RICHARD WHITE LEGAL TEAM
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Thursday, July 28 2005 14:32
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As I'm sure you're aware, Beatles songs were pretty heavily calculated, too, at least in the early days ("But Paul, pop songs don't last more than two minutes!"). Modern pop songs are by and large terrible because all pop songs are by and large terrible, but most of the classics have been filtered already. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, July 28 2005 18:00
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90% of everything is crap, but every year filters out more of the crap of yesteryear so that we end up with a distilled 9% non-crap, 1% crap that somehow survives from nostalgia or some other inexplicable human foible, and 1% of the valuable non-crap slips through the cracks? I'll propose that as the limit of content of most fields as time approaches infinity. —Alorael, who will now have to get to work figuring out the specific equation that governs the approach. There also has to be a correction for content lost over time, which is both crap-dependent (memorable works are less likely to vanish) and crap-independent (an unexpected fire destroys the only remaining copy of Insignificant Ted's single notable work). Truly difficult but culturally significant mathematics that would perhaps best be left to the qualified. Zeviz? Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Nuke and Pave
Member # 24
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written Thursday, July 28 2005 19:30
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Herein lieth the wisdom thou seeketh: % good stuff left = 10% * (1 / (t/100) ^ (1 - pi^2) / e^(-4.3) * (duration of the next lunar eclipse) / (duration of the last solar eclipse) * (total brain mass of musicians who produced at least 1 non-junk piece) / (total brain mass of musicians whose primary output is junk)) * cosmological constant % junk left = 90% * (1 / (t/(average life exectancy of a music fan)) * ((the number of music critics alive) / (the number of music critics killed by rabid fans)) * (combined sales of albums on top 10 list) / (combined sales of non-junk albums) * (flamability of paper)) * cosmological constant PS More seriously, survival rates for junk are probably much higher than you say, because there is a lot more of it produced and after a certain point people start keeping everything for "historic value". Survival rates for non-junk are probably much lower than you say, because a lot of things disappear with time regardless of quality. [ Thursday, July 28, 2005 19:37: Message edited by: Zeviz ] -------------------- Be careful with a word, as you would with a sword, For it too has the power to kill. However well placed word, unlike a well placed sword, Can also have the power to heal. Posts: 2649 | Registered: Wednesday, October 3 2001 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, July 28 2005 20:27
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(There is something wrong with this thread. It's become semi-serious. It's about Richard White and it's in RWG! Someone do something!) I should perhaps distinguish between cultural survival and archival survival. As a case in point: the music of Thomas Tallis, while not exactly common today, is still played. You can buy CDs with his music without too much effort or energy. The music of countless of Tallis' contemporaries can be found only in the various universities and conservatories of Europe. Nobody plays it, nobody thinks about it, and even the aficionados of 16th century music probably have to look them up to remember who they were. Half a millenium filters garbage out of culture nicely. Mind you, Tallis himself isn't topping any charts. Almost 500 years will leave everyone in a little bit of a cultural dusty corner. Still, find a good classical station and you'll hear Tallis every so often. Go forward less than two hundred years and you reach Vivaldi, who is a big man in the classical world. Again, the schlock is, for the most part, gone, certain Bach offspring and critical opinions thereof notwithstanding. Compare this with music written only this century and it's no wonder we're still suffering through the occasional pang of bubblegum. Never fear, the worst will be gone. We won't be alive to appreciate it, but at least our grandchildren and great grandchildren will be free of the musical scourges of our era. I'm sure this is equally true of literature, although the ivory tower experts conceive the strangest passions for unremarkable works, and in science it may be even more prevalent. Aristotle's works have survived in some part for over two thousand years. —Alorael, who will point out that while everything is mass produced and massively distributed today, even two hunded years ago the destruction of a single library, for example, could mean permanently destroyed knowledge and records. Go back even farther and there are only a handful of copies of anything written, so it's no wonder that they vanished so easily. Popularity at least ensured more copies, which in a sort of physical Darwinism leads to increased survival. Now that an eBook or mp3 can be sent to everyone with a computer, the chance of obliterating anything is very low. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 29 2005 04:19
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Ivory tower experts have to read this stuff every day for a living, so they get jaded beyond what people who read for leisure could imagine. Plus, even if not all the good stuff has been done, a dismayingly large proportion of the good stuff already has dozens of dissertations written on it. So to get your degree, you now have to write a book on the sonnet cycles of obscure mediocrities. After five years of them, you're half-insane and totally bitter, but if you've made it that far then you've also got yourself half convinced there was something to them after all. And so it goes. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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By Committee
Member # 4233
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written Friday, July 29 2005 05:02
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For a more contemporary example, consider just how much of the music of Rod Stewart gets played every day. Posts: 2242 | Registered: Saturday, April 10 2004 07:00 |
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Lack of Vision
Member # 2717
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written Friday, July 29 2005 08:38
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quote:Rod Stewart, it was reported in the Gulf News, just bought a villa on the Palm Islands in Dubai. Maybe he'll be neighbor of Posh Spice and David Beckham? I'd imagine this will cause a rather steep drop in property prices. Z -------------------- Pan Lever: Seventeen apple roving mirror moiety. Of turned quorum jaggedly the. Blue? Posts: 186 | Registered: Thursday, February 27 2003 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Friday, July 29 2005 13:02
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To take this sideways a bit, I'm thinking of starting up a new recording company. Do you think the Necronomicon on tape would sell well? How about encrypting it backwards in really bad pop songs? —Alorael, who is thinking about calling his new company something impossible to pronounce with human anatomy that is best approximated with hawking, spitting, and yipping like a rabid N/F plugged into a defibrillator Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Master
Member # 4614
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written Friday, July 29 2005 16:06
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The Skribaneedanefersniretping Sniping Company. -------------------- -ben4808 Posts: 3360 | Registered: Friday, June 25 2004 07:00 |
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Mongolian Barbeque
Member # 1528
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written Friday, July 29 2005 16:11
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quote:Well, I'd certainly buy it. Or publish it. Or both. I'm sure it would sound a lot better than most of the pop junk out there. And certainly less harmful for the young people of today—despite the instantaneous manifestations, unspeakable deaths, and so on. It would certainly fire their imaginations a lot more too. And Lord knows their imaginations need some kind of stimulation! quote:Try making it also something that can't be written down in any known writing system. That should make things even more interesting. The record publishing company with The Name Which Cannot Be Spoken, The Name That Cannot Be Written. :eek: Makes it sound very sinister indeed! All that's left is The Name Which Cannot Be Heard and The Name That Cannot Be Understood Even If You Could Hear It. That's quite a lot of names there... Must be really long! The Name That, Even If It Could Be Written, Is So Long That It Would Not Fit On Your Average Record Label. Posts: 907 | Registered: Monday, July 15 2002 07:00 |
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E Equals MC What!!!!
Member # 5491
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written Friday, July 29 2005 21:36
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quote:Oh, the good ol' "Money destroys art" argument. :P A record contract is a business deal, nothing more, nothing less. It's not an artistic grant. I doubt we'll disagree here. The record companies just want to make money. So they have people to write the songs, produce the records, play the instruments, tune the vocals, etc. Quite often in mainstream pop, the 'artist' is little more than a marketing tool - but hey, they have specialists for everything else. Trever Horn is a brilliant music-maker. Most people don't have a clue who he is (though they definitely know his work). While he might be the creative force behind a killer track, it makes the record company more money to give it to a pair of Russian lesbians. And hey, Horn probably prefers not being in the gossip mags and having to tour all the time. Most listeners don't care - the end product sounds good. I put myself firmly in this category. Britney is a talentless skank, sure. But someone wrote a darn catchy song called Toxic. 'Course, if you're the sort of person who likes the name on the record to correspond with the creative force behind the project, you do get left out in the cold a bit. There's the occasional talented singer/songwriter, but by and large you're better off looking away from the mainstream - the ones who refuse to 'sell out' don't have record deals, you see. Or to rock, where you tend to have bands rather than just singers. What was my point again? Oh yeah, in my opinion mainstream pop (and by this I'm referring to the music itself) is by and large unharmed or possibly even helped by the massive amounts of money that are involved. And even if you disagree, your beef is with MAINSTREAM pop, not MODERN pop. The modern music industry isn't massively corporate - just the bits you see on MTV are. There are loads of people making a living making the music they want to make rather than the music commercial radio wants to play. Independent artists still top the charts from time to time. -------------------- SupaNik: Aran, you're not big enough to threaten Ash. Dammit, even JV had to think twice. Posts: 1861 | Registered: Friday, February 11 2005 08:00 |
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Guardian
Member # 3521
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 19:20
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quote:Well, sure, I never attempted to argue that the Beatles or any other band I enjoy was entirely non-commercial. There's absolutely nothing wrong with artists attempting to make commercial, accessible music. The trouble comes when an artist becomes so slavishly devoted to pleasing the masses and increasing his bottom line that he refuses to allow for the slightest bit of spontaneity or experimentation in his music. The Beatles might have necessarily started out with a calculated formula, but what counts is that their focus was always on advancement, on (admittedly, carefully regulated) experimentation. Hell, do you ever see any of these modern hit machines include 9-minute orgies of seemingly random noisemaking on their albums? Didn't think so. You're quite right that loads of horrible music was produced in the sixties and seventies. However, you can't deny that both decades were chock full of enduring classics as well. I just can't seem to hunt up anything approaching that caliber from the last twenty-five years. And believe me, I've been looking. Ash, I understand the realities of the music business, and I'm really not as much of an artistic snob as you seem to believe. If I truly enjoyed Britney's music (as you seem to), I wouldn't give a damn about who wrote it and what-not. But the fact is, I can't stand the stuff. The melodies are fine, yes, but everything about the performances and production is over-calculated and over-professionalized. It's so slick and devoid of sincerity that it makes me downright nauseous. You're right, modern pop music is more than just Britney and the boy band brigade. But I don't really find much to like in the "indie" or "alternative" genres, either. Most of these acts are derivative, even imitative, to a degree that they're absolutely superfluous to anyone with broad exposure to sixties and seventies pop/rock. As for Trevor Horn, I am familiar with the name. He was a member of that lightweight pop duo the Buggles, wasn't he? Later, he joined the washed-out prog-rock group Yes and recorded an offensively lousy album or two with them. He's slavishly corporate and thoroughly uninteresting as far as I'm concerned. -------------------- Stughalf "Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed."- The Bhagavad Gita. Posts: 1798 | Registered: Sunday, October 5 2003 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 19:29
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Hmm. Stughalf, something you said reminded me a bit of something I've experienced: nothing ever made outside the late 60's sounds like electric organ-driven acid rock of the sort that the Doors and several other less famous bands (Iron Butterfly, Arthur Brown, etc.) created. I mean, nothing. The genre appears to have simply gone out existence. Now, I really like that music, even Arthur Brown, who is so late-sixties that he sounds absurd to most people. But no one makes that music that anymore, so I have to keep digging up late-sixties songs that are increasingly obscure. I think some genres and styles just go away. Some resurface at intervals in different forms (ska, swing, others), and some just die (disco, acid rock). If your favorite genre is one that died, that era is going to sound better than any other. I'm not sure if this actually relates to anything that you said, but I think it's interesting and maybe someone else does too. :P -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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E Equals MC What!!!!
Member # 5491
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 23:56
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quote:Well, they aren't exactly pop, but Linkin Park are fairly experimental. quote:Perhaps it's just an issue of taste? While Johnny O'Keefe and Elvis certainly aren't my thing, and Mozart even less so, I wouldn't say they were bad musicians. Different eras, different sounds, different preferences. Still, I find it hard to beilieve you can't find one that does it for you. quote:Ah, I understand you a bit better now. I like a slick production job, personally (and by extension, electronic music). The sheer plastic-ness of many of the performers does bug me as well, though (but apparently not to the same extent). I could try suggesting a couple of lesser-known artists if you wanted. Mind, I'd probably have less success than you did trying to get me onto the Beatles. :P quote:Personally, I think Video Killed The Radio Star is still a classic, but that's beside the point. I was referring to his achievements as a producer (and to a lesser extent, songwriter) for other artists. He's done tracks like Can't Fight The Moonlight, All The Things She Said, Kiss From A Rose, Belfast Child, and tons of other great songs that you may or may not have liked, but loads of other people loved. Heck, even Paul McCartney has used him. Are you going to argue with him? ;) quote:Why does no one make music like Bach anymore? :( [ Saturday, July 30, 2005 23:58: Message edited by: Ash Lael ] -------------------- SupaNik: Aran, you're not big enough to threaten Ash. Dammit, even JV had to think twice. Posts: 1861 | Registered: Friday, February 11 2005 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 31 2005 03:50
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quote:Ever heard Glenn Gould's "So you want to write a fugue"? It's a hilarious but serious sung fugue about writing fugues. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Guardian
Member # 3521
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written Sunday, July 31 2005 13:57
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The Emerson, Lake & Palmer album Trilogy includes a fugue, of sorts. Kel is right about musical styles phasing in and out. There's a decidedly retro influence on contemporary indie music, although much of it is inspired by the work of singer/songwriters like Cat Stevens and Nick Drake, who are decent but a bit too mellow for my tastes. I long achingly for a return of the heady "San Francisco sound" or the glorious, entirely idiosyncratic sounds of early Traffic or King Crimson, but none of it's to be found nowadays. :( Ash, perhaps the reason I haven't managed to find what I've been looking for is just a matter of taste. It's also possible that I haven't been looking in the right places. I would certainly welcome any recommendations you might have. Horn might be a good producer; I haven't listened to enough of his work to make a judgement on his skill. However, I could care less that Macca used him; his solo work was superb during the seventies, but it's been decidedly spotty since. -------------------- Stughalf "Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed."- The Bhagavad Gita. Posts: 1798 | Registered: Sunday, October 5 2003 07:00 |
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Warrior
Member # 6002
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written Monday, August 1 2005 09:36
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ANd you can guarentee the all-knowing RWG cult grabs that extra 10% of crap (twice for sureness, no less), ending up with a 110% knowledge of crap. Anyone that is normal is crappy, in their eyes of course. Not to bypass the unforseeable crap values of dung Beatles. Crap. [ Monday, August 01, 2005 09:37: Message edited by: Verelor ] Posts: 131 | Registered: Wednesday, June 22 2005 07:00 |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 3368
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written Wednesday, August 3 2005 19:39
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Nick Drake creates the only music that can make one physically ill. -------------------- "Like most of life's problems, this one can be solved with bending" Posts: 287 | Registered: Tuesday, August 19 2003 07:00 |
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E Equals MC What!!!!
Member # 5491
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written Wednesday, August 3 2005 20:16
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Sorry I haven't gotten around to this in a bit. Stug, could you give me a few pointers on what sort of thing you're looking for? Also, since my particular field of expertise is in Christian music, would it bother you if I recommended something from within that genre? Note: To clear up a few misconceptions you might have, while there's a subgenre of worship music which is more or less endless variations on "Praise God, praise God, praise God," most Christian music is more along the lines of, say, U2. There's plenty of stuff that isn't directly religious, though it's consistent with Christianity, such as Michael W Smith's "We Can't Wait Any Longer" which is about third world poverty. -------------------- SupaNik: Aran, you're not big enough to threaten Ash. Dammit, even JV had to think twice. Posts: 1861 | Registered: Friday, February 11 2005 08:00 |
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Guardian
Member # 3521
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written Friday, August 5 2005 20:07
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I have no opposition to Christian music, as long as it's solid musically. I pride myself on being very tolerant, and overtly Christian lyrics wouldn't bother me at all. I don't tend to pay much attention to lyrics anyway. In terms of my musical preferences, practically everything I like would be considered mellow by your standards. Fast songs are okay, but I do prefer the mid-tempo or slower stuff. I also have a particular liking for epic/anthemic songs as well as mood pieces. Psychedelic elements are a plus in general, and a touch of jazz, blues, or classical can be nice as well. Quality musicianship is important, and a decent vocalist is a must. Pretty much anything featuring typical '80s production values is out. In terms of genres, I won't listen to anything that would be classified as heavy metal, hard rock, emo, punk, hip-hop, rap, or bubblegum pop according to today's standards. I'll give any other genre at least a chance. [ Friday, August 05, 2005 20:09: Message edited by: Stugri-La ] -------------------- Stughalf "Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed."- The Bhagavad Gita. Posts: 1798 | Registered: Sunday, October 5 2003 07:00 |
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E Equals MC What!!!!
Member # 5491
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written Friday, August 5 2005 20:48
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Ta. I think you might be interested in Greg Sczebel. He's a young Canadian chap (20, I think) with a bit of a Jazz/Funk sound. I haven't got full songs available, but I do have some shorter clips: Here To Stay - John Lennon Songwriting Competition Grand Prize Winner In The Pocket - Shai Awards Song of the Year Lights Are Coming On Though they probably aren't really what you're looking for, I can't resist the chance to give a plug to Switchfoot. They're one of my favourite groups, and while they do have some really rowdy songs, most of their stuff is more mellow surf-rock. They also have a few actual ballads, though I don't tend to like those songs so much - which may say more about me than anything. :P More Than Fine This Is Your Life Redemption Another of my favourites, Jars of Clay. While I normally prefer the heavy stuff, these guys are the exception to the rule. Unforgetful You I Need You Sunny Days Also, Chris Rice: The Other Side of the Radio - If you don't like this song, there has to be something wrong with you. :P Brooke Fraser seems like an ideal choice (especially "Arithmetic"), but I'm struggling to find her stuff online. New Zealand Spiderwebbers will probably know the name, but she hasn't caught on in Aus or (presumably) the US yet. My searching revealed that she performed in Canberra a few weeks back and I didn't even know. :( See how you go with those. [ Saturday, August 06, 2005 17:57: Message edited by: Ash Lael ] -------------------- SupaNik: Aran, you're not big enough to threaten Ash. Dammit, even JV had to think twice. Posts: 1861 | Registered: Friday, February 11 2005 08:00 |
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