OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

from an old interview I found online with Carl Craig

TN: You yourself have explored the classical-electronic mix pretty
extensively, mixing those two genres live with Francesco Tristano
and on record with Moritz von Oswald. What’s so fascinating about
the combination of human and machine?

CC: The experimental works of John Cage and Steve Reich are a big
influence, using tape loops and things like that, it’s within the same
realm of using a CR-78 or an echo drum machine, something that
sounds very percussive and synthetic at the same time. It wasn’t ever
like, ‘Okay this is what you’ve got to listen to’, we’ve been very good
at spreading our horizons in listening to things that are different and
diverse

from 75 Rolling Stone feature on Kraftwerk:

"Autobahn" describes a journey on the German expressway leading in and out of Berlin, and underscores the group's concern with pulse and wave over note and rhythm. A Beach Boys record it is not, even though a line from the piece – "Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n auf der Autobahn" ("We're driving, driving, driving on the autobahn") – sounds uncannily reminiscent of the line from America's premier car group: "And she'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes her T-Bird away." Hütter and Schneider, in fact, claim no U.S. groups as influences. Their favorites include such space-rock outfits as Pink Floyd, Yes and Tangerine Dream, as well as avant-garde classicists John Cage, Terry Riley and, particularly, countryman Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose pioneering electronic work provides a "spiritual" tie to their own.

Electronic music came from continental Europe because Jean Michael Jarre said so.

*Michel

That’s one of the things that I enjoyed the most with the Electronica project: remembering that electronic music has nothing to do with the United States. It’s not related to jazz, blues, rock, it comes from continental Europe.

It has nothing to do with English-speaking countries, it was born in Germany with Stockhausen and in France with Pierre Schaefer, then with the Germans on one side, or me. We each come with our own particularities and we have held this legacy: these long instrumentals are the legacy of music tied with technology.

http://www.konbini.com/en/entertainment-2/jean-michel-jarre-interview

people pretend like it's proto-acid-house or some shit when it's totally just superficially coincidental use of the same technology

feel like the element of coincidence is what appeals to ppl the most about this if anything

yeah, "pave the way", "influenced", "inspired", they're narrative choices. i don't have a lot of time for that kind of Whig cultural history but i'm not sure when writers use them they are always claiming literal lineal descent, just structuring their observations.

every new thing rewrites every old thing that came before it anyway.

some people obviously are literally claiming lines of descent but like who cares what idiots think?

is this a narrative people are using or just one we're annoyed about but isn't what is actually being said?

feel like it's second-generation thinkpieces and critical thought that tend to make bad generalizations like that and assume lineage and not the original reviews

always enjoy white Germano-premicists being deaf to e.g. the latin rhythms in House music or the call and response running thru Disco etc

xp yeah largely but god there are a lot of second-generation makes you thinkpieces out there now

i guess quotes from the artists don't cut it?

man, fucking everybody in the '70s said they were influenced by stockhausen. i think it was one of those "you had to be there" things.

i wouldn't treat them like gospel, artists are just as capable of retconning their own process as anybody else. but i'm not arguing with "i was listening to this" or "i wanted to sound like that" so much as "Artist X led to Artist Y" or "without Piece A there would be no Piece B"

"influenced by" and "sounds like" can be very different things

i mean i'm barely arguing, more musing out loud: i would be cool with narrative histories of culture that start in the now and go backwards - Carl Craig begat Steve Reich etc etc

Ok Dr Who

the Beach Boys are in "Autobahn" and it doesn't really matter what Ralf or Florian say about it

alls i'm saying is that i don't find it particularly hard to believe that ppl who got involved in early electronic music or sequencer stuff would be influenced by nerdy composers who made music like rainbow in curved air or music for 18 musicians that basically sound like sequencers

no i can believe that too, i just think influence is more nebulous and difficult to delineate than a simple "X becomes Y" argument. and it's just as possible that musicians discover things that are reminiscent of what they're doing after they've started doing it. so in the Carl Craig quote above sure he's interested in Cage and Reich but it doesn't say when or how, he could just as easily have come to them after he'd noticed affinities with sounds and ideas he was already producing

and that's still influence but it works both ways, we hear and understand the stuff that's gone before us through the filter of our own already formed or half-formed ideas - again, like "Ragas to a Disco Beat", we hear it now in a different way to how it would sound in 1982 or whenever

Imagine wondering what Elysia Crampton's music sounded like and then opening this

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22103-elysia-crampton-elysia-crampton-presents-demon-city/

The Crampton review reads like an especially pretentious press release. She is an interesting artist who may actually combine Justin Bieber and Steve Reich, but the breathless prose here...whew. "It is victorious in so many ways."

The early Reich tape pieces are surely not insignificant in the development of electronic loop-based music?

pretty sure the invention of synthesizers had the biggest effect.. It's not like rock music where it was so easy to imitate other players etc...

Idk I'm dumb

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/bruce-springsteen-born-to-run-richard-ford.html?_r=0

this is very bad

you'd think a novelist might spend a little more time analyzing the actual book rather than proving his "i love rock and roll" bona fides in but NO

can't believe he did rob sheffield's patented lyric-appropriation sentence riff

david brooks wrote about springsteen too. all the white guys are assembling.

People who see art from the outside — from the spectator seats where we’re intended to see it — often don’t get the making of art very right. Which is a victimless crime. But it’s partly because we don’t quite get it that hosts of fans are drawn to Springsteen. His work’s entirety — the songs, the music, the guitar, the voice, the persona, the gyrations, the recitativos, the whole artifice of “the act,” or what Springsteen calls the “sum of all my parts” — is so dense, involved and ­authentic-seeming as to all but defy what we think we know about how regular human beings make things at ground level.

this is a better passage if you pretend it's describing weird al yankovic

old white conservatives/intellectuals love to really harp on about Springsteen because he makes them think they could understand the common man, and they also like to imagine he is the common man

conservatives listen to the boss?

maura just said brooks wrote about him, maybe that doesn't necessarily mean he listened

Loads. xp

insert 100 jokes about not listening to the "born in the usa" lyrics

I think this review is embarrassing and I *am* an old white guy

Bruce Springsteen is music for conservatives.

if you define conservatives in a way that means pining for a traditionalism that never existed, sure

how do u figure? springsteen's music is as much or more about the tragedies of a supposed idyllic time than it is about celebrating it. unless that traditionalism means a time when guitar music reigned supreme.

it depends what lens you use to look at it. if you think of blue collar, small town people who have been kicked around and screwed over, and this idea that there's some ideal working man's america out there... some sort of american greatness that's been bruised not by you or me but by the man

if you take that and remove all the trappings of social justice that Springsteen believes in, which you don't necessarily get from a surface reading, you end up with "america was great"

This thread is spawning some candidates for OP's question on its own

Well, it's backwards looking musically. The review uses a quote from Springsteen on how he never wanted band democracy, and that's central as well. It's individualistic music, it's music for pulling yourself up by your boostraps, rather than of systemic oppression (or, as it's otherwise known: The real world). Bruce hasn't even gone through a self-negating phase like for instance Dylan, no, it's his band that he keeps breaking up and getting back together. The leader stays, the collective is rearranged. And while he has tried to broaden it, the central individual in the Springsteen mythos remains the great white male.

Conservative music can be good, though. I really enjoyed a Springsteen festival show a few years back, danced like mad. But there's a conservative core to Springsteen, and it bothers me everytime Born in the USA is presented as this liberal song getting horribly misread, when it contains such a heap of jingoistic, patriotic sentiment in the choruses, and music throughout. Springsteen wrote a song that didn't bring across the sentiment he aimed for, don't blame Reagan for figuring that out.

All of this is imo, obviously.

i guess i'm thinking about songs like "the river" where it may be about the white working class but it's super bleak + depressing

if only being white and working class could be... great again

The River is about tragedies of the present, it's implied that things were better in the past ('I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company / But lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy') There's a sense of being trapped by tradition - being expected to do as your father, and, well, the fact that the couple don't just get an abortion - but it's still also a song about how things used to be better.

Another thing that kinda weirds me out, is if the song is about Springsteen's sister and brother in law, how come Mary is a complete non-entity? Isn't it kinda weird that Springsteen was able to invent an inner life for the character based on his brother-in-law, but the one based on his sister vanishes once she gets pregnant, and the only description of her is that she was 'tan and wet'? There's a hierarchy to who's inner suffering is worthy of portrayal.

What's the best Bruce Springsteen song about a woman? I'm no expert.

certainly his most passionate love song is "Bobby Jean" directed at a man.

I'm no expert

lol