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HeartfeltDawn

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  1. Ugh jesus the male self image is not in crisis. Men are held to absolutely no standard of beauty. Ugh jesus you're wrong and I'll choose to believe several academic studies ahead of you.
  2. you dont think that patriarchal society has caused many of womens self image issues? It's also doing {censored} all for male self image issues as well.
  3. To sum up this thread... women look better when they put a bunch of dark {censored} around their eyes. 2 Girls 1 Cup destroys this theory.
  4. Be more worried about the fact that cats are easily addicted to internet porn, Communism, and praise and worship.
  5. WRC because it's the only motorsport worth watching WRC and BTCC in the 1990s > WRC and BTCC now. The WRC is a joke now.
  6. i will. and you're actually the first person to notice that she is a girl. . I've been jerking off over that pic for weeks and am relieved to find out she is a girl Hope you get the money back from this bastard. If not, let's hope he ends up stranded somewhere deep within the Mojave with only expectant vultures for company.
  7. Cornell Plexi 7. Seven watt monster in superb condition. Yes, the contrast on my cameraphone was badly wrong that day
  8. I'd buy it at $20 and get you to ship it over to the UK.
  9. Dude, it takes a lot to get a band to be heralded as the next best thing. And plus, that is a rather {censored}ty sweeping generalization to loop all the "hipster bands" into, imo. Anyways, the indie genre really came out of the DIY mentality. They didn't want to sign to a big name label, they wanted to keep making music even if that meant not having a jet. Most of these bands arise out of guys just getting together and making music in an apartment, that's how my bands came together. They don't have stars in their eyes. They work from the ground up, but never really aspire to be more than local heroes. It seems to me that the people who want to be big time rockers are the guys who set out to do so. I mean, sure, these guys need to make money. They have to market, that's part of their job. Really?!? It takes a lot?!? The Strokes, Suede, Lily Allen, even Vampire Weekend... one of the comic things that has happened since blogs and the online media came into this world is that the US now gets bands hyped up in the same way we've had for ages in Britain in classic NME/Melody Maker fashion. I'm not sweeping all the 'hipster' bands into one little corner. People who know me know I don't categorise. There's two categories of music with me: Music I like and music I don't like. I don't care on your background, your aesthetic, any of those kind of things. I simply judge the music. So I can state that I feel most of the hip up and coming bands are fairly terrible and lack something, perhaps a certain passion. The education thing is an apples/oranges argument, so I won't argue it. Basically, I say yes. There's a {censored}ing hell of a lot more going on, and that hell of a lot more music is becoming a hell of a lot more accessible to people like you and i vis a vis the internet. The internet is the most powerful marketing tool the capitalized world has ever seen, ESPECIALLY with music. If it weren't for the internet, no dice I would've discovered like 75% of my musical collection. But instead, I have a really big musical library and it's seriously changed my life for the better. But that's not to say it's all good. It's pick and choose really. It just boils down to subjectivity, that's all. That's all. But like we said in the Boss pedals thread, there's some good, some great, some bad, some absolute {censored}. So this, in my view, is a moot point. Yes yes, the Internet is powerful. I know all that. You've used it to discover new music. It's inspired you to look further. With a lot of people, it doesn't. They'll go and listen to Paul Simon and think 'Wow, that's African pop' and then not go and look deeper. With all this information out there, people should be finding their own identities. Instead we're stuck in an 1980s revival that's brought back Knight Rider, countless {censored}e metal bands and a glut of vile consumerism and financial practices that threaten to {censored} up several economies. In the Uk at least we have the {censored}e that is Nu-Rave heralded by NME and Klaxons, some rather limp indie, grime seems to have stalled and one of our biggest sellers, Leona Lewis, does nasty 80s ballads. For all the informaiton and new music out there, the re-invention cycle is getting shorter and shorter. I don't know about that dude. You could make the argument that music is becoming more and more influenced by dance music or electronica, but there is still a lot going on. A lot. Like the neo-folk thing. Music today is constantly expanding in all directions at an ever increasing rate. I'm not going to debate those this band that band points as there's no way that I can convince you of them. Subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity, subjectivity. I already have made the assertion that electronica has influenced guitar music far more than guitar music has influenced electronica. The like of Caribou and Panda Bear are electronica guys who have been influenced by more traditional pop and the results are fabulous. The guitar bands who take on a sort of dance aesthetic... generally not so good. In terms of diversity... I don't know about the US but I imagine it's similar to Britain in that the major record labels have slashed their rosters, cut out a lot of the more esoteric and fringe acts, and most of them have ploughed cash into the big mainstream targets ie. singing talent shows and sub-Amy Winehouse vocal acrobatics. Music as a whole is expanding, agreed. Subjectivity on bands: c'mon, you can't claim Belle & Sebastian are hispters. I heard them on Mark Radcliffe's radio show years ago. On that show, you could write to them via snail mail, send a cheque and get a copy of Tigermilk. What do you mean by the "retraction" of the dance scene? Well, the fact that dance records aren't automatically top of the charts here in the UK, that places like Ministry of Sound don't have the clout they used to have, that 80's revival bollocks like School Disco trumped a lot of the clubs, the closure in 2002 of Cream in Liverpool etc etc etc. Dance music undoubtedly got caught because it pushed itself as a brand way too much. A lot of people I know turned away from dance music because it was full of DJs who thought their name meant something big, clubs chasing the cash and people flashing too much ego. It's no surprise that the kids growing up on council estates didn't get into dance but preferred grime and ragga and whatnot. Dance music has been overtaken by the global rise in R n' B in Britain. http://brandfailures.blogspot.com/2007/05/tired-brands-cream-nightclub.html That musical/production prowess will always be the deciding factor between mediocre, good, great, and amazing music. After all, if it sounds good to YOUR ears, what does it matter? It matters if your standards are low, the standards of your audience are low and the standards of the hype machine are low. That's why mediocre tracks can be heralded as wonderful. Take someone like Richard Hawley, a dude who gets all manner of plaudits coming his way about being like the bastard Love child of Scott Walker, Burt Bacharach and countless orchestral pop singers. It's {censored}. It's fairly predictable, tongue in cheek ballad pop. The expectations of the listening public are low so an artist doesn't have to stretch themselves. Someone like Cat Power falls straight into that area for me. I've never worked out how and why she gets the praise she does.
  10. Really? Vile? All they sound like to me are a bunch level headed kids having fun making pop music. I don't see what's so bad about that. They're not wallowing in self pity, pretension or shallow materialism, and actually use a {censored}ing mellotron in their single, these all go in the plus column for them. They're not great, but they're not the sort of things that make me question the fate of Americas youth or intellect. Ooooh, they use a mellotron. So did {censored}ing Oasis. Using a mellotron does not make you fabulous. I have no problem with the fact that they're level-headed pop kids who don't wallow in self-pity. I'd question their pretension level given some of their lyrics but I'll let them off. What I object to is that they've raided African music for a few things and lost all the vitality of African music. I don't claim to be an African music specialist but I've got plenty of stuff that I found through listening to John Peel and it absolutely kicks the {censored} out of Vampire Weekend. http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/da/68292 Is it just Ezra (vox) who
  11. Pbone, we debate with smiles on our faces and gin in our hearts. Well, I would if I had any gin. :poke: Having a greater selection of music to choose from does give you more influences. It also gives you a greater range of things to rip off. There's a ton of bands out there who sound like they've heard a couple of tracks on a Tuesday by, say, Talking Heads, written a couple of demos influenced by them on the Thursday and Saturday they're being heralded as the next great thing. They are the hipster bands to me. Being British, we don't really have the same hipster thing as North America but three years living in Toronto introduced me to the hipster element and it was pretty pathetic. It's about the right clothes, the right name drops, the right clubs. A new band can form, be big in the city because their friends will all go but they never break it really big because they do suck. It was the same when I lived in London (see the whole New Cross thing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Cross#Culture). I know hipsters and yuppies are different things. The point I was trying to make is that, in my experience of both hipsters (socialising with them) and yuppies (socialising and working for and with them), both demographics feature a high percentage of people who are are consumers of music rather than really passionate lovers of it. Music is something to own, something to drink to, something to {censored} to, something to name drop. it isn't somethign that they really, really love, certainly not in the way it matters to you. That's fine, they can enjoy it that way. As I said earlier though, the problem comes when more and more bands aim for the consumers first, artistic and musical considerations second. So does greater selection mean better quality? I say no. Dude, look at cable TV. Massive selection of channels but the majority of it is {censored}. Look at your revival programming, such as the recently screened remake of Knight Rider. Look at your local huge grocery store. Look in the aisle with the chips n' dips. All that {censored}ing selection yet can you say it's good? Universities in the UK have more courses than ever yet the general consensus is that educational standards are lower than 10 years ago. More people than ever could shoot films but the major companies are so {censored}ed for ideas that they're paying out left, right and centre for any and every major comic book franchise going (Kevin Smith should get them to shell out for the live action Mooby spectacular). In most walks of life, a greater selection doesn't lead to higher quality. I feel it's the same with music. more stuff to listen to, more bands out there, the mainstream takes some of them... but is the quality of the mainstream better? I agree with you that the breadth of music as a while has improved but my argument was centring more on the mainstream/left of centre aspect. The mainstream has narrowed considerably. I grew up during the Britpop time. I had many arguments with Torontonians about the period. They regarded it as retro bull{censored}. Really? Britain had drum n' bass in the mainstream. Portishead, Massive Attack. Trip-hop. Tricky. Goldie. People like Nicolette got radio play. UK rap was coming up, really opening the way forward for Dizzee Rascal and what not. The indie scene was stupendously good. Sure, we had Oasis and Blur and Pulp and Supergrass and tons of fabulous pop acts. We also had Radiohead coming up. There was a lot of appreciation for the post-Nirvana wave of American bands too. The point I'm trying to make is that the mainstream/left of centre music in the mid 90s was a hell of a lot more progressive and diverse than the same equivalent now. I found it really {censored}ing sad when Bloc Party first started getting press. It felt like the media was shocked: 'Oh look! A guitar band with a black man singing! How odd!' It really did show how narrow-minded things were beginning to get and they still are that way now. Simply, check the NME best album list for 2007: http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/2007.htm And then check the list for 1995: http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/1995.html I know which list looks more diverse to me. Why should I be concerned about the mainstream? because I want wierd {censored} in the mainstream. I have no problem with pop. I have no problem with Britney. I dream of a time when prime-time TV viewing isn't soaps and game shows and house improvement programmes. I dream of a time when it's all of those things plus well-produced independent documentaries, evening specials of opera performances, films made by small companies. I dream of a music channel that can play Britney Spears alongside Cornelius. I want people to produce club electronica. I want there to be bad metal out there. I want there to be emo. We see all of this in the mainstream. It's the bits we don't see that worry me because a) the mainstream is contracting in terms of its range of music and b) I do think more and more bands are going for style first, content later. Now some random points of debate: WHAT THE {censored} IS INNOVATIVE ABOUT KLAXONS?!? Answer: nothing. Yeasayer aren't a hipster band for me because they're low-key over here in the UK. Their record was one of my records of 2007. The level of sonic creativity there is way greater than any number of sub-Joy Division impersonating bastards (incidentally, the Person Pitch LP by Panda Bear was my record of the year). Daft Punk aren't hipster because they've been around for {censored}ing ages. Belle & Sebastian? No {censored}ing way! Vampire Weekend are simply vile though. Maybe they're hipsters. Maybe. I've listened to a fair amount of their stuff and it leaves me utterly cold. It's hard for me to get over the thoughts of 'Wow, dudes doing {censored}ty versions of Paul SImon in his Graceland period. Damn they're innovative". Has it changed for the better? I think so. You see more intelligent musicians, finding their way around their instrument, using other instruments, taking whatever is around them to make music--I think that is the essence of the evolution of music creation. The rise of technology and the ease with which one can create a track means you don't need a great understanding of music to produce some fairly sophisticated sounding stuff. The problem with that is that you can't then go the extra mile. For example, using Cubase with a decent orchestral samples programme, you could rig up a convincing string section but the person without that extra musical knowledge couldn't add all the subtle elements to it that someone with the knowledge could. You could have any number of music tech students who could find their way around Pro Tools yet who would be utterly screwed with a mandolin. In this forum, you could have a guy using Virtual Guitarist to produce some tracks that would fool most people but a good guitarist could hear the missing elements that come with a human performance, all those subtleties. Instruments that are easier to use don't necessarily mean more innovative music. You can take the retraction of the dance scene as proof of that. Technology is better than it was 15 years ago but house tracks of the time still have a freshness to them that dance tracks from now do not have. Acid house came about by people pushing their gear to the limits. Gear doesn't get pushed now because it's constantly upgrading. Innovation really comes when gear is pushed to the max in my opinion. Mr Spectral, I don't know why Joy Division never took me in. I agree with you on Peter Hook, his bass playing is great. When they had their highs, like Atmosphere for instance, they could produce some great stuff. Looking over their entire output though, it's really patchy. The drumming's OK but the drumming on Marquee Moon is better and a lot more interesting. The guitars are good but there's any number of more interesting sounds. The singer... maybe it is just him. Even on Atmosphere, there are moments when the sound of Curtis makes me wince. Closer is indeed a POS. It's too clean. It's a media guy's idea of what Northern Britain was like. I can only hope Anton Corbijn goes on to make a Smiths biopic Oh, I also hate New Order even more than Joy Division! Well I think there is a distinct difference between being hipster and being hip. It all really goes down to the old argument of which bands are punk and which bands are poseurs. The guys who are hip never know it or use it. The hipsters will. Part of the fun with Kid A is that they put the sounds OVER the lyrics. It's something REM did with Murmur, keep the vocals low. Best Radiohead album out there.
  12. I'm giggling at SpectralJulian's notion of the dumbed-down clone bands. All those Radiohead clones... yep, and couldn't Aphex Twin say that Kid A was a dumbed-down version (ie. less sonically radical) of his own work? Radiohead are bastards for dumbing down techno and electronic music and bringing it to the pale white guitar-loving masses There are few things musically on Kid A that hadn't been done before. In terms of audio manipulation, there were new things courtesy of the Kaoss Pad mangling of Thom's vocals in 'Everything In The Right Place'. To me, it's an album that shows technological progression rather than musical progression. So let's make some more pronouncements: -Joy Division were shit, are shit and will always be shit. There is no more precious hipster band than Joy Division. It ticks all the right boxes: non-mainstream sound, non-mainstream singer but you know that there's many within their clan that don't actually like the albums. I can't stand their albums! I hated them when I was 16 some 14 years ago and my friends and I would meet up round each other's houses and play stacks of vinyl. Fuck, I should have liked them as I adored the Manic Street Preachers, especially the Holy Bible LP. But everything about Joy Division turned me off. Ian Curtis is much like T.S. Eliot to me in that their prose is moribund and people elevate them upwards purely because they sing of death and how useless life is etc etc. It's no different to the emo kids saying how 'emotional' the emo singer is, everything Bowers complained about in the reviews above. My own theory with Joy Division is that the music press decided that they needed to hype a new 'Old Icon'. Punk had been done to death, the Smiths revival was back in town so post-punk was the logical step. Death sells and so Curtis was ideal. Mark E Smith is a more important and vital contributor to the world of music than Ian Curtis ever was. So there. So angry. Yes I hated 'Control' as well. I saw it a month ago and it was vile. Sufjan is one of those people who I should like. I like minimalism, I like textured sound but he's never quite kicked in. Maybe one day. After all, it took me 27 years before I found I liked chilli. With jazz, you find the real enthusiasts at the smaller concerts. Going to see a top headlining act is a social occasion. There are people just there because of the event. You see it habitually in sport with the corporate boxes, men and women in expensive places being served wine and beer and food on the company expense account, with barely a glance at the sport. With the posher element, somethign like jazz gets lumped in with opera as an activity that's for the wealthy, the intellectual, the well-heeled. Obviously it's bullshit. The last opera I saw cost me less than $20 and the production was great, full orchestra, stupendous vocals, set design, everything. I enjoy going to the opera now more than most gigs because the opera is an artistic experience. the creativity, the music, the whole affair... it possesses more artistic expression than any number of dudes with guitars hoping to score a couple of lines and some pussy. The audience not being into the music doesn't make the music worse but it does mean you have bands and musicians tailoring their music for that social dancing denominator. You could actually make the case that, guitar music has been influenced by techno and dance records in that there's more guitar music now being made in the same manner of dance records ie. music to dance to socialise to. There are still musicians out there making the music that they want to make and audience be damned but there's certainly a rise in the number of musicians out there tailoring their sound for a particular demographic, in this case the hipster socialites. I agree that composers in the past were producing music for patrons, not least members of the aristocracy etc. That patronage also gave the composer the freedom in which to innovate. It's like Galileo in Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo: he's working for the Church, working for shit money and it frustrates him but I think it's the procurator who reminds him that where he is living has a far more liberal attitude than other areas of Italy and therefore Galileo has more freedom to explore his ideas. if Bach, for instance, was commisioned to write something for a patron, it's the classical equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, bang something out that Bach knows the commoners will like, get the patron happy and on his side and then be able to have the freedom to swan off into his own field of sonic innovation. There's no problem with audience pleasing. It does become a problem when it feels like two out of three new bands out there are audience pleasers first and foremost and who then don't go on and innovate. If you don't see your music as backgorund music for people to hoover up booze and drugs too, that's great. That's the attitude I'd like more musicians to have. I say this as a man who has no time for his own music until November due to his double degree course and who will be back playing covers soon. I know abotu pleasing an audience. Every time I have to play fucking Wonderwall, I know about pleasing an audience and pandering to what they want. It's why I then cheer up when we get to cover some wierd shit and the audience turn and look at us with disgust And remember kids, critics suck cock because they talk endlessly despite not having an audience. Just like I have done here so, in essence, I suck pole
  13. I personally think Sufjan Stevens is lyrically wonderful but musically dull, probably because he's steeped in Americana and he's one of the links in the chain marked 'hard-working American singer-songwriter'. All the Pitchfork dudes wanted their own Springsteen and they heralded Stevens as the one. Not bad but not worth the praise he's got. In my opinion, the main problem with most musical audiences out there, be they the hipsters or the yuppier scene, is that they aren't there to witness an artistic event. Music isn't an art and a passion to them, it's an excuse for a night out with the girlfriend or a night spent dropping E and dancing. The hipsters are the ones who know who Ian Curtis is yet Peter Hook will be an unknown entity to them. Hipsters aren't innovators. They're socialites first and artists second. There are few gigs now that I've really enjoyed attending because half the audience is there to drink, some to fuck and some to fight. That's fine, I like that too but it seems that more and more music is being dilluteed down to 'backing track for life' status. The online world has given everyone greater access to music but it's beyond question that the ease by which new music can be obtained has turned music into a commodity and a lot of the actual art has vanished. I'd liken it to going to a video store. Nobody goes to a video store and thinks 'Ah, time to select a new artistic experience for me' yet if you were to go to the opera, you'd have that feeling of being privilege to a real artistic occasion.
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