tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12518466.post3896920274820621095..comments2023-07-19T11:56:30.506-04:00Comments on things to do: This post is really too long to read, y'know?ergohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15370317979111315836noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12518466.post-79399369293387673692007-03-23T03:12:00.000-04:002007-03-23T03:12:00.000-04:00kenyc: Perhaps people feel comfortable liking chee...kenyc: Perhaps people feel comfortable liking cheesy music of the past. Older people can use the nostalgia angle as an excuse to like songs that they used to be too busy pretending to be cool to admit to liking. Young people who are too cool to like the current pop music swill can indulge in catchiness, cheesyness, and clichees of crap from the past and even admit publicly to liking it because it's sooo retro to like that stuff and retro is cool if done with attitude and conviction.<BR/><BR/>Tangential intergenerational music story: he RM told me a story today about how she hates Neil Young, Neil Diamond and Billy Joel because she was forced to listen to that stuff on repeat on family road trips (the music her parents liked).<BR/><BR/>Meanwhile Momvee and her father would do record exchanges where they would hand each other albums that they each thought the other really needed to listen to and might like. (am I getting that right, MV?)<BR/><BR/>Re: agnostic relativist beliefs. Well if you keep rotating through a familiar set perhaps you'll narrow in on a subset or maybe you'll eventually find the underlying concept that is shared amongst them all and have that be the basis of your beliefs.ergohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15370317979111315836noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12518466.post-5227833285938807512007-03-22T02:14:00.000-04:002007-03-22T02:14:00.000-04:00sorry I can't resist after reading the beliefs par...sorry I can't resist after reading the beliefs part. AB and I had some convos about that a few times, with varying degrees of formality and seriousness. I have no fucking idea what I believe. Or, I do, it's just that it changes minute by minute (though I guess it is a little comforting that it at least just shifts among a certain bunch of the same beliefs, for the most part). That's why I love that Dostoyevsky quote I put up on my geocities blog. And I had many equally agnostic quotes posted up on the walls of my WV place too.<BR/><BR/>I think AB and I determined, though, that a few definites for me are:<BR/><BR/>1- it's all relative<BR/><BR/>2- the grass is always greener<BR/><BR/>3- sonic youth RULESkeNYChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14185946351358869024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12518466.post-6509537792364609352007-03-22T02:03:00.000-04:002007-03-22T02:03:00.000-04:00Ho-ly shitballs. I only read through Saturday nigh...Ho-ly shitballs. I only read through Saturday night (i.e. the second day on here) and had so much to comment on I just could not go on reading, I had to comment. Then groucho rolls up and theres another 14 things to comment about! then ergie responds to groucho and there's more. Fuck, dude!<BR/><BR/>Well, by now I've forgotten almost everything I was going to say, but just as a broad statement I want to extend a warm thank you to ERGIE and GROUCHO for providing the single most stimulating moment of my day (even above finding out about Live Earth...).<BR/><BR/>Erg, this post is just crazy prolific. I would never have the motivation to write something like that for other people to see. For my own personal uses, that's a diff. story, but wow. Also, glad you wrote about Fri, because I didn't. Or, actually I did, but no one will ever see it but me =D<BR/><BR/>One thing I wanted to comment on:<BR/><BR/><I>Don't get me wrong there's a lot to love about the 80's but there are amazing songs that have been written since then and there are all kinds of starving artists that are worthy of our attention creating music that ought to be the soundtrack of our lives in this particular slice of life.</I><BR/><BR/>Two things--one is, as a very, very general statement I think there is more happy music from the 80s. There is always happy music, but nowadays mainstream pop is stuff like FOB, DCC, My Chems, James Blunt, John Mayer, the Dixie Chicks, etc. And they're all fine...it's just if you're even remotely sad, listening to that shit could easily push you over the edge into the realm of suicidal, so it's not really something to put on as the soundtrack of your life, assuming you like to be happy. Of course that's a huge overgeneralization and there are plenty of counter examples (mainly, any hip hop song), but overall, 80s music vs. 2000s music, 80s just feels better as a life soundtrack. Shit man...I feel really bad for whoever has "the Black Parade" as a piece of hyper-nostalgia like 10 years from now...<BR/><BR/>The second thing is personally I tend to be very slow to catch on to good music. Inevitably I will always be buried in the musical past and will rarely to never recognize or appreciate great music while it is happening and cutting edge and stuff. I mean, I just bought two Police albums for Christ's sake. And two Guided by Voices albums. And I honestly have not given My Chems or Fall Out Boy or any number of current artists anywhere near a fair chance. That's just me though...<BR/><BR/>OK. What else....on GROUCHO. On hitting repeat around age 30 or whatever, this is something I have noticed around me and am completely terrified of. I know for a fact that I will slide into this same death trap but what can you do? It's probably biological. The same shit is happening with my political and religious beliefs too....well, at least with music, you can attempt to listen to as much shit as humanly possible so that your repeat is nice and diverse/extensive.<BR/><BR/>On the whole Pixies thing. I agree with GROUCHO's point that the times mattered, and I agree with ERGIE's point that the place mattered. I also agree the 'undergroundness' is a relative term (which makes sense given that I'm a foaming at the mouth relativist and want to get a tattoo that says "It's all relative.")...I wouldn't base my scale on the Billboards though--it's so indirect (sales? plus maybe radio airplay?). Instead I would base it on a shoddily performed survey of about 10 random people in one club that I happened to be drinking at....no, but on the real, the point is I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that the number of people that know the Pixies is far, far larger than the number of people that know Sonic Youth...and the number of people that know the Violent Femmes is like astronomically larger than both of those combined.<BR/><BR/>It's not like it matters, and it's not like anything I've written makes any sense. It's just fun as hell to think about. And I'm spent.keNYChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14185946351358869024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12518466.post-13950279554537148412007-03-20T17:18:00.000-04:002007-03-20T17:18:00.000-04:00gc: 1.I'm a bit of a live music junkie right now. ...gc: <BR/>1.I'm a bit of a live music junkie right now. For whatever reason, of late, I find it very balancing. When I haven't been to a show in a while I start to feel walled in. I blame it on touring last summer.<BR/><BR/>2. As to the evolution and stagnation of one's soundtrack, I actually read a great article about that very thing.<BR/><A HREF="http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/qmss/newyorker.html" REL="nofollow"> <BR/>When do we lose our taste for the new?</A><BR/><BR/>I always meant to write a post about it. But hey ... lemme jsut throw it into the comments and redredge it later. I like repeating myself.<BR/><BR/>3. The Big Chill sound track ended up being part of the sound track of my life as a result of the popularity of that movie. I am a little bit at having grown up a cultural hostage of the baby boom generation.<BR/><BR/>I just hate this pandering. Now that it's happening to me it seems so calculated. I miss that moment of discovery when I turn to the store clerk and ask them, "Hey, who does this song?" and writing <BR/>it down to look up later.<BR/><BR/>But this is all just peter pan posturing. I am pretty static. I just harbor the illusion that I can break out of my rut and grab onto something I have never heard/seen before and love it.<BR/><BR/>4. Now that the experience of culture is horizontal it does kind of change everything. I think we all get something closer to what we want and like but our experiences are so individual that we end up feeling alone or bound together as small cultural tribes.<BR/><BR/>I suppose that one must account for regional differences in exposure: growing up in the Sticks of IL or The Deep South, what is "underground" is at a very different point in the continuum.<BR/><BR/>ldbug: Heh. I think I am going through a verbose yet unhinged phase in my blogging.<BR/><BR/>I think redheads everywhere are grateful that I did not accomplish this particular goal.<BR/>=)ergohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15370317979111315836noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12518466.post-85286431604938252792007-03-20T12:20:00.000-04:002007-03-20T12:20:00.000-04:00Good lord, you did write an entire week of posts!!...Good lord, you did write an entire week of posts!!!<BR/><BR/>too bad about not puking on a red-head...maybe M here will let you puke on him sometime;-Pldbughttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02145625279209507437noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12518466.post-12877718691697820212007-03-20T12:13:00.000-04:002007-03-20T12:13:00.000-04:00Wow, I wish I weren't so busy making music that I ...Wow, I wish I weren't so busy making music that I could actually go out and see some now and again.<BR/><BR/>You're turning into quite the Chairlift groupie, aren't you?<BR/><BR/><I> there's a lot to love about the 80's but... there are all kinds of starving artists that are worthy of our attention creating music that ought to be the soundtrack of our lives in this particular slice of life.</I><BR/><BR/>Well, all us starving artists circa 2007 <I>are</I> providing the soundtrack to people's lives... young people. <BR/><BR/>The "soundtrack" of most people's lives continues evolving until their early 20s, at which point they just put it on "repeat" until they die. Hence, the 30-somethings of today are all still listening to late 80s / early 90s music.<BR/><BR/>This is nothing new. In 1983 there was a really popular movie called "The Big Chill" about a bunch of thirty-somethings going through a bunch of yuppie melodrama. What was on the soundtrack? Duran Duran? The Cure? Hell no. 60s and 70s Motown.<BR/><BR/><I>the South and I had an argument about whether The Pixies were a way underground underground band (The South's opinion) or a band that achieved moderate commercial success (I remember that them getting some radio play while I was in college).</I><BR/><BR/>Depends where you draw the line between 'mainstream' and 'underground'.<BR/><BR/>Also, the scale was very different back then. Without Internet piracy, indie labels could more confidently spend money promoting obscure bands. Commercial radio DJs still had some control over their playlists, and MTV actually devoted most of its time to videos, hence a lot of obscure bands got radio and MTV play who'd never get it today. Also, people didn't have X-Boxes and DVDs to keep them home instead of going out to shows. Even "underground" bands could fill college basketball stadiums.<BR/><BR/>That said, here's how I'd stack the totem pole of late-80s college rock acts, based on their highest positions attained on the Billboard 200 charts.<BR/><BR/>- R.E.M. / Out of Time / #1<BR/>- Sonic Youth / Experimental Jet Set... / #34<BR/>- The Pixies / Bossanova / #70<BR/>- Violent Femmes / Blind Leading the Naked / #84<BR/>- Camper Van Beethoven / Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart / #135<BR/>- Mudhoney / Piece of Cake / #189 <BR/>- Eleventh Dream Day / never charted <BR/>- Half Japanese / never charted <BR/><BR/>So yeah, if The South's point of reference is Sonic Youth, then the Pixies are "underground". But if your point of reference is "Half Japanese", they're total mainstream rock stars.Groucho Castanedahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01511700694397609626noreply@blogger.com