padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
expanding on above

reading you discuss pop context, I begin to understand a couple things - for one your unwillingness to grasp the divorce of guitars from pop song logic (including, yes, the scalar frenzy of shredding)

the initial sonic point of departure for heavy metal - where guitars depart pop structure - is the liberation of the riff from the song, via the power chord, which as mobile fifths can, unlike regular chords, be moved rapidly along the fretboard without incurring harmonic obstruction. that proceeds gradually but ineluctably to a logic of phrasal composition, song as collection of riffs - its mature, fully realized form in the atonal tremolo riffing of death and/or black metal

"Rock + Roll Queen" still exists fully within pop logic, ofc, but the impulse is there - it's a power chord riff, liberation of the song from the chord, the riff from the song

divorced from pop structure, the guitar riff and guitar lead no longer serve a pop function - hence in a context where everything is judged by its relation to pop functionality, they are indeed useless ("pointless intensity")

leaving aside metal - let's not try that again - for something more critically acceptable, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the original hardcore (i.e. punk) to the degree that you're familiar. its departure point is a better later and achieved thru pure speed and/or energy but the result is the same - divorce of the song from the chord and ultimately, pop logic. specifically, it generally follows your usual best-known equals best - Black Flag, Minor Threat, Discharge, etc - but (like metal) not only does best have nothing to do with pop logic, the music's vitality actively decreases exactly to the degree it is recaptured by pop - i.e. hardcore's ethos of "noise not music", it's single defining anthem if any is "Nothing" by Negative Approach, etc

I'm curious to see the irresistible force of your pop logic meet an immovable force beyond pop logic

for reference, the ultimate and perfect distillation of stupid prescient teenage nihilism

and/or literally any song off Why

and consider one or either an entry in the game, why not

luka would just recoil in horror, but I have faith in your natural critic's instinct to be on the ride side of history
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
quite surprised to see you namecheck latter Black Flag btw, Greg Ginn being such an inveterate shredder - the first and foremost shredder in all of hardcore! that dude never meet a fill he couldn't turn some (nominally useless) burst of atonal frenzy, and it's a tendency that only increases with time, until finally collapsing on itself into noodling on all those terrible post-Flag late 80s jam band records on SST.

not that I'm arguing - I'd personally take pre-Rollins over Rollins Flag any day (and Flipper if we're talking sludge punk) but My War is a sick record
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't imagine a lot of West Coast gangsta rap for all it's many sonics interesting him because it deals with the non-NYC sense of American spaciousness. Most non-NYC Rap in the US literally sounds built to roll over hills and stretch, it doesn't have the compact tension and burst feeling of a lot of UK music that comes from claustrophobia.

this is a great observation Crowley. you get this a lot in American poetry also
where the tendency is always to sprawl. Whitman (who i love and is a touchstone for me) being the paradigmatic example, but it gives rise to a lineage that to my fastidious, careful English ear just sounds slobbish, everything from Olson to Kerouac, to Robert Duncan and etc.

taking up space. sprawled all over the couch, doritos crumbs everywhere.
 

luka

Well-known member
luka - I remember you admitting to liking this one so no excuses to shirk my man

take my hand and reach for ))):love:(((, you mystical bastard

yeah this is brilliant, this is me strutting down a new york 'sidewalk'
whipping my hot pink handbag sassily over my shoulder, look behind
to see whos clocking me, wink and a smile, high heels clicking against the paving stones.
 

luka

Well-known member
this is a great observation Crowley. you get this a lot in American poetry also
where the tendency is always to sprawl. Whitman (who i love and is a touchstone for me) being the paradigmatic example, but it gives rise to a lineage that to my fastidious, careful English ear just sounds slobbish, everything from Olson to Kerouac, to Robert Duncan and etc.

taking up space. sprawled all over the couch, doritos crumbs everywhere.

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.
It is geography at bottom, a hell of a wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration.

CHARLES OLSON 'Call Me Ishmael.'
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
luka/barty

as we all know i'm a luka tribute act, but as a general rule people please do remember me and luke are different people. if there's tension or animosity between yourselves and luke, please don't immediately assume that i'm a part of that.

so padraig, i don't have a problem with you. not in the slightest.
 

luka

Well-known member
yes, this is important. despite some early confusion among some of you we are in fact distinct and independent entities.
 

luka

Well-known member
bartys the well adjusted one, popular with the ladies, good hair, outgoing and charming.
im the brooding one, hatching evil plans from the cave of my discontent.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
barty - don't worry, the talking drums themselves are minimal, it's post-disco everything and the kitchen sink club music, just vibe it out

the organ is so evocative of p-funk that i’m immediately getting a wealth of emotions by association; cosmos exploration, playgroundism, but most potently of all there’s a bit in that famous 76 concert they done where it all dies down and the organ part is very similar to this. that bit feels very post orgasmic when you’re starting to come back down to the real world; your breathing’s almost stabilised, the main part of the orgasm’s over but you’re still getting that afterglow, resting on a bed and all the tension in your body is sinking into and being absorbed by the mattress.

drums are very stiff; makes my back very uptight and rigid.

“it takes courage” makes me laugh, the sound of wide-eyed optimistic amateurishness.

the bass comes in and funnily enough my first connotation is sid viscous (mr tea’s musical alias). again that has humourous sense of warm familiarity.

the guitar is sunny. kc and the sunshine band’s give it up springs to mind.

wow that organ with the guitar is the mountain top, sun shining. hands in the air in religious rapture.

the horns have that wide-eyed amateurish feeling again.

as does that drum breakdown. something slightly off- it sounds like people trying.

the guitar over the horn stabs; associations of steve reich’s electric counterpoint so getting this sense of expanse.

the delay comes in on the guitar- wow more and more of it. expanding out again.

guitar and organ again, the colour pallet of gta vice city at night; purples. getting associations of staying at my dad’s flat in surry quays playing it. it’s insular, looking into myself.



that’s all the first 3.30 of it...
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Barti

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before the song’s even started i’m excited. pnd’s made some of my favourite music from the past couple of years, but strangely enough i haven’t done a full excavation of his back catalogue.

first chord- really reminds me of the first chord of nas ‘whose world is this’. sunlit new york streets. the optimism of being a teenager discovering all that east coast 90’s rap. slightly wistful remembering that time.

that very quickly dissipates. a bit like a sci-fi theme. i have the connotation of it not being appealing; a tv show i wouldn’t want to watch. or an educational science documentary that bores you to death watching in school.

the melody is evoking a handful of rnb artists that reminds me of maybe 2007 or something. sense of porousness in my eyes associated with being 12 or so. eyes open to the point of strain. early-teen energy. the world rushing around. a classroom. fatmata looking sexy in her school shirt.

windows 95 computer animation; vapourwave aesthetic.

underwater in blue haze. slightly murky. cartoonish bubbles floating up. i’m static despite a very strong current flowing all around me. there’s nor relation to the surface, it’s all around.

it’s over.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I'd argue Reynolds understands rap as a danceFLOOR related field rather than from a dance-genre perspective

The NYC Rap he's finding in disdain doesn't work in a club outside of certain exceptions, it's car, insular, withdrawing music AND Black American to boot (in opposition to Tricky who's at least British and his hip-hop draws from post-punk and is a lot more of a post-punk like collage than the American Pop Regurgitation). It's a lot like jazz afficianados loving music that strayed from its dancefloor lineage and thereby became a thing that celebrated itself but often became more and more estranged from being Pop minded and thus finding itself displaced.

Also I don't imagine a lot of West Coast gangsta rap for all it's many sonics interesting him because it deals with the non-NYC sense of American spaciousness. Most non-NYC Rap in the US literally sounds built to roll over hills and stretch, it doesn't have the compact tension and burst feeling of a lot of UK music that comes from claustrophobia.
.

well the funny thing is that Reynolds lived in NYC for about 18 years and has lived in LA now for nearly 10. So he has an "in" to the feeling of those urban spaces and how they affect psychology and sonics that most Brit-based fans would not have had, could only access through projection, received imagery, the myths of those cities

still you might say you can take the Brit out of Britain but you can't take the Britishness out, so maybe that still applies

i was actually living in NYC when all that East Coast hardcore rap came out - i don't disdain it, i just find it flatter and more level, sonically, than the stuff that was going on in the UK at that time, whether its direct counterpart (trip hop) or its mutant warped cousin (jungle)

always loved G-Funk and Dre etc from afar, but my feeling for West Coast (and Atlanta) music has really been expanded through being part of a car culture - being in the car regularly and for long stretches at a time, learning to drive finally at an advanced age, having the radio on constantly while in motion - it's a completely different set-and-setting for listening to all music but especially hip hop, it changes your criteria.

when i was living in NYC i hardly ever listened to the radio (and the only time i'd be in a car would be a cab late at night after a club). now car radio is my main source for hearing things other than stuff i'm sent or that I read about. time and again i've heard thing that are completely dismissed or ignored by critics, achieve a life and a currency on hip hop radio that makes a nonsense of the instanta-judgements that reviewers necessarily have to make about albums in this high-turnover environment. tunes creep up on repeated play, through half-attentive listening, through semi-conscious choices like whether to flip to another station or stick with the one you're on.

the ambient-like properties of tunes become a factor - their sessionability if you like. how they fill up the space of the car, how they fit with the right mood for driving. it would slant towards a cruise-control aesthetic rather than at-your-throat energy
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
expanding on above

reading you discuss pop context, I begin to understand a couple things - for one your unwillingness to grasp the divorce of guitars from pop song logic (including, yes, the scalar frenzy of shredding)

divorced from pop structure, the guitar riff and guitar lead no longer serve a pop function - hence in a context where everything is judged by its relation to pop functionality, they are indeed useless ("pointless intensity")

leaving aside metal - let's not try that again - for something more critically acceptable, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the original hardcore (i.e. punk) to the degree that you're familiar. its departure point is a better later and achieved thru pure speed and/or energy but the result is the same - divorce of the song from the chord and ultimately, pop logic. specifically, it generally follows your usual best-known equals best - Black Flag, Minor Threat, Discharge, etc - but (like metal) not only does best have nothing to do with pop logic, the music's vitality actively decreases exactly to the degree it is recaptured by pop - i.e. hardcore's ethos of "noise not music", it's single defining anthem if any is "Nothing" by Negative Approach, etc

I'm curious to see the irresistible force of your pop logic meet an immovable force beyond pop logic

for reference, the ultimate and perfect distillation of stupid prescient teenage nihilism

and/or literally any song off Why

and consider one or either an entry in the game, why not

luka would just recoil in horror, but I have faith in your natural critic's instinct to be on the ride side of history

well i don't know about all that - i mean, some of my favorite groups in the late Eighties would have been Husker Du, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Loop, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr - with Du and MBV in particular there is pop in there, but there's also guitar excess a plenty. Leary and Mascis could do a conventional extended rock solo, SY had their own version of those moments of overload and excess.

One of my favorite Du songs is "Reoccurring Dreams" which is a 16 minute improvised jam of psychedelic noise with near-jazz drumming (compared at the time by critics to Mahavishnu Orchestra, which caused me to scratch my head as I'd never heard the name Mahavishnu before).

i actually bought a lot of hardcore records in the early-mid Eighties and one of them was Negative Approach "Tied Down" the LP. Which "Nothing" is on, but i don't remember that tune. It sounds good - not as good as the title track, the one that really sticks with me - but it's not guitar-expansive or excessive. In the simplicity of the tune, it's not exactly pop, no, but it's not that far from the Ramones.

Discharge I could never really get on with - my younger brother was into them though. It actually sounds better than I remember.

I tend to feel with punk that the existence of a tune is generally not a bad thing - and most of what I would think of as the great punk groups, and the great hardcore groups, all had killer hooks. Buzzcocks, X Ray Spex, Descendents, Angry Samoans, Pistols, Ruts

in that sense, it's perhaps not as hostile to pop logic as you suggest.

Flipper - one of my fave bands of that era. They always had a riff and a groove, though.

The Black Flag that i would love would be either the rollicking "TV Party" or the wallowing "Damaged I". My War goes too far into the dirge zone for me but is certainly a kind of achievement. I like the Greg Ginn mutilated solos aesthetic but Gone was too much of a pure muso proposition for me and the later SST releases get pretty draggy.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
expanding on above

reading you discuss pop context, I begin to understand a couple things - for one your unwillingness to grasp the divorce of guitars from pop song logic (including, yes, the scalar frenzy of shredding)

divorced from pop structure, the guitar riff and guitar lead no longer serve a pop function - hence in a context where everything is judged by its relation to pop functionality, they are indeed useless ("pointless intensity")

expanding on the previous - i wouldn't say that pop-logic is a blanket criteria or perspective for me at all - i mean most of this week i'm been listening to and enjoying all this kind of overloaded splattertronica on labels like PAN, and generally a lot of the time i'm listening to really abstract electronic or musique concrete things from the past, or ambient droning things

but i do like that zone where things enter pop and change it, but also are changed by pop

there's pop potential in things like disco, dance music in general, hip hop - and often the best things come when that reaches fruition - but that in turn changes what pop can be, expands it

in terms of rock specifically, i do have an interest in what i call 'radio rock' - basically pop that rocks, rock that pops

and that's glam, essentially - it's all the power and rhythmic force and heat of rock compressed into a structure and also artfully arranged and produced so that it's like a little drama staged on the radio

the difference between the Mott of "Rock and Roll Queen" and the Mott of "Dudes" and "All the Way from Memphis" is that they slough off all that Island Records circa 1970 jamming looseness, that warm muddy as-if-live sound, and they acquire clarity and structure and focus.

As well as The Sweet and so forth, that radio rock lineage would include Cheap Trick, Steve Miller Band, but also the hits by Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, Boston, ZZ Top, Van Halen... later on "Rock Me Like A Hurricane", "Pour Some Sugar On Me", "Crazy Train"

of necessity, it's not heavy music in the main, and guitar excess is kept on a leash, but it all rocks
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
alright

opening is very "Foxy Lady" - lead guitar flares for just a second - also about as straightforward a groove as I can recall hearing Moon play

decent riff - rock opera era Who are too multitudinous to ever just take a riff and hammer it, but obviously they can do a fine momentary approximation when they want to

Townshend obv a very important early power chord proponent but he never really followed its logic further - became just one tool of many in his box

in rock's meta-context - it's the turn of the 70s, transition point in heavy guitars from the heavy psych era to hard rock proper as embodied in the Zep-Sabb axis

1:05 now into a bit of true proto-hard rock territory - a buildup some outfit like Buffalo or Dust might employ before dropping into full crunch, but instead...

1:28 ringing open chords over Entwistle

an interesting truism about The Who is the inversion of traditional guitar and bass roles, Entwistle as de facto lead insomuch as they have one. Townshend as a player tends to blur rhythm and lead - that knack of never playing rhythm in quite the same way, incorporating tons of little tricks - partial or modified chords, the odd dissonant note - in general the sense of taking a normal thing and changing its angle not enough to make it weird but just enough to confound your expectations for a moment, a kind of double consciousness.

you can very much hear the furthering of that blurred rhythm/lead, changing angles approach in people like Bob Mould

1:50-ish Moon finally beginning to cut loose - those immediately identifiable cascading tom roll fills

I like how the back half is mostly just a couple chords and Entwistle steady drone as a platform for Moon to work it out - a strong part of his magic the ability to keep perfect time without seeming to play an actual beat, just endless overlapping fills - that sense of phantom octopus limbs that Jaki Liebezeit could also evoke

in general the Who fall into the category things I respect but have never really gotten into aside from the odd thing here and they here

like I'll hear a bit from one of them that I like and just as you notice it they're already onto something else - see above comment on never locking into a riff or groove

I also respect their ability to have 3 guys doing basically separate things, and I guess there is an appeal in that sense of restrained entropy, maintaining a cohesive whole that seems to be constantly pulling itself apart in multiple directions, respect the sheer technical/compositional ability - but that the same time it's like, just play the fucking song, guys

unsurprisingly my favorite Who song is the very late, post-Moon "Eminence Front" where they embrace 80s Queen-style arena funk rock and work out a solid groove
 
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