Paul Gilbert: ”I also wrote not one, but TWO songs about the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich. One is ’A Thunderous Ovation Shook the Columns’, which is a line that I saw when I was reading about the audience’s reaction to the debut performance of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. They liked his symphony! So, fortunately, did Joseph Stalin, who had made no secret that he did NOT approve of some of Shostakovich’s earlier music, and that he’d better write something more pro-state, or be sent off to a ’work’ camp in Siberia. In these days of culture battles, I thought, today’s cancel-culture people still have nothing on Stalin.”
