If You're Listening To Music Right Now III

For all those who are thought not to understand
youtu.be/LVADXEvxdiM

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ29lZtSzAQ[/youtube]

these were the best years of frank’s soloing. well i should say 69, from ‘hot rats’ forward, he stopped playing clean and started to dig in his gibson SG, pushing that sucker to its limits. in this solo (2:22) you can literally hear the pick-ups getting confused and overwhelmed by his vibrato bar use, muting and false harmonics. burn, muthafucker.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksnwEsPKO5s[/youtube]

Flash

AAAA-AHH!!

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXZDJwoYloI[/youtube]

remember this part? this track pwned every science fiction/action movie theme song of the whole 80s decade. you will rock… and don’t you ever forget it.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JmRM4LB3yc[/youtube]

‘oh well… who wants to live forever. hahahahaha… diiiiiive!!!

youtu.be/nvq4OnhMEO4

youtu.be/LjgndGuy77o

youtu.be/FyUNbrgLezI

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F7b4skyUy4[/youtube]

^ at first I was like ‘okay this is gonna be more of that corny anglo-saxon metal that all the angry and misunderstood white kids listen to’, but then she started growling and I was like 'holy fucking christ balls’.

What’s a smart fellow like yourself doing listening to that crap, gloom?

I’m listening to it because it’s creative, talented music.
It’s super catchy, colorful, spirited and unique.
Never heard anything quite like it.
I mean how many times can you listen to traditional metal, classic rock or some cheap, refried, watered down regurgitation of it?

  • it’s hilarious, when she did the death growl over the violin riff I burst into laughter.

for me, the idea of something like this - blending some traditonal music style into an element of metal - is usually ruined through/by the production of it… because it’s always contrived and overdone in the video. i can’t stand thematic videos, especially ones like that. they’re standing out in a field in europe somewhere dressed like eleventh century barbarians. all that’s missing are the battle axes. it’s one of those corny situations where a modern band tries to be patriotic by paying creative tribute to their heritage and history, and yet off stage they’d be indistinguishable from anyone else concerning their life styles such that what they really are is actually an effacement to what they pretend to hold sacred. this is the tremendous danger involved in artistic reproduction and symbolism; the depreciation of the object of art through the artist’s idiosyncracies. i just lost more respect for european culture because of that corny-ass video, gloom. thanks alot.

but yes, i understand your concern with wanting to find new forms of metal, especially today when just about every possible formula has already been tried and then reproduced into the ground. for me, the next logical step to be made is into the ‘djent’ genre. this is where standard styles of metal are forced to make significant compositional changes in order to remain creative. this had to be done to save metal, gloom. it is where metal meets fusion, the saving grace and energy for a style that has been dying since the 90s.

here’s one that rekindled my faith in metal… one that magnus ‘andy’ anderson turned me on to a couple years ago. now i had already known that there were plenty of polyrhythmic mathmetal bands out there… i just hadn’t been actively looking for them. once i listened to this i experienced a shortlived renaissance and began looking around again. bands like ‘plini’ and ‘polyphia’, for instance, are two that i found. but here’s the one that blew me away at a time when i was fast losing hope for metal. you’ll see here that there’s no need to dress up like barbarians and start growling into the microphone. the music tells the story (‘shut up and play your guitar’ - zappa)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmfzWpp0hMc[/youtube]

ah, but that’s the thing though. you weren’t supposed to laugh, and because you did, a critical disconnect happened between the artist and audience. what was intended to be taken seriously instead produced an undesired comic effect, and in that moment the artist becomes the accidental buffoon. the fine line that band walks is in trying to give depth and intensity to something that can go terribly wrong on account of the difficulty in expressing it. what is intended to deliver through force something that’s incredibly serious to the artist becomes silly and obnoxious because of that difficulty. when she started growling like an idiot, an unintentional anticlimax occurred. now you’re laughing while you should be psyched and preparing your horse for battle. see what i mean?

This is the opposite kind of metal I like.
It was cold, bland, lifeless, soulless, like a machine.
It was basically just the band wanking off, trying to show how technically proficient they were, and falling short of even that.
Wasn’t catchy at all, didn’t elicit an emotional response from me one way or another.
Wasn’t connected with anything relatable, or even human.

I listen to all kinds of rock and metal, sometimes I like more down to earth stuff, sometimes I like more fantastic stuff.
Sometimes I like weird, psychotic even.

I don’t see why music can’t be fantastic, I mean we go to the theater to watch historical epics and fantasy, so why not listen to historically epic music?
And why not celebrate one’s heritage?
It may have not much to do with where we are today, but it is where we came from, and still speaks to us on some level.

But I don’t take music all that seriously, for me it’s mainly about aesthetics, emotions, moods, or entertainment, something weird and interesting.
Music is something I do when my left brain needs a break from the world, or from research and writing about philosophy, society and current events, and my right brain takes over completely.
I would never intellectualize, or analyze it too critically.

And I don’t think you could lose any more respect for European culture, because you already have none, I suspect you’d prefer to snuff it out completely.

I’d be a bit surprised if they didn’t find some humor in this, but either way I don’t care, I had fun listening to the music and watching the video, that’s all that matters to me.
I didn’t have any fun listening to the metal you posted.
It was boring, instantly forgettable.

oh come on. europe brought the whole world out of the dark ages and was the father of every revolution conceivable; scientific, intellectual, philosophical, economic, industrial. anybody who does not recognize and appreciate this is an ass ranger. what turns me off is the unwarranted ethnocentricity concentrated around the outmoded and outdated sympathy for culture and nationalism that the european countries feel. two hundred years ago, sure, but grow the fuck up already, stop playing the bagpipes, and get with program. imaginary lines drawn in the dirt are steadily disappearing and one day the very concept of a ‘country’ will be obsolete. instead of fighting against this inevitability, those countries with any modicum of strength should be concerned with holding power over this future in the political and economic arena. battling for control over cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and globalism rather than trying to prevent it, is the logical thing to do. you can’t stop it, so give it direction, make it useful, turn it into a tool.

lol i had this same conversation with the pedrosaurus months ago. you guys are so desensitized by all the posturing and posing on MTV, you automatically suspect that any technically skilled musician appearing in a video HAS to be showing off. not these guys, man. with that level of skill you aren’t concerned with impressing anyone, and you play for the love of the craft. clue number one is it’s instrumental nature. no need to write some stupid lyrics to fill a void created by your inability to play something interesting. there is poetry and story everywhere throughout this music, and not a single word need be said to hear it.

i see. okay, try this. recorded with the london symphony orchestra back when music was real. introducing… [pause for effect]… the mahavishnu orchestra!!

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0mlDKhn6Vo[/youtube]

note: everyone you see in that photo except mclaughlin is not playing on the apocalypse album. this one is with a whole nuther line-up.

just wait for the break at 3:01. don’t frickin’ stop the tape, dude.

Promethean

European culture is a hell of a lot more than academia and the bourgeoise, it’s the culture of the rural and working classes, and the interaction between them.
Without them, academia and the bourgeoise would’ve had nothing to stand on, and ceased to be.

For me, ethnocentricity has intrinsic value.
I like my people and my culture, I don’t like other people as much, I don’t want to be surrounded by them.

Fundamentally our culture isn’t outmoded.
It needs to be integrated with modernity, not denied, dismissed or discarded, or rather modernity needs to be integrated with it.

What’s infinitely more imaginary is 8 billion people from divergent and in some cases, incommensurable, incompatible backgrounds coming together, joining hands and singing kumbaya.
The Arab laying with the Jew.
The Mexican, Muslim, illegal and refugee maintaining our civilization in our relative absence.
We’ve been here before.
Macedonia and Rome were the precursors of modernity, and the European dark ages that followed is the precursor of the global dark ages to come.

The only thing inevitable about it is its collapse.
Ecologically, socioeconomically, even in terms of our physical and mental health and wellbeing, this growth is unsustainable, and aside from perhaps the overclass, hasn’t done anybody much good, particularly lately in the last several decades.
But that’s what civilizations tend to do, overextend themselves, decay and collapse, it’s just ours will be on a grander scale, and since in all likelihood end in nuclear war, we may never recover from it.
What’s referred to as liberalism (I’d rather call it something else, like techno-feudalism) is actually a civilization on its deathbed.
A civilization that’s been gutted both by the international elite, and uneconomic migrant.
A civilization that’s forgotten its backbone: its citizens, the productive working and middle classes.
A civilization that’s totally uprooted itself from anything natural, healthy and holistic, more fit for machines than men.
What follows now is disease, infertility, a reduction in life expectancy, and death.
The antidote then would be populism, and sustainability, but not in the sense the internationalists use the word, to mean austerity, mass depopulation and replacement.
It’s the monstrous internationalists that must die for the sake of restoring harmony between civilization and nature, not the people.

I haven’t watched MTV in like a decade, and I hardly listen to the radio.
The problem isn’t technical proficiency in and of itself, but the lack of connection with anything real.
There’s no passion, meaning or depth behind it, and it’s not even that intricate.
Take Dragon Force for contrast, not only are their songs infinitely catchier, but they require much more skill to play.

While I tend to prefer music with vocals, a lot of music I listen to these days is European, so I can’t make out most of it.
It’s the passion, breadth and depth of the vocalist I’m looking for and most importantly, the melody.
It has to evoke feelings, or it’s crap.

There’s no poetry here, just abstract math; clinical; sterile.

I fell asleep halfway through, it was boring.

alright man. i just checked out this ‘dragon force’ and i just can’t do it. machine gun power chords in 4/4 fired off at blistering speeds is what i wanted when i was seventeen, but i can’t tolerate it anymore. i respect the genre and the discipline it takes to master that style of music, but the content is too standard and predictable for my tastes.

i would however object to your claim that this stuff ‘requires much more skill to play’ than what animals as leaders writes. i think you are assuming that because dragon force is playing at incredible speeds, the music is therefore more difficult. tempo is much less of a difficulty than meter and time signature. it’s the latter that challenges concentration and focus more than anything else. most of these head banging metal bands would be lost in a matter of seconds if they had to play a layered polyrhythm. some of the stuff meshuggah writes, for instance, would short-circuit these guy’s brains. although meshuggah’s singer is also a growler, i’m loath to admit.

yeah i thought that went without saying, but a suggestion like that is dangerously marxist and in the wrong company here at ‘i love philostophy’.

for me, i’m less interested in what people are, and more interested in what they do, and why they do it. but this might sound alarming to anyone who still believes culture is bound by, and a product of, genetics. that theory has been thoroughly refuted, and i don’t waste my time with refuted theories.

prom wrote

They do it because of genetics which is obvious if you look at cultures made up of races that consistently thrive no matter where they are placed around the world. Don’t need no stinking theory to recognize the obvious.

Gloom wrote

I agree wholeheartedly.