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Roy Orbison Invention Of An Alternative Rock Masculinity by Lehman, Peter [Temple UP,2003]
Roy Orbison Invention Of An Alternative Rock Masculinity by Lehman, Peter. Published by Temple UP,2003, Paperback
Unknown Binding
First published June 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 7, 2015
Another dry leaden [several mentions of Lacan] migraine inducing PhD thesis about pop music turned into a book, yes, but these things can be interesting and this is an unusual subject.
I checked Prof Lehman’s Rate My Professor page* over at the University of Arizona – uh-oh :
Half the class falls asleep when he speaks.
His lectures are very boring as hell
His lectures are dull, to the point where I fell asleep almost every time
Unless you absolutely have to take this class, avoid it.
Horrible teacher. Horrible person. Old man who is completely obsessed with the male genitalia
Well, moving swiftly on, let’s talk about Roy. Roy Orbison is one of those giant figures in popular music whose fame comes from a tiny number of songs – ten, in fact. You would have to be a minor-hits trainspotter or an Orbifan to name any more. OK, without looking it up, let’s try...
Only the Lonely
Oh Pretty woman
It’s Over
In Dreams
Cryin’
Er….
Blue Bayou, was that one? (Yes.)
Hmmm…. Ok, gimme a clue… what? Puff puff pant pant? Oh, oh –
Runnin’ Scared!
OK I give up, what are the others ?
Falling
Blue Angel
Dream Baby
Pretty Paper
Huh, I guess I never really heard those much.
He had a multi-octave range which meant that his songs couldn’t be covered by other singers. He contrived a bizarre persona - all black clothes, dark glasses, and on stage he never moved – almost, his lips didn’t move – but out came this vast voice. And all the songs were as gloomy and broke-down as could be, and all ended in bel canto howls of psychological torment.
By not creating and circulating sexually desirable images of himself in fan magazines and on record albums, by minimising the sexual display of his body in performance and hiding behind impenetrable dark glasses, by singing in an eerie high range, and most of all by writing explicitly about male anxiety and excessive emotion, Roy Orbison created a significant alternative to the sexual image of traditional male rock stars.
So that’s the thesis and it’s true, except the prof does not say that this was a case of making of virtue out of a necessity, since Roy minus dark glasses was this
And with was this
Prof Lehman likes to write like this:
At the literal level, Orbison’s music frequently centers on the lack of powerful, traditional masculinity, and on the loss of the woman he loves. Symbolically, and in psychoanalytic terms, he lacks the phallus and consequently has trouble occupying the position of the Father, while at the same time he has lost the mother and the unification with her that precedes the infant’s experience of separation and ego formation.
So that’s what goes across at the U of Arizona. Contemplate that next time you’re singing along to Dream Baby. I think it's a good thing Roy's dead so he doesn't have to read this stuff about him not having a phallus. Now I begin to understand his students’ comments. (Although they are very rude, don’t you think?)
It is true that Roy Orbison sang masochistic songs – Crawling Back is one title which says it all; Runnin’ Scared is two minutes thirty of the exquisitest paranoia; and so on. But it’s Roy’s intensity which separates him from the pack – male singers all over the 50s and 60s used to cry buckets, and sometimes right there on stage as in the case of Johnny Ray. The kind of braggadocio of Rip it Up or King Creole or Mannish Boy or Good Morning Little Schoolgirl was only one half of the picture. Early rock and pop singers liked the more passive aspect of masculinity too :
If you've found another guy
Who satisfies you more than I do
Run to him, I'll step aside
Sang Bobby Vee in 1962
Every time the telephone rings I hold my breath
Hoping that it's you, I'm scared to death
Phone went ring, my crippled heart cried
Let it be you on the line
Sang Aaron Neville, 1961
And
I was all right for a while
I could smile for a while
But I saw you last night
You held my hand so tight
As you stopped to say hello
Oh, you wished me well
You couldn`t tell
That I`d been crying over you
Sang Roy Orbison, 1961
Well, there are a number of interesting points raised in this often tiresome book – such as the categorisation of white pop singers into white black singers and white white singers – Roy was a white white, you can’t discern any black traces in such a song as In Dreams. And the fun involved when 2 Live Crew released a parody of Oh Pretty Woman in 1989 is something to behold, I had no idea. They got sued and the judges had to decide exactly what a parody was, legally, and if the original writers or their estate could stop you doing your parody… and, indeed, whether Oh Pretty Woman itself was originally an ironic song about a romantic idiot’s encounter with a hooker, you know, after he sings “Yeahhhh she’s walkin’ back to me, oh oh pretty woman!" that maybe the next line would be “Hello darling, are you looking for a good time?”
Well – this is more my kind of thing than yours, I’d guess. But I can’t resist quoting this gem :
The recorded pop voice is a complex aesthetic text, and it is what should be compared to the dense notational text of classical music, or the dense language of a Shakespeare play.
Nice one, professor. I think I would agree with that.
*http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowR...
I checked Prof Lehman’s Rate My Professor page* over at the University of Arizona – uh-oh :
Half the class falls asleep when he speaks.
His lectures are very boring as hell
His lectures are dull, to the point where I fell asleep almost every time
Unless you absolutely have to take this class, avoid it.
Horrible teacher. Horrible person. Old man who is completely obsessed with the male genitalia
Well, moving swiftly on, let’s talk about Roy. Roy Orbison is one of those giant figures in popular music whose fame comes from a tiny number of songs – ten, in fact. You would have to be a minor-hits trainspotter or an Orbifan to name any more. OK, without looking it up, let’s try...
Only the Lonely
Oh Pretty woman
It’s Over
In Dreams
Cryin’
Er….
Blue Bayou, was that one? (Yes.)
Hmmm…. Ok, gimme a clue… what? Puff puff pant pant? Oh, oh –
Runnin’ Scared!
OK I give up, what are the others ?
Falling
Blue Angel
Dream Baby
Pretty Paper
Huh, I guess I never really heard those much.
He had a multi-octave range which meant that his songs couldn’t be covered by other singers. He contrived a bizarre persona - all black clothes, dark glasses, and on stage he never moved – almost, his lips didn’t move – but out came this vast voice. And all the songs were as gloomy and broke-down as could be, and all ended in bel canto howls of psychological torment.
By not creating and circulating sexually desirable images of himself in fan magazines and on record albums, by minimising the sexual display of his body in performance and hiding behind impenetrable dark glasses, by singing in an eerie high range, and most of all by writing explicitly about male anxiety and excessive emotion, Roy Orbison created a significant alternative to the sexual image of traditional male rock stars.
So that’s the thesis and it’s true, except the prof does not say that this was a case of making of virtue out of a necessity, since Roy minus dark glasses was this
And with was this
Prof Lehman likes to write like this:
At the literal level, Orbison’s music frequently centers on the lack of powerful, traditional masculinity, and on the loss of the woman he loves. Symbolically, and in psychoanalytic terms, he lacks the phallus and consequently has trouble occupying the position of the Father, while at the same time he has lost the mother and the unification with her that precedes the infant’s experience of separation and ego formation.
So that’s what goes across at the U of Arizona. Contemplate that next time you’re singing along to Dream Baby. I think it's a good thing Roy's dead so he doesn't have to read this stuff about him not having a phallus. Now I begin to understand his students’ comments. (Although they are very rude, don’t you think?)
It is true that Roy Orbison sang masochistic songs – Crawling Back is one title which says it all; Runnin’ Scared is two minutes thirty of the exquisitest paranoia; and so on. But it’s Roy’s intensity which separates him from the pack – male singers all over the 50s and 60s used to cry buckets, and sometimes right there on stage as in the case of Johnny Ray. The kind of braggadocio of Rip it Up or King Creole or Mannish Boy or Good Morning Little Schoolgirl was only one half of the picture. Early rock and pop singers liked the more passive aspect of masculinity too :
If you've found another guy
Who satisfies you more than I do
Run to him, I'll step aside
Sang Bobby Vee in 1962
Every time the telephone rings I hold my breath
Hoping that it's you, I'm scared to death
Phone went ring, my crippled heart cried
Let it be you on the line
Sang Aaron Neville, 1961
And
I was all right for a while
I could smile for a while
But I saw you last night
You held my hand so tight
As you stopped to say hello
Oh, you wished me well
You couldn`t tell
That I`d been crying over you
Sang Roy Orbison, 1961
Well, there are a number of interesting points raised in this often tiresome book – such as the categorisation of white pop singers into white black singers and white white singers – Roy was a white white, you can’t discern any black traces in such a song as In Dreams. And the fun involved when 2 Live Crew released a parody of Oh Pretty Woman in 1989 is something to behold, I had no idea. They got sued and the judges had to decide exactly what a parody was, legally, and if the original writers or their estate could stop you doing your parody… and, indeed, whether Oh Pretty Woman itself was originally an ironic song about a romantic idiot’s encounter with a hooker, you know, after he sings “Yeahhhh she’s walkin’ back to me, oh oh pretty woman!" that maybe the next line would be “Hello darling, are you looking for a good time?”
Well – this is more my kind of thing than yours, I’d guess. But I can’t resist quoting this gem :
The recorded pop voice is a complex aesthetic text, and it is what should be compared to the dense notational text of classical music, or the dense language of a Shakespeare play.
Nice one, professor. I think I would agree with that.
*http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowR...
December 15, 2014
What I realized from reading this book is that every other person walking the earth is obsessed with something. A good academic book about pop music even though I disagree with the author's assumed motivations and meanings of songwriters. (I don't think, "I Drove All Night" is a "stalker song" or in any way creepy) There is a lot of well researched history on the meaning of wearing black, tragic personas, recording technique, vocal performance and musicology. This is a very interesting book for Rock musicians to read.
As an artist myself, I think it's insightful and sometimes amusing to read what critics and academics interpret from your art. Reading an artist's biography can get you to thinking about the difference between the music and the musician, because they can be quite far apart in reality.
As an artist myself, I think it's insightful and sometimes amusing to read what critics and academics interpret from your art. Reading an artist's biography can get you to thinking about the difference between the music and the musician, because they can be quite far apart in reality.
May 17, 2019
Great academic insights
This comprehensive academic work gives wonderful insights into the nature of Roy Orbison's songs and a unique contribution to modern pop music. It's a great read apart from going into almost too much detail about a copyright trial involving the song Pretty Woman but then as an academic Lehman is expected to be justifiably pedantic. Generally, a pleasure to read.
This comprehensive academic work gives wonderful insights into the nature of Roy Orbison's songs and a unique contribution to modern pop music. It's a great read apart from going into almost too much detail about a copyright trial involving the song Pretty Woman but then as an academic Lehman is expected to be justifiably pedantic. Generally, a pleasure to read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews