[viewtiful_alan]

Very very true. Wish I could add more but you pretty much said it.

[atsonicpark]

i love this:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=__9aM4e15p0

[✌➬]

Originally Posted by viewtiful_alan

I get what your saying.
I don't know, maybe I'm just one of those idiots who thinks everything was better way back when. There is good music now, just very little of it hits me like most of those old albums do.

There are a lot of great bands out there now. You just have to search it out.

[Glice]

Originally Posted by viewtiful_alan

I get what your saying.
I don't know, maybe I'm just one of those idiots who thinks everything was better way back when. There is good music now, just very little of it hits me like most of those old albums do.

Good stuff. I'm actually in a very similar boat in terms of my listening, but I try not to say 'things were better' as I hate [natch] the rose-coloured revisionism of 'old bands = good bands'. It's very easy to say, at my age, that '80s rock was better', but the fact of the matter was I wasn't really there listening to 50+ so-so bands before I got to the Birthday Party (or whomever).

[viewtiful_alan]

Originally Posted by ✌➬

There are a lot of great bands out there now. You just have to search it out.

Oh I know. I've been buying a lot more new albums now than I used to.
When you live in the burbs its just hard to find anything too radical XD

[Cantankerous]

i love good music

i hate the punters who write for music magazines

[✌➬]

Originally Posted by viewtiful_alan

Oh I know. I've been buying a lot more new albums now than I used to.
When you live in the burbs its just hard to find anything too radical XD

That's why we have the internet. Download my man.

[Rob Instigator]

Originally Posted by acousticrock87

I don't know, modern music trends confuse me. People adore John Mayer in the popular world, and despise him underground. Jeff Buckley is virtually ignored by pop listeners, and worshipped underground. In reality, they're pretty equally talented and not all that different stylistically. It's not about "good" or "bad" or even "style" anymore. There are too many elements that affect us unknowingly.

yeah, they are both pussy soft fucks who sing acoustic foppery folkie BULLSHIT

[acousticrock87]

[Sheriff Rhys Chatham]

Originally Posted by atsonicpark

i love this:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=__9aM4e15p0

I love this:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vjMsSIc_EoM

[Toilet & Bowels]

Originally Posted by Cantankerous

i love good music

i hate the punters who write for music magazines

punter means customer

[Cantankerous]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

punter means customer

not in all cases, like it does butcant you use it for like someone who's easy to take advantage of? or so i was told but that was ages ago. evdiently not though

thank you though



but like what i was told is (and correct me if i'm wrong)

- a customer usually of prostitutes
- or just a shop customer
- less commonly an idiot who can be taken advantage of. like the opposite of a hustler.

[Glice]

I'd wager, without having looked into it (although I will tomorrow) that a 'punter' refers to the sort of customer who is willing to spend money on frivolous things, such as a ride on a punt.

[Cantankerous]

thank you, glice, for tempering my apparent ignorance

[acousticrock87]

I could see it being an insult. If not, it has a distasteful-enough sound to become one. If you said that in America without any context to football, everyone would wonder a second whether you were just euphemizing "cunt".

EDIT: Actually, by "everyone" I meant me.

[DJ Rick]

Originally Posted by viewtiful_alan

A band as genuinley angry as say.. Black Flag couldn't exist in today's musical climate. The anger that you heard in those records and live came from shitty touring conditions, the frustrations of living from dollar to dollar, and an overall state of alienation... all of those things are taken away by the easy accesability and use of the internet.

The internet has taken away the need for extensive guerilla promotion (another interesting facet of the Flag), for a band to be truly hated but still try, in essence it takes some of the passion and effort out of making music. Sure its a great convenience and takes away some of the above mentioned troubles, but on an artistic level, I'm gonna have to dispute the helpfulness of the internet.

The internet really really takes away some of the joy of finding things through exploring, I'd much rather find a band by taking a chance at a record store, rather than clicking on some band's site because I saw that it got a million hits.

And with the internet being the defining object of everything these days, music included, I'm gonna classify this as an argument against music's current path.

How can you be a judge of what is genuine in music and still be a Chili Peppers fan?

No one can be genuinely angry anymore because it's too easy to tour? Gee, I seem to recall gasoline being 50-75 cents per gallon back in the days when Black Flag was touring, and the network of kids that booked shows and played in bands and wrote zines was surprisingly well-connected back then. Asking someone to book a show nowadays might just mean sending a quick email...seems easy enough, right? Back in Black Flag's day, though,there were thousands of kids all across the continent whose reality did include the know-how to rent a Veterans hall or throw a party in a basement or even an oil & lube shop that some friend had a job at. We're talking about kids in the heyday of HC...they were resourceful! For many kids today, the idea that you can do something DIY that's legit enough to take seriously and that's better than anything on the radio or TV isn't even real...so good luck getting a show anywhere in the Mountain time zone or the Great Plains. See if spending $400+ on gas to drive your tour van from western Montana to Minneapolis after the dive bar in Missoula gave you $30 because only 12 people came to see you (despite all your MySpace and Facebook bulletins and cut/pasted message board posts and a few spins on the college radio station). That is what it's like for most DIY bands touring right now. A losing proposition. Black Flag did pretty well on tour. Now who's angry enough to come off as authentic?

When you're complaining about music coming too easy for folks nowadays, that's really just costly only to the quality of music in the mainstream and the dinosaurs of the music industry who wanna resist what technology's done to the marketplace. As for "underground" or DIY stuff or whatever you wanna call it, it's still overshadowed. Just because it's available for free listening on the internet doesn't mean that everyone's finding it. People who are content with mainstream crap never look beyond the flashing banner ads.

It's almost a miracle that tens of thousands of people have clicked on No Age's MySpace profile when it's staring at them from the "exclusive" location before they log in. That does mean that No Age's promoters have spent some significant coin to participate in this high-profile pay-to-play placement. But look at the site stats....it's only tens of thousands. It's not gonna make No Age rich compared to a Li'l Wayne who's selling millions of copies right out the gate. You can read about him right on the front page of Yahoo. Now, how about you and me start a new weirdo/beardo drum circle that's all about some new and extra-evil witchcraft that conjured up the sickest doom riffs with a chorus of wraith-like hot chicks whose pitch perfection is impeccable enough to create diabolic tritones, and then we'll make the B-side the most bomb-ass dancefloor remixes of the same songs somehow, and it will be critically acclaimed on the 10-12 most forward-leaning and tasteful blogs and be an instant "record of the week" at Aquarius. See where it will get us in a month or a year. Maybe 1000 page views, and everyday we wake up, we look under the bed and find half of our DIY pressing of LPs (which cost us $7 each wholesale) still there in boxes.

You really gotta know where to look online to find the mindblowingest music of today, but it is there for free to listen to. And a lot of these musicians and fans can use a thing like MySpace to keep their mutual affinity groups informed. But it's not like totally uninformed people are gonna come waltzing across that site by the thousands, and a band like Druid Perfume is still a secret to probably 90% of people who bought records by their previous band, The Piranhas. Have a look at how slow this grows... http://www.myspace.com/druidperfume

Music is at its very best stylistically and in the underground since bands like Flipper and the Butthole Surfers were new, and bands like PiL and The Fall were at the height of their game, and even pop formalists like the Go-Betweens and the TV Personalities were perfecting their genre, with Kraftwerk and Devo further spinning it out, and bands like Severed Heads and Cabaret Voltaire further blending electronics with the punk ethos. Today's music underground is probably as or more daring stylistically, mixing so many diverse influences and unghetto-izing music. Of course, everyone around here's so stymied still by the vapors of MBV and the heyday of Sonic Youth's peak of popularity between "Goo" and "Dirty", most haven't caught up to the mid-90s yet. Seriously, though...These days are gonna be considered a halcyon age in about 10-20 years.

As for the negative effects of the internet as it affects everyone, it has been the death of patience for too many listeners. If a song doesn't dazzle you right away, just dump it and move on to the next stream or download.....it's too easy. Not like when I was a kid and had to buy records based on what a trusted critic had written (thank you, Byron Coley!) or what KDVS was playing (thank you, Karl Ikola!) or how awesome did the cover look (Pushead burned me a couple times!). (I know I've told this story here before, but) Just as I was getting curious enough to investigate the back history of punk, I was reading about this band called Television. Everyone made it sound like this album called Marquee Moon was essential. So I bought it. My 13- or 14-year-old brain wasn't ready for it immediately. Actually, I thought it was kinda lame. I was like, "Where's the punk? Where's the bombast?" It didn't excite me. But because I mowed a neighbor's lawn and washed a car and begged my mom for a ride to the record store, I felt obligated to listen and re-listen many times. I had to get my time and money's worth. And I did eventually learn that it was a great album. In the day of free downloads and streams everywhere, that kinda scrutiny is rare in a young listener. Hence, less and less kids these days figure out that there's anything better than what manages to grab their interest now. Their concepts of reality are shrinking while the possibilities being pioneered in the underground are growing.

[Rob Instigator]

DJ Rick for Board President Goddamn it!

read and learn kids, read and learn.

for it is the GODDAMNED truth!

[acousticrock87]

I honestly think that if your hypothetical drum circle band was serious about making it, they would. The music industry is not only sincerity to the band's little concept of what "real" music is, it's about getting it out there.

If you're sitting in a corner shaking your head at the world because you don't want to drop the hurdy-gurdy background noise, that's a different kind of sincerity. It's admirable, in a way, but of course you're not going to sell. If people tell you what they want, and you say, "No, I want to sell millions of records on my own terms," you're just being stubborn. Sonic Youth is a crossroads for music because it fell into that tiny area where they fit both categories. Hence, they're only mediocre in their fame. But usually, it doesn't work like that.

Talent is objective, but "good music" is not. Don't get the two confused.

[Rob Instigator]

but sonic youth has never sold even half a million of any record. if they had, actually sought more sales they could have gotten more sales and done so easily.

by writing WEAK SHIT

[Toilet & Bowels]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

but sonic youth has never sold even half a million of any record. if they had, actually sought more sales they could have gotten more sales and done so easily.

by writing WEAK SHIT

i don't think sonic youth have the pop sensibilities to make it big even if they wanted to, unless they got some big time producer in to make their record for them