[viewtiful_alan]

sonic youth with timbaland... XD

[Rob Instigator]

knowing sonic youth, they'd get someone like dan deacon to produce! bleep bleep bloop!

[DJ Rick]

Originally Posted by 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.

I'm not suggesting that such a band should or would become a hitmaker. I'm just saying that--even if the band was revelatory and awe-inspiring on a fairly objective standard--it's hard to get to the point where a new band can expect to have a break-even tour. And that's true whether or not we were stubborn about including the hurdy gurdy. And, yeah...I would include it at all costs if that's what we wanted.

[acousticrock87]

My point was only that compromise does not immediately indicate insincerity.

Say your girlfriend/wife isn't into role-playing and you really want her to do it: You either suck it up and make a compromise that you aren't completely happy with, or accpet the fact that the relationship is probably going to have problems later on and make a choice. It's the same thing with a music/audience relationship. If you really want to use a hurdy-gurdy, and the audience can't stand it, you either compromise or you let the audience go. It can occassionally work out, like with Nine Inch Nails' Downward Spiral or Radiohead's Kid A, but even they still had to factor in the audience to a huge degree.

One of the best lessons in the creative arts is: kill your darlings. Just because you think something looks/sounds/seems great to you, doesn't mean it's good for your audience. In my writing classes, there are people that insist on some ridiculous pieces that no one would ever read. Poets, in particular, are notorious for that. It's fine if they want to continue like that, but they all eventually learn that it won't get them an audience.

If you don't want to give up any element of your style, then you're honest and sincere in keeping it; if you do decide that you want to comprise a couple of things to make it more digestable, then it just means your heart is in a different place, that your focus is on the audience, and not your personal life. Both are totally fine, in my opinion, but it makes for very different music.

That's not to say there aren't some megafamous shitty artists in it for the money, though.

[Cantankerous]

no compromises. never.

don't do things to fucking please other people.

[acousticrock87]

Originally Posted by Cantankerous

no compromises. never.

don't do things to fucking please other people.

Pleasing people is not the same as craving people's approval. That's like saying don't stop to help someone find their glasses because it's compromising your schedule.

[Cantankerous]

Originally Posted by acousticrock87

Pleasing people is not the same as craving people's approval. That's like saying don't stop to help someone find their glasses because it's compromising your schedule.

i don't care if anyone approves of what i do creatively or otherwise, because it's not their decision nor is it probably any of their business. i do not need your approval.


by the way, if someone approves of something that would generally indicate that they are pleased with it.

[ni'k]

i'll guess that noone cares what you do creatively in the first place because yr attitude is false and cliched and that of someone who is in sore need of approval

[acousticrock87]

Originally Posted by Cantankerous

i don't care if anyone approves of what i do creatively or otherwise, because it's not their decision nor is it probably any of their business. i do not need your approval.


by the way, if someone approves of something that would generally indicate that they are pleased with it.

I know, I'm saying that approval is stupid. Pleasing someone for the sake of gaining approval is stupid. Pleasing them for their benefit is not. There's usually a huge tension between playing live and recording--a lot of talented bands like one or the other a lot more. But if they just stopped halfway through the tour because they were tired, that would be the band's unwillingness to compromise for the sake of pleasing the audience.

EDIT: I think it's the same thing about compromising music. If you want to do something and afford to live, you gotta give your audience a bone. At the very least, run a side project or something. Working for a living is a compromise, but it needs to be done. Aside from a paycheck, society wouldn't function without that.

[Cantankerous]

Originally Posted by ni'k

i'll guess that noone cares what you do creatively in the first place because yr attitude is false and cliched and that of someone who is in sore need of approval

see previous post. ie go fuck yourself. put me on ignore if you don't fucking like it.

Originally Posted by acousticrock87

I know, I'm saying that approval is stupid. Pleasing someone for the sake of gaining approval is stupid. Pleasing them for their benefit is not. There's usually a huge tension between playing live and recording--a lot of talented bands like one or the other a lot more. But if they just stopped halfway through the tour because they were tired, that would be the band's unwillingness to compromise for the sake of pleasing the audience.

you've got a point there. thank you for clarifying.

[ni'k]

put you on ignore? i guess if you can't get approval, disaproval will do eh?

[Cantankerous]

do whatever you want. i'm going to bed.

[ni'k]

its been a rough night

Originally Posted by DJ Rick

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.

Forget my earlier post on this thread, this is the sort of long post that I don't mind reading at all.

[Dead-Air]

I have no complaints about music now as compared to any other time since the advent of recording. Once it all became eternal, it was all there whenever we could get to it.

So my complaints lie with the rest of life that make me listen to music less obsessively than I once did; being more responsible than when I woke up in the afternoon, grabbed the bong and started playing records until it was time to go out and drink and see somebody play live or dj until closing time. I don't blame music that I exist in a different reality now than then. Overall, I prefer this one actually, but the soundtrack is overall much quieter and increasingly silent.

Technology has changed music in one way I've noticed in that it is becoming less geographical. The likelihood of another "Seattle Sound" ever arising seems incredibly unlikely because now we band together with likeminded people online who might be anywhere on the planet. Of course this hasn't fully started to impact the "live" experience, but the beginnings are here. An experimental or noise musician playing a show in Portland with a bunch of other acts might realistically hope to be heard by 30-40 people on a night with a pretty good turnout. That same artist could play my radioshow on a Saturday at noon and in the course of a couple weeks get literally ten times as many downloads as that from our digital archive. Most of us would rather do both of course, but the club date being a priority and the live college radio set being an after-thought may begin to be reversed when streams and MP3 archives are brought into the mix.

[atsonicpark]

DJ Rick for the win!

[atsonicpark]

oh and thanks for the druid perfume link, this is awesome!

[Toilet & Bowels]

Originally Posted by acousticrock87

My point was only that compromise does not immediately indicate insincerity.

Say your girlfriend/wife isn't into role-playing and you really want her to do it: You either suck it up and make a compromise that you aren't completely happy with, or accpet the fact that the relationship is probably going to have problems later on and make a choice. It's the same thing with a music/audience relationship. If you really want to use a hurdy-gurdy, and the audience can't stand it, you either compromise or you let the audience go. It can occassionally work out, like with Nine Inch Nails' Downward Spiral or Radiohead's Kid A, but even they still had to factor in the audience to a huge degree.

One of the best lessons in the creative arts is: kill your darlings. Just because you think something looks/sounds/seems great to you, doesn't mean it's good for your audience. In my writing classes, there are people that insist on some ridiculous pieces that no one would ever read. Poets, in particular, are notorious for that. It's fine if they want to continue like that, but they all eventually learn that it won't get them an audience.

If you don't want to give up any element of your style, then you're honest and sincere in keeping it; if you do decide that you want to comprise a couple of things to make it more digestable, then it just means your heart is in a different place, that your focus is on the audience, and not your personal life. Both are totally fine, in my opinion, but it makes for very different music.

That's not to say there aren't some megafamous shitty artists in it for the money, though.

what you're saying seems to based entirley on speculation and vague assumptions

[acousticrock87]

Well it's completely opinion. I may have worded it a little too imperatively, but it's all open for debate.

But yes it's opinion based on speculation, as well as experience in writing and editing.

[Toilet & Bowels]

Originally Posted by acousticrock87

But yes it's opinion based on speculation, as well as experience in writing and editing.

which has what to do with music?