This is fun... Over a year ago, I came across this astonishingly hilarious (in a good way) YouTube channel called
Virgin Rock. Styled as “a classical musician’s FIRST listen and reaction.” It is fronted by Amy Shafer, who is described as a classical harpist, pianist, and music educator. She’s the Director of Piano Studies and Assistant Director of Harp Studies for The Harp School, Inc. I think it's all in and around Nashville, Tennessee. Additionally, she holds multiple advanced degrees in music performance and pedagogy, as she has the following acronyms after her name: LRSM, FRSM, RYC.
On her channel, she reviews rock classics, allegedly as a first-time listener—in other words, a newbie to the music!?! An incredible thought that first came to my mind: Is this someone who may have been raised in such total isolation (or in a cave--no disrespect, just being facetious) away from popular culture? I would find this improbable. I mean, she looks like she's in the early forties, and she does describe rock music as “very foreign” to her upbringing. When she is on screen, she displays a lot of spontaneous body language, raised eyebrows, and funny, happy -- sometimes ecstatic -- expressions while flanked by her harp and a piano. Usually sporting a headset, she reads background briefs from a tablet for the song she is reviewing.
And while based in rural middle Tennessee, she speaks with a Celtic lilt... was she raised abroad? Anyway, it's fairly fun and hilarious as I had first stumbled on her review of
Jimi Hendrix’s classic cover of Dylan's “All Along the Watchtower,” to which she says,
"It sounds like this is so much more. It's less a recitation of a parable of a story and it's more a living in the moment. We feel the immediacy of it..."
Damn, she got that right!
I've since watched several more of her videos. I listened and treated it as a novelty, you know, a classical music nerd (apologies) doing some analytics of rock classics. And then I moved on. This was about a year ago.
Then just this week, the sneaky YouTube algorithm struck again! What popped up was her review of
Kate Bush's 1985 "Running Up That Hill," a driving, operatically delivered tune that enjoyed a revival when it appeared as background in one of the episodes of the crazy Netflix series,
Stranger Things.
After that, I checked her review of
Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” She spends over 40 minutes with an inside-out review of this piece, and here’s some of what she says about this heavy metal classic with a deep commentary on Jimmy Page’s guitar work:
... that guitar part is really quite energized and exciting. But it's not because of any harmonic or melodic interest. It is rhythmic, which makes me say that in this introduction, where we hear this riff being presented in all its power and excitement, and we could say in all its glory, the guitar is serving the role of a percussion instrument. It is fulfilling the role that the drums typically do. It is simply stating a rhythm, an exciting rhythm, no less, but a rhythm rather than a melody, rather than a harmonic concept. Now, of course, it's true that riffs in rock music and metal, they are primarily focused towards rhythm, but this is an example in which it is purely rhythm.
Of course, I am a music listener, and don’t have much involvement with music theory. But I hope you enjoyed that dive into the song’s sonic architecture. In other reviews -- classic rock, soul and folk, I found Amy may riff on the lyrics of a song in relation to the mood and/or delivery of the music. And in this instance, with Immigrant Song, she got technical, if you will.
So moving along, then I discovered she did a review of the Japanese all-female jazz band
Tokyo Groove Jyoshi doing the Tower of Power (Oakland y’all!) funk classic, “What Is Hip?” So I said, "That’s it... someone has transcended nerddom, I gotta do a review of ‘Virgin Rock’.”
So there you have it!
Afterword: Well, come to find out, Amy Shafer is also doing a whole series of reviewing Led Zeppelin’s catalogue. And then, she is apparently achieving some online traction as she has also initiated a website where she is reviewing films with her partner!
