Like Llama, I thought this was about the actual movement.

Nothing wrong with Monty Python, though.

Seriously, check out Buñuel's 70s movies if you're only going to take the 70s. The Discreet Charm of the Burgoise, The Milky Way, Phantom of Liberty. All top-notch surrealism, absurd and radical.

Also, do read the First Surrealist Manifesto by Breton, it's pretty interesting and fundamental to understand the movement.

Anyone writing abut Surrealism in the 1970s and not saying anything about Luis Bunuel's great 70s works hasn't been doing their homework!!!!!!! :-)

Hint: Bunuel was a father and founder of surrealism, his first film was made in collaboration with Salvaor Dali in 1928, and he made some of his greatest films in the 1970s, including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Phantom of Liberty (my two favorite films of all time - by anyone), as well as Tristana and That Obsure Object of Desire.

Also, The Hitchhiker's Guide and Genesis have absolutely nothing to do with Surrealism, as far as I'm aware.

If there's a 'surrealism' in tv in the 70s, then surely it's Python.

Surrealism was related to Dadaism, and both were revolutionary political movements as much as art & literary movements. Surrealism was famously an attempt to marry Marx and Freud. Genesis simply cannot apply, no way. Not aesthetically, not lyrically, not ideologically - there's simply no connection.

Hmm, okay, you beat me to the punch, LOL. I posted mine before reading yours...

Surrealism is a visual deal mainly.

 

Literary surrealism - know Tommasso Landolfi short stories?  Belcampo? Lautremont?

 

 

When you speak surrealism in music, its just a confusion of term. What you really mean is avant musics or musique concrete.

 

Surreal in music would be music that jars, that has disturbing/shocking/challanging juxtapositions of style.Slightly inimical ,disparate, once-thought incompatable genres thrown together. Satie mixed  street music with classical, Messaien,Milhaud,mid-Stravinsky....

 

Nowadays everything has become meltingpot blend of genres - the term surreal has no meaning in music anymore. Especially fusion & rock.

 

Surrealism in music is a very early term mainly down to classical composers. Has little meaning today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism#Music_by_Surrealists" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism#Music_by_Surrealists

 

Fish

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/MagrittePipe.jpg" rel="nofollow">

 

I'm not sure that Monty Python was influenced by the Surrealists, but one Ionesco play had weird stuff in it, and many of the MP skits were very similar to that playwright's work, but what made it better, was the television and the fact that you could see this in color now. Few folks knew Ionesco and the Surrealistic move in the film and theater era. And since Americans don't read literature, they never heard of it!

 

For the most part, Monty Python, was a visual THE GOONS. No one, before, or since, has ever created such amazing imagery, that rivals Luis Bunuel's and his content, as Spike Milligan did on the GOON SHOW with sound effects, and brilliant writing!

 

All in all, music did not take to Surrealism very well at all, with maybe an example or two here and there, mostly because the majority of music is based on a concept, and design that is set in stone and brick, and you are not a musician if you don't use it ... and the idea in Surrealism, was exactly to break those bonds inside out ... which music did not do, and still doesn't.

 

I have written about this subject and connected it to the free form improvisations in Krautrock, that were similar, and wanting to break out of the confines of western musical concepts ... but we're a bunch of socialistic defined and designed people, and can not handle that kind of work a whole lot ...specially today ... some Bunuel, would not only get banned, the American Media would make sure no one enters the theater!

 

 

 

Is that Genesis as in the first book of the Bible...certainly a lot of surrealism in that .  ;)

 

Seriously how exactly is Genesis , the band, surrealistic..?

 

 

 

Was that supposed to be a joke..? If so it was severely lame.

Of course I  have read their lyrics. If that's your idea of surrealism then all I can say is you haven't really encountered surrealism.

 

 

There are lyrics that border on surrealism, but they aren't. They are more symbolic of a meaning for the album or the work at hand.

 

The lawnmower, is not exactly a good example of surrealism, and Peter never claimed it either. 

 

The whole of Genesis fits more into another realm of literature with its stories and ideas, and designs.

 

Perhaps we should have you read out loud in your bathroom naked (don't want to offend the family) the Surrealist Manifesto by Bresson!  It would not be as good as a woman doing this naked in a Godard film to a different book ... but what the heck.

 

You might find that not many rock bands come close! And that one lyric/line in the middle of a song, does not a theory make!

 

VOTOMS wrote: the perfect combo - the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy + Eraserhead

Bunuel's my favorite director. Lynch can't compare. Bunuel was a true European Spanish Surrealist, meaning Freudian, marxist, anticlerical, focused on history, class, the Church. Lynch doesn't bring this level of intellectualism to his art. However, I'm thankful there's a David Lynch. It's very rare to have an American director during this generation following his own whims over a long career. I wish he were more prolific; he's slowed down a lot in the last decade or so... If one make the mistake of expecting Bunuel when watching Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, one will definitely be disappointed. These are not Bunuel-esque films. They are Lynchian films.

 

Gonna tell yoh momma that you are a naughty boy!

 

 

I'm not sure you are that far off, btw ... and it's not the first time it's been said in this past century ... good thing, too, since 200 years ago, they would have called us witches, or some other stupidity and put us on the barbie!

 

I always thought that there is no better example of all this with the beginning of Fellini's Intervista ... with the little boy doing his thing into the river! I laughed so hard ... and in the end, it was the main reason why the church condemned the film! But it was pure surrealism and at its best and most innocent! Except that it was Fellini,of course!

The closest that Surrealism has come that is similar in "style" when you step back, and look at the two films that Bunuel and Dali put together almost 80 years ago, would be something like FAUST in the early albums, where the sound effects kinda ran together and you might, or might not make a story based on that.

 

Ron Geesin, has a lot of surrealistic moments in his own albums, but the fact that Roger has gone out of the way to trash him, has left him in a corner, and sadly so. Some of the stuff is there is fairly close to surrealism, but again, I actually think that his point of view and thoughts, helped Roger, later, make sense of sound effects better than anyone else in music, however, that would be totally considered against a surrealistic thought or idea!

 

In many ways, Syd Barrett, would have been way more surrealistic, were it not for his penchant for satirical commentary about anything he did, which was very "British", and probably his own way of making fun of the Sgt Pepper's obsessive idea that it was psychedelic, when half of it was silly, and not stoned or psychedelic at all! And it's "meanings" broke the stoned/psychedelic ideals which would be more in line with "surrealism" than not. In many ways, even the moments in "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Astronomy Domine" or "A Saucerful of Secrets" could be considered "surrealistic, if you take those "improvised/experimental" sections and accepted that there were no "meanings" to be extracted from them! But in IO, it becomes a sort of outer space signal like morse, or beep beep, and that is the start of AD and also the other single "Point Me to the Sky", and then in ASoS it becomes just instruments on a run to nowhere, finally coming together to make something out of nothing, so to speak! The "meaning" side of things, takes away the surrealistic concepts.

 

This makes PF not be surrealistic at all!

 

However, later, you will find some massive surrealism in Gerald Scarfe's cartoons in "The Wall", many of which add a lot more to the story and its concept, than it's really there, and actually help create a story, from a bunch of songs! I don't think that Roger, or any of us, would want to admit that, or accept that. It would be much harder to put the whole thing together without the sound effects and the cartoons that are now framed in your mind every time you hear this monster!

 

I still have a concern that someone thinks that something is surrealistic simply because they said melted clocks in their lyrics, when the very idea of melting the clock, for DALI, was much more about the heat where he lived, than it was about surrealism itself! I always thought that was hilarrious!

 

Hipgnosis' album covers, not all of them, but many of them, are excellent examples of surrealistic art works.  But Storm and friends, almost always made a comment, or editorial about the music within with them ... and most of them fit really well, in my book!