Hard News: Parties, seriousness and the death of Web 2.0
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I had the impression that the pictures of people at parties and features on "trips you can do into the wild, wild country beyond Ponsonby" were the core of the mag.
Well, the pictures of people at parties have always been part of Metro. But they were doing it when no one else did, and with the photographer's knack for taking delightfully unflattering snaps, it wasn't your typical society page.
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In truth, Dylan was, harder than anyone, working against the pop thing; promoting traditionalism; an anathema to the infantilism and narcissism of pop.
Yeh but my argument was kinda *for* the whole pop thing and Dylan was just the perfect ammunition for the beardies who wanted to intellectualise popular music, leading to your Lennon & McCartney unpleasantness etc... The greatest lyric ever, IMO, is 'A wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boom'. That said everything you need to know about pop music and after that, we might as well have given up putting words in tunes and just used the voice as an extra instrument. Or skipped 3 decades and gone straight to House. Imagine if 'Voodoo Ray' was released in 1962, immediately making Dylan and The Beatles and everyone else completely redundant. That would've been cool.
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"trips you can do into the wild, wild country beyond Ponsonby"
Back in the (early) eighties, the "wild wild country was Ponsonby. One of my mates was badly beaten up in 1981 by the Ponsonby Youth Club! KC (King Cobra) graffitti was everywhere. When my parents bought a house there (1980), people told them it was a bad, bad move. Gentrification took hold in the mid-eighties, reached critical mass and accellerated in the 90s.
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with the photographer's knack for taking delightfully unflattering snaps, it wasn't your typical society page.
I'll never forget the day my mum rang me to ask my why I was on those Metro pages putting my tongue in the mouth of a girl she didn't know.
Due to...um...factors, I couldn't really tell her an answer to either...
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Due to...um...factors, I couldn't really tell her an answer to either...
Well, it's hard to talk with your tongue in someone else's mouth.
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Russell objected
You can question my authoritah, but do not question my word mojo:
Oh no I didn't doubt it was a word (me doubt your word mojo??? I thought you were quoting Keen), from the noun infantilization!!!
I just think it's ugly, that's the point. When you could have used a turn of phrase like "causing us all to squabble and behave like children".... go on seriously tell me that infantilising rolls off the tongue :).
Besides I still think it's inappropriate for the point - the etymology of the word suggests it should refer to anything but the conversation and babble that occurs on the web .... might I suggest teenagilising :).
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Yeh but my argument was kinda *for* the whole pop thing and Dylan was just the perfect ammunition for the beardies who wanted to intellectualise popular music, leading to your Lennon & McCartney unpleasantness etc...
It wasn't the musicians, it was the critics. That whole American rock scholar thing has always got on my tits. Always looking for the new Dylan. Plus, they'd hold forth on black music and never mention reggae.
Then we wound up with those ultimate rock scholar bands, The Band and - god save us - Little Feat.
The greatest lyric ever, IMO, is 'A wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boom'. That said everything you need to know about pop music and after that, we might as well have given up putting words in tunes and just used the voice as an extra instrument. Or skipped 3 decades and gone straight to House. Imagine if 'Voodoo Ray' was released in 1962, immediately making Dylan and The Beatles and everyone else completely redundant. That would've been cool.
Not quite sure I'd go that far, but it did occur to me that it would've been nice if they'd had some house music at the Acid Tests, instead of the Grateful Dead noodling everyone senseless.
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I just went and had a look at nz.general - it really wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, although it does seem that the topic generation is in the hands of the loonies: Stuff like "When will NZ stand up to the Muslims like Australia has?"
Christ, is still up and running? How very 1995. Things online really don't die do they?
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That whole American rock scholar thing has always got on my tits.
I have to agree, although Simon Reynolds has made a fair tilt at continuing the tradition in the UK of recent. His interview in the recent issue of Fact was ponderous in the extreme.
Americans, outside of parts of NYC, rarely get reggae, Marley excluded (and then only the watered down later era),
Then again, neither do Australians....
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and - god save us - Little Feat
Huh? Ok I know I'm not anything like knowledgable about music but I just got my Little Feat double live album out a few days ago and really liked it. What's so bad about it????
Old folks Boogie is a fun song with a line (ripped off I know) with which I am more and more familiar
"You know that you're over the hill, when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill"
cheers
Bart -
Americans, outside of parts of NYC, rarely get reggae, Marley excluded (and then only the watered down later era),
Don't know if you'd call this watered down, but it's technically reggae and VERY German:
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Web 2.0 is dead? But i've not made any money out of it yet!
Perhaps it is dying, but it by no means is dead yet, in fact based on some of the questions I've been gettting from people not interested in tech this last few weeks, and some MSM reports it is just latching on as a mainstream meme (or is the word meme dying too?). So I think the buzzword /movement still has some legs left yet.
I never got into usenet, I was more interested in real time conversations so went to IRC instead. Some of the political channels on various networks have existed since the early 90s. Check out Undernet #politics (for right wing), and #political (for centre), although I should note both are more American than international.
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After I saw my father on the Metro society pages a few years back I realised that we really are screwed ... as a society.
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Joe - yeah, I have a friend in Germany who plays in a reggae band. They're very popular! Record contract 'n all. Seems to be all the rage around his neck of the woods.
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"Ahhh but what is your confidence level that the answer that google has provided you is right?"
I usually find that sampling the first 5 answers shows you if the issue is controversial. Scarily, on most questions of trivia, Google seems to pick Wikipedia first. I suppose that's because everyone can link to it, so the pagerank is through the roof.
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3410,
We also tend to discount the leap in literacy that has accompanied the mainstreaming of the internet.
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Hmmm...
I think Bush is quite clearly acting without guidance from the Seymour Skinners of this world.
I agree, I have long lamented the proof reading on TVNZ's site
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Joe - yeah, I have a friend in Germany who plays in a reggae band. They're very popular! Record contract 'n all. Seems to be all the rage around his neck of the woods.
As well as trad reggae, reggae infused electronica seems to be popular with German DJ/Producers/Labels such as Boozoo Bajou, Noiseshaper, Studio Deluxe and Sonar Kollectiv amongst others producing lovingly created, dub and version infused music. Not to mention Peter kruder and Richard Dorfmeister a little further south who created one of the best modern dub albums (K&D Sessions) of all time. In my opinion of course...
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From Keen's blog, a link to a Comment is Free piece bemoaning the blogosphere by Jonathan Freedland.
I like Freeland's column writing a lot, but this reads like yet another bit of special pleading from a Guardian journalist.
But what interested me was the repeated claims in the discussion that Comment is Free is "the best" of all blogs in terms of its discussions. It just isn't. A lot of the time, it's all opinion and no experience.
You learn something in a good discussion, and there are plenty of blogs where that holds. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and declare that Public Address is better than Comment is Free.
There, I've said it. Perhaps I should drop Toby Manhire a line and send him something for CiF ...
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Or skipped 3 decades and gone straight to House. Imagine if 'Voodoo Ray' was released in 1962, immediately making Dylan and The Beatles and everyone else completely redundant. That would've been cool.
Yes, but, and I am of the opinion that Voodoo Ray is one of the greatest pop singles of all time, that song could not have existed without The Beatles.......to steal a phrase from Carl Craig (whose incredible new remix of the Brazilian Girls is playing as I type...very post K&D) Voodoo Ray is Little Richard pushed into an elevator with Sgt Pepper, Sly Stone, and King Tubby. Nothing happens in a vacuum
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Voodoo Ray is Little Richard pushed into an elevator with Sgt Pepper, Sly Stone, and King Tubby. Nothing happens in a vacuum
Ok ok, you had me at King Tubby. Absolutely agree with all of that Simon. I was mainly Satanically advocating as I'm sure you know, but will confess to being a fan of sound more than lyrics. The feel of a tune is way more important to me than what is being said. Hence my targeting of poor old Bob.
Having said that, I consider the lines "Elvis, was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me..." to be superb beyond belief so I can't even call consistency in my defence!
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Ok ok, you had me at King Tubby. Absolutely agree with all of that Simon. I was mainly Satanically advocating as I'm sure you know, but will confess to being a fan of sound more than lyrics. The feel of a tune is way more important to me than what is being said. Hence my targeting of poor old Bob.
Some days I'm with you, some days I'm not...myself I love Dylan circa 65-66 but not much else, mostly for the way the sound of that band intertwined with the snarls. ... the bullshit detector is going haywire when it points at the voluminous critical praise for last years album. I'd rather listen to LL Cool J, aged seventeen, intoning "I Need A Beat" over an almost metallic staccato loop...he and PE had better words than anything Dylan has done in the past thirty years.
Sgt Pepper...contrary to accepted wisdom, I think that's when it also started to go right, it was the Dylan blowback that worked. being little more than a fabulous sound and colour collage. As an album it's a wonder, still after 40 years, and I was pleased to see it's rehabiltation in Mojo a couple of months back. Sure it opened the floodgates marked ugly prog rock (and gave so many acts that should never have got beyond the garage a voice) but without Pepper no Kraftwerk.......
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My parents are huge Beatles fans (they came to NZ from Liverpool in the 1960s) and I remember as a kid enjoying their early albums (Hard Day's Night, Please Please Me etc...) *and* Sgt Pepper's. There's something theatric, strange and hypnotic about it. It has several easy pointers along the way, and goes wild with Day in the Life at the end.
I probably haven't listened to it in over 30 years though.
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"You learn something in a good discussion, and there are plenty of blogs where that holds. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and declare that Public Address is better than Comment is Free."
Couldn't agree more RB. I want to use the huge interactive advantage 2.0 is giving us to learn something for sure. I can listen to talkback, pick up a Womens Weekly or watch idiot TV if I want to be numbed and sedated. Broadcast Yourself invites a fair amount of digital narcissism for sure, but one has to filter through much in life to uncover some gems. Web 2.0 offers the platform, and the foundation for imagination and creativity to create some synergy in real time. Brilliant. And I haven't made a bob off it yet either. Is it commercial? Absolutely. Is it narcissistic? A good majority, perhaps. But is it changing our culture? Most definitely. Long way from dead, just learning to ride the bike, I'd say, and falling off once in awhile.
Don't get me started on "poor old Bob", arguably the best poet of the 20th century; and Scorcese's doco No Direction Home, shows just how far ahead he was then, and still is, sorry. Nobody has ever written a song close to Like A Rolling Stone. It turned the music world inside out. Who has done that recently?
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Wait a second. On page two of this thread, did Russell dis The Band along with Little Feat?
Sigh. That hurts me. :)
I am on the Ian MacDonald side of things Beatle-wise: Revolver manages all that fantastic soundscape stuff that Pepper does, but without quite so much of the self-indulgence.
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