Most shocking piece of music.

I saw GG Allin "perform" back in the eighties. Nothing will ever come close. i don't know if i consider that lucky or not.   what an experience.

Yeah, it was pretty sick. He was naked, defecated on stage and threw it into the audience, beat himself bloody with the mic, did some sick stuff with a dead cat, etc.

Ligeti's Requiem still has the power to shock - the polytonality and atonality of the choir is quite unnerving.  It was used to good effect in parts of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'.  Ornette Coleman's 'Free Jazz' is quite shocking - two separate jazz quartets improvising different things but recorded together, producing (to my ears) a formless cacophony.

Nothing shocking about the Ligeti, nothing shocking about Coleman either. In both cases the alleged inaccessibility of the music is highly exaggerated.

Nothing shocking about G. G. Allin's music, just your regular punk rock early on, and later some kind of noise with foul language on top a la Whitehouse, as I'm given to understand.  Nothing really new or interesting, and I don't think anyone really attended Allin's concerts for the music, even if some of it might have appealed to punk or noise fans.

There's a recording somewhere of Charlie Parker playing during a mental breakdown, that might be shocking, but mostly because of the context, I guess. Wouldn't be surprised if this was an urban myth.

Throbbing Gristle has some pieces with really sick lyrics, but that would open up the way to all kinds of death metal/noise/power electronics ensembles, and none of these come across as shocking musically, or even lyrically nowadays. 

Henry Plainview mentioned Penderecki's Threnody, and it's an obvious choice.

Peter Maxwell Davies has two pieces dealing with madness - "Miss Donnithorne's Maggot" and "Eight Songs for a Mad King". They're  fairly shocking I guess, though there's likely more than a touch of black humour there.

Iannis Xenakis had a piece the title of which I don't remember (Pleiades?), which I found really beautiful, only to learn that to Xenakis it reminded of people scattering under machine gun fire, something he must have had more than his fair share of during WWII.

Beethoven's NInth made a few people go WTF?!! after its premiere, I wouldn't be surprised if his other late pieces did that as well.

Carlo Gesualdo's works might have made a few people stare in horror in his time.  

lol GG Allin....

mrcozdude wrote: ] He was naked, defecated on stage and threw it into the audience, beat himself bloody with the mic, did some sick stuff with a dead cat, etc.

mrcozdude wrote: mattmcl wrote: I saw GG Allin "perform" back in the eighties. Nothing will ever come close. i don't know if i consider that lucky or not.   what an experience. Yeah, it was pretty sick. He was naked, defecated on stage and threw it into the audience, beat himself bloody with the mic, did some sick stuff with a dead cat, etc. sweet

He did that pretty much every night, so this is probably why towards the end nobody cared.

Visitor13 wrote: mrcozdude wrote: mattmcl wrote: I saw GG Allin "perform" back in the eighties. Nothing will ever come close. i don't know if i consider that lucky or not.   what an experience. Yeah, it was pretty sick. He was naked, defecated on stage and threw it into the audience, beat himself bloody with the mic, did some sick stuff with a dead cat, etc. sweet He did that pretty much every night, so this is probably why towards the end nobody cared.

Well depending on his age im not suprised... once your old its just silly

There was a guy even more insane than G.G. Allin, called Satan Panonski. If there ever was an enfant terrible of  ex-Yugoslavian scene, he's the one.



You may check his live performances on YouTube. But warning - that's not for the faint-hearted.









Edited by clarke2001 - July 02 2009 at 07:20