Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

[zero]

Okay I'm calling a fire drill and need the full resources of the community to come to bear on this musical topic: Brian Eno's masterwork Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

I have been listening to this album obsessively for the last few weeks. Very loud, very frequently at the expense of almost everything else (except Lily Frost's Cine-Maqique which is very good). Anyways the musicianship and production is ridiculously good but the lyrical conceits are unworldly. It turns out there is SO MUCH MORE going on here then I could have ever suspected.

First of all the title is taken from a Maoist revolutionary Peking Opera of which a set of post cards can be seen here. This seems to be the thesis of the album if any.

"One of the recurrent themes of rock music is a preoccupation with new dances. And it's taken by intellectuals as the lowest form of rock music, the most basic and crude. So I was interested in combining that very naive and crude form of expression with an extremely complex concept like Taking Tiger Mountain, which would be a sort of double joke. First of all the joke of me doing a dance number and secondly the fact that it also has a complex symbology that discusses another question. The idea is paraphrasing the dance as a dance between two technologies. One of McLuhan's contentions is that conflict, international conflict, is always conflict between two technologies, not two moralities. Moralities are dictated by those technologies. I've taken the conflict between the regular-type soldiers and guerilla-type technologies. I've called the regular soldier-type ones, since they're mechanically oriented, clockwork ones. The guerilla tactic ones are electronic... I'm not subscribing to any political point of view. It's to do with this technological rift. Technological rifts have always produced hybrid art forms... For the soldiers, it's a set of emergencies. For the guerillas, it's a set of opportunities." - Brian Eno (More Dark Than Shark)

[zero]

By far the most comprehensive account of the lyrics is available here on Enoweb. I seriously cannot believe how deep this goes. I mean with songs titled Burning Airlines Give You So Much More (try writing that post 9/11!) and Mother Whale Eyeless you can't go wrong. But they are such beautiful songs. This album could seriously be my desert island album.

[MarcO]

I've been tapped into Eno for a long time, but I admit it's been many years since I heard this album. I always kind of picked him up at "Another Green World" and moved forward ("Before and After Science" is a classic too, and underrated).

I must relisten to this album when I get a chance.

[zero]

Yeah you really must at your earliest convenience. It is just that good.

[mark tonin]

Brian Eno is regarded by many as a musical genius. I remember first hearing about him many years ago, as my buddy is a Robert Fripp fanatic and had a Fripp/Eno album along with some solo Eno albums, including Taking Tiger Mountain. To be honest, the stuff never grabbed me at the time, but I'd definitely be willing to give it another listen at this time.

Having said that, when it came out I fell in love with the album that he did with David Byrne called "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," and my favourite Roxy Music album is called "For Your Pleasure," which was produced back when Eno was still a part of the band.

Peace, Mark

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

"My Life in the Bush of Ghosts"

That's an awesome album - I love the track (the name of which I forget) with the preacher.

[jon.]

Essential Eno includes:

-TTMBS

-Here Come the Warm Jets

-Ambient 4 - On Land

-Appollo

-Before and after Science

-Eno& Fripp - No Pussyfooting

-Music For Films

-Ambient 1 - Music For Airports

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo awesome!

He is one of the greats

[zero]

This seems to get at the core of what Eno was inspired by in making Tiger Mountain.

The title of the album comes from a Maoist opera entitled Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (A Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera). While in San Francisco, Eno came across a series of postcards depicting scenes from the opera: seven of these postcards are reproduced in More Dark Than Shark. -- Craig Clark

"I nearly always work from ideas rather than sounds. Titles. It's that title that just fascinates me. It's fabulous. I mean, I am interested in strategy, and the idea of it. I'm not Maoist or any of that; if anything, I'm anti-Maoist. Strategy interests me because it deals with the interaction of systems, which is what my interest in music is really, and not so much the interaction of sounds." -- Brian Eno (More Dark Than Shark)