No worries! I knew what I was getting myself into when I made that thread, and even in capslock mode I was having fun with it the whole way through. The occasional shouting match can be medicinal as long as it's a controlled burn. You weren't out of line at all :)
dang, very chill. Ever been to the corner of Royal & Orleans in New Orleans? It's in the french quarter. Any true Zeppelin fan must stand on the corner for at least 5 seconds and think about how Presence is a decent record
I think it's pretty awesome you have both a new age and a Houston rap list. Two great genres with a lot of depth, that are easily and wrongly written off by many. I'm definitely gonna dig into some artists on your lists
hey thanks for your post on that 21stC best albums thread from the other day or whenever. New sounds in pop today happen approximatlely polar opposite to when I was first buying records (see my new list please and soon make me teh famous rymer). Post-middle age clowns like basically ALL my old friends and peer group eternally harken to the 60s for the best pop (2 reasons, and they're good ones: melody/harmonic movement & the imprecise warmth brought about by analogue recording "live" performances of musicians playing "real" instruments (read: non digital/VST and so on. There's no such thing as a "not real" instrument. A guitar is a machine as much as a sampler is. You'd be amazed at the %% of 50+ folk who are blind to this simple fact. Any 15 year old nerd can write a hit now on his IPhone for talentless bimbos like Rihanna who are all autotune anyway. This such patent moron blather that one just clams up and goes into a metaphorical foetus position - the latter is like saying that Jimi Hendrix clearly could NOT PLAY THE GUITAR AS HE ALWAYS RELIED ON TRICKS LIKE WAH WAH AND LIGHTER FLUID. )
Before I explain the fundamental difference between the pop world machinations of 1968 and 2017, I'll mention how pop is both destroyed and Phoenix-like rises once more over and over and over:
For my money the single worst musician in the history of pop was Eric Clapton and his clueless sheeple fans. Dosing himself liberally with Robert Johnson's astonishing acoustic blues as a spotty future heroin addict wife stealer, he "borrowed" from the Mississippi Black Man a welter of licks, tunings, lyrics and entire songs. Then he became "God" London-wide they tell us and then he did something called Cream which in turn was an attempt at ripping of yet another American Black Man except this time one from Seattle. The banishment of rhythm geetar and keyboards left the pop world with an army of like-minded sounds, among them the most dreary unimaginative sounds ever created on Earth. It was called Blues Rock and it stank to high heaven. The only melodies with a hook were "AXE RIFFS"...all nothing more than endlessly repeated blues licks amplified at deafening volume played in unison with the bass and with no colour or shading anywhere at all). The proliferation of this horrendous genre held dear by millions of zonked white bread 20-somethings as their very own was fortunately equalled by 2 other massive forces - yet still resulting in a music with little or no defining melody or verse and with most likely zero harmonic movement (read: chord progressions especially with key changes throughout the song). Clapton, who had given the gravy train of his creation away by the year in question anyway (1969) and his millions of ignorant, racist, misogynist and reactionary followers almost single handedly destroyed pop's future as vanguard at the moment of the sea-change that changed the course of things for decades to come: MILES DAVIS AND THE BEATLES.
Miles did "Bitches Brew", the forever misspelt, mispunctuated album of the most forward looking electrified jazz city funk fusion acid blast recorded up til that year. The Beatles did "Comne Together" which at a cryptically ironic crossroad, black American funk musicians began covering, recording and including in their live sets. A far from Clapton's wholesale robbery of the American Negro Man who, having been slain in a bar fight in the early 1930s, never of course saw one cent from the White Man in payment for his genius which is in fact still at the very roots of qwe have called "rock" for decades.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE POP CREATIVE MACHINATION OF 1968 AND 2017:
It's all in reverse. The way the creativity flows. I will give you four songs as examples. 1)1968 "All Along The Watchtower" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Arguably the greatest cover version ever, it's a Dylan song of course. A Vanguard lyric. Two white trash are talking. Perhaps in some stinking smoke filled working class dive. They basically run through a verse where we meet the joker and the thief in which the joker would of what Australia's Midnight Oil poetically described the mental state where "The rich get richer and the poor get the picture" thusly:
There must be some kind of way outta here Said the joker to the thief There's too much confusion I can't get no relief Business men, they drink my wine Plowman dig my earth None were level on the mind Nobody up at his word
The second verse is the thief's. He has had this moment himself years past and many perfectly see the lie that we live and just laugh about the cosmic crime of it, thusly:
"No reason to get excited, " The thief – he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us Who feel that life is but a joke But you and I we've been through that And this is not our fate So let us not talk falsely now The hour's getting late."
Then a 3-pronged electric break with sound textures never before realised in a studio much less on pop radio down the hamburger joint. Then the final verse where something odd happens. The miscreant blue collar drunks decide to go ballistic. Maybe rob a back or slice Sharon Tate's unborn child from the womb. We never know. We are never told. We see them disappear into the whiteness of the snowstorm instead, nothing ever ever resolved.
This was astonishing to me at !0 years old. I was a smart kid. This bizarre, trippishly electric and other-worldy sound and lyric was coming from a transistor radio down the swimming pool while I perved on my friend's older sister's bums and wondered what it would feel like for a girl with a bum like that and tits to....well this music was in the Top 5 with Julie Andrews and The Beatles and it was.... A YOUNG POOR BLACK AMERICAN SINGING A SONG FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF YOUNG POOR WHITE AMERICANS......wow!!!
It killed like 10 birds with one stone. And it was vanguard. The studio and attendant technology was now firmly into it's infant run as music's new musical tool. Once again a guitar is a tool, a machine. Just like a synth, sampler, computer or Iphone. You just push some buttons and twiddle some knobs and new sounds happen just by fucking around. The buttons you press are called frets. The knobs you twiddle are called pots and strings. Problems: this is a very primitive machine. Amplified and nothing else it provides primitive results.
So in 1968 the Vanguard of "All Along The Watchtower" "Strawberry Fields" "MacCarthur Park" or "Good Vibrations" filters down to those who are only influenced, never an influence themselves. There is never to be a chart hit resembling the Hendrix masterpiece again, though typically it is ultra-predictable white trash staples that bcome the standard norm for decades (read: Stairway to heaven" "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Layla").
2) THE VANGUARD FILTERS UPWARDS INSTEAD OF THE OPPOSITE WAY. IT'S ONLY 4 YEARS SINCE FKA TWIGS RELEASED "WATER ME" a radically fucked up hot-as-shit black robot woman on my YouTubes.
ONLY ABOUT 2 YEARS LATER AND THE RADIO WAS ON AT WORK. OMG WTF I THINK AS WHAT SOUNDS LIKE A SMOOTHER FKA TWIGS OOZES OUT OF THE SPEAKERS BLENDING IN UNDER AND OVER OVER THE MACHINERY.
But it is not FKA Twigs. Itis Flume and it is called "Never be like you" and it's FKA Twigs filtred down alright. Filtered down so it sounds like a lovelorn Katy Perrry on a Monday Morning E Downer.
The vanguard filtered up through the underground layers to the sunlight, warmth and dollars of the mainstream. As it has now for decades. Not since those heady days of 1968 has it filtered down.
So tomorrow on the chart radio we will hear Tim Hecker and Fennesz, you know. Except it will not be them. It will be a FLUME of them both, their noise and sonic revolution filtered through the Stepford Wife Iphone of contemporary reality.
Before I explain the fundamental difference between the pop world machinations of 1968 and 2017, I'll mention how pop is both destroyed and Phoenix-like rises once more over and over and over:
For my money the single worst musician in the history of pop was Eric Clapton and his clueless sheeple fans. Dosing himself liberally with Robert Johnson's astonishing acoustic blues as a spotty future heroin addict wife stealer, he "borrowed" from the Mississippi Black Man a welter of licks, tunings, lyrics and entire songs. Then he became "God" London-wide they tell us and then he did something called Cream which in turn was an attempt at ripping of yet another American Black Man except this time one from Seattle. The banishment of rhythm geetar and keyboards left the pop world with an army of like-minded sounds, among them the most dreary unimaginative sounds ever created on Earth. It was called Blues Rock and it stank to high heaven. The only melodies with a hook were "AXE RIFFS"...all nothing more than endlessly repeated blues licks amplified at deafening volume played in unison with the bass and with no colour or shading anywhere at all). The proliferation of this horrendous genre held dear by millions of zonked white bread 20-somethings as their very own was fortunately equalled by 2 other massive forces - yet still resulting in a music with little or no defining melody or verse and with most likely zero harmonic movement (read: chord progressions especially with key changes throughout the song). Clapton, who had given the gravy train of his creation away by the year in question anyway (1969) and his millions of ignorant, racist, misogynist and reactionary followers almost single handedly destroyed pop's future as vanguard at the moment of the sea-change that changed the course of things for decades to come: MILES DAVIS AND THE BEATLES.
Miles did "Bitches Brew", the forever misspelt, mispunctuated album of the most forward looking electrified jazz city funk fusion acid blast recorded up til that year. The Beatles did "Comne Together" which at a cryptically ironic crossroad, black American funk musicians began covering, recording and including in their live sets. A far from Clapton's wholesale robbery of the American Negro Man who, having been slain in a bar fight in the early 1930s, never of course saw one cent from the White Man in payment for his genius which is in fact still at the very roots of qwe have called "rock" for decades.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE POP CREATIVE MACHINATION OF 1968 AND 2017:
It's all in reverse. The way the creativity flows. I will give you four songs as examples.
1)1968 "All Along The Watchtower" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Arguably the greatest cover version ever, it's a Dylan song of course. A Vanguard lyric. Two white trash are talking. Perhaps in some stinking smoke filled working class dive. They basically run through a verse where we meet the joker and the thief in which the joker would of what Australia's Midnight Oil poetically described the mental state where "The rich get richer and the poor get the picture" thusly:
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Business men, they drink my wine
Plowman dig my earth
None were level on the mind
Nobody up at his word
The second verse is the thief's. He has had this moment himself years past and many perfectly see the lie that we live and just laugh about the cosmic crime of it, thusly:
"No reason to get excited, "
The thief – he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour's getting late."
Then a 3-pronged electric break with sound textures never before realised in a studio much less on pop radio down the hamburger joint. Then the final verse where something odd happens. The miscreant blue collar drunks decide to go ballistic. Maybe rob a back or slice Sharon Tate's unborn child from the womb. We never know. We are never told. We see them disappear into the whiteness of the snowstorm instead, nothing ever ever resolved.
This was astonishing to me at !0 years old. I was a smart kid. This bizarre, trippishly electric and other-worldy sound and lyric was coming from a transistor radio down the swimming pool while I perved on my friend's older sister's bums and wondered what it would feel like for a girl with a bum like that and tits to....well this music was in the Top 5 with Julie Andrews and The Beatles and it was.... A YOUNG POOR BLACK AMERICAN SINGING A SONG FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF YOUNG POOR WHITE AMERICANS......wow!!!
It killed like 10 birds with one stone. And it was vanguard. The studio and attendant technology was now firmly into it's infant run as music's new musical tool. Once again a guitar is a tool, a machine. Just like a synth, sampler, computer or Iphone. You just push some buttons and twiddle some knobs and new sounds happen just by fucking around. The buttons you press are called frets. The knobs you twiddle are called pots and strings. Problems: this is a very primitive machine. Amplified and nothing else it provides primitive results.
So in 1968 the Vanguard of "All Along The Watchtower" "Strawberry Fields" "MacCarthur Park" or "Good Vibrations" filters down to those who are only influenced, never an influence themselves. There is never to be a chart hit resembling the Hendrix masterpiece again, though typically it is ultra-predictable white trash staples that bcome the standard norm for decades (read: Stairway to heaven" "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Layla").
2) THE VANGUARD FILTERS UPWARDS INSTEAD OF THE OPPOSITE WAY. IT'S ONLY 4 YEARS SINCE FKA TWIGS RELEASED "WATER ME" a radically fucked up hot-as-shit black robot woman on my YouTubes.
ONLY ABOUT 2 YEARS LATER AND THE RADIO WAS ON AT WORK. OMG WTF I THINK AS WHAT SOUNDS LIKE A SMOOTHER FKA TWIGS OOZES OUT OF THE SPEAKERS BLENDING IN UNDER AND OVER OVER THE MACHINERY.
But it is not FKA Twigs. Itis Flume and it is called "Never be like you" and it's FKA Twigs filtred down alright. Filtered down so it sounds like a lovelorn Katy Perrry on a Monday Morning E Downer.
The vanguard filtered up through the underground layers to the sunlight, warmth and dollars of the mainstream. As it has now for decades. Not since those heady days of 1968 has it filtered down.
So tomorrow on the chart radio we will hear Tim Hecker and Fennesz, you know. Except it will not be them. It will be a FLUME of them both, their noise and sonic revolution filtered through the Stepford Wife Iphone of contemporary reality.