Darian Worden's latest post at his blog inspired me to find an equally-fitting metal video to post here. Granted, not many things can equal performing with a viking ship on stage and billows of live flame shooting up whenever you growl the word "Fire!" But I think I found something fairly close.
In the late 1930's Sergei Prokofiev wrote the score for a Soviet war propaganda movie entitled "Alexander Nevsky", based on the historical and legendary figure of the same name. The music, and the movie it's written to accompany, can count as good examples of Socialist Realism - simple musical and literary themes, unambiguous moral virtues of the good guys and unambiuous evil of the bad guys, heroism of the crowd, cheap jabs at the rich, etc. - though this particular movie is probably more of a "let's kill Nazis" movie than a "nationalize the means of production" kind of movie. The villains are blond-haired German knights who wear scary helmets that have funny statuets on the tops of them, who lead thousands of faceless pawns, and who receive spiritual support and justification from pale, sunken-eyed black-hooded monks whose empathy for lost souls leads them to do the sign of the cross in front of each Rus child who is then thrown into the fire.
The Russian band Merlin made a death metal cover of one of the songs in the score, and very appropriately made a music video with footage from the 1938 movie.
I have but one criticism of the song - I wish they had included a choir. A choir would have made it WAY more epic. But I guess they didn't want something that sounds like they just added bass drums and guitar distortion to the orchestral and choral arrangement.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
About Me
- Isaiah
- I am a part-time philosopher and a former immigration paralegal with a BA in philosophy and a paralegal certificate from UC San Diego.
No comments:
Post a Comment