Music of the Day, 26 November 2023

mixing it up in nearly every possible way

After I posted Thursday’s MotD, I realized there’s a connection between Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) and the band I’d featured the previous day: AC/DC. Both created songs that nodded to the relationship between classical and rock music. That got me to wondering how many other bands had done something similar. It took me a couple of days and rethinking my criteria for inclusion on it, but here is my first MotD playlist.

The first criterion is that each song mentions at least one classical composer; the second is that the reference is positive; and the last is that I like the song. That second criterion eliminated at least one song I really like; and the final one did in several songs I found in my search.¹ In chronological order, here are the songs that made the cut for rock songs that mention classical music in a positive tone.

Can’t start this party any better than with the father of rock himself, Chuck Berry, singing “Roll Over Beethoven,” which was released in 1956.

This is the song that launched my exploration: ELO’s “Rockaria!,” which is from their 1976 release A New World Record. Between the word “orchestra” right there in the name and the string instruments, their affection for classical music couldn’t be any clearer. Nice name check of Chuck Berry too.

The next song up is from AC/DC: “Let There Be Rock,” from the 1977 album of the same name. Yes, I chose this video because Bon Scott looks like he’s having so much fun.

Same decade as the previous two, and now we’re getting funky! This is from Funkadelic’s 1978 album titled One Nation Under a Groove. Yummmmmmm.

And that’s it for the songs that met all my criteria. If I’d been willing to relax the second criterion, next up would be Def Leppard’s “Let’s Get Rocked.” I like the song, but the diss of classical music? I can’t go for that.

There are four more songs I want to include, primarily because I found them interesting (and they satisfied my three requirements, more or less). Continuing in chronological order, the next song is from the Eurythmics’ 1987 album Savage… which describes the song pretty well. That’s some very angry knitting Annie Lennox is doing at the start of “Beethoven (I Love to Listen To).”

Next we move into punk and a band unknown to me before this project. Apparently someone in The Adicts really likes Rossini; this song is from their 1992 album, 27.

Our next tune may stray a bit further from rock music, but it’s so clever I had to include it. Here is Gas House Gang with “Beethoven 5.1,” which they performed in 2003.

Today’s final selection is an enormous departure from the song that was a big international hit for Chumbawamba. “Wagner at the Opera” is from their 2010 album ABCDEFG and is based on a true story.

That was quite a ride, eh? I hope you enjoyed this musical exploration as much as I did.

1. It was rather more difficult than I’d expected to come up with good search strings to get what I wanted. When I exhausted that method, I turned to just searching on composers’ names plus “song lyrics,” which means I’ve almost certainly missed some songs. If I have, please share in the comments