Musical Warfare on Pensacola Beach

Island Authority "executive director" (nee general manager) W.A. "Buck" Lee is waging war on criminal "rowdies" who come to Pensacola Beach, the weekly Gulf Breeze News is reporting. And music is his "first weapon" of choice.

Lee has nixed contemporary rock, blues and jazz -- which apparently attract undesirable beach-goers -- and is switching the weekly "bands on the beach" concerts to "oldies, Beatles and country," the newspaper reports.

Country music? Buck's got it all wrong. Just because he's an oldie doesn't mean the rowdies don't share Buck's poor taste in music. In fact, most of the hooligans we've come across on the beach seem to prefer country music -- the fewer the chord changes, the better.

No, if he wants to drive the punks, ruffians, and roughnecks away from Pensacola Beach, what Lee needs to do is roll out the Big Guns --Mozart, Sibelius, Offenbach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms. The composers don't have to be dead to drive villains away from the beach, either.

A fitting place to start might be with contemporary avant garde composer Phillip Glass. A few minutes of his opera "Einstein on the Beach" will send those beach brutes back over the toll bridge, screaming for mercy:

(For modernist comedian Emo Philip's weirdly appropriate dance interpretation of the same music, click here.)

If there's anyone left on the beach after that, Buck could try Glass' "Waiting for the Barbarians." It's a "harrowing" allegorical opera of a --

loyal civil servant who conscientiously runs the affairs of a tiny frontier garrison town, ignoring the threat of impending war with the "barbarians", a neighboring tribe of nomads.

Sounds just like Pensacola Beach to us.