Post a controversial music opinion

numerology is for feebs; go 66-75, 76-85, 86-95 or go home

I'm going try an 19th century style diet of found-on-teh-pavement-next-to-dogshit festering maggot bacon and raw cabbage & liquorice to see if explosive farts smelled much better back then as well..... -=≡~ξ-＿-*) yeah they did!

If you've never caught so much as a whiff of a pleasant fragrance, they most certainly did!

originality = booshit
algebra = booshit
(controversial) opinions = booshit
innovation = oh god gak

numerology is for feebs; go 66-75, 76-85, 86-95 or go home

Either you're gerrymandering or current periodizations are already gerrymandered (inclined towards the latter hypothesis myself).

what non-gerrymandered taxonomy is there also who cares, i just think those periods are more coherent

Platonic taxonomy or bust

How about 66-76 (Aristocracy), 77-89 (Timocracy), 90-00 (Oligarchy), 01-09, (Democracy), 10-20 (Tyranny)?

I love music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZHm5_i1vI

2006 Steve Sinton Tomáš Bureš Olga Tikhonova Silvia Finocchi Ferreira
2007 Orazio Salvatori Orazio Salvatori Alina Popa Andrea Carvalho
2008 Alessandro Savi Lionel Beyeke Vivian Hijikema Maria Stukova
2009 Mahadev Deka Martin Kasal Larissa Cunha Dora Rodrigues
2010 Charles Mario Miha Zupan Valentyna Yefyemchuk Flora Conte

xxp I definitely fall into the category of someone who grew up buying into the "80's sucked" ethos, however looking back and having a lot more knowledge of what came out during that era, I can firmly pinpoint my dislike on production and mixing fads and early digital technology being overused to a fault. Gated reverb, a renewed emphasis on upper midrange and high frequencies when mixing, near ubiquitous bass roll off after 1984, a new wave of digital FX, the way (non-punk/hardcore) distorted guitars were recorded and mixed, pre-emphasized CDs, etc.

Also the decade has two distinct flavors, the first being 80-84, which had a ton of great R&B, late disco and hybrid funk and other weird shit that retains some of that bass warmth of the 70's and groove while exhibiting some crisper arrangements and more forward thinking sounds (see Megatron Man, Computer World, The Dreaming, Straight from the Heart, etc etc).

85-90 is the second, and even after hearing a ton of things I like from this era, I still think it's one of the least interesting eras for studio albums. The club scene from this period however must have been lit, and that is where all the bass went, as it was certainly not found in the recordings. This production trend persists a few years into the 90's until maybe 92/93 when frequencies below 200hz start to make a comeback thanks to rap and house/techno making its way outside the club and onto the charts more. In fact I can think of very few fairly mainstream records from 85-89 where the production feels "timeless" like, say Talk Talk. Maybe Hounds of Love? I'm sure there's others, but it feels few and far between.

That said, the ideas expressed in the 80's, the influence of queer culture, the excitement of new sounds and genres being born or in their infancy (rap/hip hop, new jack swing, house, techno, hardcore, shoegazer, industrial music, dancehall) all make the decade something to be celebrated. I just wish it sounded better, but the 90's basically did that - refined those genres into polished gems.

numerology is for feebs; go 66-75, 76-85, 86-95 or go home

― rumpy riser (ogmor), Monday, August 3, 2020 6:59 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm.

*bullshit alert* I feel sometimes like us nerds want pop music to have the same uhhh epistemological structure as sports or science or something but it ends up all boring subtanceless theology-y

Tbf everything is boring substanceless theology.

aw pom your mom doesn't make me think of theology at all

Theology comes in many shapes and sizes, Simon.

some impressively sinewy and ripped posts itt tonight!

flatten the theology curve

theology, like all thought, is a mirror that judges the voyeur

religion is not on trial

Just because there's no substance to it doesn't mean it lacks form amirite.

enforcing the fairytale atmosphere by having the children and animals privy to a magical world denied to the adults

some impressively sinewy and ripped posts itt tonight!

― calzino, Monday, August 3, 2020 8:

Music is the new gay thread

My 80s are Prince and Def Leppard and Chaka Khan and Bowie and Michael Jackson and the Clash and Steel Pulse and the Stones and Madonna and Kool & the Gang and the Police and Modern English and DeBarge and Cyndi and Thomas Dolby and Sparks and the GoGos and Peter Tosh and Bruce Springsteen and the Psychedelic Furs and Joan Armatrading and Dexy and Van Halen and Lionel Richie and Howard Jones and Wham and the Pogues and Whitney Houston and Journey and OMD and Joan Jett and Weird Al and Til Tuesday and Simple Minds and Terence Trent D'Arby and Cameo and Tears for Fears and Morris Day.

If you want to conflate all that into "DX7s and gated reverb" be my guest, but it looks like a decent panoply of sounds and musical concepts to me.

I get the sense that Pavement are too derivative for the crowd that came up with SST bands, Husker Du, etc. in the '80s

I think this describes me. I liked and *saw* many of the SST bands (as well as the Fall) but I just couldn't relate to Pavement - not sure whether if it was their "derivativeness" or their vibe or their feel... It could be just that I was a teenager going to SST shows but was 22 or so when I first heard Pavement, so maybe had different tastes by then or a different mindset.

I simultaneously believe that the '80s were a great decade for music and that there were long stretches of it when it was really boring to listen to Top 40 radio. Underground/club stuff always fun though. Even though I love freestyle - mostly a post-'84 trend - I agree with the notion that '80-'84 had more appealing grooves before production got all cluttered.

I have no idea whether this is controversial or not but when I'm listening to ambient music nothing turns me off more than spoken word passages.

avoid anything on Fax records (aka some of the greatest ambient music ever made)

But I feel your pain because this is me w/ jazz

I'm like that with jazz too, barring a couple of exceptions (Matana Roberts, for instance).

Yeah agree about Matana, she can do no wrong tbh

agree except if it's words in a language I don't understand. then it's ~mysterious~.

Mostly agree, except if it's done supremely well, a la Robert Ashley,

And having said that, there's a moment if I'm playing a podcast and switch apps to play music, when the two crossover and I have an experience of what I understand as pure ASMR - to the point where, if I'm driving, I'll almost have to pull over. Weird.

That should have been 'but having said that...'

Disagree, particularly if there are samples involved, I dig it. CF. Bill Nelson - Sleeplessness

Samples do make it more bearable, but it's still a nope from me 99% of the time. Basically any bits of intelligible speech are too much, unless we're talking about a brief interlude (e.g. the amusingly bizarre intrusion of 'toujours humecter la mouture, toujours', cribbed from 37° 2 le matin aka Betty Blue, on Stars of the Lid's ...and Their Refinement of the Decline).

The Pulitzer Prize for DAMN. should have at the least been divided between all of the credited composers on the album, if not the producers as well.

kind of agree on vocal jazz. never really been able to get down with it, as it honestly sounds kind of corny to me. even including folks like ella and billie. i respect it, but given a choice, i'm going with instrumentals 100% of the time.

same re:spoken parts in ambient music. great way to ruin it.

my challop for the day: there never has been, and there never will be, a time when electric blues is more appealing than acoustic blues. especially on studio recordings.

also xpost sund4r: that's a valid point, but the same could be made about a lot of pulizter and nobel prize winners. everyone's got their respective "tribes."

I don't think it could be said of most Pulitzer winners in music, no: there is usually one credited composer for the pieces that win most years. Unless you mean librettists should share in the award when it is given to an opera or that e.g. Ornette's band should have shared his award, both of which I would consider valid.

The Seattle Symphony/Ludovic Morlot's performance of John Luther Adams's Become Ocean feels less integral to the piece's success than the quasi ghostwriters behind DAMN..

xp yep

If the academy is to expand the definition of "distinguished composition", they also need to expand their definition of composition accordingly, if you catch my drift.

Kendrick is a state of mind.

so is equally crediting those responsible for said state of mind.

ahh shit, i got us stuck in a feedback loop. sry.

Harry Smith gets way too much credit for the Anthology of American Folk Music. So he picked the songs and wrote the liner notes, big fucking deal. He also missed A TON of great music simply because it didn’t happen to be in his record collection.

He and Lomax both. We missed out on a lot of really great stuff for a really long time because the curators - whose hard work I acknowledge as a gift despite these omissions - weren't interested in stuff outside their own specific preferences. The tons of amazing African American banjo players, for instance.

What’s Going On is a bit boring.

I like it but I'd prefer a bit more edge throughout (one 'Inner City Blues' isn't quite enough).

Harry Smith gets way too much credit for the Anthology of American Folk Music. So he picked the songs and wrote the liner notes, big fucking deal. He also missed A TON of great music simply because it didn’t happen to be in his record collection.

― Mr. Snrub, Wednesday, September 23, 2020 3:56 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

He and Lomax both. We missed out on a lot of really great stuff for a really long time because the curators - whose hard work I acknowledge as a gift despite these omissions - weren't interested in stuff outside their own specific preferences. The tons of amazing African American banjo players, for instance.

― Paul Ponzi, Wednesday, September 23, 2020 4:21 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

did we miss out on great stuff because of them or did we later discover more great stuff because they created a space where there was interest in preserving and listening to that kind of music?

what if they never existed? how much would have been lost? how much more music was documented and later released because of the interest in pre war stuff they cultivated?

Lomax had an awful habit of trying to get the best blues artists of their day to perform folk tunes because that was his idea about what they should be playing, it's great he recorded them at all, but annoying that he failed to capture the music they actually wanted to play. He made 30s folk & blues a whole lot less interesting than 20s folk & blues.

Lomax had an awful habit of trying to get the best blues artists of their day to perform folk tunes because that was his idea about what they should be playing, it's great he recorded them at all, but annoying that he failed to capture the music they actually wanted to play. He made 30s folk & blues a whole lot less interesting than 20s folk & blues.

yes, please read blues as "blues" - it was Lomax who did a great deal of the pigeonholing

I agree but that happened before him too, Robert Johnson had a wider repertoire (They're Red Hot the only recorded evidence) than what was portrayed on his recordings

though I guess my argument is that ideally they would have been recorded by someone who wasn't trying to push a musical direction on them, but the more likely reality is they wouldn't have been recorded at all