[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

As for writings about the music itself, it's useful when it's about jazz or classical or some other genre where I could use some technical help. But rock?

greg saunier is a conservatory-trained percussionist. is it a waste for him to play rock? (okay, latter-day deerhoof has been poppy and unlistenable, but still).

what about rock covers of traditional folk/country music? even stuff like the white stripes jolene deserves an explanation. apparently the celtic roots of american country music are what makes it popular in some parts of the british isles.

then the other day i heard some kiddie band that was replicating echo and the bunnymen to the point of carbon copy. someone should be able to explain to the audience what is it that they are ripping off and what are those things called (rhythms, vocal inflections, instrumentation, melodic lines--what?).

or tell me for example what parts of the rolling stones liars channelled and what varied from them.

or why pelican never plays on classic rock radio when it clearly totally could.

[evollove]

Hm. I guess I'm filing "rock history" over here, and "rock criticism/theory/essay" over there.

Yeah, I love me some good rock history, for sure (although usually in the form of a documentary or a good insert booklet).

[evollove]

I am a dick the more I think of it.

A point with deep sociological or philosophical force in a rock essay feels like a waste. The same point made in a literary essay is fine with me, and part of a long, rich, honorable tradition.

[!@#$%!]

even rock history will be about musical personalities not about the perpetuation, dissemination and evolution of musical strains. "this guy fucked someone else's girlfriend. they did drugs together." but what did keith moon bring to drumming?

or tell me how galaxy 500 mutated into contemporary techno.

or how the roots of ambient music go all the way back to satie.

wait, there was this cool pbs documentary "latino usa" (i think) that got into that-- how salsa is the nuyorican melding of cuban rhythms for example. it's made up of a few good episodes. but that shit is rare. you don't read this stuff often.

[!@#$%!]

or right now on the spotify was playing rh+ which is an ongoing italian outfit but i could hear a lot of 80s new wave over a bed of slowed-down flock of seagulls.

or what are the elements that make wye oak so pleasant to my ears? i know they aren't revolutionizing my world or anything i just like them a lot but i can't understand why. and what's the name of the pedals they use?

hey, what pedals does agata use in his monster pedal board? how do they alter each other? this is not conservatory shit-- it's electric guitar geekery.

explain to me why rika was doing with the bass when she was on melt banana (i think she's gone--is she gone?). explain to me the musical reason why tzadik had to include afri-rampo in their releases. explain the fucking music. i am fucking starved for good explanations of what the music is doing, where it comes from, where is it going.

[evollove]

Totally fair. I'll give you your curiosity.

For the most part, I like mystery in my music, so I guess that's where I'm coming from.

(Although, again, I really appreciate a good piece on whatever Schoenberg's doing tonally in a certain string quartet or whatever.)

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

"this guy fucked someone else's girlfriend. they did drugs together." but what did keith moon bring to drumming?

I'd want to know what Keith brought to drumming via a doc, then listen to a few tracks while reading about the drugs and fucking.

[tesla69]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

tacitus was right. history is a permanent downward slope. get used to it somehow or kill yourself. there are only dystopias..

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!

THAT IS MAKING HISTORY AND NOT BEING USED BY IT!

This article is right on and parallels some things I've been thinking about - basically corporate culture = no culture. And thats what we have here, a forced corporate culture which has efficiencized anything interesting or human right out of the equation.

[dead_battery]

conan the fluoridian

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

Totally fair. I'll give you your curiosity.

you can't give me what's already mine, but i suppose that's an american idiom that eludes me

Originally Posted by evollove

For the most part, I like mystery in my music, so I guess that's where I'm coming from.

that would be like saying "i like mystery in my novels, so i guess i don't want to know grammar"

Originally Posted by evollove

(Although, again, I really appreciate a good piece on whatever Schoenberg's doing tonally in a certain string quartet or whatever.)

and yet, "noise rock" is doing more tonally than schoenberg ever did, thanks to chaos, but nobody can tell me what structures are these

Originally Posted by evollove

I'd want to know what Keith brought to drumming via a doc, then listen to a few tracks while reading about the drugs and fucking.

sure, i can also tell you that beethoven hand-picked 60 grains of coffee to brew and drink before writing, or that bach was as genitally fecund as he was musically prolific, but we have better writing about what they contributed to the history of music, don't we?

Originally Posted by evollove

A point with deep sociological or philosophical force in a rock essay feels like a waste. The same point made in a literary essay is fine with me, and part of a long, rich, honorable tradition.

and yet, rock was the soundtrack of the social revolution of the 60s, but an essay about that somehow would be a waste.

as for rich and honorable traditions, i don't know what's in this piece but it's one of the best things i've ever read about rock (and yes it helped to be familiar with said scene back in those days)

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/a...on-the-killjoy

enjoy it, sucka.

(and of course i dare you to generationally place that writer without looking him up. it's an easy job, really)

[evollove]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

you can't give me what's already mine, but i suppose that's an american idiom that eludes me

It is an American idiom. Hence it's rudeness and arrogance.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

that would be like saying "i like mystery in my novels, so i guess i don't want to know grammar"

Not really. Without basic grammar knowledge, lit is incoherent. Without basic music knowledge, rock, even experimental rock, still makes sense.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

sure, i can also tell you that beethoven hand-picked 60 grains of coffee to brew and drink before writing, or that bach was as genitally fecund as he was musically prolific, but we have better writing about what they contributed to the history of music, don't we?

Why choose? That bio stuff is fun, sometimes enlightening, and again, when it comes to classical music, someone needs to explain to me how, for example, Beethoven's counter-point works in the late string quartets.

By the way. last night I watched the very good 20 Feet From Stardom. I enjoyed the personal stories, I enjoyed learning how the craft of background singing has developed. But I'm not sure I'd read a 400 page book on the subject.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/a...on-the-killjoy

enjoy it, sucka.

(and of course i dare you to generationally place that writer without looking him up. it's an easy job, really)

Sorry. I read the first three paragraphs, then skimmed. That's a long article. Fugazi's sincerity ruined the DC scene? Is that what's going on? And I have no idea how old the writer could be. I sort of don't get what I was supposed to take from that vis a vis this thread.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

It is an American idiom. Hence it's rudeness and arrogance.

ha ha ha

Originally Posted by evollove

Not really. Without basic grammar knowledge, lit is incoherent. Without basic music knowledge, rock, even experimental rock, still makes sense.

sorry, no. you "hear" musical structure even if you don't understand it. you "make sense" of grammar even if you don't understand what the fuck a dependent clause is. you can see the beauty of a building even if you don't know anything about construction. but you can get another level of enjoyment if you know the nuts and bolts. just like everyone can eat a delicious meal but the initiated can get the nuances of seasoning and technique on top of "yum yum!". what i'm trying to say is that this love of "mistery" is just antiintelectualism on your part. which i think you justify by saying "i'm not the antiintellectual, this music is supposed to be dumb". which is why i linked you the article, in part-- he agrees with you-- rock is here to appeal to our baser instincts (and he quotes ronan's father on it).

Originally Posted by evollove

Why choose? That bio stuff is fun, sometimes enlightening, and again, when it comes to classical music, someone needs to explain to me how, for example, Beethoven's counter-point works in the late string quartets.

Why choose indeed? But it applies both ways and that's what the author of that piece complains about.

Originally Posted by evollove

By the way. last night I watched the very good 20 Feet From Stardom. I enjoyed the personal stories, I enjoyed learning how the craft of background singing has developed. But I'm not sure I'd read a 400 page book on the subject.

and because you wouldn't, nobody else would? how about just 2 pages?

Originally Posted by evollove

Sorry. I read the first three paragraphs, then skimmed. That's a long article. Fugazi's sincerity ruined the DC scene? Is that what's going on? And I have no idea how old the writer could be. I sort of don't get what I was supposed to take from that vis a vis this thread.

not sincerity per se, rather their earnest puritanism-- the sincerity gets mocked only secondarily. i guess you had to be there. but i linked it cuz it's a bit of social commentary on both rock and dc, and the social role of music, and if you look at the dispute it points out at the larger role of a certain kind of music in the culture, and how generational attitudes have changed.

the author is of course a sex-drugs-rocknroll baby boomer (because after the boomers came AIDS-- people always forget the boomer legacy of AIDS).

but in a different level it's kind of the same disputation you're making-- rock is dumb, doesn't need or deserve analysis or understanding, you just need to feel like the dinosaurs are back on earth. which is at some level true (which is why i liked the article, people at dc shows used to behave like monks), but at some other level it is not true, in the sense that a) there is now a long tradition of complex, difficult, "intellectual" rock, and b) musicians and lovers of music will want a little more information than "wow, that shreds, maaaan" or whatever is it that people say when talking about "dumb" music.

and with this i'm not even saying that i am capable of understanding what people like tears o'rourke or john mcEntyre brough to dumb-as-rocks rock and roll, i am simply complaining because i'm missing out on the understanding (not the feeling, i get the feeling) of it. and i like to rant on the internets.

also, i think the high-brow/low-brow art distinction you're making has been abandoned for over half a century now. it's all culture.

[evollove]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

rock is dumb,

Not dumb, exactly, and of course I get your point about intellectually stimulating music, but when someone really smart and skilled devotes their talents and their entire life to writing about rock, just feels like a waste to me, personally.

Because:

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

also, i think the high-brow/low-brow art distinction you're making has been abandoned for over half a century now. it's all culture.

I sort of still make the distinction. And there are still museums and literary journals with discriminating taste, and they still give out Nobels.

Actually, I think now we have a choice about whether or not to accept any sort of cannon, which is even more liberating.

So from my antiquated perspective, I find it hard to take Camille Paglia's academic take on the Rolling Stones all that seriously. (Also, I'm sort of dumb, and I have to be selective about firing my brain cells.)

Or it may be I'm feeling my mortality, and with only so much time left, the number of things I take seriously has dwindled.

But I use to care a lot about rock theory, and this book used to get me hard. I think many will enjoy it:

http://www.amazon.com/Rhythm-Noise-A...ythm+and+noise

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

Not dumb, exactly, and of course I get your point about intellectually stimulating music, but when someone really smart and skilled devotes their talents and their entire life to writing about rock, just feels like a waste to me, personally.

right, but i am not concerned with people's wasted talent, i want to read good writing about music i enjoy. thing is though, "rock" (whatever that may be) is a dead form and at this point sort of irrelevant to the culture-- a lesser genre, soon to be confined to museums and preservation halls and academic departments just like jazz or the study of "the classics". i was reading some garbage article in gawker which is always garbage but the writer made one good point (almost makes me want to believe in miracles to find something worthy there) that the last time there was some kind of mass "youth" thing centered around rock was in the early 90s… that's 20 fucking years ago! (oh yes, the article was about the dead nirbano and what he meant to people etc.)

back in the 90s though there was also this utopianist writing about raves and electronic/sampled music and the poor suckas in mondo 2000 claimed that with the death of the rockstar and its supplanting by electronic music without "stars" performing onstage but instead drugged out people immersed in some communal experience, some sort of great anarchist era was about to happen. haa haaa haaa haaa.

poor people.

Originally Posted by evollove

Because:




I sort of still make the distinction. And there are still museums and literary journals with discriminating taste, and they still give out Nobels.

well sure there is good and there is bad. on that note, the boomer idol bob dylan has been nominated for the nobel literature prize before.

Originally Posted by evollove

Actually, I think now we have a choice about whether or not to accept any sort of cannon, which is even more liberating.

unless you're in ukraine and the cannon is shooting at you and you have no choice! (sorry, terrible joke on many levels). but yes. we can read/ listen to/ watch whatever the fuck we want. which is why i want writing about the irrelevant thing i listen to!-- just like that whiny article that inspired this thread. he whines for me (but not for thee, in this case).

Originally Posted by evollove

So from my antiquated perspective, I find it hard to take Camille Paglia's academic take on the Rolling Stones all that seriously. (Also, I'm sort of dumb, and I have to be selective about firing my brain cells.)

but paglia was not talking about music! she was talking about archetypes in popular culture-- she was talking about the popular imagination. she was not doing any kind of musical analysis. warhol is the one who put tin cans in his high-concept paintings, and everyone has followed since. also, frank herbert's "dune"--pulp or masterpiece?

Originally Posted by evollove

Or it may be I'm feeling my mortality, and with only so much time left, the number of things I take seriously has dwindled.

that, for sure. same goes for drinking budweiser. my problem now is to find books i want to read. i found some chekhov translations online and i'm happy to say i've finished a short story. a sort of miracle. i used to devour books until i went to grad school. the force-feeding gave me a delicate stomach and i haven't recovered since.

Originally Posted by evollove

But I use to care a lot about rock theory, and this book used to get me hard. I think many will enjoy it:

http://www.amazon.com/Rhythm-Noise-A...ythm+and+noise

that i had never seen. i might check it out. thanks for the link. though these days i read mostly how-to books on farming and making bricks out of mud and that sort of shit.

[Glice]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

and yet, "noise rock" is doing more tonally than schoenberg ever did, thanks to chaos, but nobody can tell me what structures are these

No. Unless you mean something specific. Noise rock tends towards being tonally limited; serial music (let's assume that's the side of Schoenberg you mean) is quite deliberately, self-consciously and pathologically not tonally limited.

Of course, it's possible you mean something do with accidentals and 'noise' (in the sense of 'impure' tones) being of greater import; I tend to see the outside of the tonal centre as critical but not imperative. MBV (because we all know them, not because they're exemplars of noise-rock or even part of that) have a shitload of not-tonal stuff - 'deliberate accidentals', perhaps - but in my view they're perenially sticking to staid formal arrangements, straight-up intervals and rigorous arrangements. (Which in my view is common and analogous to whatever noise rock means)

Anyway, I only came here to post this: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/c...ic_theory.html

Which does a couple of things, for me - it explains that there's a high degree of thought and care goes into what may appear to be an asinine song (and it can still be asinine after that's agreed upon) - the mainstream industry, being an industry, tends to pay a lot of attention to these details. I tend not to see that elsewhere in popular music (meaning a lot of rock music, in the broadest sense) but I realise that's both contentious and prejudicious of me. It also explains why people really don't want music theory - while this might be an exciting article insofar as it's relatively unusual, the novelty would quickly wear off as every song has its variations on standard tropes and journalism would end up being flat descriptions.

Generally speaking, I tend towards the idea that music theory is a specific, unrelated subset of music appreciation - by which I mean, while the process of appreciation might tacitly include it, it doesn't rely upon it. Certainly, that'd explain why most of you have such appalling taste in music.

[Genteel Death]

To be honest, sweetheart, it's more likely that all the people with bad taste in music find the way it's written about it
tedious and listen to Taylor Swift instead.

[chocolate_ladyland]

I love good music writing. Rare, but excellent. Although I think more journalists should actually delve into the music itself. What is it precisely about the music that moves them? Is it a synth sound? How do they present their overall sound? Talk about that instead of tying to label as transgressive-IDM-noisecore or comparing every punk band to Wire or Minor Threat.

[jennthebenn]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

jenn is our lester bangs, per that article.

If fucking only.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by jennthebenn

If fucking only.

bullshit. you've got great metaphor & bravado in spades. to wit:

"The Blackest Crow"--As far as "Cali-metal-band-tries-Southern-balladry" goes, which thankfully isn't far, "Blackest Crow" is better than Metallica's "Ronnie." But so is being catapulted headfirst into a tree.

[…]

With the release of this laborious shitcicle, Megadeth are officially the most ignominious major band in thrash metal history. Their decline has been more painful to witness than Sir Laurence Oliver in The Jazz Singer. Mustaine's the guy who writes an album about anamnesis. Mustaine's the guy who knows what anamnesis is to begin with. And that album would be top-to-bottom wretched. Maybe 63 seconds of salvageable material, and not consecutive seconds either.

i rest my case.