Post a controversial music opinion

sorry for your hearing loss

how did you know i'm having an attack of tinnitus

^I am too (due to a non–music-related noise event)... it always goes away, but I always worry it won’t :/

I've been getting it lately tbf but it hasn't diminished my appreciation of the excellence of Relayer.

Relayer is fucking glorious. My favourite Yes album and I wish they'd done more like it.

Morton Feldman’s 2nd String Quartet is one of the greatest quartets ever written

The music on Bitches Brew is a letdown after the awesome cover art.

BB is my least favorite of the rock fusion albums

The Afrofuturist painting promises this mind-bending sci-fi funk excursion, and what we get is stoned jazzbos playing on top of each other.

Miles Davis was flailing a little, creatively, from 1969-71. The first half of Bitches Brew is pretty good, but the second half is superfluous. In A Silent Way is as much a Teo Macero album as a Miles Davis album. The live records take a long time to feel rewarding, and some of that is undoubtedly sunk costs. Even A Tribute To Jack Johnson is only about 1/2 great. But from 1972-75, he was on fire.

half of all jazz is superfluous haha

xxp Oof I kind of agree, except that "Pharaoh's Dance" is a masterpiece

BB is easily my least favorite electric Miles record, live or studio. It's like A Love Supreme in a way: it's transitional in that there's far more fully-realized work before and after it, but it feels like a necessary step; and it's overrated largely due to however many decades of "THIS IS THE DEFINITIVE yadda yadda."

I wouldn't say Miles was flailing, though: the 1969-70 live stuff with Shorter is uniformly ace (the 3/7/70 show is one of my favorite Miles recordings ever, absolutely relentless), and even when a lesser figure like Steve Grossman comes in, Chick Corea manages to compensate with a noisy approach he apparently abandoned immediately after leaving Miles.

The only time during that period when Miles sounds less than focused to me is the '71 stuff with Ndugu Chancler, who didn't have the drive or sense of orchestration that Jack DeJohnette and (especially) Al Foster had.

I love Dark Magus and Agharta though.

i don't care how the sausage got made In a Silent Way is one of the greatest album's ever released

The only time during that period when Miles sounds less than focused to me is the '71 stuff with Ndugu Chancler, who didn't have the drive or sense of orchestration that Jack DeJohnette and (especially) Al Foster had.

Ha, I find the Chancler live recordings fascinating and wish Sony would devote a volume of the Bootleg Series to just shows from that 1971 European tour. (I talked to Gary Bartz about it recently; unfortunately, the audio wasn't good enough to use it for a podcast.)

I agree with you ums

I have spoken before (and probably posted to this end) about how my lack of reverence for Laughing Stock is rooted in the fact that it took so, so long to record, whereas In A Silent Way was recorded in a day; that Laughing Stock's influence on bands like Radiohead et al. has been less about the textures of the album and more about the "let's spend endless days in the studio experimenting instead of practicing so we can do it quickly" approach to album making

This thread is less about being "controversial" and more about a bro-down over classically bro-y artists, albums, and sub-genres

dunno whether debating influential Miles Davis recordings is more classic sausage party than doing so re the merits of pink floyd albums

What would an unbroified controversial music opinion look like?

thinking bitches brew is miles' worst fusion-era record is practically like critical consensus at this point, not sure why it was posted here

Tori Amos>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Kate Bush

xp

Can't argue with that (form and content both).

I applaud Shakey for his true controp. (and disagree violently obv)

I don't get Kate Bush at all. No emotional resonance whatsoever, just theatre.

haha I totally don't believe that was just trying to come up w an opinion that met pomenitul's criteria

I wouldn't put as many ">"s there, but in a lot of ways I prefer Tori to Kate ... tho I like both.

like when I'm in emo "me-time" mode, Little Earthquakes is way more likely what I put on than a Kate Bush album

Confessional vs. literary. I'll take literary for $200, Alex.

Side 2 of Yellow Submarine > Side 1 of Yellow Submarine

"Tango Whiskeyman" is the only good song Can ever recorded.

I don't get Kate Bush at all. No emotional resonance whatsoever, just theatre.

― pomenitul, Tuesday, January 29, 2019 7:11 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's Nick Cave for me

^ both of them here (Birthday Party excluded)

Theatre doesn't have emotional resonance?

I understand not liking her, but theatre/resonance aren't a binary imo

there is a certain way of thinking

a wrong and terrible way of thinking but still

affectlessness as signifier of authenticity and other nonsense

Theatre doesn't have emotional resonance?

― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, February 1, 2019 7:58 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post PermalinkTom Waits falls into this category for me too

it's more just like theater qua theater,...it's top-heavy with presentation.

Tom Waits also falls into this category for me

Co-sign on Tom Waits and Nick Cave.

guys working the character a little too hard and failing to wink

Nick Cave = probably 2 or 3 albums worth of good stuff
Tom Waits = probably 12 or 13 albums worth of good stuff
Kate Bush = flawless and fuiud
Disliking "theatre" = oh fuck off everything's performance

would you watch an actor on stage who reminds the audience that "It's only a play, mate"?

theatricality > schtick

I think for the most part music shouldn't involve suspension of disbelief

a category mistake

PBS was showing some Closing Time-era Tom Waits a couple weeks back and I found it so embarrassing! Two hours of this painful cod-hobo business

There's no question that all the world's a stage, yadda yadda, but that's precisely why an escape from theatricality seems so desirable to me. This implies a self-avowedly impossible, doomed quest for 'authenticity' (no, it isn't real but my wish for it to be is) rather than affectlessness. Art that plays up its own de facto inauthenticity tends to be a tiresome tautology in my book (with exceptions, of course, such as Roxy Music).

I think for the most part music *always* involves suspension of disbelief

I don't need to believe that David Bowie is, variously, a harlequin or nazi or a astronaut. He's just asking me to play along, so I'm in on it. Whereas for me w/ Waits or Nick Cave I get the sense that they actually want me to buy into these personalities, and I just fail to get there.

I don't really get more of an 'escape from theatricality' from "Cornflake Girl" than from "Running Up That Hill", though. I sort of get that there's more of a guts-spilling autobiographical quality in Amos's work and more of a third-person storytelling quality in Bush's but I don't know that I agree that this quite maps onto the binary you're setting up. I like Bush a lot more because I think she has a better voice, songs that say more to me, and more interesting music (but I like things by Amos).