Musicology | Love 'em, Hate 'em

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

. . .

Something I can't appreciate-- and it's a explaining water to a fish situation-- is the rock concert experience.

I think I've said this but I've seen two big shows as an audience member- Pearl Jam in a stadium and Boris in a place with a few hundred people- Pearl Jam was really silly; Boris was good but the crowd wasn't for me. A bunch of dudes and spontaneous moshpits...I don't pay money to be suddenly hit in the face...

. . .

Attended three concerts while I was in the US Midwest. Had not previously done so.

Midnight Oil. Don't recall why. Most memorable aspect was the urinals were overflowing and there was several cm of urine on the floor.
Was glad that I had worn my work boots.

The Pogues. A band that is a personal favourite. Sean McGowan was reasonably, if far from completely, sober and they gave a brilliant performance.
Memorable.

Billy Bragg. Don't care for his politics, but do appreciate his songwriting skill. He gave a great performance. Solo on electric guitar as is his custom.

Also used to go the to Sunday Jazz Showcase when it was at the Blackstone Hotel. A Brazilian friend was a jazz fiend.

As for hip-hop and rap:

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The only rapper I like is Marc Panther from the J-band Globe

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On the other hand, I do like the blues.

Was a regular at the New Checkerboard Lounge again back when it was on E. 43rd St.
Had the pleasure of seeing various Chicago blues legends perform.

Hah! Reasonably sober is much better than being unreasonably so! Everyone loves the Pogues- not much to add there. And I hear you on Billy Bragg...

But Midnight Oil, this is a band I've never heard of- turning them on now.

The Jazz and Blues crowds are a whole different thing. Especially in Chicago!

I gotta admit, the blues are great and the bedrock of so much but I am not enthralled by it, like I am with jazz. Maybe too many bad rock bands ripping off the blues ruined my ear for it?

Also the crowd of guitar players who insist on their authenticity because of their aping blues....anyone who picks up a guitar learns some rudimentary blues playing- but there is a great divide [while not un-bridgable] playing a folk music of poor southerners as if I'm down in the delta, ready to pick cotton, with a drinking problem and my baby just left me.

[noddy]

Oneida, is a nice Brooklyn hipster band who were really good when I saw'em but they don't seem to have caught on outside Brooklyn.
.

i liked this one.

the other 2 are more generic and whilst not bad, i have heard so many variations upon those themes.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

probably not missing anything, its a time and place thing, I doubt I could find it again now ive hit the Get Off My Lawn stage of life.

never got Pearl Jam, monotonous Mr Ed voice, straight up and down bland strum rock - it was MOR crap ala air supply or foreigner to my ears - nirvana isnt much better either.

in terms of that era - only early soundgarden still has a place in my playlist from time to time - bad motor finger is an american classic which belongs in the all time greats for that type of music.

I did live the rock pig thing for the late 80's and into the 90's .. saw so many concerts, played in lots of crap gigs but I have to play the "if you remember you werent there" card for most of it.

big rock concerts are usually terrible, stadiums suck (red hot chili peppers where woeful, even in their prime) but the bands with a solid rythmic backbone in a smaller venue - peak primus or mr bungle springs to mind - can elevate the madness when they are in the pocket and getting the tension and release combinations just right.

Hip Hop is something that mostly passes me by but i do have a softspot for the pumping bass sample stuff from the 90's - the guys who are all fat and on TV now

So much of the music isn't designed for places bigger than a bar/small concert hall. And it's kinda creepy as a quasi-religious experience that some of these bands try to conjure.

It's the Who problem- I hate the Who, or the Who past 1967...the big stadium rock Who is awful and you can see in it in video footage- they were this tight rock n roll band that could get a dance floor moving and they turn into this bloaty, theatrical mess where they have to mug to try to get to the energy level their looking for.

Which brings me to Pearl Jam. They're awful-- though I have a soft spot for Riot Act-- but when you're friend's music choices range within the post-grunge Nickelback/Creed/Foo Fighters crowd...you go with the original.

[noddy]

Nickelback/Creed/Foo Fighters

twitch.

i would safely say i dont listen to rock if those be the choices

agreed in full on the big stadium thing - exactly what I was getting at.

speaking of quasi religious experience (and insufferable fanbases), Tool Aenima is another american classic.


--

as for midnight oil - their is only one album "10 through 1"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1_0BoziWEQ

it is a cringe fest of "woke" middle class masturbation fuel.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Oneida, is a nice Brooklyn hipster band who were really good when I saw'em but they don't seem to have caught on outside Brooklyn.
.

i liked this one.

the other 2 are more generic and whilst not bad, i have heard so many variations upon those themes.

Oneida is great- when I saw them they were playing all bespoke instruments and amps. They then proceeded to play one of their many 15 minute 1 chord/1 riff songs....And I said to myself, that's what I want to do.

So I can't listen to them too much because then I become too self-indulgent. Same thing happens when I hear Trout Mask Replica or those Bob Dylan records on speed.
Same thing with this album, one of my favorites but sending all kinds of wrong messages:

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"I, I am the boy, she, she is the girl, he, he is the bear..."

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Obviously, you don't have the massive intellect to understand Maynard James Keenan.

Yeah, I bought Aenima after hearing how out of the loop I was on missing this musical masterpiece, placed it once and flushed it years and years ago.

I'm gonna throw the Trent Reznor I Don't Wanna Grow Up Ego Project Extraordinare Carnival onto the same broken, fragile pile.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Soundgarden is a band I can't listen to anymore, myself.

Nirvana on the other hand-- the first rock album I ever bought was In Utero.

I remember exactly where I was, driving to a friend's house, when I heard this song, and I heard it in my head almost like this- with the cellos:

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I was completely blown away by it's unrelenting intensity, it's unusual drums, it's throbbing bass and that incredibly sharp hook.

I asked my friend who this was, and he goes, "Oh, that's Dave Grohl's old band. They had one hit and sorta faded." I didn't know so, I went to Napster or whatever the program was at the time was and downloaded the first three songs that popped up on the list: Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, Come As You Are and In Bloom. And I remember saying to myself, "how was this a one-hit wonder, what happened to these guys?"
The very next day, I went and bought In Utero. Then I began saving for a guitar.

It was only later I looked up the whole, disturbing story...and I remembered it.

I remembered it, not so much because of Kurt Cobain or his death, but the day they found his body, my mother took away my instruments and forbid me from playing music, because "all musicians destroy themselves." It's still a vivid memory. I had been taking flute/violin lessons at the time, and was sorta okay with it because I didn't want to put in the practice and my real desire since I was little was to play piano like Ray Charles. So I didn't really understand was was going on but, it had a big affect in my life.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Of course, especially as I get older, it sinks in that Kurt Cobain was a really disturbed and juvenile drug addict, and that intensity/tension was self-directed in a way I've personally never felt...lyrically In Utero is very much in the pop album vein of "I'm gonna write a whole album about my relationships in the media" that I don't really care for- that's before you deal with the heavy amount of self-loathing. (When Madonna does it, there's a lot less of that self-loathing, at least.) I think there is a tendency to read more ominousness into In Utero than it deserves but at the same time, it's an awfully hard listen in places. And like a lot of rock, and rap, it's not good for the soul.

But that trick- chromaticism over playing around with thirds and great dynamics- that's in almost all Nirvana songs, still gets me- even if the songs don't. It gives it an amateur romanticism/chamber music thing...it took me a long time to process that. And Nirvana should be thought of as a tight drum/bass combo that happened to have a wailing lead singer with a sense of melody, and they performed about 40 or 50 variations of Paul McCartney's Helter Skelter.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

But the real reason I can't dismiss them all together is because they wrote a perfect pop song and a handful of others which come awfully close.

Come As You Are is perfect.

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I don't care if they stole that riff.

Everything is so incredibly simple in that song but works so well together. And that noodle riff, leading into the suspended chords and the extra simple propulsion beat still gets me...especially when it marshals at the end with that very slight bass/drum change. The lyrics too always reminded me of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (the only Hemingway novel I like.) I could've sworn that every word in the lyrics was lifted from the book- but doing a google search, it is telling me "no". Something about this song triggers WWI in my head, I guess.

All Apologies comes real close to perfect to for much of the same reasons:

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I really like the 2013 remix and have always liked that weaving cello. The lyrics I could do without...

I guess it says a lot about my musical tastes (or lack of them).

I love narcotic phasing- noodling guitar of these terse phrases, codas with mantras...simple, terse parts pulled out of the aether which just grow. Atonal artifacts with their own sensibility throughout and working through dissonances, real and imagined. A watery thing...but more in the "still, deep waters" sense. Non-theatrical, unless it is approached with a good deal of camp.*

Songs which capture a sense of certitude but not necessarily understanding, like bathing in a fathomless ocean.

Now, Mr.Perfect, long ago started with U2's With or Without You, and that probably outstrips these...there is something really transcendent going on there. I'm going to throw Marvin Gaye's "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" on here too.


*I don't mean that in the too cool to perform sense...there is just something I intuit that makes me weary. Maybe it's Pascal's warning about the theater:

11. All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theatre. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love, principally when it is represented as very chaste and virtuous. For the more innocent it appears to innocent souls, the more they are likely to be touched by it. Its violence pleases our self-love, which immediately forms a desire to produce the same effects which are seen so well represented; and, at the same time, we make ourselves a conscience founded on the propriety of the feelings which we see there, by which the fear of pure souls is removed, since they imagine that it cannot hurt their purity to love with a love which seems to them so reasonable.


So we depart from the theatre with our heart so filled with all the beauty and tenderness of love, the soul and the mind so persuaded of its innocence, that we are quite ready to receive its first impressions, or rather to seek an opportunity of awakening them in the heart of another, in order that we may receive the same pleasures and the same sacrifices which we have seen so well represented in the theatre.


– Blaise Pascal, Pensees, § 1.11

[noddy]

my love of bad motor finger is my love of big dumb riff rock done well, that album has a couple of gems for it - but i do struggle to listen now post suicide, that tends to ruin any music.

nirvana - i get it, but i was surrounded by whinging at the time and was bored of their whinging and then he popped himself and well... any quality their was became to lost to me.

those songs you highlighted are good pop tunes, no arguing that.

I love narcotic phasing- noodling guitar of these terse phrases, codas with mantras...simple, terse parts pulled out of the aether which just grow. Atonal artifacts with their own sensibility throughout and working through dissonances, real and imagined. A watery thing...but more in the "still, deep waters" sense. Non-theatrical, unless it is approached with a good deal of camp.*

the Idée fixe thing in music is the bomb.

the Pierre Boulez recordings of Varèse rocked that concept so hard, its one of the few modern classical things I used to really love - Stravinsky is my benchmark.


--

like most I came to Varèse via Zappa and his yellow shark record sits with them well - the only other one his I can still listen to is Sleep Dirt, the rest have slipped due to being trapped in time and place.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

my love of bad motor finger is my love of big dumb riff rock done well, that album has a couple of gems for it - but i do struggle to listen now post suicide, that tends to ruin any music.

yeah, I hear you there- on both fronts. Kim Thayil is excellent...the whole band is.

You know what sets them apart, in my estimation, from a band like Tool? They had excellent taste in tonal quality (or they worked with people who kept an eye on that sort of stuff). Like in A Room A Thousand Years Wide --what heavy bands are that good with that sort of stuff?

I was always more of a Down on the Upside guy- I would throw that on a lot while driving to school. Thing for me is that BadMotorFinger (and Superunknown to some extent) is that they'll go 1000 mph an hour with amazing riffs and then just sort of drop it and be totally lost at parts.

Superunknown is a top 5 produced album of the 90s. It is amazing, especially considering how thick the whole mix is. It still sounds great 20 something years later. But there is something about that album as a whole which is off to me.

Fell On Black Days is awful- and the most played track on the car radio. hah.

My Wave, 4th of July, Fresh Tendrils, Limowreck and Spoonman are standouts to me. But the pop gem is:

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[NapLajoieonSteroids]

And if we are going to talk about the mopiest music for mopes, how do we leave out Radiohead?

I have fond memories associated around Hail to the Thief, but I don't think I can make it through that album beyond the opening track.

I'm one of those hipsters that can't stand In Rainbows, don't like their song where they ripped off the Hollies, and would toss out most of the discography, outside of Kid A/Amnesiac and the much hated King of Limbs.

Before I lost track of these things, Kid A/Amnesiac were on the outs for not being hip or the best things ever...but I do think they are very good albums in a way Ok Computer is not.

Every song on Ok Computer is great but as an album, it is a bloody chore to work through. I don't have time for Thom Yorke's alienation and superstitions. And paranoia about Skynet using us as target practice is over the top, as we are all in good hands of our reptilian overlords who will take care of skynet when the time is ripe.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Another one I've grown to dislike:

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Rock pop-sociology down the gullet until your gut explodes!

I still love a lot about the production and arrangement of this album. But my goodness, that earnest and unearned smugness is much too much and only gets worse on subsequent albums.

See their disco song:

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only good thing of the track is how they incorporated David Bowie's vocals.

Bowie could get away with the sociological thing because David Bowie was actually a smart, sophisticated, worldly guy. The Arcade Fire kids are not those things but they sure want us to think that. And it's embarrassing, for the band and those kids who share in the posing.

As Carl Eric Scott wrote in his Rock Songbook-- a sort of conservative response to ROCK-- David Bowie is the kind of rock performer to take seriously, most especially because of his idea of modernity is the sort that deserves a response.

Carl's Rock Songbook #114: David Bowie and the Songbook

Carl's Rock Songbook #115: David Bowie As Democratic Changeling

Carl's Rock Songbook #21: David Bowie's Sunday

Carl's Rock Songbook #116: David Bowie, Changes

I'll throw this one in there too as it dealt with the sociological doom attitudinizing of rock:

Carl's Rock Songbook #25: Simon and Garfunkel, "Sounds of SIlence"

[Typhoon]

The master of contemporary angst.

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Most of Dylan's work sounds dated to me, unlike Cohen's.

[Typhoon]

When it comes to contemporary bands from Canada, prefer Alvvays to Arcade Fire.

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Aside from the music, the 2nd video has some remarkable editing, the band is embedded in archival footage of Expo 67 in Montréal, Canada.

[noddy]

ive never heard a canadian band that i like - which to be fair is also true of 99.8724% of australian bands too - sheltered middle class kids havent got much of interest to say on many subjects.

the exceptions tend to be focused on the things which everyone gets - our self destructive ways and/or good times

my submission for modern existentialist moper is Nick Cave - who took much from Leonard Cohen (and Tom Waits), much of his output leaves me cold but when he gets his theatrical overblown thing just right, its got a quality to it.

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i cant find the ones i wanted to on youtoobs, nevermind.

---

radiohead, Im indifferent, what i heard never made me want to hear more.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Speaking of Soundgarden&Pearl Jam:

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This is Matt Cameron's band; I remember really liking this album but I haven't listened to it in years.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

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[Mr. Perfect]

I asked my friend who this was, and he goes, "Oh, that's Dave Grohl's old band. They had one hit and sorta faded." I didn't know so, I went to Napster or whatever the program was at the time was and downloaded the first three songs that popped up on the list: Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, Come As You Are and In Bloom. And I remember saying to myself, "how was this a one-hit wonder, what happened to these guys?"

my mother took away my instruments and forbid me from playing music, because "all musicians destroy themselves." It's still a vivid memory.

Wow.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

It's true though I overly dramatize it for effect. My mother is not hysterical for starters. And while she couldn't articulate it, it's the point I've been making:

Musical forms (even popular forms) matter and what you allow in matters too (though one shouldn't act fanatical about it). For example:

Despite all the sadness or raunchiness someone can associate with blues music and musicians, there is also a great amount more to it than that...someone put it that all blues musicians have songs about great debauchery on Saturday nights and even greater, and sincere depths of veneration on Sunday mornings. It's a complete picture of man, warts and all with a solid philosophy which permeates it- southern stoicism.

The starting point for hard rock culminates in that suicidal end point- whether an actual suicide like the one mentioned above, or by stupefaction or arrested development, it happens if you buy into it too much or don't smarten up- not everyone does. It has to- that primitive Beethoven, me against the crowd, quasi-religious/nature experience calls for ever more personal music. And the way to make it ever more personal is to make it ever more negative...minor keys, self-loathing, self-pity, negative emotions all around....it's debauched and that's it because it's more personal. It's angry, and that's it because it's more personal. It's some sort of pantheistic overreaction because nothing is ever personal enough. As the late Peter Lawler was fond of saying (something to the effect of,) "It's creepy (and creeping) liberal-tarianism. Ever more and more about 'me' transgressing all 'we' boundaries."

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Speaking to four to the floor noise:

Les Rallizes Dénudés:

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First band I was in, we did interpretations of Les Rallizes (by which I mean, I played famous, poppy basslines while babbling and the guitarist made a lot of noise) and covered the Ventures.

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It was only later that we found out Les Rallizes connection with the Japanese Red Army. Some member of the band even helped them hijack a plane.

Talk about hardcore.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

On the other side of the political spectrum, which is not the reason I've been really into them lately, are Les Brigandes

Where else am I gonna find a band of women who longingly sing about the heroics of Mussolini and how the Pope is a Jesuit rat and about secret mason plots?

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this song, In Hell is fantastic (leaving the lyrics aside)

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here they are really bummed out that [strike]Petain[/strike]...errm....Le Pen didn't win.

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[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Unfortunately, besides seeing Jewish wire pullers everywhere, they are not fond of Americans either:

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Which is why it is vitally important that after posting this, I'll be starting a Go Fund Me/Patreon/Give Me Money page...so you too can give me money to err, emm, save the republic and rescue our good name!

Mr.P, I'm expecting you to dip in to your war chest for this one. I'm gonna have to parachute in on a full charm offensive. It's a diplomatic mission, bigly!

[noddy]

It's true though I overly dramatize it for effect. My mother is not hysterical for starters. And while she couldn't articulate it, it's the point I've been making:

Musical forms (even popular forms) matter and what you allow in matters too (though one shouldn't act fanatical about it). For example:

Despite all the sadness or raunchiness someone can associate with blues music and musicians, there is also a great amount more to it than that...someone put it that all blues musicians have songs about great debauchery on Saturday nights and even greater, and sincere depths of veneration on Sunday mornings. It's a complete picture of man, warts and all with a solid philosophy which permeates it- southern stoicism.

The starting point for hard rock culminates in that suicidal end point- whether an actual suicide like the one mentioned above, or by stupefaction or arrested development, it happens if you buy into it too much or don't smarten up- not everyone does. It has to- that primitive Beethoven, me against the crowd, quasi-religious/nature experience calls for ever more personal music. And the way to make it ever more personal is to make it ever more negative...minor keys, self-loathing, self-pity, negative emotions all around....it's debauched and that's it because it's more personal. It's angry, and that's it because it's more personal. It's some sort of pantheistic overreaction because nothing is ever personal enough. As the late Peter Lawler was fond of saying (something to the effect of,) "It's creepy (and creeping) liberal-tarianism. Ever more and more about 'me' transgressing all 'we' boundaries."

does make you ponder the inevitable backlash of the authoritarian "we" which fixes all that.

[Simple Minded]

Unfortunately, besides seeing Jewish wire pullers everywhere, they are not fond of Americans either:

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Which is why it is vitally important that after posting this, I'll be starting a Go Fund Me/Patreon/Give Me Money page...so you too can give me money to err, emm, save the republic and rescue our good name!

Mr.P, I'm expecting you to dip in to your war chest for this one. I'm gonna have to parachute in on a full charm offensive. It's a diplomatic mission, bigly!

I'm in for $10. we need more intellectuals with big vocabularies in the music world.

I'd suggest starting out in the New Country field as an anti-PC rebel. Band name could be Exist (inspired by seeing a "resist" bumper sticker on a car this morning) or Gay Chevera!