Progressive Rock Music?

by hillary_step 37 Replies latest social entertainment

Terry

Terry,
Interesting summation.
We are frozen in Corbonite times with vapidity laced tatoos festooning bubble-gum teenyboppers in a show of hairless crotch fantasies.
lol..How could I ever disagree with that.
People of our generation are accused of 'being stuck in the 70's'. I can but disagree. I am stuck in innovation and quality. Frankly, politically, musically and creatively the 60's and early 70's were by far the most interesting times that I have lived through, and I have a couple of decades to compare them with! That is not to say that there are not some stellar musicians out there, but few can fight the pimps and the Siren's call of a mortgage free life.

I'm shocked that younger people JUDGE each other by what music they listen to!

Music has become a T-shirt, a membership card and gang sign more than an intellectual participation in the artist's consciousness.

Wasn't it Duke Ellington who said there are only two kinds of music? (Good and Bad.)

Variety of expression is one thing, but, singularity of conception is another. I find so much that is derrivative that it saddens me.

The hip-hop "beat" hasn't varied much for ten years. Why does that bore me and thrill them?

Music seems manufactured around the hit to the extent it is souless cut and paste hook pandering plugged into the face-du-jour.

The unique voice, the epiphany viewpoint, the outside angle thinkers are out there--but, they are consigned to the shadows by trendspotters and fangbang vampire promotion mavens sucking originality out and leaving the lifeless corpse of mediocrity to accept the Top Artist awards.

Terry

Terry,
You put it in a way I've never thought of before. That was very interesting. I guess Im an old dog that can still learn something about music after all
THANK YOU!
What we are starving for is a latter day voice crying out from the wilderness who has the ear of the throngs. A modern day LESTER BANGS who can set the pieces on the proper squares and cheer on the winners and boo the wannabees from the playing field.
Music Critics are sadly lacking. The Internet has made the DEMO in democracy deaf to informed opinion.
We need a whole lot more "why" and a whole lot less "what" on our plate.
LESTER.....LESTER.....where are ya baby??
hillary_step

Robert Wyatt is one of the most inspirational musicians that I know.
He was one of the original founding members of Soft Machine, and easily one of the top ten rock drummers ever to pick up sticks. Here he is in 1970 playing with Soft Machine "Out-Bloody-Rageous" Elton Dean, who died very recently is on alto saxophone
In 1973 He fell from a window in London during a party and was paralysed from the waist downwards, which put an end to his drumming career. He immediately focused his creative energy into songwriting and keyboards and has gone on to produce a body of work that makes a difference. Here he is singing "Free Will And Testament" It is worth the effort it takes to listen to the lyrics.
HS
Barbie Doll

Socrificial Loon-----You have a PM
nvrgnbk

For Terry and h_s:
Are you guys aware of all the new stuff out there?
Surely you know that there is more being offered than just hip-hop and pop drivel.
It's not being played on commercial radio, but it's out there to be heard.
Not saying you'd like all of it, as art appreciation is highly subjective, but I think you might find some of it acceptable, maybe even enjoyable.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MbZM6ZSlvvY Devotchka
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FcANFVcJeOM Radiohead
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QNVVX-m-oSw Sigur Ros
http://youtube.com/watch?v=AjLFG0i2_AE My Morning Jacket
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Pyp34v6Lmcc Arcade Fire
http://youtube.com/watch?v=a6i_uJfNnG4 John Vanderslice
http://youtube.com/watch?v=97IT0-EDTtw Wilco
hillary_step

nvrgnbk,
I have a record company, small and new, so I have to be aware of what is out there, especially in my own domain. I have to say though that I always more interested in innovators than copyists. For example, the second Bob Wyatt song was recorded a couple of years ago not in 1970 and I can almost guarantee that you can find no other person who writes and sounds like him. This is why I posted it, to show that a world class drummer paralysed from the waist downwards in 1973 has made a career in music that is upraralleled, just as Picasso would have if he lost the use of his right hand.
I think this is what Terry and I are whining on about. I do not blame young musicians for this, it is the record companies who should take much of the blame for placing creativity way down the list of the important charaterstics of there 'commodities'.
I have played through a couple of the links you posted and have some Radiohead myself which I find very good in small flashes of brilliance, but generally quite tedious. What I hear makes me think, 'yeah, good, sounds like....." I like my bands to sound like themselves. I also like for them to be players who can move from genres like rock, jazz and classical without even having to think about it. Not that they will excel in all these genres, but that they are accomplished musicians I have heard no bands like that in modern times, apart from the old farts still playing and jazz musicians. I will concede that there are some terrific young Jazz players. The reason that so few cave in to record company pressures is that much fewer people listen to Jazz, with subsequently less money on the table.
I feel sure for example that you can find no bands who play as well as Soft Machine, PFM, National Health, Henry Cow for example whose members still maintain the level of creativity that they had when they first took to the traps. Record companies used to take risks, often because they were run by music fans themslves. It is this approach which fed creativity. Many of my old friends made up the band Caravan. I can tell you that when Decca first signed them, they also allowed them seven months during which they practiced day and night, seven days a week, twelve hours a day in an old church hall that they rented before they cut their first album. I know a lot of record company executives and a lot of young musicians, but I have only seen this level of committment in Jazz, or among very few emerging musicians. It was not, "I wanna be a rock star and make millions', it was 'I wanna make music".
Whine over. Terry's turn now. ;)
HS
hillary_step

Terry,
The hip-hop "beat" hasn't varied much for ten years. Why does that bore me and thrill them?
Because it is more lifestyle than music? Have you read Kenny Drew on rap music?
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=21243
I thought this rather witty:
It's a sad commentary on our culture and society when the biggest thing in popular music is an ex-crack dealer whose claim to fame is being shot nine times, and one of the greatest entertainers in the world was on trial for child molestation. If that's not a sign of the coming Apocalypse, I don't know what is! And if 50Cent was really shot nine times, why couldn't one of those bullets have hit a vital organ? Who the fuck was shooting at him: Stevie Wonder?
HS
Terry

Whine over. Terry's turn now. ;)
I was in the Art business for over 20 years.
A lot of people want to be "artists". I call those people "artistes". (Ar-teests.)
Wannabees. Not necessarily savvy or talented or even aware. They like the looks of the lifestyle.
Others are obsessively "sincere". They are eaten up with process. PROCESS! They carve, paint, whittle, slop dots and splash globs, build, mould and combine X's and Y's. The result is something.....tedious....but....not art.
ART CHANGES YOU when you encounter it.
You walk in the door one person with one world view and you walk out the back door a DIFFERENT person altogether.
You don't/can't see the world the same way.
Why?
You encountered ART!
MUSIC is ART when it is its essential best.
Good...........better........best........ESSENTIAL BEST!
Original? yes.
Informed? Certainly.
Intriguing or mysterious? Can be.
Obvious, yet catchy? If you say so.
Can anybody do it? HELL NO!
Even the Artists who can do it can't ALWAYS do it!
It is like eating Krugeraands and trying to shit gold bricks! Good luck, buddy.
An artist/musician is a prism that light passes through and suddenly, on the other side, the essential colors hidden in the purity of light becomes a splash of revealed constituency dazzling and insuperable.
Huh?
The whole is more than the sum of its parts. But, you gotta KNOW the parts, brother, to create a Whole.
Sense and Sensibility. (No, not Jane Austen.)
Art in a musician is a Sense which leads to a Sensibility that enables the artist to ____tap in____and pull out of the festering maw of chaos a wriggling, screaming newly birthed monster raised as one's own that can live in this world without devouring us.
Living with the Monster without being eaten alive is what the Musician/Artist does best. He can't really tame it so much as learn to work with it and around it and try not to wake up dead.
75% of Everything is crap!
Don't believe me? Buy the complete Beatles songbook and flip pages, buster!
Art is on loan. It is temporary. It is lurking in the corner of a generation's eye never to be seen the same way twice.
Look at all the "GREAT" writers whose books are crap now. Same book. Now crap. Once hailed, feted and toasted.
Look at all the "GREAT" songs. Crap now. Top 40. Cheered, f-d in the greenroom, applauded and now----crap.
Why?
We are an organism. The artist is a gene that turns "on" and turns "off". One day we have a full head of Rock n' Roll hair and the next day we are doing the "combover" to hide the glistening pate!
We can only be the Flower Power generation for a few minutes before our music, our artists and our sense and sensibility is Old Hippie bullshit.
Sniff it deep, my man, sniff it deep. Hold it in your lungs while you can. Grow dizzy from the tickle of original feeling and blow it out your arse as a Golden Oldie.
That's ART!

Progressive Rock Music?

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