As if people care… I have two favorite love songs (I hate love songs!). One of my criteria is that the song is gender neutral.
I also like this song because of the line: “we’re searching for some perfect world we’ll never find”
I like this song because of the subtle reference to suicide. “People ask me how, how I’ve lived ‘til now, I tell them I don’t know”
I like this song because I really like pink, she is awwwww-some.
I find this song disturbing and exhilarating for it shadows some inner metaphysically lost role, and speaks volumes for the expanding role of the alienated martyr in today’s socially
normative image of God in man.
It really speaks for the haunted spirit, of the child within.
I concur.
By the way, I didn’t know that La Campanella is actually by Paganini. The original actually sounds much better.
Yeah… Liszt was obsessed with the devil. Paganini was considered (by lore) to be the first musician to sell his soul to the devil to be the best violinist of all time. Cool story.
Liszt was probably the most adept to deal with his guilt, the technique was extremely difficult to pull off , peter lorre with faust on the beach.
Oh, this song - I remember it being in one of my piano books but I never felt like I responded to it enough to want to learn it properly. I preferred playing pieces by Beethoven and Chopin in particular, there were countless others but those two seemed to stick out for me. I dunno man, I just feel like Liszt wanted to write some pretty notes with that piece - I don’t feel the sincere expression of an inspired artist like I do with B and C. Something like Erik Satie’s simplistic Gnossiennes and Gymnopedies are by contrast so mesmerisingly more absorbing. Maybe I just don’t relate, but I’ve always had a strong sense of certain pieces of music really resonating with me, and many just not doing that. Subjective, right?
Oh for sure Liszt is melodic, but how you’re melodic really makes a difference for me. And being particularly melodic isn’t even a necessary requirement - and it’s easy to be overly melodic. I don’t know if you’re a jazz fan, but that stuff can get just about as melodic as is possible and to me it usually just sounds like a frenzy of notes. Harmony has always been more important for me, and imo jazz too often overdoes that as well. I almost don’t care at all about rhythm or lyrics - hence my attraction to Doom Metal I guess. There’s even a genre that mixes doom with jazz influences, and the result can be something like this band here: youtube.com/watch?v=EMCvSUndy3g - not their best song to illustrate my point, but they’re one of my favourite bands and this is one of my favourite songs by them. Basically just really slow lounge music - which actually illustrates really well an even better point to make about music, which is too often neglected by musicians like Liszt. It’s the space between the notes that counts, the silence and all the notes you don’t play - ironically a sentiment commonly attributed to the famous jazz artist Miles Davis.
So now I’ve muddied the waters sufficiently, some points about my personal musical preferences still rise to the surface - and I can apply these emergent points to Angelina.
It’s better when she’s not oversinging too many notes to showcase herself and to artificially embellish the melody. It’s better when she instead lingers on notes and leaves pauses, to allow us to appreciate the notes she’s singing and the chords she’s colouring. The common modern emphasis is on showing off how many notes you can sing “around” a cadence and to over-emphasise every climax like you’re melodramatically trying to get an Oscar nomination, because then talent show audiences cheer harder with how impressed they are. Even Celine Dion holds back on these things relatively more tastefully - and since she’s still alive, I think even she outclasses Angelina Jordan simply based on that fact alone, along with her relative maturity allowing her to project sincerity rather than precociousness. She’s also able to better produce that kind of “resonating” effect when she “belts out” the climaxes to her songs, which really hits home to me. It’s why Nessun Dorma sung by the late Pavarotti is so impactful - it requires the full body to pull off. I’ve even heard Sia do this to great effect e.g. in the chorus to “Chandelier” (particularly in the last line before it levels out in the second section of the chorus), but she’s another victim to the contemporary trend of artificially emphasising vocal “imperfections” to make herself “distinctive” to stand out in a saturated Capitalist marketplace. Celine was perhaps born just enough years before her to have been able to succeed without having to resort to that. It’s still there to an extent, but it teeters more to the side of operatic training than pop sensation. I’m not even a fan of opera singing, but I far prefer it to today’s pop sensations.
I feel like there’s so much homogenous pop that a demand for some kind of objective metric has become necessary to distinguish between it all, quantified by vocal range and dexterity, versatility, and youth.
I could say the same about Liszt about what I’ve heard by Paganini, though I’m not knowingly as familiar with his works.
Compare the above linked piece with this one.
What Jacqueline Du Pre is playing is at times extremely technical and her use of vibrato pushes the limits, but it’s always tasteful to a fault. Paganini by contrast may as well be a dancing pixie imposing his personality on the entire audience almost oppressively. Jacqueline basically exudes the piece as part of her own soul, whereas the piece Vanessa Mae learned is outside of her and in your face.
Best when your sober
Sober is bestest.
strange that someone with the intelligence to talk competently about music (sil, i mean) would find such things as ‘doom metal’ pleasant. i truly cannot understand how he could like something like the sample he posted. i could understand how someone much simpler and less intelligent than sil might like it, but not this guy. i think what’s happening is, that darker element such music attempts to display is expressed so crudely in such form that the darker element becomes simplified to the point that an elaboration of melody isn’t required for it to be effective. it is, so to speak, genuinely ugly… not a caricature of the ugly. but in being so, there can be no depth or distance traversed. that dark element deserves to be developed better because it is as important, if not more, than those elements characterized by the anatomy of faster tempo, the major scales, the general lack of conflict between tones.
to give an example of what i consider an excellent development of a particular idea of the darker variety which is difficult to produce well with music, go to 4:57 of this song. there are structural reasons why there is a very strong ‘unsettling’ feeling there. but you’d not be able to capture that in a simpler form. that is to say, fripp’s elaboration (the diminished scaling) produces very tense tonal conflicts that do not get resolved. that lack of resolution is one of the key structural elements in the anatomy of that ‘darker element’. but to do it, and do it well, there must be a greater compositional range as the medium.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVb2tnFN5AA[/youtube]
but ‘doom metal’, on the other hand (and i don’t mean all of it), isn’t going to create an area in which several conflicts can be created; it sits lazily and flatly on what is most base and most ugly. there is nothing sinister in it, no amount of real madness or distress. it is so ugly that any hint of existential dread we might feel is robbed of its right to be properly developed thematically, and remains simply noise.
you know, everything is just wrong there, and that’s why it so perfectly right. the identifiable back beat which remains stable but in a strange meter, the little percussive wood instruments chattering and arguing behind the drums, the nervous, indecisive bass figures and open ended lines, the blistering speed of the maddening notes of fripp’s impossible scales… all this shit is in complete turmoil with itself and is brilliantly done.
you are absolutely disturbed. that’s the point. but listen to the whole song. you’ll hear nothing like it.
This is a funny thread to me!
Music brings out all kinds of shit in people!
I liked all your songs btw (even silhouette’s elevator music)
As far as Angelina Jordan is concerned, you can tell from multiple videos what she CAN do! And from this, you know that she doesn’t oversing - if anything, she holds back
Cardi B is the best singer in the world. Case closed.
Just another guy who contradicts to send a sexual signal to get laid. pfft. Seen billions of you mr. r
yawns. Boring
When you join the adults in a few billion years, you’ll be greeted with open arms.
You do realize you’ll have to regret all those rapes you’re doing? Right?
See you on the flip side.
You’re the rapist. Not me. I get consent when I bang.
Missa Solemnis
He is forgiven. At least in a black mass.
I wouldn’t say jazz is melodic. Or maybe it is, and I simply don’t understand what the word “melodic” means, but in that case, I’d say it’s melodic in a very bad way. As you say, jazz is for the most part a random mess of notes. Does that mess count as a melody? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I don’t like its variation in pitch.
Personally, I don’t see the point of music that is neither melodic nor rhythmic. Lyrics are a nice touch but they aren’t necessary. Music that is entirely about lyrics (e.g. rap) doesn’t interest me. Ideally, music should contain all of the three: melody, rhythm and lyrics. Alternatively, it should possess melody and rhythm. Alternatively, it should be melodic (w/o lyrics). Alternatively, it should by rhythmic (w/o lyrics.) Purely lyrical music and music that doesn’t have any of the three doesn’t interest me.
The value of jazz, as I see it, lies entirely in its rhythm. Sonicbloom’s Time Out is interesting entirely thanks to its rhythm (there is little to no melody.) That’s the same value you can find in experimental techno such as Aphex Twin’s Meltphace 6 and electronic dance music in general. Funk, some “progressive” rock and some “progressive” metal also revolve around the same thing.
To wish eternal torment for the one you envy. That’s some poisonous shit ecman… lower even than the blue bottled priest.
You know if it weren’t for that fact that your celibacy, whether voluntary or not, is such an insipid triviality and hardly deserving of any attention, one might be able to say there’s some substance to any of it. But its so obviously the impotent envy of an antisocial personality disorder thats causing it, one just dismisses it as nonsense they ought not respond to.
Holy shit you could almost be a character in a steely dan song.
autotune
You guys are funny.
Let me lay some shit on you!
There are two reasons I don’t have sex:
1.) viewtopic.php?p=2768740#p2768740
You guys are so fucking horny you don’t give a fuck.
2.) I’m actually hyper-sexual. I will fuck any woman that crawls on this earth! I get crushes on every woman. When they chose someone else, instead of me or them AND me, it broke my heart. That “raw” feeling From heartbreak is the worst pain in existence, but I endured for decades with this feeling, it’s like a mother losing a child… and then I realized that if I slept with all the women who wanted to sleep with me, I’d be causing that same heartbreak to someone else, and it’d make me a hypocrite.
Reason one: I don’t want to be a rapist
Reason two: I don’t want to be a hypocrite
Work that shit out amongst each other!
I can nerd over music pretty well (e.g. this post), I started piano 30 years ago, taught myself guitar 20 years ago, and I’m a sucker for all the theory stuff - yet I still respond to minimalism far more than something like what you linked. Musically I figure King Crimson are pretty untouchable so I can hardly speak ill of them, I’m just not a fan of the frantic “on edge” kinda feel. I guess there’s a little darkness in there after an opening 3 minutes of not much more than percussion: we have some doomy chromatic guitar followed by some Black Sabbathy guitar riffing, which repeats before that 4:57 section you pointed out: a ton of diminished 5ths over what would be some standard pentatonic sounding bassline if it weren’t for the irregular meter. Then it goes into what sounds like full-on improvisational mayhem for a minute and a half, followed by a quiet slow violin section for a while with lots of chromatics, which eventually opens up a little, then not much happens with a bit more violin. It closes with still more violin melding back into the revisited frantic theme back into some more heaviness for a short while, and then it fades out again.
Maybe I’m too familiar and desensitised by dissonance that a little bit of it just doesn’t do much for me. It feels like the intentions of the piece were just to make a bit of edgy art, and I guess they succeeded. Inversely to your comparison with doom metal, I feel like no real depth or distance was traversed by KC. I’d probably feel differently if I was the same age as I am now back when they were making that kinda stuff, I dunno.
I feel so much more darkness from the trudging bleakness of that Tyranny song. To me it sounds like the depths of physical and emotional immobility that I remember from my much younger years when I was depressed. It’s not laziness, but it is flat and it is ugly. It’s a torrent of overwhelmingly oppressive forces dragging you down into yourself and to block out the world, infatigably driving into your mind a singular nihilistic truth that there is no other way than the only thought on your mind. To me it feels like a far more eroded state of mind than merely feeling frantic, unsettled and unresolved - “bothered” by your distress, but instead completely sapped of energy beyond all motivation to do anything at all but stare into an abyss. There is intentionally “no development” of the dark element, and the simplified crudeness is just fidelity to the experience being portrayed. That seems like true madness and distress, which feels sinister at the time. The “existential dread we might feel is robbed of its right to be properly developed” is exactly what they’re going for, because that’s how it feels.
So sympathy in heartbreak is the basis of your philosophy?