Roxy Music

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Upon First Hearing Avalon (I Used To Like Roxy Music, 1982): A Tone-Poem

Put in percussion, lots of imported blocks scraping
Muted bongos, plucked bass beats, empty hollow sounding
Tones to get your empty ribcage reverbrating
He’s singing lyrics about communicating
“without conversation or a notion”
It’s okay, it rhymes with “ocean” and “no emotion”
Electric guitars muted popping an almost tone
Let’s mention sambas and dances from foreign places
Might give you an idea of something in another location
And talk some more about not having any direction
And now he mentions something about “out of focus”

The party’s over, and he almost feels the hormonal surgers
Horrid visions of yuppies pastel sugar clumping
Horrid visions of pastel yuppies humping
Dental students and xenotransplantation majors,
Creating yuppie clone-pups in pink and mintgreen
From their laboratory testube pumping
The horns are so sterile, they must be wearing blue rubber gloves,
While they read the music and key the notes atmosphering the above
A polyester coated pill popped tune approximating parallel love
Saxophones humming each note on key
A real forerunner of Kenny G

Syntho-lush, synthetic and synthesized,
Technoglyphic sanitosis layer after layer
Right down to the airbrushed cover
Like Maxfield Parrish and maybe another,
It’s going to be this Same Old Scene over and over
He said it before, “Nothing lasts forever.”

(Avalon—Put it on a remote desert island and pray for a hurricane to save us from continuing forms of this aural trephination.)