Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
The reason of course we were plagued with Dire Straits.
Related of course to the reasoning behind Days Of Future Passed - Deram wanted to show off their new recording tech for both classical and pop music, but couldn't be bothered springing for two different records to do it on. Which leaves us with juxtapositions like this:
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I've been thinking too, and the thread ties in nicely to some other stuff I've been thinking about recently - such as why do I, and atheist of several year's standing, still go to church almost every month to sing a service? (Bear with me.) Because most music has a function, a time and place and context which enhance its meaning (and whose meaning, in return, it enhances); and bringing it out of context, so it can no longer serve that function, means losing part of that meaning. My flatmate is in his bedroom right now, (probably) surfing the internet while he listens to late-90's drum 'n' bass; he's not in a club in Birmingham in 1996, so no wonder it sounds a bit naff. Similarly none of the many settings of the Evening Service (Mag and Nunc) by C. V. Stanford are my favourite bits of choral music to sing; but in an Evensong service in a large Victorian church they make perfect sense. The Evensong service itself is a fantastic bit of poetry and pageantry, roughly contemporary with the King James Bible, and hearing it said and sung in context is worthwhile for anyone with an interest in British cultural history. In fact most of what has been said about "Music" in this thread is probably applicable to art in general.
Sorry, what was I saying? What's the function of "Sound Chaser"? Fucked if I know. Showing off your HiFi to your Oxbridge classmates maybe.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Why say in 20 minutes what can be said perfectly in 3 or 4?
The flipside is that some things just take 20 minutes (or more) to say.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I know little or nothing of classical musical music
Not to mention that you're talking about dozens if not hundreds of genres right there, differing from each other as much as Robert Johnson and Yes and Britney Spears, if not more so. I'll admit that the quantity of recorded popular (for want of a better word) music probably now exceeds the quantity of written-down classical (f.w.o.a.b.w) music, but classical (Western art?) music still has 10x the timespan behind it.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I know little or nothing of classical musical music
I think that's because you invented it just then.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
There's truth and beauty in all of those.
Exactly. There has to be something worthwhile in every genre, or it wouldn't exist.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Well I do I guess. I’m sick of people misrepresenting the history of popular music by describing it in absolutist terms.
Like when you dismissed the entire early Flying Nun canon as people who could barely play their instruments? ;-)
"Worst" and "Most" are pretty absolute too.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
All I got from this was a vague sense of amusement. Apart from that, I found it pointless and irritating, perhaps because there's not even a pretense of the economy and emotional directness of rock 'n' roll.
What I get from it is the sensation of a whole bunch of really great musicians having heaps of fun, in a way that infuses the whole song. I just find it infectious. I don't even think they're trying to show off any more - they've just been playing together like that for long enough that that's what comes naturally. You're right that there's no pretense of economy or directness - that's quite clearly not what they're aiming for, and I don't think you can fault them for that.
I would find being made to listen to this music for an extended period very challenging indeed.
So what you're saying is it's bang on topic for the thread, right? But it's a fair cop. I don't often listen to Yes these days for that very reason - a couple of times a decade is more than enough. But I really enjoyed revisiting it for this thread.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Scott Chris,
If you define pretentiousness as "showing off to compensate for emotional insecurity" or "taking yourself too seriously" then nearly every human I've ever met is prone to the resulting affectations.
How do you define "too seriously"? My take: you can enjoy "non-serious" music because it's good to dance to, or it's catchy, or it reminds you of that great weekend when you were 19, etc. But "serious" music you're supposed to enjoy because it says something you hadn't thought of before, or illuminates old things/experiences in a new way; and if it doesn't deliver on this, then it's as useless as a dance tune with no beat. "Too serious" art relies on delivering an insight which is either incoherent, obvious (thus depending as much on the artee as the artist) or false, without any other redeeming qualities.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Danielle,
Prog in general is difficult for me because the self-conscious virtuosity kinda makes me want to hurl, and I hate all that 'look at us stopping and starting on a dime with our weird time signatures, aren't we awesome?' schtick
I have something just for you, Danielle: