum pum
I played my best for him, pa rapa pum pum
rapa pum pum
rapa pum pum
If you wanna give, it's the time of year
JB on the beat, yeah yeah, I'm on the snare
It's crazy how some people say, say they don't care
when there's people on the street with no food, it's not fair
It's about time for you to act merrily
it's about time for you to give to charity
Rarely do people even wanna help at all
'cause they warm by the fire, getting toys and their dolls
Not thinking there's a family out hungry and cold
wishin' wishin' that they had somebody they could hold.
So I think some of you need to act bold
give a can to a drive, let's change the globe.
I'm the drummer boy so go (repeat 5x)