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Lost in the city: Yes's ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ and the expansion of musical expression in rock

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2015

John R. Palmer
John R. Palmer*
Affiliation:
Sonoma State University, Department of Music, 1801 East Cotati Avenve, Rohnert Park, CA, 94928-3609, USA E-mail: john.palmer@sonoma.edu
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Abstract

Yes's ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ addresses one of the primary concerns of the counterculture: the alienation of the individual from humanity by the dominant consumerist, ‘plastic’ culture, represented by the city. In their expression of the effects of alienation, Yes expanded the musical vocabulary of rock, for while the allusive imagery of the song's text relates the locus of the protagonist and his being ‘lost’ amid the population of the city, the arrangement of the song and the purely instrumental passages lay bare the frustration of an individual unable to establish intimate, human relationships. Contemporary commentary on hippie perceptions of, and reactions to, mainstream culture provides a background to an analysis that demonstrates the descriptive power of the instrumental passages in this 1971 work.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , October 2015 , pp. 408 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Discography

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