Marching on

Here, quoted from the July Wire, is Ariel Pink's rendition of music history:

"I'll go one step further and say that it all goes to music degenerating over the aeons. Like, the most inspirational things are possessed by something morally and aesthetically bad and undesirable. So you've got Bach at one end, who represents all the ambition in music that could ever be attained, in a sense, and then you infuse it with a little sensuality and you get Beethoven, right, which is kind of profane. And then you infuse it with a little bit of opera, which makes it kind of campy, and then you've got your Wagner. Then you take your Wagner, make him Jewish and you've got Mahler. Then you've got Arnold Schoenberg, who said, 'No, listen to Bach, he started his own language, we've got to rewind it all the way back to the top. How do we start a new language?' [Sings a series of apparently unrelated notes] Then you've got John Cage, which is pure American nonsense in the midst of this several hundred years of trying to progress music to its apex. Then, of course, the Germans, Stockhausen. And in the midst of that you have all this terrible music coming out of America, which is rock'n' roll, the music of numbskulls [slaps fist in palm four to the bar]. That's where we are going, right. That's after hundreds of years of musical evolution and we get to the poor people's music: let's lift that up and see what we can make with that."

And then the big finish: "And I think my contribution, if I have any, is to make it more terrible."

That's pretty charming! Especially the bit about taking your Wagner and making him Jewish. Like how if you took "What Women Want" and made it Jewish you would get "Annie Hall."