second heliocentric revolution, indeed.
too many fools, though.
Friday, February 28, 2014
the last rap news (22) was especially awesome
the copernicus section is something else.
second heliocentric revolution, indeed.
too many fools, though.
second heliocentric revolution, indeed.
too many fools, though.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
(most of february from the music page was deleted in some kind of ram-freeze that took the whole computer down with firefox. there is active code of some sort
on facebook that causes word documents to seize up and crash when pasted
into them. largely preliminary discussion of “stuck”, which is sad mostly due to the beginning exploratory discussion of vstis. realguitar & reallpc & bandstand were downloaded on feb 12, 2014. something else that happened was that the brace on my sennheisers snapped.)
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
immediate reaction to the new st vincent record
deathtokoalas
i'm not really willing to point any fingers at david byrne. my perception of what was going on there was that byrne essentially hired her to write songs for him. she seemed to be the dominant artist in the arrangement. by far. it's sort of annoying that byrne's inflated sense of importance got a refill from this.
rather, it seems like she's been listening to a lot of tuneyards and is trying to integrate more of an idm/electronic sound into her style. it's a good idea on paper. certainly, radiohead could have delved a lot deeper into the warp records catalog than they actually did. but what i'm getting on the first few listens is that it's come with a trade-off in a lesser amount of attention paid to the arrangements. well, sometimes we just want to clear our heads.
there's some goodness, no doubt. but it sounds like a transition album to me.
Anon Woll
Except she has said before it was a 50/50 process when it came to the songwriting. He came up with the big band idea and they went from there.
deathtokoalas
well, conceptually, maybe, but i think that's being extremely generous insofar as the idea of songwriting is concerned. i really don't think that david byrne has the slightest idea how to write those kinds of horn parts. insofar as what she's saying is true, that sounds like byrne vaguely describing an idea and annie actually writing it out - which is a process that used to be called "commissioning a composer".
something else that crossed my mind repeatedly was "wow. annie clark is really a big upgrade over adrian belew.". and i'm actually a substantial belew fan.
the point is simply that this "hanging around with david byrne too much" stuff is really backwards. and maybe even a little sexist.
Anon Woll
I think that you got my words twisted. He proposed the idea of making the record with a horn section and touring with it and she went "that sounds fun, let's do it", then they both composed and wrote lyrics on the album, like a near 50/50 split.
I am not totally defending David Byrne or anything or gonna be part of the "WOW pffft look what she picked up from him" crowd because this actually reminded me a bit of "Marrow" more than a "Love This Giant" song, with that kind of constant staccato and almost march-y kind of feel in all of the non-chorus parts. I just am saying he deserves slightly more credit than "dude who hired St. Vincent to write songs for him". She is her own artist and has been developing her stage and studio craft for years and years now. And yeah, it is backwards and most likely sexist. Sucks but whatever. Looks like she may be the most successful with this record so haters can eat it.
BubbaZen10
I think David could handle those horn parts. And while i'm actually impressed with her playing, putting her on a par with Adrian Belew? REALLY? Maybe i haven't seen enough of her playing, but that sure seems like a stretch. I really am liking it a lot though. Been a while since some new(er) music grabbed my attention like this.
And btw, wtf did koalas ever do to you??!! ;)
William Sanders
I'm mostly sure that talk of a Byrne influence stems from her change in appearance, an added vibe of eccentricity that includes her use of choreographed dancing/movements during her live show. Byrne implemented the dancing on the Love This Giant tour and she liked the added dynamic, so she's doing it on her own now. That seems like influence to me.
As for the notion of sexism, you're forgetting the stark contrast in legendary status between the two songwriter/performers. Byrne has been a legend longer than Annie has been playing guitar. You can "think" whatever you'd like about who came up with what arrangements, or you can "think" Byrne's not capable of creating those kinds of horn parts, but since you don't actually know any of this, you come off as less than intelligent.
deathtokoalas
her appearance hasn't changed at all, and you're not doing a very good job at comprehending what i wrote. the obvious truth is that david byrne is not a musician in any sense, let alone the kind of trained musician that clearly wrote those parts. he blatantly has absolutely no idea whatsoever how to sing in key, let alone how to write those kinds of horn parts. in a situation where you have a very capable and educated person on one side and what is basically a lucky opportunistic hack on the other it's not difficult to figure who is doing all of the actual labour.
again, if you'd try a little harder to understand the dynamics involved, you'd realize that byrne has no claim to "legendary status" at all. what he's done throughout his career is piggy back on other people's ideas. the idea that there's some kind of hierarchical difference is precisely the sexist bullshit that i'm calling out: she's a musician and he isn't. you're only claiming otherwise due to a perceived gender misbalance. so, it would do you some good to try and understand the situation properly in terms of balances of power and media interpretation before you start accusing other people of deficits of intelligence.
the foolish thing to think in this situation is that byrne was anything other than the lucky recipient of an eccentric woman fawning over somebody she had a crush on in her teenage years. so, i'll state it in easier to understand terms for you: the idea that byrne is a legend and st. vincent is not is precisely the sexist bullshit that needs to be called out. rather, annie clark is one of the most talented and interesting musicians of our era, and david byrne is a has been that was never more than an overrated hack that took credit for other people's ideas when he was something to begin with.
is that easier for you to understand?
BubbaZen10
Longer than she's been playing guitar?? Hell man, how old is that gal? Try longer than she's been alive! ;)
The "people turn your tv on and throw it out the window" part definitely reminds me a bit of "Burnin' Down the House." (that descending part is similar) She's working with the guy, and is probably a fan of his music, so i'm sure there's an influence there, but i definitely hear a lot of other influences coming from her that maybe people don't pick up on. I really see and hear some Cabaret Voltaire in both the video and some of the sounds.
deathtokoalas
yeah.
i think annie's a huge nin fan, personally.
to put it another way, if we were talking about an eno/byrne collaboration, or a byrne/belew collaboration, it would be all about how byrne was hanging out while they did all the work. but when it's a young, attractive woman? it's his superior legendary essence that's managed to rub off a little on the lucky gal.
and that's bullshit.
William Sanders
I stopped reading after "her appearance hasn't changed at all".
I did catch a little of your ramble not far from where I type. Annie Clark will be a legend, she's as talented or more so than Byrne, but she's still young and working towards it. There's a difference, unlike yourself I'm not hellbent on making this an issue of sexism. I won't be supplying the false sense of vindication for you today. Take care.
deathtokoalas
too many words for you, william? not used to reading that much at the same time?
there's no need to get your boxers all unironed about it, either. it's just the way the world works.
BubbaZen10
Man, let me make this clear; i can see a few influences from Byrne's old days, but since i just recently got into this gal and this band, i have looked at other videos on here, and i personally think that, musically, Annie wipes the floor with David Byrne. This is one talented person. (but David IS a better musician than you are giving him credit for here, most certainly)
For real man, NIN definitely in there! I hear a lot of different things coming from her. She's sharp, and has obviously absorbed a lot, like a good musician would. I get how some fans on here are baggin' on this song, and i get why. It's never fun when a band you love goes a little pop or mainsteam to attract new people (like me) but this is just a good damn song, period.
Now, about her being better than Adrian Belew? BULLSHIT!! I saw him with King Crimson in the 80's. She's good. VERY good. She is not at that level yet! ;)
Btw, The Cabs are who Trent ripped off!!!!!! ;)
I think you'll appreciate this song. Look up Sensoria by Cabaret Voltaire. You'll hear it a little i think. She does a backing vocal line that reminds me of that song.
That is the REAL shit man. Where a lot that you probably like came from. Music-wise, and video-wise. That video was in the MomA. Groundbreaking stuff.
deathtokoalas
trent took a bit from cabaret voltaire in his earliest incarnation, as well as a lot from ministry, bits from coil and foetus and neubauten and a substantial amount from bowie - and he's trying to look like ogre from skinny puppy. i had my industrial phase in the mid to late 90s. and you can hear a bit of that in her sequencing.
but the bit that reznor added himself was this sort of quirkiness. well, it was expanded on in some of the remixes as well. i can really hear that in her writing at points, especially her guitar playing, and it's very much his idiosyncrasy. i guess there's a continuity there in belew.
i mean, we all have influences. i don't deny that byrne probably was one on annie. she's definitely electro-pop in the broad sense that runs from lundgren through to bowie, byrne, anderson, reznor and beyond. it's just the way the argument is being thrown out that is difficult to stomach.
rather, i hope byrne is able to take something away from his time working with annie.
BubbaZen10
Oh, i have no doubt she has reinvigorated him!
The fact you knew who the Cabs were gets you many internet points!
William Sanders
You're too emotionally biased in your assessments, that's why you say so many absurd things. I have no time for that.
BubbaZen10
Absurd things said are like, MY FAVORITE THINGS!!
I have no time for the too serious shit myself.
I have time koala killer, or whatever the fuck your name is, but make it quick, i have an appointment at 3. TICK TOCK!
deathtokoalas
that was the perfectly sexist remark, william. i'm sort of proud of you, actually.
William Sanders
Of course it was, everything is to you.
BubbaZen10
Ok, how much more will you put into this? How far will you push a feminist?
She's made valid points. Anyone who says this chick is riding on Byrne's coattails needs to look into her more. This is one very talented person, and Koalahater might be right that it's actually HIM riding HER coattails at this point.
deathtokoalas
i missed a couple of posts.
i actually think her playing is really underrated. i don't want to do this "on par with" thing. i'm going to state though that i'm an abstract guitarist myself (i have some stuff up on my page if you'd like to click through), and it's a big part of my interest in st. vincent's work. she has progressive streaks, but she's more in a post-punk tradition, and that generally means toning done the excesses. but she did go to berkeley, and her instrument was guitar, and it does come out fairly clearly. she runs off her riffs in a kind of effortless, not flashy way, though - which is definitely not "belewish". she's kind of more of a blues/metal guitarist by instinct. i know that sounds bizarre initially, but if you deconstruct it carefully it comes out pretty clearly. that's more in the sabbath or maiden side of things.
in a broad sense, though, her effects heavy approach has it's origins in the belew and fripp school of guitar. it sounds to me like it's been through a few steps on the way there. there's one specific thing she does often that is very belew and it's this kind of glissando trick through heavy distortion. it's leaning towards the kind of effects belew is known for. and, it comes out in a stylistic sense as well: belew was the guitarist on a lot of the music that preceded this and sounds similar to it: bowie, talking heads, laurie anderson, nine inch nails. and, yeah, a bit of crimson, too. when we're talking about byrne specifically? it's a comparison that's hard to ignore, given how much belew added to byrne's work.
it does sort of intersect with the sexism, though. it's still a little unsettling to see an attractive woman play like annie does. as much as i might like carrie brownstein, and as many heads as pj harvey may have turned, that level of playing wasn't really there. in the end, i think normalizing female shredding is something that's going to be a part of her legacy. there's a clip from a few years ago where she runs off the riffs to surgeon that's worth watching and demonstrates what i'm getting at. as much as it's distracting from the music, and as much as she's clearly trying to avoid that, i'm not aware of any kind of precedent.
i lost my own train of thought, though. by "upgrade", i meant in terms of general musicality and depth of musical knowledge. there's no use in comparing them directly and ranking one higher than the other. there's a similarity in the way they approach the instrument, but they're pretty different in terms of writing.
part of me does kind of want to hear her do a really flashy guitar record, though.
William Sanders
I thought I was done, people keep bringing me back in. Saying Clark is riding Byrne's coattails is absurd, just as saying Byrne basically hired Clark as the songwriter for their collaboration is absurd, or insinuating that Byrne can't create melodies with horns based on nothing more than a gut-induced hunch is absurd. We can celebrate both artists without shitting on one of them, koalas should give it a try.
deathtokoalas
byrne was involved with some interesting records in the 80s, but he doesn't deserve a lot of credit for them - as bowie doesn't deserve much credit for the second half of low (he wasn't even in the recording studio when it was created) and neither mccartney nor lennon can really honestly take credit for george martin's work. it would be time consuming to develop this argument here, but people that are familiar with the other works of eno, belew, harrison and weymouth can hear where the genius really originated
augusts1
You should brush up on Byrne's discography. He composed the score for Twyla Tharp's ballet 'The Catherine Wheel' in '81 & a classical instrumental album called 'The Forest' in '91(both of which I own). He also collaborated w/Ryuichi Sakamoto for the amazing soundtrack to Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in '87. And those 3 are just the tip of the iceberg for his creations apart from his regular albums. He's done plenty of other film work too.
So your assertion that Byrne is a hack & using Clark for his own sexist gain since he has no talent of his own holds no water. at. all. Btw, check his Wiki page to find more of his work referenced there. And I'm a recent convert to Clark mainly because of her involvement w/Byrne.
deathtokoalas
again, if you look at the credits on those records, and you listen to the other work by the artists that did most of the work, it's easy to hear that byrne was not responsible for very much of the interesting components. guitar, vocals & the odd simplistic fill on another instrument. the rest of it is handled by the production teams, which (like bowie) he had a bit of an ear for.
well, and the gigolo dancing. byrne is EXCELLENT at gigolo dancing...
LicoriceLain
Or maybe they simply have very similar musical sensibilities...
grubbymanz
idk i think she is really influenced by byrne and could not say who really arranged what. if you listen to an album like feelings like maybe wicked little doll, and some of the other more synth funky things there is nothing on their collab album that couldn't have been on that album, before she was even putting out music. Also her neurotic pop thing, i bet she was really influenced by byrne and t heads and would not be so quick to consider arrangements on their joint album to be hers based on her recent output,when her style is informed so much by the person she was collaborating with.
i'm not really willing to point any fingers at david byrne. my perception of what was going on there was that byrne essentially hired her to write songs for him. she seemed to be the dominant artist in the arrangement. by far. it's sort of annoying that byrne's inflated sense of importance got a refill from this.
rather, it seems like she's been listening to a lot of tuneyards and is trying to integrate more of an idm/electronic sound into her style. it's a good idea on paper. certainly, radiohead could have delved a lot deeper into the warp records catalog than they actually did. but what i'm getting on the first few listens is that it's come with a trade-off in a lesser amount of attention paid to the arrangements. well, sometimes we just want to clear our heads.
there's some goodness, no doubt. but it sounds like a transition album to me.
Anon Woll
Except she has said before it was a 50/50 process when it came to the songwriting. He came up with the big band idea and they went from there.
deathtokoalas
well, conceptually, maybe, but i think that's being extremely generous insofar as the idea of songwriting is concerned. i really don't think that david byrne has the slightest idea how to write those kinds of horn parts. insofar as what she's saying is true, that sounds like byrne vaguely describing an idea and annie actually writing it out - which is a process that used to be called "commissioning a composer".
something else that crossed my mind repeatedly was "wow. annie clark is really a big upgrade over adrian belew.". and i'm actually a substantial belew fan.
the point is simply that this "hanging around with david byrne too much" stuff is really backwards. and maybe even a little sexist.
Anon Woll
I think that you got my words twisted. He proposed the idea of making the record with a horn section and touring with it and she went "that sounds fun, let's do it", then they both composed and wrote lyrics on the album, like a near 50/50 split.
I am not totally defending David Byrne or anything or gonna be part of the "WOW pffft look what she picked up from him" crowd because this actually reminded me a bit of "Marrow" more than a "Love This Giant" song, with that kind of constant staccato and almost march-y kind of feel in all of the non-chorus parts. I just am saying he deserves slightly more credit than "dude who hired St. Vincent to write songs for him". She is her own artist and has been developing her stage and studio craft for years and years now. And yeah, it is backwards and most likely sexist. Sucks but whatever. Looks like she may be the most successful with this record so haters can eat it.
BubbaZen10
I think David could handle those horn parts. And while i'm actually impressed with her playing, putting her on a par with Adrian Belew? REALLY? Maybe i haven't seen enough of her playing, but that sure seems like a stretch. I really am liking it a lot though. Been a while since some new(er) music grabbed my attention like this.
And btw, wtf did koalas ever do to you??!! ;)
William Sanders
I'm mostly sure that talk of a Byrne influence stems from her change in appearance, an added vibe of eccentricity that includes her use of choreographed dancing/movements during her live show. Byrne implemented the dancing on the Love This Giant tour and she liked the added dynamic, so she's doing it on her own now. That seems like influence to me.
As for the notion of sexism, you're forgetting the stark contrast in legendary status between the two songwriter/performers. Byrne has been a legend longer than Annie has been playing guitar. You can "think" whatever you'd like about who came up with what arrangements, or you can "think" Byrne's not capable of creating those kinds of horn parts, but since you don't actually know any of this, you come off as less than intelligent.
deathtokoalas
her appearance hasn't changed at all, and you're not doing a very good job at comprehending what i wrote. the obvious truth is that david byrne is not a musician in any sense, let alone the kind of trained musician that clearly wrote those parts. he blatantly has absolutely no idea whatsoever how to sing in key, let alone how to write those kinds of horn parts. in a situation where you have a very capable and educated person on one side and what is basically a lucky opportunistic hack on the other it's not difficult to figure who is doing all of the actual labour.
again, if you'd try a little harder to understand the dynamics involved, you'd realize that byrne has no claim to "legendary status" at all. what he's done throughout his career is piggy back on other people's ideas. the idea that there's some kind of hierarchical difference is precisely the sexist bullshit that i'm calling out: she's a musician and he isn't. you're only claiming otherwise due to a perceived gender misbalance. so, it would do you some good to try and understand the situation properly in terms of balances of power and media interpretation before you start accusing other people of deficits of intelligence.
the foolish thing to think in this situation is that byrne was anything other than the lucky recipient of an eccentric woman fawning over somebody she had a crush on in her teenage years. so, i'll state it in easier to understand terms for you: the idea that byrne is a legend and st. vincent is not is precisely the sexist bullshit that needs to be called out. rather, annie clark is one of the most talented and interesting musicians of our era, and david byrne is a has been that was never more than an overrated hack that took credit for other people's ideas when he was something to begin with.
is that easier for you to understand?
BubbaZen10
Longer than she's been playing guitar?? Hell man, how old is that gal? Try longer than she's been alive! ;)
The "people turn your tv on and throw it out the window" part definitely reminds me a bit of "Burnin' Down the House." (that descending part is similar) She's working with the guy, and is probably a fan of his music, so i'm sure there's an influence there, but i definitely hear a lot of other influences coming from her that maybe people don't pick up on. I really see and hear some Cabaret Voltaire in both the video and some of the sounds.
yeah.
i think annie's a huge nin fan, personally.
to put it another way, if we were talking about an eno/byrne collaboration, or a byrne/belew collaboration, it would be all about how byrne was hanging out while they did all the work. but when it's a young, attractive woman? it's his superior legendary essence that's managed to rub off a little on the lucky gal.
and that's bullshit.
William Sanders
I stopped reading after "her appearance hasn't changed at all".
I did catch a little of your ramble not far from where I type. Annie Clark will be a legend, she's as talented or more so than Byrne, but she's still young and working towards it. There's a difference, unlike yourself I'm not hellbent on making this an issue of sexism. I won't be supplying the false sense of vindication for you today. Take care.
deathtokoalas
too many words for you, william? not used to reading that much at the same time?
there's no need to get your boxers all unironed about it, either. it's just the way the world works.
BubbaZen10
Man, let me make this clear; i can see a few influences from Byrne's old days, but since i just recently got into this gal and this band, i have looked at other videos on here, and i personally think that, musically, Annie wipes the floor with David Byrne. This is one talented person. (but David IS a better musician than you are giving him credit for here, most certainly)
For real man, NIN definitely in there! I hear a lot of different things coming from her. She's sharp, and has obviously absorbed a lot, like a good musician would. I get how some fans on here are baggin' on this song, and i get why. It's never fun when a band you love goes a little pop or mainsteam to attract new people (like me) but this is just a good damn song, period.
Now, about her being better than Adrian Belew? BULLSHIT!! I saw him with King Crimson in the 80's. She's good. VERY good. She is not at that level yet! ;)
Btw, The Cabs are who Trent ripped off!!!!!! ;)
I think you'll appreciate this song. Look up Sensoria by Cabaret Voltaire. You'll hear it a little i think. She does a backing vocal line that reminds me of that song.
That is the REAL shit man. Where a lot that you probably like came from. Music-wise, and video-wise. That video was in the MomA. Groundbreaking stuff.
deathtokoalas
trent took a bit from cabaret voltaire in his earliest incarnation, as well as a lot from ministry, bits from coil and foetus and neubauten and a substantial amount from bowie - and he's trying to look like ogre from skinny puppy. i had my industrial phase in the mid to late 90s. and you can hear a bit of that in her sequencing.
but the bit that reznor added himself was this sort of quirkiness. well, it was expanded on in some of the remixes as well. i can really hear that in her writing at points, especially her guitar playing, and it's very much his idiosyncrasy. i guess there's a continuity there in belew.
i mean, we all have influences. i don't deny that byrne probably was one on annie. she's definitely electro-pop in the broad sense that runs from lundgren through to bowie, byrne, anderson, reznor and beyond. it's just the way the argument is being thrown out that is difficult to stomach.
rather, i hope byrne is able to take something away from his time working with annie.
BubbaZen10
Oh, i have no doubt she has reinvigorated him!
The fact you knew who the Cabs were gets you many internet points!
William Sanders
You're too emotionally biased in your assessments, that's why you say so many absurd things. I have no time for that.
BubbaZen10
Absurd things said are like, MY FAVORITE THINGS!!
I have no time for the too serious shit myself.
I have time koala killer, or whatever the fuck your name is, but make it quick, i have an appointment at 3. TICK TOCK!
deathtokoalas
that was the perfectly sexist remark, william. i'm sort of proud of you, actually.
William Sanders
Of course it was, everything is to you.
BubbaZen10
Ok, how much more will you put into this? How far will you push a feminist?
She's made valid points. Anyone who says this chick is riding on Byrne's coattails needs to look into her more. This is one very talented person, and Koalahater might be right that it's actually HIM riding HER coattails at this point.
deathtokoalas
i missed a couple of posts.
i actually think her playing is really underrated. i don't want to do this "on par with" thing. i'm going to state though that i'm an abstract guitarist myself (i have some stuff up on my page if you'd like to click through), and it's a big part of my interest in st. vincent's work. she has progressive streaks, but she's more in a post-punk tradition, and that generally means toning done the excesses. but she did go to berkeley, and her instrument was guitar, and it does come out fairly clearly. she runs off her riffs in a kind of effortless, not flashy way, though - which is definitely not "belewish". she's kind of more of a blues/metal guitarist by instinct. i know that sounds bizarre initially, but if you deconstruct it carefully it comes out pretty clearly. that's more in the sabbath or maiden side of things.
in a broad sense, though, her effects heavy approach has it's origins in the belew and fripp school of guitar. it sounds to me like it's been through a few steps on the way there. there's one specific thing she does often that is very belew and it's this kind of glissando trick through heavy distortion. it's leaning towards the kind of effects belew is known for. and, it comes out in a stylistic sense as well: belew was the guitarist on a lot of the music that preceded this and sounds similar to it: bowie, talking heads, laurie anderson, nine inch nails. and, yeah, a bit of crimson, too. when we're talking about byrne specifically? it's a comparison that's hard to ignore, given how much belew added to byrne's work.
it does sort of intersect with the sexism, though. it's still a little unsettling to see an attractive woman play like annie does. as much as i might like carrie brownstein, and as many heads as pj harvey may have turned, that level of playing wasn't really there. in the end, i think normalizing female shredding is something that's going to be a part of her legacy. there's a clip from a few years ago where she runs off the riffs to surgeon that's worth watching and demonstrates what i'm getting at. as much as it's distracting from the music, and as much as she's clearly trying to avoid that, i'm not aware of any kind of precedent.
i lost my own train of thought, though. by "upgrade", i meant in terms of general musicality and depth of musical knowledge. there's no use in comparing them directly and ranking one higher than the other. there's a similarity in the way they approach the instrument, but they're pretty different in terms of writing.
part of me does kind of want to hear her do a really flashy guitar record, though.
William Sanders
I thought I was done, people keep bringing me back in. Saying Clark is riding Byrne's coattails is absurd, just as saying Byrne basically hired Clark as the songwriter for their collaboration is absurd, or insinuating that Byrne can't create melodies with horns based on nothing more than a gut-induced hunch is absurd. We can celebrate both artists without shitting on one of them, koalas should give it a try.
deathtokoalas
byrne was involved with some interesting records in the 80s, but he doesn't deserve a lot of credit for them - as bowie doesn't deserve much credit for the second half of low (he wasn't even in the recording studio when it was created) and neither mccartney nor lennon can really honestly take credit for george martin's work. it would be time consuming to develop this argument here, but people that are familiar with the other works of eno, belew, harrison and weymouth can hear where the genius really originated
augusts1
You should brush up on Byrne's discography. He composed the score for Twyla Tharp's ballet 'The Catherine Wheel' in '81 & a classical instrumental album called 'The Forest' in '91(both of which I own). He also collaborated w/Ryuichi Sakamoto for the amazing soundtrack to Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in '87. And those 3 are just the tip of the iceberg for his creations apart from his regular albums. He's done plenty of other film work too.
So your assertion that Byrne is a hack & using Clark for his own sexist gain since he has no talent of his own holds no water. at. all. Btw, check his Wiki page to find more of his work referenced there. And I'm a recent convert to Clark mainly because of her involvement w/Byrne.
deathtokoalas
again, if you look at the credits on those records, and you listen to the other work by the artists that did most of the work, it's easy to hear that byrne was not responsible for very much of the interesting components. guitar, vocals & the odd simplistic fill on another instrument. the rest of it is handled by the production teams, which (like bowie) he had a bit of an ear for.
well, and the gigolo dancing. byrne is EXCELLENT at gigolo dancing...
LicoriceLain
Or maybe they simply have very similar musical sensibilities...
grubbymanz
idk i think she is really influenced by byrne and could not say who really arranged what. if you listen to an album like feelings like maybe wicked little doll, and some of the other more synth funky things there is nothing on their collab album that couldn't have been on that album, before she was even putting out music. Also her neurotic pop thing, i bet she was really influenced by byrne and t heads and would not be so quick to consider arrangements on their joint album to be hers based on her recent output,when her style is informed so much by the person she was collaborating with.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
continuing the discussion with sennheiser
jessica
hi.
sorry to bring up a ghost thread, but i'm a little concerned about the cord that got here. it arrived when it did back in december, and i've been ecstatic about it since. but i've been noticing for the last several weeks that the left side of the cord again comes in and out.
i've swapped the inputs on the phones a few times and am convinced it's the cord, rather than the phones. the red/right in is flawless regardless of which phone it's plugged into, but the black/left one slowly fades over long periods regardless of which phone it's plugged into. often, merely touching it is enough to reset it.
i ultimately think it's a contact issue. that is to say that i think that the metal on the cord is sort of falling out. maybe it's a hundredth of a mm smaller in diameter. and i'd actually be willing to believe it's a production thing if you told me that. it's very obvious that there's not a short in the cord. but it's also obvious that if i keep messing with it one will develop.
i'm just wondering if you have any information that might be of interest. would you be able to verify that there is a small difference in the size of the metal plug going into the phones, over all these decades? is it possible i got a mild defect that's a tad small?
phones:
sennheiser 440-II (ireland)
cord:
069427
Cable steel 3m jack3.5/jack6.3
sennheiser
Hi Jessica,
No problems, please don't apologise!
I am rather surprised that a cable so new could be defective, but it's not unheard of. That's why you've got a 3 month warranty. Before we get into the whole rigomorol surrounding replacement, I'm bound to ask if the cable polarity has always been respected, you'll notice one pin is fatter than the other. If the cable has been forced in backwards, then the problem may not actually be the cable!
Just asking!
Please let me know about that, and we'll proceed from there!
Cheers,
jessica
i've definitely been careful about polarity - letters always on the outside. i'm certain it's not that. and, as mentioned, it does it with both phones on the black side, and only on the black side.
the entire idea of a warranty completely slipped my mind. it's getting to the end of the three months. so, how does that process work?
(pause)
i'm just a little concerned because you were always previously quick to apply.
i have to say that i don't want to send this cord back. it seems like there's something wrong, but it's a minor adjustment and i know now i can replace the cord when i need to.
but if it is under warranty, i kind of feel entitled to it.
again: if i have to send it back, then forget it. it's not worth the trouble.
also, do you have any information about possible manufacturing mismatches?
sennheiser
Hi Jessica,
My apologies for the delay in response! I was out on holidays.
If you'd be so kind, please provide your address (to save time trying to find it in the computer...) and parts will send you out a new one. No need to return the other, just toss it.
hi.
sorry to bring up a ghost thread, but i'm a little concerned about the cord that got here. it arrived when it did back in december, and i've been ecstatic about it since. but i've been noticing for the last several weeks that the left side of the cord again comes in and out.
i've swapped the inputs on the phones a few times and am convinced it's the cord, rather than the phones. the red/right in is flawless regardless of which phone it's plugged into, but the black/left one slowly fades over long periods regardless of which phone it's plugged into. often, merely touching it is enough to reset it.
i ultimately think it's a contact issue. that is to say that i think that the metal on the cord is sort of falling out. maybe it's a hundredth of a mm smaller in diameter. and i'd actually be willing to believe it's a production thing if you told me that. it's very obvious that there's not a short in the cord. but it's also obvious that if i keep messing with it one will develop.
i'm just wondering if you have any information that might be of interest. would you be able to verify that there is a small difference in the size of the metal plug going into the phones, over all these decades? is it possible i got a mild defect that's a tad small?
phones:
sennheiser 440-II (ireland)
cord:
069427
Cable steel 3m jack3.5/jack6.3
sennheiser
Hi Jessica,
No problems, please don't apologise!
I am rather surprised that a cable so new could be defective, but it's not unheard of. That's why you've got a 3 month warranty. Before we get into the whole rigomorol surrounding replacement, I'm bound to ask if the cable polarity has always been respected, you'll notice one pin is fatter than the other. If the cable has been forced in backwards, then the problem may not actually be the cable!
Just asking!
Please let me know about that, and we'll proceed from there!
Cheers,
jessica
i've definitely been careful about polarity - letters always on the outside. i'm certain it's not that. and, as mentioned, it does it with both phones on the black side, and only on the black side.
the entire idea of a warranty completely slipped my mind. it's getting to the end of the three months. so, how does that process work?
(pause)
i'm just a little concerned because you were always previously quick to apply.
i have to say that i don't want to send this cord back. it seems like there's something wrong, but it's a minor adjustment and i know now i can replace the cord when i need to.
but if it is under warranty, i kind of feel entitled to it.
again: if i have to send it back, then forget it. it's not worth the trouble.
also, do you have any information about possible manufacturing mismatches?
sennheiser
Hi Jessica,
My apologies for the delay in response! I was out on holidays.
If you'd be so kind, please provide your address (to save time trying to find it in the computer...) and parts will send you out a new one. No need to return the other, just toss it.
i am so remarkably bad with my hands. it makes me laugh to think i wanted to be a brain surgeon when i was a kid, although to be fair to myself what i *meant* was a mad scientist that hooks up brains to computers rather than somebody that goes in and physically carves up the mind.
there's currently crazy glue *everywhere*.
and i feel kinda funny. aha. ahahaha. ahahahahahahahahah...\
there's currently crazy glue *everywhere*.
and i feel kinda funny. aha. ahahaha. ahahahahahahahahah...\
Monday, February 24, 2014
independent cd stores. i love what they do for the community, but sometimes i wonder.
i went in to get the new mt. zion disc. i haven't been buying a lot of cds lately, but i try and keep up with those guys. and i've been "saving" a lot of money from not smoking, so i've actually put aside a small amount for a monthly budget. i used to collect those little round discs before real life came around and started demanding i start paying into it. it gave me great enjoyment, so i'd like to get back to doing it. i'm going to be kind of working around my reviews to fill in holes in the collection.
so i thought i'd check to see if there's any belew. they had some of the ones i have and a bunch of the ones i don't really want, as well as one that i have a sort of high-end bootleg of. it was a gift from a friend of my father. my uncle used to do the same thing. so, i have a stack of this stuff - mostly prog-related. i've never really considered them as 'part of the collection'. rather, i've always thought of them more as try-before-you-buy type things, but i'm treating them as though they are for the review site. in actuality, a lot of them are out of print, so those boots are the closest i'm ever going to get. that's the case for this one.
so: $10 for an out of print disc i don't have - collectors jump on that shit. bring it up to the cash...
"geez, this is an old disc."
"yeah."
"i'll mark it down to $6."
"swell."
it's $184, new, on amazon. and i'd be surprised if the disc i got was ever actually played. the insert doesn't look like it's been unraveled before. crisp.
now, that says more about amazon taking advantage of dwindling supply than anything else. it's kind of an asshole price. but, still.
if you collect cds, you have stories like this - and you're glad the indie stores don't do these sorts of rigorous checks. there's not much chance somebody's going to walk into a cd store in windsor and hand over $200 for a decades old out of print adrian belew cd. sure. but, it could conceivably be auctioned for more than $6.
so, i'm happy about this, but i have to wonder....
i went in to get the new mt. zion disc. i haven't been buying a lot of cds lately, but i try and keep up with those guys. and i've been "saving" a lot of money from not smoking, so i've actually put aside a small amount for a monthly budget. i used to collect those little round discs before real life came around and started demanding i start paying into it. it gave me great enjoyment, so i'd like to get back to doing it. i'm going to be kind of working around my reviews to fill in holes in the collection.
so i thought i'd check to see if there's any belew. they had some of the ones i have and a bunch of the ones i don't really want, as well as one that i have a sort of high-end bootleg of. it was a gift from a friend of my father. my uncle used to do the same thing. so, i have a stack of this stuff - mostly prog-related. i've never really considered them as 'part of the collection'. rather, i've always thought of them more as try-before-you-buy type things, but i'm treating them as though they are for the review site. in actuality, a lot of them are out of print, so those boots are the closest i'm ever going to get. that's the case for this one.
so: $10 for an out of print disc i don't have - collectors jump on that shit. bring it up to the cash...
"geez, this is an old disc."
"yeah."
"i'll mark it down to $6."
"swell."
it's $184, new, on amazon. and i'd be surprised if the disc i got was ever actually played. the insert doesn't look like it's been unraveled before. crisp.
now, that says more about amazon taking advantage of dwindling supply than anything else. it's kind of an asshole price. but, still.
if you collect cds, you have stories like this - and you're glad the indie stores don't do these sorts of rigorous checks. there's not much chance somebody's going to walk into a cd store in windsor and hand over $200 for a decades old out of print adrian belew cd. sure. but, it could conceivably be auctioned for more than $6.
so, i'm happy about this, but i have to wonder....
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
death to adrev
these guys are pissing me off.
they're trying to get me on this (at youtube, not bandcamp), which is a sample art collage in the style of something like art of noise or negativland, but with video game samples.
it's largely silly. i was 16. and i was using primitive tools. but it is still interesting on some level.
i could maybe bend a little if the claim was at least accurate. there's a lot of samples from civ2 and doom II. but that's not what i'm getting. the claim i'm getting is that the sample starts at 0:05. yet, no sample starts at 0:05.
so, it seems like it's more like somebody there said "this sounds like it might have one of our samples somewhere, so we're going to put an ad on it".
ugh.
ads are the scourge of the internet. if it weren't for ad block, i'd probably cancel my internet. i'm not joking.
so, i've sent them a simple either/or. i won't let the video sit with an ad on it. that's not in the set of possible outcomes. if they're not going to remove the bullshit claim (and the claim *is* bullshit), i'm going to take the video down, remove the first section and re-upload it. they can either be jerks or not be jerks...
i'm not holding my breath. but maybe i'll get lucky.
they're trying to get me on this (at youtube, not bandcamp), which is a sample art collage in the style of something like art of noise or negativland, but with video game samples.
it's largely silly. i was 16. and i was using primitive tools. but it is still interesting on some level.
i could maybe bend a little if the claim was at least accurate. there's a lot of samples from civ2 and doom II. but that's not what i'm getting. the claim i'm getting is that the sample starts at 0:05. yet, no sample starts at 0:05.
so, it seems like it's more like somebody there said "this sounds like it might have one of our samples somewhere, so we're going to put an ad on it".
ugh.
ads are the scourge of the internet. if it weren't for ad block, i'd probably cancel my internet. i'm not joking.
so, i've sent them a simple either/or. i won't let the video sit with an ad on it. that's not in the set of possible outcomes. if they're not going to remove the bullshit claim (and the claim *is* bullshit), i'm going to take the video down, remove the first section and re-upload it. they can either be jerks or not be jerks...
i'm not holding my breath. but maybe i'll get lucky.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
i had a thought walking through the rain: what we need to deal with flooding issues are elephants. if you just let an elephant walk through the streets it would suck all the water up and voila...
....except there are some problems. it's too cold for elephants, and that's not clean water, and it has to find it's way back out eventually.
so, robot elephants. seriously. this is the future of flood control.
i mean, we could maybe deal with the weather issue by genetically engineering mammoths, but it's still not humane to have them out lapping up water on the street.
....except there are some problems. it's too cold for elephants, and that's not clean water, and it has to find it's way back out eventually.
so, robot elephants. seriously. this is the future of flood control.
i mean, we could maybe deal with the weather issue by genetically engineering mammoths, but it's still not humane to have them out lapping up water on the street.
it's dry in here and not likely to spill over. i don't feel the structure got the test i was expecting it to, but it's not really a needed test, either. i'm not expecting this kind of snow again next year. but the temperature didn't climb to where it threatened it would, and the rain didn't come down nearly as hard, either. really, windsor seems to have completely skipped the system.
that's ok with me. there's still a lot of water to get out of here, but the temperature is going to drop enough to stop the melt and let it drain.
head is also clearing. what a wasted week...
that's ok with me. there's still a lot of water to get out of here, but the temperature is going to drop enough to stop the melt and let it drain.
head is also clearing. what a wasted week...
geez. this person is stuck in the 80s. that's why this sucks.
1) strats, jaguars and jazzmasters were integral to alt. rock, which is what people nowadays are going to go looking to them for. green day, billy corgan, john frusciante. tom morello also used a strat. they're good PUNK guitars BECAUSE they aren't muddy with full chord riffs.
2) you need an ibanez entry for the nu metal, emo and post-hardcore kids: tone that sounds like a corporate robot vomiting out cockroaches through autotune vocoders, while screaming FEED ME.
3) why pick angus young of all people (gross) as an sg player, when you've got zappa and thayil amongst others to choose from? worse is that it's again years out of date: hi gain sgs created that mall punk sound. i bought my sg due to thayil, but the high gain mall punk thing is why kids go for sgs today. i bet a high school survey would conclude that well over 90% of people under 20 have never even heard of either angus young or ac/dc (that's not dad music anymore, it's grandpa music, and grandpa grew out of it many years ago, if he didn't overdose on something (possibly cheese) before kid got to know him).
4) if you want that mevins/boris sound, you probably want to go with a paul - while realizing the sound is mostly in the amp.
(link apparently lost)
1) strats, jaguars and jazzmasters were integral to alt. rock, which is what people nowadays are going to go looking to them for. green day, billy corgan, john frusciante. tom morello also used a strat. they're good PUNK guitars BECAUSE they aren't muddy with full chord riffs.
2) you need an ibanez entry for the nu metal, emo and post-hardcore kids: tone that sounds like a corporate robot vomiting out cockroaches through autotune vocoders, while screaming FEED ME.
3) why pick angus young of all people (gross) as an sg player, when you've got zappa and thayil amongst others to choose from? worse is that it's again years out of date: hi gain sgs created that mall punk sound. i bought my sg due to thayil, but the high gain mall punk thing is why kids go for sgs today. i bet a high school survey would conclude that well over 90% of people under 20 have never even heard of either angus young or ac/dc (that's not dad music anymore, it's grandpa music, and grandpa grew out of it many years ago, if he didn't overdose on something (possibly cheese) before kid got to know him).
4) if you want that mevins/boris sound, you probably want to go with a paul - while realizing the sound is mostly in the amp.
(link apparently lost)
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
24 hours from now, i will know whether this basement is unusually flood resistant or not.
there's about 20 cm of snow on the ground. it was 7 degrees today, which was warm enough to turn the neighbourhood roads into a series of interconnected ponds. starting around 10 am, we're going to get close to 50 mm of rain (tapering off about midnight tomorrow), around with temperatures rising to around 10 degrees at about the same time. the temperature is then going to drop back to freezing very quickly...
that's kind of an algorithm for flooding, so it seems to be a virtual certainty that there's going to be some water issues in the neighbourhood. the roads are going to flood and the sewers are going to back up. that's very easy to predict, and not really much to care about from my perspective. what i'm worried about is that water seeping in...
i'll find out.
there's about 20 cm of snow on the ground. it was 7 degrees today, which was warm enough to turn the neighbourhood roads into a series of interconnected ponds. starting around 10 am, we're going to get close to 50 mm of rain (tapering off about midnight tomorrow), around with temperatures rising to around 10 degrees at about the same time. the temperature is then going to drop back to freezing very quickly...
that's kind of an algorithm for flooding, so it seems to be a virtual certainty that there's going to be some water issues in the neighbourhood. the roads are going to flood and the sewers are going to back up. that's very easy to predict, and not really much to care about from my perspective. what i'm worried about is that water seeping in...
i'll find out.
awake, but still not fully alert.
you have to keep in mind that i'm somebody that has historically routinely gone well over 48 hours without sleep, on nothing but coffee and nicotine. nicotine is such a powerful stimulant, for me anyways. i'm well aware of the reality that if i just go buy a pack of smokes i can get some 36 hour days in. but i need to cut the reliance on it.
so i'm not used to this...
i'm hoping the flip of that is that the option for really long days will be there if i want it by just getting a pack.
drugs should be used as drugs, y'know?
producing humans that are naturally wired on caffeine - or that don't form a resistance, at least - strikes me as a worthwhile application of genetic engineering.
personally, i'd love to have that dna flipped...
you have to keep in mind that i'm somebody that has historically routinely gone well over 48 hours without sleep, on nothing but coffee and nicotine. nicotine is such a powerful stimulant, for me anyways. i'm well aware of the reality that if i just go buy a pack of smokes i can get some 36 hour days in. but i need to cut the reliance on it.
so i'm not used to this...
i'm hoping the flip of that is that the option for really long days will be there if i want it by just getting a pack.
drugs should be used as drugs, y'know?
producing humans that are naturally wired on caffeine - or that don't form a resistance, at least - strikes me as a worthwhile application of genetic engineering.
personally, i'd love to have that dna flipped...
c'mon, brain. you're supposed to like humidity.
the hypersensitivity is off the wall, but so be it. i think the pollen or whatever may have something to do with it (i've never been checked, but it's something that comes and goes). but, every little change in my surroundings produces these exaggerated responses. the atmospheric pressure changes, i get a stomach ache. the moisture level of the air changes, i get a headache. i'm starting to wonder if i was born with a swim bladder.....
in the end, it's just more proof that i am not a member of homo sapiens. sorry. like i've said - i don't mind being on the same clade. that's ok. but i'm not the same species as the rest of you.....
physically feeling snot harden at the top of your nose might be the weirdest shit ever.
actually, i feel a lot better since i woke up from a nap. weirdness, though.
it's actually the constant napping that's made me rather useless this month. awake for a few hours....zzzzz....again and again...
it's partly the fact that i keep putting myself in nicotine withdrawal. i realize this and realize i just need to make a fucking choice. as i've been stating for years, it's not the cigarettes that are stopping me from quitting altogether, it's the other things we smoke for recreational reasons. which i'm infrequent about. but it's putting me in constant withdrawal....
yet, i'm wondering if it has something to do with the weather, too, given how sensitive i seem to be to it. it's been so cold. and now my sinuses are thawing out.
coffee has stopped working, which scares me. i don't like the stronger options. maybe i'll switch brands.
the hypersensitivity is off the wall, but so be it. i think the pollen or whatever may have something to do with it (i've never been checked, but it's something that comes and goes). but, every little change in my surroundings produces these exaggerated responses. the atmospheric pressure changes, i get a stomach ache. the moisture level of the air changes, i get a headache. i'm starting to wonder if i was born with a swim bladder.....
in the end, it's just more proof that i am not a member of homo sapiens. sorry. like i've said - i don't mind being on the same clade. that's ok. but i'm not the same species as the rest of you.....
physically feeling snot harden at the top of your nose might be the weirdest shit ever.
actually, i feel a lot better since i woke up from a nap. weirdness, though.
it's actually the constant napping that's made me rather useless this month. awake for a few hours....zzzzz....again and again...
it's partly the fact that i keep putting myself in nicotine withdrawal. i realize this and realize i just need to make a fucking choice. as i've been stating for years, it's not the cigarettes that are stopping me from quitting altogether, it's the other things we smoke for recreational reasons. which i'm infrequent about. but it's putting me in constant withdrawal....
yet, i'm wondering if it has something to do with the weather, too, given how sensitive i seem to be to it. it's been so cold. and now my sinuses are thawing out.
coffee has stopped working, which scares me. i don't like the stronger options. maybe i'll switch brands.
Monday, February 17, 2014
people seem to think i care about genres. if i were to place my own music in one, it wouldn't otherwise exist. i call it "blender rock" in that it takes in influences from all over the place and melds it all together. it's a concept that roughly encapsulates the idea of "progressive rock", but explicitly rejects attempts to stabilize progressive music as having a defined sound. other artists i'd place in this genre would be zappa, beatles (66-69), hendrix, floyd, genesis (gabriel), can, elo, mahavishnu, crimson, bowie, queen, oldfield, cardiacs, cure, u2, swans, sonic youth, coil, foetus, neubauten, flaming lips, key/goettel, mbv, nirvana, nin, pumpkins, tool, tori, tortoise, mr. bungle, squarepusher, radiohead (-01), bjork, asmz, 65dos, keneally, mars volta, lightning bolt, spiral beach, man man, fuck buttons, genghis tron, battles, ssris, indricothere, st. vincent, pepepiano and la dispute. all are influences.
i'm interested in hearing about further examples of blender rock.
i'm interested in hearing about further examples of blender rock.
TAKE THAT YOUTUBE HIPSTERS.
man, i'm telling you. a hundred ad exec brains just exploded. there's no way to place this in a demographic.
i'm basically convinced at this point that youtube is swarming with "suits" that are going around ensuring that their products don't get bad advertising.
so, i'm trolling them. well the idea is to draw attention to myself in hopes that people might click through and listen to my own, but i find what i'm *actually* doing is arguing with ad execs that are trying to maintain the sanctity of their ads (which is what youtube is to a marketing douche - it's a way to upload advertisements for their records/products) while i convincingly insult their products.
of course, they need to find creative ways to defend their ads. so, they go looking through my shit looking for a way to create a caricature of me.
i'm on to you, fuckers.
man, i'm telling you. a hundred ad exec brains just exploded. there's no way to place this in a demographic.
i'm basically convinced at this point that youtube is swarming with "suits" that are going around ensuring that their products don't get bad advertising.
so, i'm trolling them. well the idea is to draw attention to myself in hopes that people might click through and listen to my own, but i find what i'm *actually* doing is arguing with ad execs that are trying to maintain the sanctity of their ads (which is what youtube is to a marketing douche - it's a way to upload advertisements for their records/products) while i convincingly insult their products.
of course, they need to find creative ways to defend their ads. so, they go looking through my shit looking for a way to create a caricature of me.
i'm on to you, fuckers.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
so, i'm considering setting my clock to cst. i live in the eastern time zone. allow me to explain.
i grew up in ottawa, which is several hundred kilometres east of where i am now, windsor. so, the sun came up earlier there, and set a little earlier as well. yet, i always wanted the sun to come up even earlier, not later. drats. foiled. yet, i feel if i set my clocks to cst, it will overcompensate in the direction i'd prefer.
then i started wondering if maybe everybody was on cst anyways, and it's weird that i'm still on est.
well, you'd have to think that a substantial number of people in the est edge of the midwest live on cst. those boundaries are probably merely a suggestion.
"see, this is why we can't have anarchism - i bet they think they can just pick their own time zones"
i grew up in ottawa, which is several hundred kilometres east of where i am now, windsor. so, the sun came up earlier there, and set a little earlier as well. yet, i always wanted the sun to come up even earlier, not later. drats. foiled. yet, i feel if i set my clocks to cst, it will overcompensate in the direction i'd prefer.
then i started wondering if maybe everybody was on cst anyways, and it's weird that i'm still on est.
well, you'd have to think that a substantial number of people in the est edge of the midwest live on cst. those boundaries are probably merely a suggestion.
"see, this is why we can't have anarchism - i bet they think they can just pick their own time zones"
stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (bandstand mix) (original upload)
i downloaded bandstand for the drums because the way i wrote the track required something that would read general midi through track 10. these are the drums that will be worked into the final mix. it's basically a way to play old midi files through vst, so i figure it qualifies as a different card mix.
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 12, 2014.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/bandstand-mix
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 12, 2014.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/bandstand-mix
years ago, when i first started recording music, there were a lot of things that couldn't be done with a computer. like, trying to use midi to trigger something that sounded like a guitar? you could make paste together guitar riffs that were obviously made using samplers, but the emulation wasn't close. other instruments, like strings, could be done fairly well with expensive synthesizers, but not with any widely available sound card.
when vst instruments came out, it was exciting but the plugins were mostly toys or driven around recording to wave in real time. over time, the power of midi-based vst plugins has come to the point where there's no longer any foreseeable limits in using midi (that is written musical notation) to convincingly emulate any possible instrument. the problem has been solved through sample libraries, mostly. when integrated with the power to synthesize, it's become a really complete answer to electronic sound production.
that doesn't mean i'm going to throw my guitar away. really, it's sort of the same thing with the guitar, although i noticed this around '08. using a combination of amp simulation and effects processing, i can basically make my old guitar sound like any type of guitar that's ever been recorded, and some that never have. with a relatively small investment, anything a guitarist could possibly imagine is available within software.
that actually makes it a really exciting time to be a musician.
when vst instruments came out, it was exciting but the plugins were mostly toys or driven around recording to wave in real time. over time, the power of midi-based vst plugins has come to the point where there's no longer any foreseeable limits in using midi (that is written musical notation) to convincingly emulate any possible instrument. the problem has been solved through sample libraries, mostly. when integrated with the power to synthesize, it's become a really complete answer to electronic sound production.
that doesn't mean i'm going to throw my guitar away. really, it's sort of the same thing with the guitar, although i noticed this around '08. using a combination of amp simulation and effects processing, i can basically make my old guitar sound like any type of guitar that's ever been recorded, and some that never have. with a relatively small investment, anything a guitarist could possibly imagine is available within software.
that actually makes it a really exciting time to be a musician.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
three midi mixes of stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides
1) played through winamp on a sb live! and captured in a sound editor.
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.
2) played through winamp on an m-audio delta and captured in a sound editor.
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/m-audio-mix
3) played through winamp on a sb live! through directmusic and captured in a sound editor.
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/directmusic-mix
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.
2) played through winamp on an m-audio delta and captured in a sound editor.
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/m-audio-mix
3) played through winamp on a sb live! through directmusic and captured in a sound editor.
written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/directmusic-mix
it's always fun watching viruses fail on my system because i deleted all the functionality in the operating system that they rely on to do stuff. i have no use for the code, it's just sitting there waiting to be exploited.
the first reboot after installing evaluation software will come up with a stream of error messages that will go away on the next reboot: cannot find xxx.dll. that's right. not there. sorry to disappoint you, nefarious script dial, but i just didn't think that file was a good idea to leave sitting there. my foresight is your misfortune.
the first reboot after installing evaluation software will come up with a stream of error messages that will go away on the next reboot: cannot find xxx.dll. that's right. not there. sorry to disappoint you, nefarious script dial, but i just didn't think that file was a good idea to leave sitting there. my foresight is your misfortune.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
i'm noticing that listeners on youtube have an attention span, both through metrics and observation. people are in it for the full record. so, i'm repackaging a few things to make them more whole. i don't think people are likely to use my playlists, but if i give them the whole thing at once they may just listen..
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DdI-ZoM0M8
even my earliest material was short on traditional songs, so this really stands out in my discography as a lo-fi psychedelic pop tune. i've connected the track to two guitar-driven psychedelic instrumental sections that i'm also rather fond of and that are leaning towards the composer that i became as i grew older.
something else i like to say about this song is that i give my age away clearly. it's a silly song about imaginary villains. not much depth to it. it's one of the few places where it's obvious that my voice hasn't changed yet. beyond that, this simply couldn't have been written by an adult. it's just too cute.
the instrumental sections at the beginning and end of this are older than 1996, and were both things that i would often play in my room for hours by myself to sort of chill myself out if i was going through some childhood drama. i dressed them both up here, but at their core they're both very sombre folk tunes. while i don't have clear memories of many of the thoughts i had when i was between ten and fifteen years old, i can state with certainty that i developed a lot of the core concepts that define who i am while meditating on these chord patterns.
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt7AWQ7QiOE
this is the second recording of the track (you can get to the first by clicking through the link). the initial 1997 recording is the first song-oriented keyboard-driven track in my discography. it's not the last one, but these tracks are relatively rare, coming from me. production wise, both versions of the track were huge steps forwards relative to when they were created. this version is defined uniquely by the sequencing. while i'd actually hesitate to order the two versions (the original is maybe a bit more raw, while the rerecording is more elaborate), i only want one version on youtube......
so, yeah: this is a song about a pre-treatment transgendered teenager fantasizing about genital mutilation. yeah, well, *life* is heavy. deal with it....
3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBPyVJCuydc
this was initially an anti-smoking song, and you want to interpret that as a kind of anti-corporate punk rock thing rather than an anti-libertarian thing. public health has a slightly different dimension to it in countries where health care is publicly operated. canada's health care system (or collection of systems) is not technically socialist, but the public funding model still brings ideas of public ownership (or at least public investment) into the equation. the question of finding ways to reduce large costs on smoking related illnesses is consequently a valid policy discussion, as it opens funds and resources to spend on other health concerns.
the initial demo version of this was recorded when i was 16; this version was recorded a little more than a year later. over that period, i smoked a few things, and i liked some of them. my anti-tobacco perspective did not weaken until my early 20s, and i actually even started smoking around the age of 20 as a stimulant (it works well with coffee), although all the versions of the track were done by this point. a lot of my argument against smoking was that it was just a pointless destruction of yourself. what i learned was that it has useful properties in increasing alertness. i suppose it's up to the end user to weigh the costs.
but, by the time i had this version done, i had made a clear decision to not be anti-pot. at the time, i would have been anti-alcohol, anti-tobacco and pro-pot. it's what the evidence i had seen suggested to me: alcohol and nicotine were very dangerous, while marijuana was not. so, i converted this song out of an anti-tobacco rant and into a pro-marijuana sample collage. that collage was somewhat juvenile, and has been removed from the track. however, it's accessible from bandcamp if you stumble through a maze of links to it.
musically, this is very post-punk and is coming out of the large amounts of early 80s music that i was listening to at the time.
4 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rF9wM1p0M
this is the final section of the last proper inri demo, which was written as somewhat of a suite, but only in a fleeting moment, and then forgotten. it's a sort of sardonic take on the jesus story, in that it follows a persecuted person through a suicide and a resurrection, with tongue in cheek commentary.
initially, it was a song suite about being young and not listened to, culminating in a rather dramatic overreaction - that i ridiculed as counter-productive, partly by reference to kurt cobain, whose suicide is an event that hangs over the childhood of my generation. people that were adults at the time might want to think of it in the same way that they interpreted watching kennedy get his brains blown out on live tv. as i grew up (stated loosely - i was still 17/18, here), i realized this is a general condition of society that is not limited to young people. so, i generalized it to reflect the illusion of what we call "democracy", and gave it an exaggerated persecution complex. the cynicism was targeted at the clinton administration, but in a broader sense i'm sort of ridiculing the rather cartoonish perception of generation x as this kind of raelian mass of fatalist children....
the vocals seem dead, and may confuse people looking at this as 90s punk (which is retroactively defined by it's screamy vocals). at the time, i considered screaming to be sort of contrived and passe. the recitation is a very considered reaction to something i interpreted as largely cartoonish. i mean, i was still influenced by the screamy stuff i grew up with, but it wasn't a characteristic of much of anything i was attracted to after about '97 or so.
the initial, somewhat abridged version was initially the end of my first inri cassette demo, which you can get to by clicking through the links.
i've pulled back from insisting on recited vocals in order to minimize that contrivedness, but the truth is that the vast majority of music released after about '97 that has screamed vocals very much *is* contrived. time has only cemented my rejection of falsely emotionalized vocals in punk-derived genres.
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DdI-ZoM0M8
even my earliest material was short on traditional songs, so this really stands out in my discography as a lo-fi psychedelic pop tune. i've connected the track to two guitar-driven psychedelic instrumental sections that i'm also rather fond of and that are leaning towards the composer that i became as i grew older.
something else i like to say about this song is that i give my age away clearly. it's a silly song about imaginary villains. not much depth to it. it's one of the few places where it's obvious that my voice hasn't changed yet. beyond that, this simply couldn't have been written by an adult. it's just too cute.
the instrumental sections at the beginning and end of this are older than 1996, and were both things that i would often play in my room for hours by myself to sort of chill myself out if i was going through some childhood drama. i dressed them both up here, but at their core they're both very sombre folk tunes. while i don't have clear memories of many of the thoughts i had when i was between ten and fifteen years old, i can state with certainty that i developed a lot of the core concepts that define who i am while meditating on these chord patterns.
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt7AWQ7QiOE
this is the second recording of the track (you can get to the first by clicking through the link). the initial 1997 recording is the first song-oriented keyboard-driven track in my discography. it's not the last one, but these tracks are relatively rare, coming from me. production wise, both versions of the track were huge steps forwards relative to when they were created. this version is defined uniquely by the sequencing. while i'd actually hesitate to order the two versions (the original is maybe a bit more raw, while the rerecording is more elaborate), i only want one version on youtube......
so, yeah: this is a song about a pre-treatment transgendered teenager fantasizing about genital mutilation. yeah, well, *life* is heavy. deal with it....
3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBPyVJCuydc
this was initially an anti-smoking song, and you want to interpret that as a kind of anti-corporate punk rock thing rather than an anti-libertarian thing. public health has a slightly different dimension to it in countries where health care is publicly operated. canada's health care system (or collection of systems) is not technically socialist, but the public funding model still brings ideas of public ownership (or at least public investment) into the equation. the question of finding ways to reduce large costs on smoking related illnesses is consequently a valid policy discussion, as it opens funds and resources to spend on other health concerns.
the initial demo version of this was recorded when i was 16; this version was recorded a little more than a year later. over that period, i smoked a few things, and i liked some of them. my anti-tobacco perspective did not weaken until my early 20s, and i actually even started smoking around the age of 20 as a stimulant (it works well with coffee), although all the versions of the track were done by this point. a lot of my argument against smoking was that it was just a pointless destruction of yourself. what i learned was that it has useful properties in increasing alertness. i suppose it's up to the end user to weigh the costs.
but, by the time i had this version done, i had made a clear decision to not be anti-pot. at the time, i would have been anti-alcohol, anti-tobacco and pro-pot. it's what the evidence i had seen suggested to me: alcohol and nicotine were very dangerous, while marijuana was not. so, i converted this song out of an anti-tobacco rant and into a pro-marijuana sample collage. that collage was somewhat juvenile, and has been removed from the track. however, it's accessible from bandcamp if you stumble through a maze of links to it.
musically, this is very post-punk and is coming out of the large amounts of early 80s music that i was listening to at the time.
4 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rF9wM1p0M
this is the final section of the last proper inri demo, which was written as somewhat of a suite, but only in a fleeting moment, and then forgotten. it's a sort of sardonic take on the jesus story, in that it follows a persecuted person through a suicide and a resurrection, with tongue in cheek commentary.
initially, it was a song suite about being young and not listened to, culminating in a rather dramatic overreaction - that i ridiculed as counter-productive, partly by reference to kurt cobain, whose suicide is an event that hangs over the childhood of my generation. people that were adults at the time might want to think of it in the same way that they interpreted watching kennedy get his brains blown out on live tv. as i grew up (stated loosely - i was still 17/18, here), i realized this is a general condition of society that is not limited to young people. so, i generalized it to reflect the illusion of what we call "democracy", and gave it an exaggerated persecution complex. the cynicism was targeted at the clinton administration, but in a broader sense i'm sort of ridiculing the rather cartoonish perception of generation x as this kind of raelian mass of fatalist children....
the vocals seem dead, and may confuse people looking at this as 90s punk (which is retroactively defined by it's screamy vocals). at the time, i considered screaming to be sort of contrived and passe. the recitation is a very considered reaction to something i interpreted as largely cartoonish. i mean, i was still influenced by the screamy stuff i grew up with, but it wasn't a characteristic of much of anything i was attracted to after about '97 or so.
the initial, somewhat abridged version was initially the end of my first inri cassette demo, which you can get to by clicking through the links.
i've pulled back from insisting on recited vocals in order to minimize that contrivedness, but the truth is that the vast majority of music released after about '97 that has screamed vocals very much *is* contrived. time has only cemented my rejection of falsely emotionalized vocals in punk-derived genres.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Thursday, February 6, 2014
deathtokoalas
ok, so, as we all know, this record was hugely influential on both "post-hardcore" and, by extension, "post-rock". specifically, the "jazzy" guitar playing.
i'm just wondering if anybody can pinpoint any influences on the guitar playing on this record? i mean, i can hear an influence from new york (sonic youth, and the web of artists behind them), but it's not total. specifically, it's not the extent of the tonality.
more specifically, i'm hearing the sound come up in a lot of recent hardcore acts (animal faces, touche amore, la dispute, defeater, native, loma prieta) and i'm starting to realize that it's a huge part of what i like about them, partially because i'm relating it to my favourite post-rock bands (do make say think especially) and a bunch of noise & no wave i grew up with. so, there's all kinds of continuity there. what is really the source, though? it must have a history before spiderland.
conversely, i'm also wondering if anybody could steer me carefully through emo & post-hardcore from slint to the bands i've mentioned, with a specific focus on that clean and jazzy guitar playing. i was listening to post-rock & idm, mostly. up until extremely recently, i've never really been able to get into any kind of dc punk, or anything that's come from it. it just all sounded like noisy garbage to me. but, the merging of dc punk and melodic hardcore is striking me as a killer combination - the dissonance is reclaiming it from being noisy garbage. that, and a lot of these bands are writing weird concept albums and stuff.
anyways, yeah. research project - trace the guitar style on this record both forwards and backwards.
MrOtisotis
I'm not really clear on what your question is, but the guitar sound in Slint is essentially expanded upon in the band Tortoise, which is the band the guitarist of Slint formed after this album.
deathtokoalas
yeah. there was labradford, too. i'm deeply familiar with post-rock. it's the hardcore side i'm less familiar with.
the closest thing i've been able to find so far is the first june of 44 record.
MrOtisotis
oh I see what you mean, hardcore I know nothing of either, sorry I could'nt help you out
Lourenço Veiga
maybe king crimson
deathtokoalas
actually, i need to vehemently state that this does NOT sound like crimson of any era. it's sort of an annoyance to me, actually, because i grew up listening to crimson (and studying fripp's guitar playing). there's a certain metered guitar aspect to it that very vaguely sounds like some of the things robert fripp was doing outside of king crimson, but the proper influence on this in that aspect is steve reich, and not through fripp or eno but through branca, swans and sonic youth. a better english prog comparison than fripp & crimson is actually the hackett/gabriel period of genesis.
where crimson had an influence on post-rock is more indirectly through the symphonic side, such as a band like gybe!. that's lark tongues in aspic period crimson, mostly. all the weird rhythms and stuff can again more accurately be traced to the no wave scene: dna, teenage jesus, that kind of stuff. pajo's style was always highly fluid and lyrical, whereas fripp's was very jagged and constructed.
crimson, of course, has had a huge influence on various neo-prog acts from dream theatre to porcupine tree. and, through his work with bowie and gabriel, he helped define a "new wave" guitar style that was dominant in the 80s. you can also hear a lot of fripp in something like polvo, and a lot of the noise that came from it. but i'd really like to go back in time and yell at whomever it was that first drew the comparison between crimson and math rock. it was just lazy journalism. it must have been that crimson was the only band that the guy knew that played in abstract time signatures. i guess he'd never heard of led zeppelin. more topically, he clearly had no understanding of the punk jazz thing, or of john zorn.
Lourenço Veiga
the guy from slint? of course the style came from no wave but the guitars sound a lot like fripp.. if he heard them or not i dont care, they are amazing anyways.. big black, sonic youth, talk talk and rites of spring are obvious inspirations since they were an american hardcore band, and those guys were very close minded in terms of music (actually they only heard those bands - steve albini said) that was american and underground. glenn branca and swans and that stuff were an influence to the influences of slint, in my opinion
deathtokoalas
i dunno. i don't hear any rites of spring on the record, but i think i can weakly abstract the big black. talk talk is often cited in such situations, but i honestly don't really hear the similarity. sonic youth, i agree is pretty dominant.
regardless, i think the crux of my argument was that what you're mistaking for fripp is really reich, through a few channels of influence.
i was really more interested in charting the way forwards, and i think i've found an undercurrent that's been previously traveled.
DiamorphineDeath
there's a lot of rites of spring influence on this album dude....
deathtokoalas
i don't agree at all.
i mean, to begin with, i don't think rites of spring were very special. it's pretty garden variety, generic punk. embrace took a really weird spin on black flag (and ian mackaye's attempt to sell out didn't initially work as planned), but before that there wasn't really anything special about what we anachronistically label as emo. so, if you could identify a punk sound, there's not any reason to pull the influence from rites of spring specifically, rather than any other punk band - except certain conventions that are almost entirely bullshit.
....but there isn't a punk sound to the disc to begin with. at all. remotely...
Lourenço Veiga
lol of course there is... this is pure hardcore PUNK but slower (it's called post-hardcore). and i still think it sounds a lot like crimson
deathtokoalas
i've stated repeatedly that the dominant guitar influence on the record is sonic youth. at no point do the guitars deviate from a massive sonic youth influence. it's the only really discernible influence. that's the reality. as you've confused fripp with reich, you've confused dc emo with new york no wave.
i would nearly be willing to restrict the record to a SINGLE influence of sonic youth, and even insult slint by saying "man, they're just a second rate sonic youth knock off" except that there's a missing quantity. this record is 90% sonic youth, 10% something else (exact numbers derived from the a.s.s. equation). i don't know what that something else is. it'll bug me forever. i'll get it eventually.
Stefan Bruge
Although I'm sure they weren't influenced by them, whenever I hear Spiderland I am always reminded of The Gordons, an early 80s New Zealand band who have that Sonic Youth detuned guitar sound and sort of lurching rhythm that The Butthole Surfers would make their own. The Gordons revival starts here!
deathtokoalas
just in case anybody was curious, the path outwards i've found (and what i was more interested in discussing) goes through the following:
june of 44 - engine takes to the water (louisville)
a minor forest (sf bay area)
*indian summer (sf bay area)
*portraits of past (sf bay area)
*native nod (new york)
i've searched through hundreds of crappy (scr)emo acts of varying levels of popularity and that's the entirety of what i can pull out as being both influenced by slint and an influence on either late 90s and early 00s post-rock or modern hardcore or both, and actually being worth listening to. there's some other obvious links (eg, saetia) that are just awful. the sf stuff is noticeably coloured by drive like jehu and seems to be the "home base" of the sound i'm tracing here, if you will.
* - bands i'd flat out never heard of until this week.
if anybody has any further suggestions as to how to trace this particular jazzy guitar sound (and recited beat vocals) into the existent "wave" of arty melodic hardcore that exists, it would be neat to hear them.
and maybe we've exhausted the boundaries of the existing debate?
+Stefan Bruge it's a bit weird deriving the missing section from the butthole surfers, who were of course never meant to be taken very seriously. i just put on hairway to steven for the first time in a long time, though, and i think you might have a point.
what's interesting is that that record is a lot easier to deconstruct into morricone, zeppelin, hendrix, etc.
i was kind of hoping for an obscure jazz musician. i think it's a little bit of a downer to take it from there, tbh - but it's the best suggestion i've seen so far,
(pause)
yeah. halfway through piouhgd and i consider this issue resolved - slint is roughly 90% sonic youth, roughly 10% butthole surfers. so, we can close this discussion now.
unless people have suggestions moving forwards
gorryman
There is a doc in the works something like "following the breadcrumbs" might have some definitive answers ,,,being that they were from Loisville ,,,I might ad them kids is crazy down there I would dig deeper into jazz for lack of a better term for peeps like Larry Coryell and John Fahey awkward spacey finger picking and dissonance probably had a crazy jazz fusion drunk uncle around handing them weird vinyl "my two cents"
kerry mcphearson
Jawbox and Glassjaw are definitely the bands your looking for. "See For Your Own Special Special Sweethart" and "Worship & Tribute"...I would say that they also influenced artist like PJ harvey, Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. Hell spiderland even influenced older artist like Tom waits, Swans and Scott Walker
deathtokoalas
naw, that's exactly what i'm trying to avoid. terrible music, all of it (except swans).
glassjaw got a little better when they grew up a bit, but their early material is some of the dumbest noisy garbage i've ever heard. jawbox were always boring corporate pop that had more to do with bon jovi than punk rock. modest mouse, pj harvey and built to spill were equally boring indie rock for college dropouts. and i'd rather listen to bowie than walker.
but, while all of that horrible music was selling lots of records, there has to have been something more interesting happening under the surface because i can hear it's effects in bands like la dispute. that's what i'm charting out.
what i'm realizing is there was an underground movement i wasn't aware of. please avoid further corporate rock suggestions. not a fan of corporate rock...
o9k
Omg you are such a douche. Even if they (or you) disliked 'corporate rock' they could very well be inspired by it. Without knowing it, or just to do it differently. But to get back to the point, I think the guitar-style is influenced by Greg Ginn. He also had this unique "jazzy" and "off" way of playing.
deathtokoalas
i was rejecting corporate rock derivations from slint, not proposed corporate rock influences on slint. i asked the question, so i have a right to restrict the answers. really, nothing that's been discussed as influential up to this point would qualify as corporate rock. crimson had some influence on garbage like journey, but crimson themselves are generally acknowledged as "the prog band that never sold out". and they really didn't. even their early 80s new wave period remained challenging listening.
ginn and morris were both talented and educated punk guitarists and definitely stand out in that sense. i have to admit i'm not familiar with the jazz side of the sst catalog, and i'll acknowledge that's a good suggestion for possible influence. it's easy to see how they could have just grabbed some sst discs thinking they were hardcore and - surprise! but the ginn sound was more free jazzy. it's not really the flowing, shimmery, morricone-esque style that i'm hoping is ultimately traceable through from slint to defeater and la dispute.
to update on that, i've bumped into a band called frodus that seems as though they were destined for greatness and yet had to deal with unending bad luck. but they themselves sound, to me, like a cross between foetus and nirvana, with a heavy dual influence from la (jane's addiction, rhcp) and dc (fugazi). those shimmery guitars are there, but they're a minor aspect. so, i'm trying to find something parallel to that that jumps underneath the next wave of bands (that is, i'm seeking an influential underground, arty counterpart to thrice or thursday that isn't as metal as saetia).
to broaden the spectrum a bit, i should point out that there were some very mainstream 90s records that have that jazzy guitar sound - lp2 by sunny day real estate, ok computer by radiohead, razorblade suitcase by bush and to a lesser extent anything by tool. what i'm looking for might actually be those bands. these acts were teenagers in the 90s...
Chris Anderson
Check out "Cows- Sorry in Pig Minor". The style reminds me a little bit of this, and it came out just before Spiderland. Not entirely the same, but I definitely get similar vibes-- and Cows are more on the hardcore side of things.
deathtokoalas
i'm not as familiar with cows as i am with some of the other stuff from the period (i tried a few times, but it's just too atonal), but i really don't hear what you're talking about - unless you mean to draw attention to the common influence from sonic youth type stuff, in which case that's true, but not at all what i'm talking about. also, that seems to be their last record, from many years after spiderland.
yeah, i'm listening to that one right now and i don't hear much of a comparison (except in the sense that the first track seems to be a bit of a joke), but it's definitely a lot less.....stupid.....than their earlier material.
i've never really understood why people really listen to stuff like ween, butthole surfers, cows, etc over and over again. or even the acid mothers. i could see how it would be fun to see live, but the recordings become flat out idiotic after the shock value wears off.
it mostly comes from zappa, but zappa's musicianship was really top notch, which can keep you coming back. bungle, i get, for the same reason. but the bulk of that stuff is just....yuck...
Chris Anderson
Eh, it's just music. I don't think it's really supposed to be taken that seriously. For the same reason people like Picasso even though his paintings aren't that technically impressive, people enjoy The Cows, Butthole Surfers etc. It's not about power levels or some pedantic wrong or right- it's just art-it's an aesthetic. It's meant to express a mood felt by people during that time- it's supposed to be fun. Even if something seems like 'a joke' that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
Personally, I think 'Cabin Man' is a pretty solid track, all around. It portrays a definite nihilistic kind of delirious aesthetic. On the other hand, I could argue that in a lot of cases Zappa gets too farcical and starts to suffer musically due to this-- but I'm not going to, because I get that it doesn't matter and that was just the art he felt like making at the time. Listen to what you like, I only recommended Sorry in Pig Minor because it has a similar grim existential aesthetic to Spiderland, albeit the group is more conventional for music of the period.
deathtokoalas
most of that strain of noise music is definitely not meant to be taken seriously, which is what i'm getting at. that's why it's awful. there's not serious on the level of satire, and not serious on the level of not having an artistic vision. these people were better labeled drunkards than artists.
and, no, art isn't entirely subjective. there's no use in comparing apples to oranges, but it's very much worthwhile to point out that this person here has a cogent thought process that was carefully put together and this person here flipped on a delay pedal and went for a smoke. at that point, it's up to the listener to consciously choose openly bad music, which is no doubt exactly what's going on when somebody picks a butthole surfers record off the shelf.
to put it another way, i run a review page that has a five year grace period on it because i want to get what the record meant rather than first impressions. there's a scale from 0 to 11 with 0 the highest, but it's not strictly a linear ranking. near the bottom, it's more about categories. a mark of 8 translates to "it's fun because it's stupid". i'll analyze something like white zombie that way. i know it's stupid, but that's exactly why the jokes keep on giving. that is to say that nailing white zombie, which would be necessary if i were to do the review objectively, would be to miss the reality that it's stupidity is also it's charm. there's a wide swath of music that, in this way, defies the way that music critics work. it needs to be put aside into it's own space.
i wouldn't put most of the material by meat puppets, butthole surfers, ween, big black, the cows or the rest of that batch of music in this category, because the jokes aren't good enough. it's just shitty music; it doesn't deserve that kind of special treatment. however, separating them out from normal analysis as outliers is more or less what most of their fan base is doing. in the more extreme cases, it may be all they listen to. understanding that requires a pavlovian, not a music critic.
there's absolutely a level of objective analysis underlying that, but it's suspended to take into consideration that the musicians involved are purposefully pushing back against it. personally, i'd rather just ignore that and bulldoze them into the crap pile, but that's precisely where the choice to listen to objectively bad music comes in.
Chris Anderson
That's just, like, your opinion man. Music is probably the most subjective art form there is next to visual art-- I think you'd be doing your line of critics and viewership a lot of credit if you'd stop using an arbitrary scale to rate bands that you just don't feel. You're comparing sounds, dude, literally you are comparing sounds and making that judgement, that one is silly and fun and the other is just stupid. I get it, I make my own judgements like that all the time-- I just don't know where you get off pretending you are so justified in your analysis. I guess that's the problem with critics, just have to convince yourself your opinion is final.
deathtokoalas
i'm not suggesting people aren't allowed to disagree with me. in the end, it is indeed merely my opinion. but, analyzing the creative organization of sound is not the same thing as analyzing the wind blowing through the trees. in the sense that organizing sound is a type of thought, criticizing music is as valid as criticizing any other argument.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
if this is trying to sound like red, it's the greatest failure in the history of music. i'm a fusion guitar player. i've studied fripp's playing in a lot of detail, off and on for roughly twenty years.
(edit: here's one of my frippertronics influenced pieces. there's several others if you click my name and check the vid. well, might as well, considering the length of the thread. /watch?v=OsbbHeMAenE)
and it was basically my childhood lullabies. it's a record i could hum from start to finish. spiderland is really not remotely similar. so, even if there was an attempt (and i'm really not buying this), the absolute dissimilarity indicates that there must have been more dominant, subconscious influences.
it sounds far more like the meat puppets.
besides, as has been mentioned repeatedly, it's abundantly obvious that they basically ought to be sending out royalty checks to thurston moore and lee renaldo. not that they'd take them. but, it's abundantly clear that that's the dominant influence.
rhombusskullvsteal1
this is distorted guitar which is used in post hardcore more than post rock, but could be said to take place in both. I think it's post rock/ emotive hardcore, or somewhere on the schism between genres. they are unique for sure. I don't know how to label them.
deathtokoalas
yeah. i'm not having difficulty putting the noisier aspect in context. that's kind of more my niche. like i say, i'm pulling it directly from sonic youth but there was a whole movement there, really. "no wave". it's the sound of 'for dinner' that has been hugely influential and seems to me to come out of nowhere.
as an aside, i don't think the spoken word aspect of this is really connectable to what was called "emotive hardcore" in 1991. in 1995, maybe, but that's getting anachronistic. i think that needs to be traced right back to the beats. but, through who? again, we have sonic youth as the most likely suspect, due to their sort of obsession with burroughs and others. in the context of the period, then, i'd have to put slint in the same genre as sonic youth and swans - no wave, with a bit of a goth flair. or even just alternative rock. it's fair to point out it had an influence on other stuff, but trying to connect it to stuff that came later is sort of anachronistic.
i honestly can't really hear what's particularly different about rites of spring at all. and it just sounds to me like mackaye was listening to a lot of black flag when he put together embrace. then fugazi drew a lot both on the chicago big black thing and the la rhcp thing, which brought that big bass sound forward as dominant in the area. for a good five years that big bass sound seems to have defined the punk of the area, or at least virtually all of it i've heard. one has to go to the west coast to hear the future (scr)emo sound begin to develop. neither this nor what followed it sound to me like they're in that dc punk genealogy; i really don't hear any dc punk or even chicago punk in this at all. it's all new york, to me.
ReadyMindsetGo
Just a thought that arose while reading this dialogue... instead of speculating and coming up with your own conclusions on who influenced whom, why don't you contact band members themselves with your questions? Also, I wonder what you hope to get out of all this.
deathtokoalas
asking people directly is never a good way to get a good answer. it's inevitably going to come with little more than a set of biases. i grew up listening to tears for fears and they formed a big part of how i understand melody. yet, i would never cite them as an influence, for a variety of reasons. so, i don't think i'm going to get anything out of asking them besides the standard story, which is at best incomplete.
and i'm just looking for a guitarist to listen to.
Dan White
Wouldn't an incomplete story from the artists themselves still be valuable?
deathtokoalas
i think i'm likely to get more valuable responses in a forum like this.
JeanPaul LeFebvre
I honestly think you are putting WAY too much thought into what these guys were thinking when they made this album. Just listen. Everybody is going to hear something different. That's what is so great about music.
deathtokoalas
nah. i'm just looking for the source of the guitar style, again mostly because i like listening to it. although, admittedly, also because i have a hobby review site that aims to piece together these kinds of connections.
for me, the sound peaks in do make say think. so, when i get around to writing essays about their records, i'm going to want to understand the historical context properly.
i know writing these histories is something a lot of people frown on, but it's something i think somebody really should be doing. as is probably clear, slint is a bit before my time. but i lived through dmst's rise in ottawa. and they're important, historically, for other reasons i'd rather not remind myself of.
i should probably point out that this isn't my favourite record or anything. we all know how influential it was. but regarding the rock of the period, i'd personally rather listen to sonic youth. or drive like jehu. or the smashing pumpkins...
Eben Hoffer
there was a pitchfork interview with slint a little while ago, on the anniversary-- which I can't seem to find right now, but go looking-- and they talked a good amount about how being in louisville at the time they were playing meant they were really cut off from a lot of what was happening in other indie scenes, and to a large extent were trying crazy stuff and following their noses without much of a sense of 'influence'. I'd look to other 90s 00s kentucky bands, like rodan, rachel's, and in general anything on quarterstick records.
Ned Blackburn
are you sure you don't hear some Red-era crimson in here? Dem tritones...i can hear some shellac too. also leave Jawbox alone, FYSS is a fantastic record
deathtokoalas
as i said before, fripp was a very jagged and constructed player when he was in crimson. his rhythm work was based on sudden interruptions and jarring juxtapositions. his work with eno was a little less written out, but it was almost entirely lead playing. the aspect of pajo's style that i'm drawing attention to and trying to trace forwards (through a minor forest and tortoise to do make say think, and also to la dispute through some still unknown intermediary) is really fluid and based mostly on strong voiceleading. this is a renaldo/moore/branca/reich thing.
about the only thing i can hear is a mild similarity between washer and starless, but it's mild - washer sounds no more like starless than it does like tears for fears or joy division or the cure or television or even u2. red is mostly a jazz fusion record; slint is definitely in a punk lineage. again: sonic youth is the missing link there, not king crimson.
if anything, i hear more of an influence from early 80s belew, which was the period he was also working with the talking heads.
i may have over-reacted in reducing the shellac and big black influences. that would have been out of annoyance. i'm asking for influences forward (and tangentially, backwards) regarding a flowing, jazz-influenced, voice-leading clean guitar style. that's not coming from albini, although some of the (sporadic) heavier sections might plausibly be. again, though, i don't see any reason to deviate from the heavy sonic youth dominance in the sound.
functio1
It's no big deal in terms of their sound. If you play the vinyl at twice speed it sounds like various bands that were around slightly before this album, specifically punk bands like SNFU, Spermbirds and a few others. Slowing all that down wasn't just something Slint did - Codeine did the same thing, and others slowed things down even more (even down to the 'brown note'). The only reason some people chuck the 'jazzy' thing at Slint is probably because (a) they're music journos who'd never heard of the band until post 2000 and were desperate to quantify it into some sort of genre pigeon hole (such is their wont, the talentless gits) and (b) some people are generally ignorant of a whole flavour of hardcore punk that did the whole timing/chord change stuff, only faster, in the late 80s. I first heard this album the week it came out in the UK, and at very very high volume through a madly powerful PA. Yes, it was amazingly good, but at the time we didn't sit around rubbing our chins and pondering where it all came from, whether it was jazzy, etc etc - it was a progression of things that had gone on before, especially if you'd listened to some US hardcore bands from a few years before. And, to be honest, it did have the flavour of Big Black, Bitch Magnet, and a few others when hearing it the first time around - and especially if you'd heard Slint's first album when that came out. So it's a melange, in a good way. But anyone trying to make out that it was some sort of isolated new sound that suddenly appeared in 1991 is not only barking up the wrong tree, but is barking up the wrong tree in the wrong forest.
deathtokoalas
i think i mostly agree with what you're saying (although it should be clarified that what came from it was pretty jazzy. i mentioned a few times i'm working backwards from dmst and tortoise, who are both pretty jazzy), and i can construct the general idea of it well from all the stuff like swans and sonic youth that i spent so much time with in the late 90s (working backwards from growing up with grunge), but there's a specific voice leading in the sound that is undeniably Jazz (with a capital j).
but, maybe it was just some guitarists sitting down and deciding they liked a type of voice leading. nobody seems to have a better answer.
i seem like i'm contradicting myself, lol. i mean, it's slowed down hardcore (i've used the goofy term no wave, just cause people understand what that means, and it fits like a glove in it's most generic meaning), at it's root rather than jazz. but (in places) it's using a guitar-centric compositional technique found in a lot of smoother types of jazz (rather than the more free, noisy jazz crimson fit into.). and i've listened to so many jazz guitarists, and just can't place the style well - despite hearing it come up over and over again in all kinds of music from about 95 onwards.
*shrug*.
functio1
Maybe it's better just to see it as coming from the more metal elements of hardcore/thrash. That all may have jazz roots, but it doesn't mean that any of those bands had heard of any of it. People borrow from all over the place without having to trace a direct line from one form of music into their own. You just roll with what you like the sound of, and may not know - or care - where it comes from. The same could be said of jazz guitarists too, of course.
deathtokoalas
there's practically no voice leading in that type of metal. it's pretty much the precise characteristic that gives it that ugly sound. it's all fifths crashing against each other.
as somebody that is interested in the historical development of the instrument, it's very interesting to me. so, it'd be nice if people could lay off the "it doesn't matter" schtick. to me, it does. because i want it to..
David Jackson
I found an interview with Britt Walford where he goes into detail on what music he thinks influenced Spiderland. Artists he mentions in the interview are: Nick Cave, Madonna and Big Black. http://www.factmag.com/2014/03/12/murder-ballads-an-interview-with-slint/
Also a Dave Pajo list of his top 13 albums. Big Black shows up again, as well as Steve Reich, Leonard Cohen, Die Kreuzen.
http://thequietus.com/articles/13851-david-pajo-slint-favourite-albums
For the record neither mentions King Crimson or Butthole Surfers
deathtokoalas
see, this is what i mean, though. the reich and cave (and maybe cohen) are probably legitimate, the big black is maybe posing a little (although it's there), the die kreuzen is probably posing flat out (it's often mentioned as an influence on "emo") and the rest of it almost seems sarcastic. it's like he's inserting madonna for swans or something. still, none of it gets to the aspect of the sound i'm thinking of...
Voyaging123
the playing is largely uninfluenced; in other words, it is almost entirely original/innovative, there's a reason this album is so important in the history of rock
great works of art cannot be strictly traced back to their predecessors for the very reason they are great: they are original, though of course true and complete originality is impossible... I see no obvious direct influences on the playing
deathtokoalas
nothing is uninfluenced. pretentious nonsense.
it's a total rip-off of sonic youth.
and it's not a great record. an influential record, sure, but a pretty boring one, in totality.
i'm sick of morons responding to this so i'm closing the thread. if you have anything worthwhile to say, find a way to contact me. otherwise, fuck you.
ugh. if you're going to try to track me down to give me your brilliant insight, please LOOK UP WHAT THE TERM "VOICE LEADING" MEANS FIRST.
judging from past attempts to track me down, chances are that you not only do not have the insight i'm looking for, but you probably don't even understand the question.
read this first. please:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_leading
ok, so, as we all know, this record was hugely influential on both "post-hardcore" and, by extension, "post-rock". specifically, the "jazzy" guitar playing.
i'm just wondering if anybody can pinpoint any influences on the guitar playing on this record? i mean, i can hear an influence from new york (sonic youth, and the web of artists behind them), but it's not total. specifically, it's not the extent of the tonality.
more specifically, i'm hearing the sound come up in a lot of recent hardcore acts (animal faces, touche amore, la dispute, defeater, native, loma prieta) and i'm starting to realize that it's a huge part of what i like about them, partially because i'm relating it to my favourite post-rock bands (do make say think especially) and a bunch of noise & no wave i grew up with. so, there's all kinds of continuity there. what is really the source, though? it must have a history before spiderland.
conversely, i'm also wondering if anybody could steer me carefully through emo & post-hardcore from slint to the bands i've mentioned, with a specific focus on that clean and jazzy guitar playing. i was listening to post-rock & idm, mostly. up until extremely recently, i've never really been able to get into any kind of dc punk, or anything that's come from it. it just all sounded like noisy garbage to me. but, the merging of dc punk and melodic hardcore is striking me as a killer combination - the dissonance is reclaiming it from being noisy garbage. that, and a lot of these bands are writing weird concept albums and stuff.
anyways, yeah. research project - trace the guitar style on this record both forwards and backwards.
MrOtisotis
I'm not really clear on what your question is, but the guitar sound in Slint is essentially expanded upon in the band Tortoise, which is the band the guitarist of Slint formed after this album.
deathtokoalas
yeah. there was labradford, too. i'm deeply familiar with post-rock. it's the hardcore side i'm less familiar with.
the closest thing i've been able to find so far is the first june of 44 record.
MrOtisotis
oh I see what you mean, hardcore I know nothing of either, sorry I could'nt help you out
Lourenço Veiga
maybe king crimson
deathtokoalas
actually, i need to vehemently state that this does NOT sound like crimson of any era. it's sort of an annoyance to me, actually, because i grew up listening to crimson (and studying fripp's guitar playing). there's a certain metered guitar aspect to it that very vaguely sounds like some of the things robert fripp was doing outside of king crimson, but the proper influence on this in that aspect is steve reich, and not through fripp or eno but through branca, swans and sonic youth. a better english prog comparison than fripp & crimson is actually the hackett/gabriel period of genesis.
where crimson had an influence on post-rock is more indirectly through the symphonic side, such as a band like gybe!. that's lark tongues in aspic period crimson, mostly. all the weird rhythms and stuff can again more accurately be traced to the no wave scene: dna, teenage jesus, that kind of stuff. pajo's style was always highly fluid and lyrical, whereas fripp's was very jagged and constructed.
crimson, of course, has had a huge influence on various neo-prog acts from dream theatre to porcupine tree. and, through his work with bowie and gabriel, he helped define a "new wave" guitar style that was dominant in the 80s. you can also hear a lot of fripp in something like polvo, and a lot of the noise that came from it. but i'd really like to go back in time and yell at whomever it was that first drew the comparison between crimson and math rock. it was just lazy journalism. it must have been that crimson was the only band that the guy knew that played in abstract time signatures. i guess he'd never heard of led zeppelin. more topically, he clearly had no understanding of the punk jazz thing, or of john zorn.
Lourenço Veiga
the guy from slint? of course the style came from no wave but the guitars sound a lot like fripp.. if he heard them or not i dont care, they are amazing anyways.. big black, sonic youth, talk talk and rites of spring are obvious inspirations since they were an american hardcore band, and those guys were very close minded in terms of music (actually they only heard those bands - steve albini said) that was american and underground. glenn branca and swans and that stuff were an influence to the influences of slint, in my opinion
deathtokoalas
i dunno. i don't hear any rites of spring on the record, but i think i can weakly abstract the big black. talk talk is often cited in such situations, but i honestly don't really hear the similarity. sonic youth, i agree is pretty dominant.
regardless, i think the crux of my argument was that what you're mistaking for fripp is really reich, through a few channels of influence.
i was really more interested in charting the way forwards, and i think i've found an undercurrent that's been previously traveled.
DiamorphineDeath
there's a lot of rites of spring influence on this album dude....
deathtokoalas
i don't agree at all.
i mean, to begin with, i don't think rites of spring were very special. it's pretty garden variety, generic punk. embrace took a really weird spin on black flag (and ian mackaye's attempt to sell out didn't initially work as planned), but before that there wasn't really anything special about what we anachronistically label as emo. so, if you could identify a punk sound, there's not any reason to pull the influence from rites of spring specifically, rather than any other punk band - except certain conventions that are almost entirely bullshit.
....but there isn't a punk sound to the disc to begin with. at all. remotely...
Lourenço Veiga
lol of course there is... this is pure hardcore PUNK but slower (it's called post-hardcore). and i still think it sounds a lot like crimson
deathtokoalas
i've stated repeatedly that the dominant guitar influence on the record is sonic youth. at no point do the guitars deviate from a massive sonic youth influence. it's the only really discernible influence. that's the reality. as you've confused fripp with reich, you've confused dc emo with new york no wave.
i would nearly be willing to restrict the record to a SINGLE influence of sonic youth, and even insult slint by saying "man, they're just a second rate sonic youth knock off" except that there's a missing quantity. this record is 90% sonic youth, 10% something else (exact numbers derived from the a.s.s. equation). i don't know what that something else is. it'll bug me forever. i'll get it eventually.
Stefan Bruge
Although I'm sure they weren't influenced by them, whenever I hear Spiderland I am always reminded of The Gordons, an early 80s New Zealand band who have that Sonic Youth detuned guitar sound and sort of lurching rhythm that The Butthole Surfers would make their own. The Gordons revival starts here!
deathtokoalas
just in case anybody was curious, the path outwards i've found (and what i was more interested in discussing) goes through the following:
june of 44 - engine takes to the water (louisville)
a minor forest (sf bay area)
*indian summer (sf bay area)
*portraits of past (sf bay area)
*native nod (new york)
i've searched through hundreds of crappy (scr)emo acts of varying levels of popularity and that's the entirety of what i can pull out as being both influenced by slint and an influence on either late 90s and early 00s post-rock or modern hardcore or both, and actually being worth listening to. there's some other obvious links (eg, saetia) that are just awful. the sf stuff is noticeably coloured by drive like jehu and seems to be the "home base" of the sound i'm tracing here, if you will.
* - bands i'd flat out never heard of until this week.
if anybody has any further suggestions as to how to trace this particular jazzy guitar sound (and recited beat vocals) into the existent "wave" of arty melodic hardcore that exists, it would be neat to hear them.
and maybe we've exhausted the boundaries of the existing debate?
+Stefan Bruge it's a bit weird deriving the missing section from the butthole surfers, who were of course never meant to be taken very seriously. i just put on hairway to steven for the first time in a long time, though, and i think you might have a point.
what's interesting is that that record is a lot easier to deconstruct into morricone, zeppelin, hendrix, etc.
i was kind of hoping for an obscure jazz musician. i think it's a little bit of a downer to take it from there, tbh - but it's the best suggestion i've seen so far,
(pause)
yeah. halfway through piouhgd and i consider this issue resolved - slint is roughly 90% sonic youth, roughly 10% butthole surfers. so, we can close this discussion now.
unless people have suggestions moving forwards
gorryman
There is a doc in the works something like "following the breadcrumbs" might have some definitive answers ,,,being that they were from Loisville ,,,I might ad them kids is crazy down there I would dig deeper into jazz for lack of a better term for peeps like Larry Coryell and John Fahey awkward spacey finger picking and dissonance probably had a crazy jazz fusion drunk uncle around handing them weird vinyl "my two cents"
kerry mcphearson
Jawbox and Glassjaw are definitely the bands your looking for. "See For Your Own Special Special Sweethart" and "Worship & Tribute"...I would say that they also influenced artist like PJ harvey, Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. Hell spiderland even influenced older artist like Tom waits, Swans and Scott Walker
deathtokoalas
naw, that's exactly what i'm trying to avoid. terrible music, all of it (except swans).
glassjaw got a little better when they grew up a bit, but their early material is some of the dumbest noisy garbage i've ever heard. jawbox were always boring corporate pop that had more to do with bon jovi than punk rock. modest mouse, pj harvey and built to spill were equally boring indie rock for college dropouts. and i'd rather listen to bowie than walker.
but, while all of that horrible music was selling lots of records, there has to have been something more interesting happening under the surface because i can hear it's effects in bands like la dispute. that's what i'm charting out.
what i'm realizing is there was an underground movement i wasn't aware of. please avoid further corporate rock suggestions. not a fan of corporate rock...
o9k
Omg you are such a douche. Even if they (or you) disliked 'corporate rock' they could very well be inspired by it. Without knowing it, or just to do it differently. But to get back to the point, I think the guitar-style is influenced by Greg Ginn. He also had this unique "jazzy" and "off" way of playing.
deathtokoalas
i was rejecting corporate rock derivations from slint, not proposed corporate rock influences on slint. i asked the question, so i have a right to restrict the answers. really, nothing that's been discussed as influential up to this point would qualify as corporate rock. crimson had some influence on garbage like journey, but crimson themselves are generally acknowledged as "the prog band that never sold out". and they really didn't. even their early 80s new wave period remained challenging listening.
ginn and morris were both talented and educated punk guitarists and definitely stand out in that sense. i have to admit i'm not familiar with the jazz side of the sst catalog, and i'll acknowledge that's a good suggestion for possible influence. it's easy to see how they could have just grabbed some sst discs thinking they were hardcore and - surprise! but the ginn sound was more free jazzy. it's not really the flowing, shimmery, morricone-esque style that i'm hoping is ultimately traceable through from slint to defeater and la dispute.
to update on that, i've bumped into a band called frodus that seems as though they were destined for greatness and yet had to deal with unending bad luck. but they themselves sound, to me, like a cross between foetus and nirvana, with a heavy dual influence from la (jane's addiction, rhcp) and dc (fugazi). those shimmery guitars are there, but they're a minor aspect. so, i'm trying to find something parallel to that that jumps underneath the next wave of bands (that is, i'm seeking an influential underground, arty counterpart to thrice or thursday that isn't as metal as saetia).
to broaden the spectrum a bit, i should point out that there were some very mainstream 90s records that have that jazzy guitar sound - lp2 by sunny day real estate, ok computer by radiohead, razorblade suitcase by bush and to a lesser extent anything by tool. what i'm looking for might actually be those bands. these acts were teenagers in the 90s...
Chris Anderson
Check out "Cows- Sorry in Pig Minor". The style reminds me a little bit of this, and it came out just before Spiderland. Not entirely the same, but I definitely get similar vibes-- and Cows are more on the hardcore side of things.
deathtokoalas
i'm not as familiar with cows as i am with some of the other stuff from the period (i tried a few times, but it's just too atonal), but i really don't hear what you're talking about - unless you mean to draw attention to the common influence from sonic youth type stuff, in which case that's true, but not at all what i'm talking about. also, that seems to be their last record, from many years after spiderland.
yeah, i'm listening to that one right now and i don't hear much of a comparison (except in the sense that the first track seems to be a bit of a joke), but it's definitely a lot less.....stupid.....than their earlier material.
i've never really understood why people really listen to stuff like ween, butthole surfers, cows, etc over and over again. or even the acid mothers. i could see how it would be fun to see live, but the recordings become flat out idiotic after the shock value wears off.
it mostly comes from zappa, but zappa's musicianship was really top notch, which can keep you coming back. bungle, i get, for the same reason. but the bulk of that stuff is just....yuck...
Chris Anderson
Eh, it's just music. I don't think it's really supposed to be taken that seriously. For the same reason people like Picasso even though his paintings aren't that technically impressive, people enjoy The Cows, Butthole Surfers etc. It's not about power levels or some pedantic wrong or right- it's just art-it's an aesthetic. It's meant to express a mood felt by people during that time- it's supposed to be fun. Even if something seems like 'a joke' that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously.
Personally, I think 'Cabin Man' is a pretty solid track, all around. It portrays a definite nihilistic kind of delirious aesthetic. On the other hand, I could argue that in a lot of cases Zappa gets too farcical and starts to suffer musically due to this-- but I'm not going to, because I get that it doesn't matter and that was just the art he felt like making at the time. Listen to what you like, I only recommended Sorry in Pig Minor because it has a similar grim existential aesthetic to Spiderland, albeit the group is more conventional for music of the period.
deathtokoalas
most of that strain of noise music is definitely not meant to be taken seriously, which is what i'm getting at. that's why it's awful. there's not serious on the level of satire, and not serious on the level of not having an artistic vision. these people were better labeled drunkards than artists.
and, no, art isn't entirely subjective. there's no use in comparing apples to oranges, but it's very much worthwhile to point out that this person here has a cogent thought process that was carefully put together and this person here flipped on a delay pedal and went for a smoke. at that point, it's up to the listener to consciously choose openly bad music, which is no doubt exactly what's going on when somebody picks a butthole surfers record off the shelf.
to put it another way, i run a review page that has a five year grace period on it because i want to get what the record meant rather than first impressions. there's a scale from 0 to 11 with 0 the highest, but it's not strictly a linear ranking. near the bottom, it's more about categories. a mark of 8 translates to "it's fun because it's stupid". i'll analyze something like white zombie that way. i know it's stupid, but that's exactly why the jokes keep on giving. that is to say that nailing white zombie, which would be necessary if i were to do the review objectively, would be to miss the reality that it's stupidity is also it's charm. there's a wide swath of music that, in this way, defies the way that music critics work. it needs to be put aside into it's own space.
i wouldn't put most of the material by meat puppets, butthole surfers, ween, big black, the cows or the rest of that batch of music in this category, because the jokes aren't good enough. it's just shitty music; it doesn't deserve that kind of special treatment. however, separating them out from normal analysis as outliers is more or less what most of their fan base is doing. in the more extreme cases, it may be all they listen to. understanding that requires a pavlovian, not a music critic.
there's absolutely a level of objective analysis underlying that, but it's suspended to take into consideration that the musicians involved are purposefully pushing back against it. personally, i'd rather just ignore that and bulldoze them into the crap pile, but that's precisely where the choice to listen to objectively bad music comes in.
Chris Anderson
That's just, like, your opinion man. Music is probably the most subjective art form there is next to visual art-- I think you'd be doing your line of critics and viewership a lot of credit if you'd stop using an arbitrary scale to rate bands that you just don't feel. You're comparing sounds, dude, literally you are comparing sounds and making that judgement, that one is silly and fun and the other is just stupid. I get it, I make my own judgements like that all the time-- I just don't know where you get off pretending you are so justified in your analysis. I guess that's the problem with critics, just have to convince yourself your opinion is final.
deathtokoalas
i'm not suggesting people aren't allowed to disagree with me. in the end, it is indeed merely my opinion. but, analyzing the creative organization of sound is not the same thing as analyzing the wind blowing through the trees. in the sense that organizing sound is a type of thought, criticizing music is as valid as criticizing any other argument.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
if this is trying to sound like red, it's the greatest failure in the history of music. i'm a fusion guitar player. i've studied fripp's playing in a lot of detail, off and on for roughly twenty years.
(edit: here's one of my frippertronics influenced pieces. there's several others if you click my name and check the vid. well, might as well, considering the length of the thread. /watch?v=OsbbHeMAenE)
and it was basically my childhood lullabies. it's a record i could hum from start to finish. spiderland is really not remotely similar. so, even if there was an attempt (and i'm really not buying this), the absolute dissimilarity indicates that there must have been more dominant, subconscious influences.
it sounds far more like the meat puppets.
besides, as has been mentioned repeatedly, it's abundantly obvious that they basically ought to be sending out royalty checks to thurston moore and lee renaldo. not that they'd take them. but, it's abundantly clear that that's the dominant influence.
rhombusskullvsteal1
this is distorted guitar which is used in post hardcore more than post rock, but could be said to take place in both. I think it's post rock/ emotive hardcore, or somewhere on the schism between genres. they are unique for sure. I don't know how to label them.
deathtokoalas
yeah. i'm not having difficulty putting the noisier aspect in context. that's kind of more my niche. like i say, i'm pulling it directly from sonic youth but there was a whole movement there, really. "no wave". it's the sound of 'for dinner' that has been hugely influential and seems to me to come out of nowhere.
as an aside, i don't think the spoken word aspect of this is really connectable to what was called "emotive hardcore" in 1991. in 1995, maybe, but that's getting anachronistic. i think that needs to be traced right back to the beats. but, through who? again, we have sonic youth as the most likely suspect, due to their sort of obsession with burroughs and others. in the context of the period, then, i'd have to put slint in the same genre as sonic youth and swans - no wave, with a bit of a goth flair. or even just alternative rock. it's fair to point out it had an influence on other stuff, but trying to connect it to stuff that came later is sort of anachronistic.
i honestly can't really hear what's particularly different about rites of spring at all. and it just sounds to me like mackaye was listening to a lot of black flag when he put together embrace. then fugazi drew a lot both on the chicago big black thing and the la rhcp thing, which brought that big bass sound forward as dominant in the area. for a good five years that big bass sound seems to have defined the punk of the area, or at least virtually all of it i've heard. one has to go to the west coast to hear the future (scr)emo sound begin to develop. neither this nor what followed it sound to me like they're in that dc punk genealogy; i really don't hear any dc punk or even chicago punk in this at all. it's all new york, to me.
ReadyMindsetGo
Just a thought that arose while reading this dialogue... instead of speculating and coming up with your own conclusions on who influenced whom, why don't you contact band members themselves with your questions? Also, I wonder what you hope to get out of all this.
deathtokoalas
asking people directly is never a good way to get a good answer. it's inevitably going to come with little more than a set of biases. i grew up listening to tears for fears and they formed a big part of how i understand melody. yet, i would never cite them as an influence, for a variety of reasons. so, i don't think i'm going to get anything out of asking them besides the standard story, which is at best incomplete.
and i'm just looking for a guitarist to listen to.
Dan White
Wouldn't an incomplete story from the artists themselves still be valuable?
deathtokoalas
i think i'm likely to get more valuable responses in a forum like this.
JeanPaul LeFebvre
I honestly think you are putting WAY too much thought into what these guys were thinking when they made this album. Just listen. Everybody is going to hear something different. That's what is so great about music.
deathtokoalas
nah. i'm just looking for the source of the guitar style, again mostly because i like listening to it. although, admittedly, also because i have a hobby review site that aims to piece together these kinds of connections.
for me, the sound peaks in do make say think. so, when i get around to writing essays about their records, i'm going to want to understand the historical context properly.
i know writing these histories is something a lot of people frown on, but it's something i think somebody really should be doing. as is probably clear, slint is a bit before my time. but i lived through dmst's rise in ottawa. and they're important, historically, for other reasons i'd rather not remind myself of.
i should probably point out that this isn't my favourite record or anything. we all know how influential it was. but regarding the rock of the period, i'd personally rather listen to sonic youth. or drive like jehu. or the smashing pumpkins...
Eben Hoffer
there was a pitchfork interview with slint a little while ago, on the anniversary-- which I can't seem to find right now, but go looking-- and they talked a good amount about how being in louisville at the time they were playing meant they were really cut off from a lot of what was happening in other indie scenes, and to a large extent were trying crazy stuff and following their noses without much of a sense of 'influence'. I'd look to other 90s 00s kentucky bands, like rodan, rachel's, and in general anything on quarterstick records.
Ned Blackburn
are you sure you don't hear some Red-era crimson in here? Dem tritones...i can hear some shellac too. also leave Jawbox alone, FYSS is a fantastic record
deathtokoalas
as i said before, fripp was a very jagged and constructed player when he was in crimson. his rhythm work was based on sudden interruptions and jarring juxtapositions. his work with eno was a little less written out, but it was almost entirely lead playing. the aspect of pajo's style that i'm drawing attention to and trying to trace forwards (through a minor forest and tortoise to do make say think, and also to la dispute through some still unknown intermediary) is really fluid and based mostly on strong voiceleading. this is a renaldo/moore/branca/reich thing.
about the only thing i can hear is a mild similarity between washer and starless, but it's mild - washer sounds no more like starless than it does like tears for fears or joy division or the cure or television or even u2. red is mostly a jazz fusion record; slint is definitely in a punk lineage. again: sonic youth is the missing link there, not king crimson.
if anything, i hear more of an influence from early 80s belew, which was the period he was also working with the talking heads.
i may have over-reacted in reducing the shellac and big black influences. that would have been out of annoyance. i'm asking for influences forward (and tangentially, backwards) regarding a flowing, jazz-influenced, voice-leading clean guitar style. that's not coming from albini, although some of the (sporadic) heavier sections might plausibly be. again, though, i don't see any reason to deviate from the heavy sonic youth dominance in the sound.
functio1
It's no big deal in terms of their sound. If you play the vinyl at twice speed it sounds like various bands that were around slightly before this album, specifically punk bands like SNFU, Spermbirds and a few others. Slowing all that down wasn't just something Slint did - Codeine did the same thing, and others slowed things down even more (even down to the 'brown note'). The only reason some people chuck the 'jazzy' thing at Slint is probably because (a) they're music journos who'd never heard of the band until post 2000 and were desperate to quantify it into some sort of genre pigeon hole (such is their wont, the talentless gits) and (b) some people are generally ignorant of a whole flavour of hardcore punk that did the whole timing/chord change stuff, only faster, in the late 80s. I first heard this album the week it came out in the UK, and at very very high volume through a madly powerful PA. Yes, it was amazingly good, but at the time we didn't sit around rubbing our chins and pondering where it all came from, whether it was jazzy, etc etc - it was a progression of things that had gone on before, especially if you'd listened to some US hardcore bands from a few years before. And, to be honest, it did have the flavour of Big Black, Bitch Magnet, and a few others when hearing it the first time around - and especially if you'd heard Slint's first album when that came out. So it's a melange, in a good way. But anyone trying to make out that it was some sort of isolated new sound that suddenly appeared in 1991 is not only barking up the wrong tree, but is barking up the wrong tree in the wrong forest.
deathtokoalas
i think i mostly agree with what you're saying (although it should be clarified that what came from it was pretty jazzy. i mentioned a few times i'm working backwards from dmst and tortoise, who are both pretty jazzy), and i can construct the general idea of it well from all the stuff like swans and sonic youth that i spent so much time with in the late 90s (working backwards from growing up with grunge), but there's a specific voice leading in the sound that is undeniably Jazz (with a capital j).
but, maybe it was just some guitarists sitting down and deciding they liked a type of voice leading. nobody seems to have a better answer.
i seem like i'm contradicting myself, lol. i mean, it's slowed down hardcore (i've used the goofy term no wave, just cause people understand what that means, and it fits like a glove in it's most generic meaning), at it's root rather than jazz. but (in places) it's using a guitar-centric compositional technique found in a lot of smoother types of jazz (rather than the more free, noisy jazz crimson fit into.). and i've listened to so many jazz guitarists, and just can't place the style well - despite hearing it come up over and over again in all kinds of music from about 95 onwards.
*shrug*.
functio1
Maybe it's better just to see it as coming from the more metal elements of hardcore/thrash. That all may have jazz roots, but it doesn't mean that any of those bands had heard of any of it. People borrow from all over the place without having to trace a direct line from one form of music into their own. You just roll with what you like the sound of, and may not know - or care - where it comes from. The same could be said of jazz guitarists too, of course.
deathtokoalas
there's practically no voice leading in that type of metal. it's pretty much the precise characteristic that gives it that ugly sound. it's all fifths crashing against each other.
as somebody that is interested in the historical development of the instrument, it's very interesting to me. so, it'd be nice if people could lay off the "it doesn't matter" schtick. to me, it does. because i want it to..
David Jackson
I found an interview with Britt Walford where he goes into detail on what music he thinks influenced Spiderland. Artists he mentions in the interview are: Nick Cave, Madonna and Big Black. http://www.factmag.com/2014/03/12/murder-ballads-an-interview-with-slint/
Also a Dave Pajo list of his top 13 albums. Big Black shows up again, as well as Steve Reich, Leonard Cohen, Die Kreuzen.
http://thequietus.com/articles/13851-david-pajo-slint-favourite-albums
For the record neither mentions King Crimson or Butthole Surfers
deathtokoalas
see, this is what i mean, though. the reich and cave (and maybe cohen) are probably legitimate, the big black is maybe posing a little (although it's there), the die kreuzen is probably posing flat out (it's often mentioned as an influence on "emo") and the rest of it almost seems sarcastic. it's like he's inserting madonna for swans or something. still, none of it gets to the aspect of the sound i'm thinking of...
Voyaging123
the playing is largely uninfluenced; in other words, it is almost entirely original/innovative, there's a reason this album is so important in the history of rock
great works of art cannot be strictly traced back to their predecessors for the very reason they are great: they are original, though of course true and complete originality is impossible... I see no obvious direct influences on the playing
deathtokoalas
nothing is uninfluenced. pretentious nonsense.
it's a total rip-off of sonic youth.
and it's not a great record. an influential record, sure, but a pretty boring one, in totality.
i'm sick of morons responding to this so i'm closing the thread. if you have anything worthwhile to say, find a way to contact me. otherwise, fuck you.
ugh. if you're going to try to track me down to give me your brilliant insight, please LOOK UP WHAT THE TERM "VOICE LEADING" MEANS FIRST.
judging from past attempts to track me down, chances are that you not only do not have the insight i'm looking for, but you probably don't even understand the question.
read this first. please:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_leading
ugh.
we require only a miniscule fraction of the population to carry out the useful work that is required to make society function. of the population at large, there are more volunteers than there are useful positions. the jobs that people do not volunteer to do are mostly not useful - which is why people don't want to do them. for the few exceptions, we could rotate the labour around to the point where we're working a few hours a *year*. keynes suggested a few hours a week, but the technology is way beyond that point, now. i see no reason to think this reality of volunteers existing to do meaningful and necessary work because they want to will ever change.
what that leaves is millions of people that really have no social value beyond that which we contrive for them. what's the difference, in terms of social value, between working as a server or in a supermarket and living on disability? there isn't one. neither produces anything of any kind of value. while there's no doubt that a retail worker fits the definition of "nothing to sell but labour", they don't belong to the productive class. in terms of actual contribution in terms of producing something valuable, the reality is that they're just as "parasitic" as welfare recipients. a really disturbingly high amount of our workforce exists as an appropriating "middle man" between producers and consumers. the cashier at the grocery store is stealing profit from the farmer that made the food, while the sales person at the clothing store is stealing profit from the workers that made the clothes. so, proletariat by definition, but not proletariat in substance. a union of service workers is a bourgeois union.
when you look at the actual producing class, most of it isn't even on this continent. technological shifts may be in the process of relocalizing production, but it will not create new jobs (unless you count robots as people).
so, there is no longer a concern of the productive v. the unproductive. almost none of us are actually productive. what we need to do is find a way to distribute goods fairly amongst the unproductive, and that's not going to be possible until people come to terms, "en masse", of the uselessness of their daily existence. that is, we will not revolt until we understand how unproductive we really are, and how that makes us all equally entitled to the benefits of technology.
we require only a miniscule fraction of the population to carry out the useful work that is required to make society function. of the population at large, there are more volunteers than there are useful positions. the jobs that people do not volunteer to do are mostly not useful - which is why people don't want to do them. for the few exceptions, we could rotate the labour around to the point where we're working a few hours a *year*. keynes suggested a few hours a week, but the technology is way beyond that point, now. i see no reason to think this reality of volunteers existing to do meaningful and necessary work because they want to will ever change.
what that leaves is millions of people that really have no social value beyond that which we contrive for them. what's the difference, in terms of social value, between working as a server or in a supermarket and living on disability? there isn't one. neither produces anything of any kind of value. while there's no doubt that a retail worker fits the definition of "nothing to sell but labour", they don't belong to the productive class. in terms of actual contribution in terms of producing something valuable, the reality is that they're just as "parasitic" as welfare recipients. a really disturbingly high amount of our workforce exists as an appropriating "middle man" between producers and consumers. the cashier at the grocery store is stealing profit from the farmer that made the food, while the sales person at the clothing store is stealing profit from the workers that made the clothes. so, proletariat by definition, but not proletariat in substance. a union of service workers is a bourgeois union.
when you look at the actual producing class, most of it isn't even on this continent. technological shifts may be in the process of relocalizing production, but it will not create new jobs (unless you count robots as people).
so, there is no longer a concern of the productive v. the unproductive. almost none of us are actually productive. what we need to do is find a way to distribute goods fairly amongst the unproductive, and that's not going to be possible until people come to terms, "en masse", of the uselessness of their daily existence. that is, we will not revolt until we understand how unproductive we really are, and how that makes us all equally entitled to the benefits of technology.
Monday, February 3, 2014
immediate impression of new cloud nothings single
deathtokoalas
i hope the record sounds less like late 90s radio pop, which usually makes me want to throw things through windows and vomit all over people.
bunzigga
yeah honestly...like there are hints of it throughout their music but i can tolerate it
deathtokoalas
well, one of the things i grew up listening to was "pop-punk" like weezer, nirvana, early offspring, bad religion. i loved that sound. it was catchy, but it had a really gritty edge to it. you could kiddy mosh while you were singing along to it. it was just super fun...
....but i have very specific and not-so-good memories of mainstream rock music just going full suck around '98, when mainstream "punk" (it was already pop at this point, but it still had an edge) got so sappy and stupid that it was basically nkotb with power chords. if course, if you didn't like that you could listen to a lot of homophobic stupidity like limp bizkit, or become a sad emo kid, instead. thank god for the arrival of post-rock at roughly the same time. but i always missed more traditional mainstream type in-your-face rock, and about the only place i was getting it for years was the white stripes (and then the thermals for a bit).
i found their last record really hit a sweet spot there, mixing the infectious catchiness with enough grit that it was still undeniably "rock music". i'll admit it hit me in a quarter-age crisis. wasted days ticked off all those boxes. this thing, i don't know...it's crossed the line for me...
but, you're right: it's not a total discarding of their previous sound, it's just honing in on their more marketable side. and it's a single. that even makes sense.
like i say, i'm hoping it's just a single to push the disc with. but, i mean, this is a path that's well charted. the "green day rise to fame" phenomenon is highly emulated. they may lose me in the process, but i'm old, anyways. further, as an abstract musician that will probably never sell a cd in my life, i find it hard to blame anybody for hopping on to that path and just going with it.
it would still at least be nice if the record rocks a bit harder than this.
Bootiee “The Human” Shorts
post rock arriving in the late 90s?
deathtokoalas
there may have been earlier precedents of questionable relevancy (in hindsight, it's hard to think of a band like tortoise as 'post-rock', despite how they were earlier synonymous with it), but post-rock first started building a real audience around '98 or so.
(i should also point out that i was 17 in 1998, which was old enough to start getting into more serious music. for me, that was a convergence in my maturity level developing with a new form that was starting to gain more popularity. i thought siamese dream was pretty awesome in '94, but i would not have had the patience to get into the genre foundations of post-rock, despite enjoying it now. let's not try too hard to prove me wrong :P)
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
(i've deleted an extremely offensive post from bootiee shorts and blocked him. instead, note the following.)
fwiw, '98 was a terrible year. between the skaters threatening to beat me up, the friends that deserted me because i had something other than sex on my mind and the gender identity crisis i was going through, it's a wonder i made it out of it alive.
people need to learn to pull their heads out of their asses.
so, back to the point - this is music that reminds me of the people that used to beat me up in high school, rather than music i used to connect to while getting beaten up. it's a bit of a disappointment. i hope the disc is a little less boring.
Solace Creat
I find it ironic that you relate more to, or prefer, the 'in your face' music and were also beaten up in highschool.
deathtokoalas
the mid 90s were weird. everything was mixed up. i get the impression that things have restabilized since, with metalheads and jocks beating up punks again (although the names may have changed a little, and the lines may have blurred, the three distinct subcultures seem to have reconstructed themselves). but the sort of weakening of jock rock in the 90s (whitesnake and skid row became green day and blink 182) didn't eliminate the basic "jock beating down freak" relationship. the fashion just changed, that was all. that being said, i wasn't listening to slayer, either - and they were the really violent kids that would literally assault you with skateboards and steal your shoes. the jocks didn't really know how to skate, but the metalheads did.
it was weird. i have specific memories of listening to bad religion in my headphones while snaking through back alleyways trying to avoid the skate gangs in slayer and pantera muscle ts. all the stereotypes were just wrong during this period.
punks were always the kids that got beat up, though. that's a constant from the mods forward. it's a big reason why the anger and insolence of punk has always appealed to punks. and, arguably, the release is why it was created in the first place.
that whole tough guy bro poseur shit that the metalheads have nowadays is a hip-hop thing that came into rock culture in the 90s.
Solace Creat
I would classify myself as a metal-head, but I don't think I agree with you. Well. I guess I wasn't in highschool in the 90s, or middle school...But: All of the metal heads I've known are very open, inclusive, and passive (perhaps with some anger issues, but I don't think it's a general rule that they're aggressive). I view them much more as rebels than jocks. All the jocks did listen to hip hop, rap, and blink 182 stuff, but I don't think any of them were into metal. If anything, at my school, there was more aggression towards Mexicans. There were often fights dubbed, "Whites and blacks versus the Mexicans". The jock group was still technically a clique, and they made fun of whomever in a much more light-hearted way than I think is generally portrayed in the media. Though, the fights were also a bit more individualistic, rather than groupy. The basic principal of the social herd was the same, (people hung out with people with their interests) but I don't think there were active rivalries between 'cliques'; at least, not that I was aware. The entire school was much more inclusive than, say, the 70s-90s cliche. I think the cliques are much less defined, nowadays. Who knows. Maybe I was oblivious. This song does sound a bit like punk meets mainstream '(indie) rock/pop', with the punk turned down heavily. I think I get what you mean, now. The opening is like the start of a punk song, then it falls into the more...poppy shit. I would say it lacks more of the punk eccentricity and spirit.
deathtokoalas
the root of the subculture war that took place from the 40s to the 80s (and got all confused in the 90s) was the rebels/rockers/metalheads on one side and the mods/punks/teddy-boys on the other. it's a fascinating thing to check out. there were actual riots between "metalheads" and "punks" at stones and hendrix concerts. there was a crossover there, so they were brought into contact. and you couldn't ever have something like a sabbath-who tour because it would just be bloodshed. people would literally get killed.
throughout it all there was another subculture a little more underground that worked it's way through in complicated ways: beat culture. burroughs, kerouac and the like. they had an influence on both the hippies and the mods, and, later on, a giant influence on "alternative rock". (and the hippies turned into disco fans). that style of emo spoken word is literally just beat music. i know most young metalheads would shudder at the suggestion that they have anything to do with emo or alternative rock, but the stoner and doom styles of metal nowadays are culturally beat music, rather than in the biker/rocker/metal realm. a lot of it even traces through boris and melvins and back to punk rock like blag flag and swans. that is to say that it comes from punk. i've been to enough doom and stoner shows to know that these kids are not metalheads but punks. that was kind of what i was getting at with the labels changing. on the other hand, the kids i see at legion shows nowadays tend to give me the creeps. to me, they look like they should be wearing slayer ts.
...and there were always places where things merged. i mean, the musicians themselves mostly don't have time for this stupidity (although it's actually true that black flag used to get into actual fistfights with l.a. metal bands that would go down to find them to beat them down - both motley crue and guns 'n' roses are known to be among the many bands that rollins and friends had to physically defend themselves against.). while that was happening, there was a lot of music in the 80s that mixed punk and metal. what the kids call "hardcore" (rather than black flag or dead kennedys) and "metalcore" nowadays musically comes from that mix of metal of punk, rather than one or the other. culturally, though, it's more "metal" than anything else i can see. and, again, with the shifted labels.
so, it's not really reasonable to look at what you see around you and connect it back to 80s metal. i know the marketing might want you to, but you really can't. rather, you've got four types of youth subculture:
1) kids into sports, competition and capitalism. they're usually rich. they need to be dominant and will beat down anyone who challenges their alpha standing. jocks. douches.
2) macho types that hate anything effeminate, from hippies to queers to women and will beat it down out of genuine *phobic hate. bikers. metalheads. rockers. skinheads. assholes.
3) nihilists, mostly. anarchists, not pacifists. punks. mods. some emos. they tend to get beat down because they speak out and/or because they "look gay".
4) beat culture. pacifists. poets. surrealists. sonic youth fans. trent reznor was the archetypal 90s beat icon. they hate everybody and tend to avoid conflict by staying apolitical.
you can kind of combine 1-2 and 3-4. but, as mentioned, nowadays you're more likely to find beatniks and punks at a doom "metal" show and metalheads and jocks at a "hardcore" show.
Solace Creat
Ah. Nevermind, gotcha. I tend to group all of metal within the subgenre of melodeath for some reason. Still, I haven't known any jocks into any kind of metal.
deathtokoalas
that piddly malmsteen shit is really 90% prog. they just took their image from metal, really. historically, that goes back to stuff like yes and genesis, which is very much on the beatnik side. the modern parallel to what i'd call "metal" is what the kids call "metalcore". they're very confused - they think it's some kind of hardcore, when it's really the evolution of thrash.
Sam Kernodle
A while ago there was a download for the whole record when they played it live in Boston. It wasn't the best quality but it sounded really like their last album.
Aldo Hanel
the rest of the record is a lot different, don't worry
Ned Blackburn
if only 90s radio pop actually sounded like this and you weren't just exaggerating for effect
Olm8Cuz
you're sexy and I'd probably fuck you if you were down?
Solace Creat
Well. This took a turn.
deathtokoalas
possibly obvious implied sarcasm aside, and it might be a little weird to expose this on a random youtube comment, but i identify as something called 'asexual' - in addition to being transgendered. it's actually been nearly ten years, and i'm not in much of a hurry to get back to it. so, it's a very broad, general 'no' with absolutely no chance of wavering on it. sorry.
Solace Creat
You don't see many asexuals these days. While I personally identify with the term 'asexual', I do think it's more of a psychological suppression rather than an actual orientation. Though, that's a bit semantic.
deathtokoalas
there's no such thing as sexual orientation. any human can be conditioned to be attracted to anything. if media decided to run with it by spreading the proper kind of images attached to the right kind of stimulus, we could have people sexually attracted to trees or airplanes or anything else. we could have an entire class of people that are only turned on by aromatized plastics. this has been demonstrated using pavlovian methods: orientation is highly malleable and entirely plastic. as it is, we live in a society where both genders are highly sexualized. that's both why hypersexuality is the current trend and bisexuality is becoming the new normal. we're constantly being conditioned to interpret both genders erotically, and slowly learn to respond through arousal - just like pavlov's dog salivates on the ring of a bell. it follows that people can avoid that conditioning by avoiding media, people and culture. i don't want to pretend that's a conscious choice on my behalf - that i'm avoiding the conditioning - but i happen to prefer spending time by myself, and as a result haven't been conditioned. the fact that i don't watch any tv (none. ever.) is probably a dominant factor in my lack of sexual interest. not watching tv or films or much of what's popular on youtube means i haven't been through that conditioning of what is really pornographic media that saturates the lives of most young people. so, i'm not suppressing anything, it's just that the conditioning i've been through has been very weak because i'm not interested in the culture that enforces it. there's also a feedback cycle inherent to that that leads to ever decreasing sexual interest, which means that once you get into the asexual "zone" it continues to self-perpetuate itself.
Olm8Cuz
touche my friend, touche.
David Gorczyca
responding to your initial comment - i really like the band but they sound softer and softer on every album.
Solace Creat
I don't know if I believe that. I also don't know if I don't believe that. As in all things, I would be more apt to attribute sexual orientation as nature as well as nurture. If the gay gene is found, that'll settle that. Until then, it's a moot point, though I could see that as being true. Pretty sure that a sex drive isn't a result classical conditioning, though operant conditioning may play a role. Perhaps the way people go about it is influenced by society, and while there is programming involved, it's more biological, imo. It's instinctual; otherwise, the human race probably wouldn't exist. If that were the case, then, myself, watching an abhorrent amount of television would be more apt to adhear to the aforementioned conditions. However, I'm not really asexual. If Kate Beckinsale or Natalie Portman showed up at my door ready to go, I'd have a difficult time saying no. So, I guess I just prefer not to go through all the complications of the ritual dating game, but I do value being close with someone. Also instinctual. I really think that since the base drives are instinctual, if someone doesn't adhear to those instincts it's a personal choice or a psychological...I don't want to say issue, but...complication of some sort. Of course, I guess this is all pretty semantically. I just don't believe that 'asexuality' is really a thing; in addition, if sexual preference doesn't exist due to the above criteria, then neither does asexuality. Though, I can appreciate the disgust or aloofness towards the typical courting rituals. They're pretty ridiculous.
deathtokoalas
there's no evidence of a gay gene. it's been used as a legal argument because american case law is exceedingly illiberal when it comes to certain things. arguing that gay people have no choice but to be gay has at times been the only available argument to prevent them from being punished. the legal argument has been "it's not their fault". it's been successful enough that it's taken on this sort of popular perception. however, it's not at all a scientific position and it's really almost certainly wrong - despite it's historical usefulness in court. i'd argue it's actually more liberating to think of sexuality as a choice than as something genetic. homosexuality is not an incurable disease, it's a decision that people should be given the right to make freely. but i'm actually taking a middle position in arguing in terms of unconscious conditioning - it's malleable (and this is demonstrable), but the result of uncontrollable stochastic events. i didn't mean to be too specific about the type of conditioning. if operand plays a role, it's probably in normalizing heterosexuality as "natural", i.e. in rejecting homosexuality. that would be strictly cultural. the type of conditioning i'm thinking about is something very chaotic that doesn't follow any kind of exact rules or patterns. but there are studies that demonstrate the malleability of it using classical conditioning. have you ever had a dog hump your leg? i don't think we're more complicated than that. the dog could be conditioned to become aroused at the sight of your leg, to the point it loses attraction to other dogs. the biological urge creates the arousal, but it clearly doesn't specify a target. if it did, there wouldn't be gay people at all, and dogs wouldn't hump your leg. anybody who's ever had a penis knows they don't always react to a clear stimulus. how that biological urge is shaped is where the complicated, stochastic conditioning comes in. to suggest it's hard wired really strikes me as entirely ludicrous; most people will agree that they've gone through phases in their lives where they seem to be aroused by almost anything at all, and should a phase of the sort intersect with an experience there's a substantial chance it could become habitual. it's a mild shift in mindset. rather than seeing us as evolved to fulfill a biological function of sex to reproduce, and deviating from that being pathological or defective, i see us as primitive creatures that will mostly fuck about anything we get the chance to - human or not. i go back and forth between thinking that our hormones are too stupid to understand the difference between a member of the opposite sex and livestock, and thinking that this indiscriminate level of persistent arousal is actually an evolutionary trait. that is to say we've evolved to fuck anything and everything we can, without being picky about things like function, gender or species. the suppression is mostly in "heterosexuals" denying "homosexual" urges, and that's entirely cultural. one of the ways to understand all this is just to look at human history. sexual orientation shifts with culture, both ways. in classical greece, virtually everybody was openly bisexual. but sex was an act that was very connected to class. for example, a man who owned slaves was expected to penetrate them as a statement of dominance and ownership. yet, a free man could never be penetrated by a slave or by another free man as that was a sign of submission. a lot of the taboos we have around sexuality come from these sorts of cultural things, rather than anything biological. and they can be easily traced by anybody with the time and patience to do it. also, as an aside, asexual isn't a lack of attraction in the sense of being impossible to arouse. it's just a disinterest in sex. some people that identify as asexual maintain sexual relationships. it's just not what drives them.
Bertie Wooster
good god. i guess you spend the time you free up not being sexually-attracted writing ridiculously long, completely bullshit comments on youtube. outstanding life choices you've made. the idea that sexual attraction is completely conditioned and isn't tied in anyway to the procreation drive is the most hilariously anti-science thing i've ever read, making the average creationist look like a biology phd.
deathtokoalas
i didn't say it isn't tied to the procreation drive, i've pointed out that this mechanism is imperfect. the creationist ideal ought to be that non-standard sexualities are some kind of abomination. if you think of life as a perfectly created thing by some divine force, that makes sense. modern science, on the other hand, introduces a lot of error. newton, for example, would be considered a creationist today. it's maybe ironic that his clockwork universe was used as an argument against god, because he actually saw the perfection of his system as being an argument in favour of it. but, we know now that things aren't so simple - that there's all kinds of error terms brought on by random events. it's the randomness that presents an argument against creation, even as it collapses the perspectives of classical science. extrapolating this (now not-so) new understanding of the universe to biology is admittedly an argument against darwinism in it's strict sense. i'm an evolutionist, but i have a lot of problems with the idea of natural selection and think it's ultimately destined for such a drastic reworking that it will find it's way into the dustbin. i'm more inclined to lean towards genetic drift as a sort of "background radiation" that explains most evolutionary change, and natural selection as something rare that must be rigorously demonstrated rather than philosophically assumed. if i'm right, that's ok; that's how science works. put bluntly, you're stuck in the nineteenth century, dude. for example, one could consider the dawkins-gould debate. is the rate of evolution constant or fluctuating? i'm over-simplifying, and dawkins would correct me, but consider the medium. gould has pointed out that there are large jumps in the fossil record that seem to contradict the idea of constant change. but, maybe the answer lies outside of this paradigm. as the climate is changing, we're seeing evidence before our eyes that hybridization is more common than we thought. a model is developing whereby changes in climate lead to recombination of related species - hence coyotes and wolves are recombining into one species, and there's some evidence that grizzly and polar bears, as well as lynx and bobcats, are going through similar hybridizations. with these hybridizations, we see the kind of morphological changes that gould has pointed to for evidence of dramatic jumps in the speed of evolution. i don't want to mislead you, here: i'm presenting a highly contentious hypothesis. yet, as more evidence builds to corroborate it, the end result could very well be that they are both wrong and that natural selection really is micro, while macro is driven by hybridization events. is this perspective not more consistent with a chaotic universe than the modern synthesis is? in the question of sheer survival, ask yourself this question: is a species that highly specializes it's reproductive behaviour to carefully sexually select more or less likely to pass on it's genes than a species that just fucks everything? are genes more likely to pass on when they are held back to certain traits or when they're just playing the odds? is survival of the horniest not a rational proposition? why does your dog hump your leg, anyways? you can see it all over the place. all kinds of species produce hundreds or thousands of eggs. advanced mammals cannot reproduce like this; it just requires too much energy. but, the equivalent strategy is to just fuck at every possible opportunity.
the actual science on the topic seems to indicate that humans are born horny, but without any innate preference one way or another. i would think that, if left to develop without any kind of gender coercion, most humans would mature into bisexual creatures that are driven by what could only be deemed "barbaric" levels of lust towards just about anything - humans, animals, whatever is around. one of the defining characteristics of civilization is the ability to repress that lust. the freedom for women to walk around half naked is a long way from the rape of the sabine women. it follows that attraction to the same sex can be exaggerated or minimized, as can attractions to the opposite one, but that neither is exclusively hard-wired in anybody at birth. sexual tabula rasa....
also, fwiw, i do enjoy this quite a bit more than i would enjoy any kind of conventional existence. i'll never understand why people take such narrow perspectives that they have to criticize people for not living up to some contrived ideal. maybe there are people on this planet that would rather spend time alone on the internet. that's a personal choice. i don't criticize people for wasting their lives and their minds on sex; learning a little bit of mutual respect for other lifestyles would do you (and others) some good.
Solace Creat
You make convincing points. My understanding of the word 'asexual' was off, then, at the very least for the purposes of this conversation.
umjim
Everyone is arguing and I just want to know what your deal with Koalas is..?
deathtokoalas
their despicable cuteness necessitates their imminent destruction.
i hope the record sounds less like late 90s radio pop, which usually makes me want to throw things through windows and vomit all over people.
bunzigga
yeah honestly...like there are hints of it throughout their music but i can tolerate it
deathtokoalas
well, one of the things i grew up listening to was "pop-punk" like weezer, nirvana, early offspring, bad religion. i loved that sound. it was catchy, but it had a really gritty edge to it. you could kiddy mosh while you were singing along to it. it was just super fun...
....but i have very specific and not-so-good memories of mainstream rock music just going full suck around '98, when mainstream "punk" (it was already pop at this point, but it still had an edge) got so sappy and stupid that it was basically nkotb with power chords. if course, if you didn't like that you could listen to a lot of homophobic stupidity like limp bizkit, or become a sad emo kid, instead. thank god for the arrival of post-rock at roughly the same time. but i always missed more traditional mainstream type in-your-face rock, and about the only place i was getting it for years was the white stripes (and then the thermals for a bit).
i found their last record really hit a sweet spot there, mixing the infectious catchiness with enough grit that it was still undeniably "rock music". i'll admit it hit me in a quarter-age crisis. wasted days ticked off all those boxes. this thing, i don't know...it's crossed the line for me...
but, you're right: it's not a total discarding of their previous sound, it's just honing in on their more marketable side. and it's a single. that even makes sense.
like i say, i'm hoping it's just a single to push the disc with. but, i mean, this is a path that's well charted. the "green day rise to fame" phenomenon is highly emulated. they may lose me in the process, but i'm old, anyways. further, as an abstract musician that will probably never sell a cd in my life, i find it hard to blame anybody for hopping on to that path and just going with it.
it would still at least be nice if the record rocks a bit harder than this.
Bootiee “The Human” Shorts
post rock arriving in the late 90s?
deathtokoalas
there may have been earlier precedents of questionable relevancy (in hindsight, it's hard to think of a band like tortoise as 'post-rock', despite how they were earlier synonymous with it), but post-rock first started building a real audience around '98 or so.
(i should also point out that i was 17 in 1998, which was old enough to start getting into more serious music. for me, that was a convergence in my maturity level developing with a new form that was starting to gain more popularity. i thought siamese dream was pretty awesome in '94, but i would not have had the patience to get into the genre foundations of post-rock, despite enjoying it now. let's not try too hard to prove me wrong :P)
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
(i've deleted an extremely offensive post from bootiee shorts and blocked him. instead, note the following.)
fwiw, '98 was a terrible year. between the skaters threatening to beat me up, the friends that deserted me because i had something other than sex on my mind and the gender identity crisis i was going through, it's a wonder i made it out of it alive.
people need to learn to pull their heads out of their asses.
so, back to the point - this is music that reminds me of the people that used to beat me up in high school, rather than music i used to connect to while getting beaten up. it's a bit of a disappointment. i hope the disc is a little less boring.
Solace Creat
I find it ironic that you relate more to, or prefer, the 'in your face' music and were also beaten up in highschool.
deathtokoalas
the mid 90s were weird. everything was mixed up. i get the impression that things have restabilized since, with metalheads and jocks beating up punks again (although the names may have changed a little, and the lines may have blurred, the three distinct subcultures seem to have reconstructed themselves). but the sort of weakening of jock rock in the 90s (whitesnake and skid row became green day and blink 182) didn't eliminate the basic "jock beating down freak" relationship. the fashion just changed, that was all. that being said, i wasn't listening to slayer, either - and they were the really violent kids that would literally assault you with skateboards and steal your shoes. the jocks didn't really know how to skate, but the metalheads did.
it was weird. i have specific memories of listening to bad religion in my headphones while snaking through back alleyways trying to avoid the skate gangs in slayer and pantera muscle ts. all the stereotypes were just wrong during this period.
punks were always the kids that got beat up, though. that's a constant from the mods forward. it's a big reason why the anger and insolence of punk has always appealed to punks. and, arguably, the release is why it was created in the first place.
that whole tough guy bro poseur shit that the metalheads have nowadays is a hip-hop thing that came into rock culture in the 90s.
Solace Creat
I would classify myself as a metal-head, but I don't think I agree with you. Well. I guess I wasn't in highschool in the 90s, or middle school...But: All of the metal heads I've known are very open, inclusive, and passive (perhaps with some anger issues, but I don't think it's a general rule that they're aggressive). I view them much more as rebels than jocks. All the jocks did listen to hip hop, rap, and blink 182 stuff, but I don't think any of them were into metal. If anything, at my school, there was more aggression towards Mexicans. There were often fights dubbed, "Whites and blacks versus the Mexicans". The jock group was still technically a clique, and they made fun of whomever in a much more light-hearted way than I think is generally portrayed in the media. Though, the fights were also a bit more individualistic, rather than groupy. The basic principal of the social herd was the same, (people hung out with people with their interests) but I don't think there were active rivalries between 'cliques'; at least, not that I was aware. The entire school was much more inclusive than, say, the 70s-90s cliche. I think the cliques are much less defined, nowadays. Who knows. Maybe I was oblivious. This song does sound a bit like punk meets mainstream '(indie) rock/pop', with the punk turned down heavily. I think I get what you mean, now. The opening is like the start of a punk song, then it falls into the more...poppy shit. I would say it lacks more of the punk eccentricity and spirit.
deathtokoalas
the root of the subculture war that took place from the 40s to the 80s (and got all confused in the 90s) was the rebels/rockers/metalheads on one side and the mods/punks/teddy-boys on the other. it's a fascinating thing to check out. there were actual riots between "metalheads" and "punks" at stones and hendrix concerts. there was a crossover there, so they were brought into contact. and you couldn't ever have something like a sabbath-who tour because it would just be bloodshed. people would literally get killed.
throughout it all there was another subculture a little more underground that worked it's way through in complicated ways: beat culture. burroughs, kerouac and the like. they had an influence on both the hippies and the mods, and, later on, a giant influence on "alternative rock". (and the hippies turned into disco fans). that style of emo spoken word is literally just beat music. i know most young metalheads would shudder at the suggestion that they have anything to do with emo or alternative rock, but the stoner and doom styles of metal nowadays are culturally beat music, rather than in the biker/rocker/metal realm. a lot of it even traces through boris and melvins and back to punk rock like blag flag and swans. that is to say that it comes from punk. i've been to enough doom and stoner shows to know that these kids are not metalheads but punks. that was kind of what i was getting at with the labels changing. on the other hand, the kids i see at legion shows nowadays tend to give me the creeps. to me, they look like they should be wearing slayer ts.
...and there were always places where things merged. i mean, the musicians themselves mostly don't have time for this stupidity (although it's actually true that black flag used to get into actual fistfights with l.a. metal bands that would go down to find them to beat them down - both motley crue and guns 'n' roses are known to be among the many bands that rollins and friends had to physically defend themselves against.). while that was happening, there was a lot of music in the 80s that mixed punk and metal. what the kids call "hardcore" (rather than black flag or dead kennedys) and "metalcore" nowadays musically comes from that mix of metal of punk, rather than one or the other. culturally, though, it's more "metal" than anything else i can see. and, again, with the shifted labels.
so, it's not really reasonable to look at what you see around you and connect it back to 80s metal. i know the marketing might want you to, but you really can't. rather, you've got four types of youth subculture:
1) kids into sports, competition and capitalism. they're usually rich. they need to be dominant and will beat down anyone who challenges their alpha standing. jocks. douches.
2) macho types that hate anything effeminate, from hippies to queers to women and will beat it down out of genuine *phobic hate. bikers. metalheads. rockers. skinheads. assholes.
3) nihilists, mostly. anarchists, not pacifists. punks. mods. some emos. they tend to get beat down because they speak out and/or because they "look gay".
4) beat culture. pacifists. poets. surrealists. sonic youth fans. trent reznor was the archetypal 90s beat icon. they hate everybody and tend to avoid conflict by staying apolitical.
you can kind of combine 1-2 and 3-4. but, as mentioned, nowadays you're more likely to find beatniks and punks at a doom "metal" show and metalheads and jocks at a "hardcore" show.
Solace Creat
Ah. Nevermind, gotcha. I tend to group all of metal within the subgenre of melodeath for some reason. Still, I haven't known any jocks into any kind of metal.
deathtokoalas
that piddly malmsteen shit is really 90% prog. they just took their image from metal, really. historically, that goes back to stuff like yes and genesis, which is very much on the beatnik side. the modern parallel to what i'd call "metal" is what the kids call "metalcore". they're very confused - they think it's some kind of hardcore, when it's really the evolution of thrash.
Sam Kernodle
A while ago there was a download for the whole record when they played it live in Boston. It wasn't the best quality but it sounded really like their last album.
Aldo Hanel
the rest of the record is a lot different, don't worry
Ned Blackburn
if only 90s radio pop actually sounded like this and you weren't just exaggerating for effect
Olm8Cuz
you're sexy and I'd probably fuck you if you were down?
Solace Creat
Well. This took a turn.
deathtokoalas
possibly obvious implied sarcasm aside, and it might be a little weird to expose this on a random youtube comment, but i identify as something called 'asexual' - in addition to being transgendered. it's actually been nearly ten years, and i'm not in much of a hurry to get back to it. so, it's a very broad, general 'no' with absolutely no chance of wavering on it. sorry.
Solace Creat
You don't see many asexuals these days. While I personally identify with the term 'asexual', I do think it's more of a psychological suppression rather than an actual orientation. Though, that's a bit semantic.
deathtokoalas
there's no such thing as sexual orientation. any human can be conditioned to be attracted to anything. if media decided to run with it by spreading the proper kind of images attached to the right kind of stimulus, we could have people sexually attracted to trees or airplanes or anything else. we could have an entire class of people that are only turned on by aromatized plastics. this has been demonstrated using pavlovian methods: orientation is highly malleable and entirely plastic. as it is, we live in a society where both genders are highly sexualized. that's both why hypersexuality is the current trend and bisexuality is becoming the new normal. we're constantly being conditioned to interpret both genders erotically, and slowly learn to respond through arousal - just like pavlov's dog salivates on the ring of a bell. it follows that people can avoid that conditioning by avoiding media, people and culture. i don't want to pretend that's a conscious choice on my behalf - that i'm avoiding the conditioning - but i happen to prefer spending time by myself, and as a result haven't been conditioned. the fact that i don't watch any tv (none. ever.) is probably a dominant factor in my lack of sexual interest. not watching tv or films or much of what's popular on youtube means i haven't been through that conditioning of what is really pornographic media that saturates the lives of most young people. so, i'm not suppressing anything, it's just that the conditioning i've been through has been very weak because i'm not interested in the culture that enforces it. there's also a feedback cycle inherent to that that leads to ever decreasing sexual interest, which means that once you get into the asexual "zone" it continues to self-perpetuate itself.
Olm8Cuz
touche my friend, touche.
David Gorczyca
responding to your initial comment - i really like the band but they sound softer and softer on every album.
Solace Creat
I don't know if I believe that. I also don't know if I don't believe that. As in all things, I would be more apt to attribute sexual orientation as nature as well as nurture. If the gay gene is found, that'll settle that. Until then, it's a moot point, though I could see that as being true. Pretty sure that a sex drive isn't a result classical conditioning, though operant conditioning may play a role. Perhaps the way people go about it is influenced by society, and while there is programming involved, it's more biological, imo. It's instinctual; otherwise, the human race probably wouldn't exist. If that were the case, then, myself, watching an abhorrent amount of television would be more apt to adhear to the aforementioned conditions. However, I'm not really asexual. If Kate Beckinsale or Natalie Portman showed up at my door ready to go, I'd have a difficult time saying no. So, I guess I just prefer not to go through all the complications of the ritual dating game, but I do value being close with someone. Also instinctual. I really think that since the base drives are instinctual, if someone doesn't adhear to those instincts it's a personal choice or a psychological...I don't want to say issue, but...complication of some sort. Of course, I guess this is all pretty semantically. I just don't believe that 'asexuality' is really a thing; in addition, if sexual preference doesn't exist due to the above criteria, then neither does asexuality. Though, I can appreciate the disgust or aloofness towards the typical courting rituals. They're pretty ridiculous.
deathtokoalas
there's no evidence of a gay gene. it's been used as a legal argument because american case law is exceedingly illiberal when it comes to certain things. arguing that gay people have no choice but to be gay has at times been the only available argument to prevent them from being punished. the legal argument has been "it's not their fault". it's been successful enough that it's taken on this sort of popular perception. however, it's not at all a scientific position and it's really almost certainly wrong - despite it's historical usefulness in court. i'd argue it's actually more liberating to think of sexuality as a choice than as something genetic. homosexuality is not an incurable disease, it's a decision that people should be given the right to make freely. but i'm actually taking a middle position in arguing in terms of unconscious conditioning - it's malleable (and this is demonstrable), but the result of uncontrollable stochastic events. i didn't mean to be too specific about the type of conditioning. if operand plays a role, it's probably in normalizing heterosexuality as "natural", i.e. in rejecting homosexuality. that would be strictly cultural. the type of conditioning i'm thinking about is something very chaotic that doesn't follow any kind of exact rules or patterns. but there are studies that demonstrate the malleability of it using classical conditioning. have you ever had a dog hump your leg? i don't think we're more complicated than that. the dog could be conditioned to become aroused at the sight of your leg, to the point it loses attraction to other dogs. the biological urge creates the arousal, but it clearly doesn't specify a target. if it did, there wouldn't be gay people at all, and dogs wouldn't hump your leg. anybody who's ever had a penis knows they don't always react to a clear stimulus. how that biological urge is shaped is where the complicated, stochastic conditioning comes in. to suggest it's hard wired really strikes me as entirely ludicrous; most people will agree that they've gone through phases in their lives where they seem to be aroused by almost anything at all, and should a phase of the sort intersect with an experience there's a substantial chance it could become habitual. it's a mild shift in mindset. rather than seeing us as evolved to fulfill a biological function of sex to reproduce, and deviating from that being pathological or defective, i see us as primitive creatures that will mostly fuck about anything we get the chance to - human or not. i go back and forth between thinking that our hormones are too stupid to understand the difference between a member of the opposite sex and livestock, and thinking that this indiscriminate level of persistent arousal is actually an evolutionary trait. that is to say we've evolved to fuck anything and everything we can, without being picky about things like function, gender or species. the suppression is mostly in "heterosexuals" denying "homosexual" urges, and that's entirely cultural. one of the ways to understand all this is just to look at human history. sexual orientation shifts with culture, both ways. in classical greece, virtually everybody was openly bisexual. but sex was an act that was very connected to class. for example, a man who owned slaves was expected to penetrate them as a statement of dominance and ownership. yet, a free man could never be penetrated by a slave or by another free man as that was a sign of submission. a lot of the taboos we have around sexuality come from these sorts of cultural things, rather than anything biological. and they can be easily traced by anybody with the time and patience to do it. also, as an aside, asexual isn't a lack of attraction in the sense of being impossible to arouse. it's just a disinterest in sex. some people that identify as asexual maintain sexual relationships. it's just not what drives them.
Bertie Wooster
good god. i guess you spend the time you free up not being sexually-attracted writing ridiculously long, completely bullshit comments on youtube. outstanding life choices you've made. the idea that sexual attraction is completely conditioned and isn't tied in anyway to the procreation drive is the most hilariously anti-science thing i've ever read, making the average creationist look like a biology phd.
deathtokoalas
i didn't say it isn't tied to the procreation drive, i've pointed out that this mechanism is imperfect. the creationist ideal ought to be that non-standard sexualities are some kind of abomination. if you think of life as a perfectly created thing by some divine force, that makes sense. modern science, on the other hand, introduces a lot of error. newton, for example, would be considered a creationist today. it's maybe ironic that his clockwork universe was used as an argument against god, because he actually saw the perfection of his system as being an argument in favour of it. but, we know now that things aren't so simple - that there's all kinds of error terms brought on by random events. it's the randomness that presents an argument against creation, even as it collapses the perspectives of classical science. extrapolating this (now not-so) new understanding of the universe to biology is admittedly an argument against darwinism in it's strict sense. i'm an evolutionist, but i have a lot of problems with the idea of natural selection and think it's ultimately destined for such a drastic reworking that it will find it's way into the dustbin. i'm more inclined to lean towards genetic drift as a sort of "background radiation" that explains most evolutionary change, and natural selection as something rare that must be rigorously demonstrated rather than philosophically assumed. if i'm right, that's ok; that's how science works. put bluntly, you're stuck in the nineteenth century, dude. for example, one could consider the dawkins-gould debate. is the rate of evolution constant or fluctuating? i'm over-simplifying, and dawkins would correct me, but consider the medium. gould has pointed out that there are large jumps in the fossil record that seem to contradict the idea of constant change. but, maybe the answer lies outside of this paradigm. as the climate is changing, we're seeing evidence before our eyes that hybridization is more common than we thought. a model is developing whereby changes in climate lead to recombination of related species - hence coyotes and wolves are recombining into one species, and there's some evidence that grizzly and polar bears, as well as lynx and bobcats, are going through similar hybridizations. with these hybridizations, we see the kind of morphological changes that gould has pointed to for evidence of dramatic jumps in the speed of evolution. i don't want to mislead you, here: i'm presenting a highly contentious hypothesis. yet, as more evidence builds to corroborate it, the end result could very well be that they are both wrong and that natural selection really is micro, while macro is driven by hybridization events. is this perspective not more consistent with a chaotic universe than the modern synthesis is? in the question of sheer survival, ask yourself this question: is a species that highly specializes it's reproductive behaviour to carefully sexually select more or less likely to pass on it's genes than a species that just fucks everything? are genes more likely to pass on when they are held back to certain traits or when they're just playing the odds? is survival of the horniest not a rational proposition? why does your dog hump your leg, anyways? you can see it all over the place. all kinds of species produce hundreds or thousands of eggs. advanced mammals cannot reproduce like this; it just requires too much energy. but, the equivalent strategy is to just fuck at every possible opportunity.
the actual science on the topic seems to indicate that humans are born horny, but without any innate preference one way or another. i would think that, if left to develop without any kind of gender coercion, most humans would mature into bisexual creatures that are driven by what could only be deemed "barbaric" levels of lust towards just about anything - humans, animals, whatever is around. one of the defining characteristics of civilization is the ability to repress that lust. the freedom for women to walk around half naked is a long way from the rape of the sabine women. it follows that attraction to the same sex can be exaggerated or minimized, as can attractions to the opposite one, but that neither is exclusively hard-wired in anybody at birth. sexual tabula rasa....
also, fwiw, i do enjoy this quite a bit more than i would enjoy any kind of conventional existence. i'll never understand why people take such narrow perspectives that they have to criticize people for not living up to some contrived ideal. maybe there are people on this planet that would rather spend time alone on the internet. that's a personal choice. i don't criticize people for wasting their lives and their minds on sex; learning a little bit of mutual respect for other lifestyles would do you (and others) some good.
Solace Creat
You make convincing points. My understanding of the word 'asexual' was off, then, at the very least for the purposes of this conversation.
umjim
Everyone is arguing and I just want to know what your deal with Koalas is..?
deathtokoalas
their despicable cuteness necessitates their imminent destruction.
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