i get the point that you're attacking an unfair caricature, but i spent a while working out of a call centre in ottawa, canada that took a lot of in calls from the southern states and i heard a lot of people with really exaggerated accents - so exaggerated that i could legitimately barely understand them. it wasn't because of a bad connection or static or whatever, it was because we were simply speaking different languages. words i'd never heard before, verb usages that didn't make any sense to me - the whole thing.

ironically, the idea at the time was that canadians were ideal call center employees for the american market because we were cheaper (due to our dollar being around $0.60 usd at the time, which has since changed drastically) and we spoke english that americans could understand - unlike asians or latin americans.

but, i have to be honest - i would personally have a much easier time with an asian accent than i would with a deep south one because, while asian accents might be broken, they're not a structurally different language. the feeling was sometimes mutual - not just "aboot. hahaha.", but "i don't understand what you said because your grammar is foreign to me".

it really surprised the hell out of me, actually. i think i learned that we're not that far from "deep south american" being a different language than "english".

you, on the other hand, just speak a bit slower than i do.

i'm not sure what's going on outside. when i was out there, it sounded like a race track around the corner. air show? several lawn mowers? don't know. but, sitting inside, the waveforms of the different motors are expanding and overlapping with each other and harmonizing, and it sounds like an ambient noise festival.

maybe i just wish i was at an ambient noise festival.

it's nice out.

hurry up, customs.

deathtokoalas
again: i love that vice is doing this, because it provides some hard evidence to back up the reports coming out of the region and this just isn't coming from elsewhere in the western media. yet, i feel this video requires some context. the basic explanation is that what you're seeing here is turkish-backed militias fighting with saudi-backed militias for control over a post-assad syria. but, let me explain further.

whatever the causes of the initial uprising, the situation was taken advantage of by outside forces looking to advance their geostrategic interests, as also occurred in libya and, at a higher level, in egypt. this led to an influx of saudi-backed fighters looking to expand saudi influence in the region. something that's very interesting is that, before all of this happened, assad was actually on the path to relinquish power to a civilian government. i believe that the overriding interest of the saudi monarchy is to prevent this transfer of power, and install a saudi-style theocratic government instead.

unlike his father, the assad that is in power now did not seize control through a military coup. he inherited power in a way that is more or less monarchistic. but, something that the western media has completely ignored is the reality that he hasn't ever seemed to actually be interested in ruling. if a prince is interested in ruling, does he move to britain to study optometry? how does that help him in learning how to rule a nation? rather, it's been clear for years that the younger assad is more or less an empty figurehead in a state that is run by a junta of military generals, and that he basically wants to step down and focus on his life outside of government. western media rarely reflects anything approximating truth, but it's treatment of assad the individual (rather than the regime that uses him as a figurehead) is a really extreme example of outlandish messaging.

if you've been following syrian politics behind the mess, what you actually see is a state this is trying to democratize by modifying it's constitution to allow for strengthened democratic institutions. one could suggest they're following the "turkish model" in a slow democratization that could take many years. but, ignoring hillary clinton's scoffing reaction, that seemed to be the path the syrian state was heading down.

now, if you think it through, elections in syria might not be what the west really wants. for example, it could allow hezbollah into power, or it could lead to a strongly anti-zionist government. certainly, it would lead to instability. the west always prefers a strong dictatorship that it understands over the uncertainty of popular opinion. so, it initially backed the saudis in their attempt to take control of the region before a democracy could be established.

however, over time it became clear that such a theocratic state would not have popular support in syria, which has been a secular (if not particularly free) society for many decades now. when given the opportunity to support assad or support the saudi rebels, the syrian people chose to support assad. so, the entire thing backfired.

realizing this, a coalition of american allies that includes turkey and qatar have broken with the saudis. there has been a wide realization that the tactics the saudis want to use will not be successful in taking stable control of syria, but will merely lead to decades of war. in order for western interests to take control of syria with popular backing, they need to present themselves as a more moderate force.

so, this is what you're seeing, here: it's all about putting a softer image on the rebels, to make them seem more moderate, in order to generate support for them. but, the interests driving the conflict have not at all diverged.

there's potential for a wider conflict developing amongst nato-aligned nations, which threatens to severely damage american influence over the region. the americans have long been following a british-inherited policy of divide and conquer, where they simultaneously build up each of the major players in the region (turkey, egypt, israel, saudis, iran) and play them off against each other. this asserts their own hegemony while eliminating any local hegemony. should one country threaten to become too powerful (as the saudis have threatened to recently), you can expect the americans to throw their weight behind their competitor (which would be iran). but, the most important strategic ally always has been and remains turkey.

so, the key thing to understand is that the saudis are not only advancing western interests, they also have their own interests, which also includes toppling the shia ("heretic") government in iraq. isis is operating over a wide swath of territory. the boundary between iraq and syria does not truly exist at the moment. and, this is both the cause and the effect of obama's attempt to soften his approach towards the heretics in tehran, too.

it's not widely understood in the west that there remains a great deal of animosity between turks and arabs over control of the levant, where arabs are still bitter over a millenium of turkish imperialism and the turks remain leery about allowing saudi-backed fundamentalists to set up bases too close to their borders.

so, while the general conflict between nato and russia is driving the big picture, and the saudi-iran conflict is driving the civil war, what is driving the actual fighting on the ground is a turkish-arab conflict over the post-assad space.

and, we should hope that doesn't get out of hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cb3OURdl3g

and i just want to add that the purpose of this message control is to facilitate an upcoming nato bombing campaign, which is now possible due to the russians being distracted in ukraine.

Bman Chu
You make some pretty outrageous, sweeping claims about the west without providing a shred of evidence in support. The west is not one single entity united in conspiracy against the middle east and russia. The west has many different faces and desires as well as many free and informed voices.

deathtokoalas
kinda, but not really. if i was unclear, i was really referring to the nato alliance, which is (excluding minor squabbles) under the unitary command of the united states. 

SilverRadiant
oh boy that was the longest explaination I've evr seen :O

deathtokoalas
are books really that far out of the public consciousness at this point?

that wouldn't meet the length requirements of most undergraduate essays, and some high school essays.

===

Doğan Kutbay
So ISIS is Russian backed up?

The Global Excursion
Chechen

Höri
No. The Assad gov is Russian backed. ISIS are a band off opportunistic islamist brigands trying to take advantage and accumulate wealth amid the chaos.

The Russian speakers are the remnants of the Chechen rebels, that fought and lost against Russia and now looking for a new home.

Adam Nohcho
Iranian

deathtokoalas
as is stated in the video, isis is saudi-backed. the russian speaking aspect of this is curious, but if it's true they would likely be chechens.

in the larger scheme of things, isis and russia are not on the same side of the conflict. 

Che DESIGNER
Lost against russians? You are talking bullshit here. This is not a game it is a war, no one wins when people die. Don't talk about the things that you know nothing about.

James seeker
No Russia supports Assad

deathtokoalas
that's a half-truth. the russians are supporting the existing government, but support a peaceful transition of power and have been putting pressure on assad to put the process of that transition in motion (and, in truth, he has been). what the russians really support is a russian geo-strategic presence in syria. they're not tied to any specific incarnation of that.

TheGiantKiller8
The 'existing' government is a minoritarian mafia regime that was installed by the French COlonial powers today allied with Russia ie BASHAR. These skum bags were going to be overthrown inevitably like all the British/French./Russian puppets in the region from sadam, Mubarak, ghadhafi and so on.

No matter how much people hate the rebels they are the popular movement in region

deathtokoalas
the baath party wasn't put in place by the french, the whole "arab socialism" thing was mostly an indigenous movement, but received a lot of support from the soviets. syria spent most of the cold war aligned with the soviets, no different than eastern europe really, which is what this is really all about - cleaning up the post-soviet satellite states (libya and syria) and aligning them with nato. the russians, of course, have other ideas.

there's no evidence that the rebels, whether the "moderate" ones under the former fsa or the saudi-backed loonies, represent anybody except their handlers. syria had some problems with freedom of expression, but people were hardly starving on the streets. despite the propaganda, revolutions are rarely about political rights and usually about basic economics. the circumstances for a mass uprising in syria simply weren't in place. there wasn't one. at best, it was a fringe movement of the usual leftists, and at worst it was essentially a foreign invasion.

Amine
Actually there is a point of view that says that they are a creation of the Iranian secret service to create disorder in the region  

deathtokoalas
that's hilarious.

because iran wants to create disorder.

the propaganda is thick though, people will believe that.

the evidence isn't debatable. that isis is a saudi front carrying out american geostrategic aims is a factual statement.

ahahahahahaha....

i'm a fan of this.

ugh. this new "facebook for iphone" shit is just horrific. it was bad enough losing 50% of the page to ads, now we just lost another 25% to a sneaky ploy by facebook to get pages to prominently display likes as ads along the sides.

i think this is sort of facebook admitting that people don't actually click on likes, meaning the medium really isn't useful to advertisers, meaning their entire reason to exist is up in the air. the increasingly aggressive nature of facebook advertising is a function of the inefficacy of advertising on social media. but, facebook seems to be run by legitimate Corporate Idiots, and it's consequently likely to get worse. i do predict that the ads are going to be what turns facebook into a ghost site in the end. if it's not already halfway there.

i like the rss capabilities. i repeat that it was the rss, not the people, that dragged me in - and late at that, not until 2010. and, so long as "content generators" (which in my case mostly means show promoters in the detroit/windsor area) continue to use facebook, i'll continue to use it as well. the corollary of that is that so long as people go looking for these sorts of sites, i feel i should maintain it.

but, cutting me down to 25% of the screen for my actual content is too much. to me, that makes the site unusable. i'm going to be converting this page (and the rest of my facebook pages, too) into an rss dump over the next few weeks, by emulating the timeline page at my appspot site.

there's another benefit to getting off these scripted sites, which is that they badly waste hardware resources. i shouldn't need 500 mb of ram to fully load this page back to 1981. it can be easily reproduced with an html table and an iframe in a way that could be loaded easily on a 386.

i'm going to leave the rss dump because people are going to keep checking the site for these sorts of things for the near future, but also because facebook could still turn things around. but, for right now, the future of facebook seems to be a dead zone of advertising scripts, where corporate servers communicate to each other across a barren landscape.

don't look for a replacement, either. the era of a centralized internet was thankfully short lived. the initial nature of the internet as decentralized and targeted to specific interests seems to be reasserting itself. that's something to be excited about.

for me, as a musician, that means the replacement ought to be something like spotify. it's not clear yet which network is going to win out. but note that there's a paywall there, which means i'm not interested. soundcloud is awful. so, i'd like to see bandcamp increase it's networking aspect. however it stabilizes, that's where the future is. and, likewise, expect a gamer network and a fashion network and a ...

the model to look towards is something like youtube, which will probably not be supplanted as the video networking site (unless it fucks up like facebook has). in the end, i think google did get it right, but not the way it meant to.

so, i'm not signing off, but i'm mutating outwards; i'm realizing this host is dead, discarding the exoskeleton and growing into a new one.

my song of the next two weeks might initially come off as a young teenager emulating a nirvana deconstruction, but it's actually closer to pearl jam's punk rock underbelly. the best pearl jam tracks were always the punk tracks, and this record is the better of the early ones when it comes to that. looking back, i point to yield as their high point, but it wasn't out yet in 1996.

(relevant tracks: my very first impression specifically, but the lead guitar style in the early demos is drawn partially from mccready as a minor but noticeable influence (as well as some of mccready's influences, most obviously hendrix, and maybe a touch of page, although i was never much of a zeppelin fan) and this continues moving forwards quite a ways. there's also the flowing bass style, that i'll actually draw a primary influence from jim creeggan (who?) in relation to but that drew me to ament by similarity and is noticeable in the early demos and for years afterwards.)

i just want to get the point across, so the word gets out.

i need to reiterate that i post a lot at rt, al jazeera and other global intersections. that's how i'm getting traffic from across the world.

unfortunately, the google algorithms are interpreting that as bought views, and while, again, i'll state that buying views wouldn't get me anything besides a lot of confused sheep, it's obvious that i'm not buying 4 views from south korea or whatever else.

what's setting the trigger off is the ratio. less than half of my views over the year are from the united states (although us + uk + can make up a bit more than half). according to google's filters, that's impossible without buying views.

and i claim that's blatantly racist.

what's going to happen over time is that google is going to slowly delete most of these views - most zealously the ones from southeast asia, russia, the middle east and africa.

what has to happen is that youtube needs to change how it tries to catch bought views, because what it's doing right now is just erasing 80% of the planet from it's watch stats.

more to the point, i guess, is that i'm *not* advertising to an american-centric audience, but largely to one outside the united states. my views would not be popular in that country.

....and, i mean, i'm not even from the united states. it's sort of ridiculous to expect me to get mostly american traffic when i neither live there nor am interested in their culture, but rather rant a whole lot about how evil they are.

google is notoriously difficult to contact, but they do react to negative information when they hear it, so talk amongst yourselves. it'll get back to them.

the reality is that a canadian news analyst commenting heavily over global news sources should expect to generate a global audience, and google has their head in their ass about it if their algorithm interprets that as fraudulent due to the views being less than 50% american.

i need to stop thinking about it, though. it really doesn't matter. it's just pissing me off on the principle of it.

deathokoalas
o'reilly is legitimately standing at the end of a long line of human thought, but it doesn't necessarily have to do with religion. the crux of what o'reilly is saying is that people won't behave properly unless they have a fear of consequence. because o'reilly also wants small government, he pushes it off to a higher power to enforce the threat of consequence. but, there's a lot of problems with the whole approach.

to begin with, just because bill wants the bad guys to believe they're going to have to deal with god doesn't mean they're going to. because religion is so counter-intuitive, in order for it to really work as a disincentive it needs to be enforced from the top - by government, maybe, as was done by various christian churches in the past and is still enforced in islamic theocracies, or maybe by media, as is done more viably in the united states. so, it's just a hobbesian argument, in the end - and nothing to do with religion, itself.

but, what's worse is that a really moral person doesn't require the consequence. if you're only behaving because of the threat of consequence, you're not truly moral. his ends really don't follow from his strategy.

dawkins seems to generally realize that he's often debating with social engineers, rather than legitimately religious people. whatever sort of self-constraints he imposes on himself tend to neutralize his arguments. i wish he'd engage his opponents on the level they truly exist on, rather than the level they pretend they exist on.

it's easily googleable, but the mixtape from 4-tet is a dubious reference; it was originally released on the anti ep, on warp records, by the band itself - and way back in 1994, before most of you were even born.

you know, something else that happened right before my back went up in flames was that i switched from folgers to maxwell house. and i drink around a pot of extremely strong coffee a day, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. pot two is coming up, we'll have to see how that works out...

but, what i wanted to post was this:

<phil hartman>

MAXWELL HOUSE! COFFEE SO STRONG, IT WILL MAKE YOUR NECK HURT SO BADLY, THAT YOU'LL BE COMPLETELY CONVINCED YOU HAVE M.S.

</phil hartman>

also, why isn't there a "bill clinton killed phil hartman" conspiracy theory?

weird that i can hear this tonight but couldn't hear it last night or the night before. it's richie hawtin, specifically. he'll be on another hour.

at first, i thought it was a house party, so i took a walk around the neighbourhood planning to crash it. yeah, i'll do that. well, listen, if you're going to turn the music up loud enough that i can hear it in my apartment, i'll interpret that as an invite; if i'm listening to your music anyways, i'd like to come in and dance, thank you.

but, as i started walking around, i started realizing it was coming from a rather large distance away because i could hear cheering in the background. it was the cheering that dissuaded me; must be a hefty cover. the bass seemed rather close, though. i guess it was roaring in between the houses...

i also realized that the dj actually wasn't very interesting, and it wasn't worth stumbling around trying to find.

i assumed it was probably the casino in downtown windsor, not across the river in detroit. that is really ridiculously loud....

http://www.movement.us/

what i'd say about the video is that it's really, unbearably cheesy - and perhaps a little bit trivializing.

...and that producing controversial videos is a time-tested way to distract from the fact that your music is regurgitated, unoriginal garbage.

that being said, i'll give them a C for effort. i'd prefer to see this message articulated than it's opposite one.

lol.

does friedman know what "inelastic demand" means?

these are the existing stats on my top video. i've pointed out repeatedly that buying views would not help me, due to the fact that i'm an abstract artist and have no commercial potential or potential to herd a flock. but these stats make it clear they aren't bought. you'd think it would make more sense to run it against poisson or something (perhaps some research is necessary to get the right distribution, poisson strikes me as useful in finding the rare event of a full play) to determine if the data fits a reasonable shape, rather than to just be all racist about it.

it's that one algerian hit i want, not the hundreds of dumb americans that get confused after 0:07. i'd rather they delete the american hits, and let me keep the algerian one.

we'll have to see what they do or don't do with this, but it seems like all those hits outside of the first world - in turkey and south africa and elsewhere - will be declared fake.

because they don't actually exist.

i'm noticing that the youtube algorithm is basically racist, in that it rejects any hits from outside of the "first world".

sorry, white men from california. i post regularly on videos discussing global affairs. those hits from russia are legit.

in your world, nobody in russia actually uses the internet, i guess.

i ultimately don't really care. youtube views are not a meaningful currency to an obscure artist that is about substance over style. like anybody else, it makes sense for me to maximize the potential audience. but, i'd rather have one quality hit than ten thousand people that listen for five seconds. see, the unfortunate reality, though, is that the latter is necessary to get the former.

but, people should be aware that youtube isn't actually really cracking down on fake hits, it's just applying a type of racial profiling, and it's going to negatively affect people with an actual global reach, by turning audiences outside of the first world into non-entities.

in a sense, it's sort of what we all already knew: the tech industry doesn't think the rest of the world actually exists.

i think we've all heard rumours of just how widespread the "buy fans" industry is on social media, but on soundcloud they've taken it to a different level. i'm actually getting spammed to buy likes, and i can't believe that's possible without some help from soundcloud.

well, the business models on these sites are notoriously bad. could they make money by selling likes? it might be the only way they're making money.

as mentioned, i've really tried to avoid soundcloud. i'm using it to hold lo-fi demos. i'd never upload anything finished there...

this is what i got spammed with:

https://soundcloud.com/jake_pk

open spamming suggests to me that the industry is working in plain view.

i mean, i'd never buy likes. it's pathetic. a non-starter. but it's actually not something that would help me either, as i'm more interesting when i'm obscure. if we want to talk venn diagrams, my intersection with popular culture is pretty much zero. it doesn't really matter how much i spend on buying likes or other kind of bullshit promo because what i'm creating is inherently revolting to anybody with a follower mindset. to me, buying likes is like trying to market tampons to teenage boys......it's floating a product that is entirely useless to that market.

i'd go so far as to argue that the type of person that is going to listen to my art is almost certainly going to use ad blocking software.

chances are you missed the joke from pat sajak.

i'm hoping he keeps it going, by calling his detractors jewish nazi pedophiles.

i have to admit it would be fun to storm a police station and make the pigs squeal. yet, that's just a twisted fantasy.

it's not clear to me where the people in between stand, but these are police state tactics that have the potential to completely undermine the government in kiev. it doesn't really matter what the law says.

....and that remains the only message that vice is succeeding in getting across: the conversion of ukraine from a failed democracy to a militarized police state.

basically, no.

there were repeated iranian invasions of greece over thousands of years from the area now called ukraine, where anachronistic buddhist statues have been found. the buddhist beliefs are, of course, of ultimate iranian origin in central asia, and not of indian origin in the south of the subcontinent. pythagoreanism was actually mostly derived from orphism, which was connected to the indigenous religions of the remnants of these iranian invasions in the areas around thrace and up the side of the black sea.

the similarities between greek and indian religion are consequently derived from the same common root of derivation as the similarities between greek and indian language - a common origin in the iranian tribes of central asia and southern russia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F46QRtrQK4

this puts me into hysterical fits of laughter every time.

deathtokoalas
i still remember sitting hunched over on my bed when i was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, transcribing soundgarden tabs to standard tuning and wrenching my hands inside out actually playing them. this one's in standard tuning. burden in my hand was one i remember being particularly weird to play. that might be the best practice you can give a kid to get their hands going around.

with fell on black days, it was that off the wall solo (and those harmonies at the end) that was fun to play along with, because the chemistry between kim and chris on the track is so deep that it gets across through a mass manufactured tape played on a cheap ghettoblaster. there's only maybe two or three songs that i know of like this, where you can really channel the emotion of the track just by playing along with it.

the guitar just turns into this electrified monster, and the guitar trance suddenly takes over.

(deleted post) 

deathtokoalas
kim's stuff isn't that hard to learn, really, if you're coming into it with enough dexterity. it's a specific style, you just need to get your fingers and mind into it and most of it comes out pretty naturally because it's mostly just all tremoloing through pentatonics. i always wondered if that wonky guild of his was initially a way to get a zappaesque sg thing going on.

but it's a lot of fun to play.

(deleted post) 

deathtokoalas
something i used to do back in the day was just run chromatically up and down the neck. i spent a brief period trying to be an impressionist jazz punk guitar teacher by just throwing all the theory out the window and teaching kids to work directly with semitone intervals. the idea was to warp their brains into rejecting western tonality and understanding the instrument as a kind of matrix of notes, in which they could build their own patterns.

none of the kids lasted long, but they did get their fingers moving quickly. see, to me, that's the important thing - being able to move your fingers with enough control to be able to create what you hear in your head.

so, that helps. it's dry, though. kim would throw his beer at me, call me a wanker and tell me to go listen to steve vai. of course, i agree with him to a large extent. i kind of don't feel like soundgarden was meant to be studied.

but it does work.

Huzaifa Ahmed
dude what's wrong with koalas?

deathtokoalas
koalas need to be destroyed due to their cuteness.

J.C. Gleason
Aren't the majority of Soundgarden songs in drop D? I know that Black Hole Sun,  Birth Ritual and Outshined are but I don't know.

deathtokoalas
soundgarden used alternate tunings in general, not just dropped d, although the low e was in fact often dropped down a little (sometimes down to c). a lot of the interesting voicings they came up with came from using open tunings.

J.C. Gleason
Really? Huh, you learn something new everyday.

deathtokoalas
yeah. the open tunings were a genre marker of alt rock in the 80s, but are really pretty standard through the history of folk rock.

Jackson P.
Black Hole Sun isn't in drop D....

deathtokoalas
i'm pretty sure it is, actually. it's been a long time, though.

this song isn't, though.

Jackson P.
Yeah you're right. But it's harder to play in drop d than whatever I originally learned IMO.

And yes, this is just in standard. Rather easy song as well.

Could've very well done without that last guitar solo though :/

deathtokoalas
bah. it's the solo that's the fun part to play....

J.C. Gleason
Not necessarily.

deathtokoalas
iirc, black hole sun is in drop-d specifically because it uses the lower two notes. you'd have to transpose it up at least a full tone (unless you're down a half step anyway, then a semi tone) to play it in standard tuning.

at that age, i couldn't be bothered to fuck with tunings. i had one of those ibanezes with the locking bridges and the thumb screws, which means i would have had to unlock the thing to take it in and out of dropped-d or open c or whatever else. that's why i retabbed all the weird tunings for standard tuning. i mentioned it's good for the hands, but it was also good for getting to know the fretboard.

Mathews Barbosa
true story

Djalma Reis
You....damn, you could stay in silence, but no!, you wrote this. You've shared this with us; gold we find through the night on the internet. Thank you very much.

Grease Munkee
why wouldnt you just tune to the song?

deathtokoalas
well, it was the ibanez. i didn't know what it was when i bought it (well, my dad bought it), i was like 12 at the time. i don't know if they still make these things or not, but they lock the tuning in place near the nut and then give you thumb screws near the bridge to tune with. the thumb screws only let you go up or down about a tone or so, then you need to unlock the system at the nut. it's an annoying process. and, if you want to play four or five songs in a row in an alternate tuning, you're going to be spending more time fiddling around with the guitar's hardware than actually playing.

the purpose of the system is to prevent tremolo/whammy players from going out of tune. it's the kind of thing people like steve vai, who use a lot of whammy bar, need to get through a set on stage; not the best guitar for kids playing with tunings.

when i was about 15, my aunt gave me a $20 gift certificate at a local music store. it's the thought that counts, but the truth is she really had no idea that $20 doesn't go very far in a guitar store, and i didn't really need any more strings.

so, i took a look through the tab books. it was the mid 90s. i didn't need anybody to teach me how to play nirvana songs, that was easy enough. i'd already taught myself most of siamese dream (with a little help), and the best parts of superunknown, but would have probably jumped on either if they were there. they weren't. so, i grabbed the tab book for the first candlebox disc...

this one was a lot of fun to work through.

i'm only going to want to listen to this once every 2 years or something at this point, but it's nice to hear the whole song when i do, you know? thanks for not uploading the video edit.

it's funny sometimes how you're playing a harmony over a chord change and it sounds familiar and you can't figure it out and then you do. :).

"you're sharper these days, roll on security."

have to blame hendrix for this in the end, though. plausibly through srv as an intermediate.

but, here's the thing: 6s, 7s, 9s, whatever - even 3s - rock music just needs to get beyond the 5s. don't tell me you can't punk up a major 7th. i've got a list for you. i do. that's what really made 90s rock sound so much more interesting - the simple fact that, harmonically, it really actually was more interesting.

also, why did they have to cut the track? it's jarring.

first time i heard this, i though she said "shalom" and that it was an anti-apartheid song.

which brings up a bit of a point. i don't think the comparison is very accurate. and i think it's sort of racist to deny all the work that was being done in south africa by south africans. they let mandela out to prevent a revolution, not to allow one. but the south african movement, nonetheless, had a component in popular media. it had biko, for instance.

don't want to put words into the joy formidable's mouth - it's clear i misinterpreted the track. but that's maybe something for the bds folks to think about.

i actually, think this is the weakest of the four. she's singing it from an emotional distance that the other three don't have, for obvious reasons. i can almost imagine her stumbling around backstage, mumbling something about these fucking children upstaging her or something...

deathtokoalas
i actually think she did a pretty good job with this. it's sombre without being too dramatic.

i'm more confused by the accordian and the four guitars. actually, kim is probably playing bass. still.

Puggle Paws
I think its meant to be like how All Apologies was played on Nirvana; MTV Unplugged. There were several guitars and I think Krist played accordion on it (not sure if it was on all apologies but he played it for a few songs)

deathtokoalas
i think it's a photo-op, and she's probably lip-synching.

Puggle Paws
why do you think that? I think they did it cause they wanted to mix it up instead of having all three songs electric. I don't think she is lip-syncing what would be the purpose of that? I mean Nirvana were very against that sort of thing, If you watch Nirvana's performance "Top of the Pops" smells like teen spirit they made their fake instrument playing obvious as the producers wanted them to play with a backing track sabotaging the thing on purpose. 

deathtokoalas
maybe they are making it obvious? the lip synching is a deduction from it being obvious that they're not all playing. st vincent & joan jett do not seem to be playing. kim gordon looks like she might be, and krist looks like he is, but if the others aren't...

Puggle Paws
I will watch it again, kinda writing an essay atm :(. I doubt they would though, doesn't seem like them to do that sort of thing.

deathtokoalas
and, fwiw, i'd bet lorde's management insisted on it, rather than the remnants of nirvana. the other songs were clearly live.

it's just a function of being a commodity.

but i do think she did a good job with it.

Puggle Paws
I did watch it again, I'm not sure, I'm not one to easily pick out lip syncing etc. But to me it doesn't look like a lip sync, I mean at that one pint were she had moved a little away from the mic it was slightly quieter. I'm not sure about the other guitars but Pat, Joan and Kim were definitely playing. Not sure about that st vincent girl, but she probably was. 

Mark Humphrey
I think Krist just wanted to crack out the accordion again lol

Alex Driftmier
I agree, it's amazing. This video sucks though, watch it on a good quality tv..and video. She rocks. Suck it.

i think everybody confused by kim gordon's voice should go listen to some sonic youth. start here...

deathtokoalas
nirvana wasn't really from seattle, they were from olympia. i'm not sure if that's what dave was thinking, or if it's sort of like the mccartney thing in the sense that nobody could get it mixed up, but, if it's the latter, i think there's something fitting in it.

i didn't say anything about this performance, though

i think she's a good character actor. not just here, but in general. it's a little different than the others because she's clearly trying to play the part. it's maybe still a sacred cow. but she does it well.

and on this note, somebody that i think would have been interesting would have been ritzy o'brien, maybe something upbeat.

kristaps 5645
haha. I was thinking the same thing. completely agree. tho Nirvana was never about pushing vocal stylistics or image conscious.

Otherworldly Things
You are right. They aren't really from Seattle. They are from Aberdeen, Washington. That is where Kurt and Krist met as teenagers and formed various bands, before settling on the name, Nirvana. 

deathtokoalas
the point is that they didn't come out of the seattle rock scene, they came out of the olympia riot grrrl scene. you wouldn't see them playing shows with soundgarden or pearl jam, you'd see them playing shows with bikini kill or l7.

Ecstatic Discharge
They played a couple gigs with Soundgarden but youre right they toured with both L7 and Bikini Kill

newman!

*shakes fist*

courtney hits midlife crisis. which is probably good news, actually. maybe she should call some of her friends up and convince them to go into midlife crisis, too.

the whole idea of midlife crisis has always struck me as sort of backwards. i mean, we spend roughly 30 years defining who we are, then toss it in the trash to conform to some bullshit abstract idealization of what society expects us to be and that's supposed to be some kind of progress in repressing our individualism or something? then, when we connect with who we actually always were, it's presented as some kind of regression? fuck that. if there's any period in our lives that should be called a "crisis" it ought to be the period in the middle when we're trying to run away from ourselves, and the end to that period of crisis ought to be when we finally look ourselves in the eye and realize we always were what we always knew we were in the fucking first place.

or maybe there's a 90s revival happening. who knows.

i like the energy, but it seems a tad contrived. all peaks, no valleys. it'll go over well in a live context, though, and that's probably more important.

and her voice really does sound great, considering what she's put it through.

well, i dunno what the right reaction to this is. i loved michael when i was very little, but it's not a style i've been into over the last roughly 25 years. so, i probably won't listen to it repeatedly...

on first listen, i feel timbaland is doing a pretty good job at capturing certain timbres and aesthetics across his career, even honing in on the right periods, while also uplifting it a little bit with a dubstep and modern pop twist. the initial demoes are also released for purists. could we expect anything more from the tracks? we couldn't, really. it's not new material, so the question "would michael work with timbaland in the early 2010s" is sort of meaningless.

i always preferred michael either in race shattering punk rock mode or in social justice fuck the fuckers mode, and this is low on either of those aspects in favour of love songs. that's a reflection of the material, of course.

further, you can tell that a lot of these are outtakes because the tracks tend to repeat aimlessly after the midway point. when it's not clear they aren't fully written, it's mostly clear they were abandoned...

high points: "a place with no name", "do you know where your children are", "xscape".

jackson's work was mostly....ummm..."collaborative"....as long as he's singing, it's not that different than the real thing.

but, being pasted together from outtakes over 30 years, the album couldn't possibly flow well.

regardless....take it for what it is.

weird what one finds on a random search. i'm working out a solo in f minor. searching for fun...

if you're going to do something like this, it would do a lot of good to explain why the chord is f minor. once you know that F, Ab, C (with f on the bottom) makes an Fm, it's just a process of finding the triad where you want it to be. i find the d shape to be quite nice for minor chords.

anyways, back to my solo in f minor :P

i want to get it out front that i think you get the logic right, but that it only really applies starkly to the hyperfeminine extreme of the transfemale spectrum. if you begin with the grey area part of this and extrapolate it, i think you'll see that it sort of contradicts what you're getting at. if you acknowledge that a lot of transwomen are a little more in the centre in the sense that they have bigendered and androgynous traits, you'll have to conclude that they may have a few traits that may be attractive to some gay men. i mean, what you're saying is true, but only in that limited range of transwomen. so, you should have stuck with the whole grey area theme :)

personally? i'm the super shy, dresses down, tanktop 'n' jeans, bookish-librarian type rather than the big hair, stiletto heels & makeup everywhere type (no judging, it's just not me). while i don't get much attention from gay men for the reasons you're suggesting, and others, i do get a little bit, and i think there's some good reasons for it. a gay male may notice that we might share some tastes in art, for example, especially music, and think that this is something to build a relationship on top of. and, because i have a small-breasted, thin and athletic type of physique rather than a really curvy one, he may see something sufficiently sexy in it. conversely, a lot of straight men will interpret me as overly challenging or "unfeminine" for the same reasons they're afraid of assertive feminists. the ones that are attracted to me are attracted to me for the same reasons they're attracted to tomboys - or to challenging feminists.

it's about breaking down those media strereotypes of hyperfeminity in transgendered women, but it's also about those grey areas. transgendered people inhabit a lot of them, and because of that they're going to generate a lot of interest within them as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8EpCEoRfcA

still awesome.

deathtokoalas
it's really pretty sad just what level of effort people perceive is being put into this. the writing in this profile is largely stream of consciousness. i'll go back to correct spelling or modify sentence structures to eliminate underlying assumptions in the writing that only make sense to me, but what you're reading here is otherwise completely raw.

so, how do you approach somebody accusing you of using a thesaurus? this is shit i'm pumping out in a few minutes per post. so,  when the false assumptions are stripped out, that must be a suggestion that i have an advanced vocabulary, which i actually think is not at all true - i think it's obvious that i graduated high school and have read a few books since but i wouldn't suggest that much beyond that stands out in what i'm presenting here. nor would i want it to. i fucking hate pretentious blowhards. here's a startling fact: over the approximately ten years that i spent in university i went to zero parties and made zero friends that i stayed in contact with outside of the scholastic context. the hate was really mutual, actually. it wasn't somewhere i fit into. at all.

for the first few years, i greatly preferred hanging out in the projects near my parents house, with dropouts and hustlers. then i spent a few years hanging out with street artists and ravers, followed by a few years of complete lonerism and then a few years with occupy kids before i went back to being a complete loner. i've never been or ever wanted to be the elitist educated kid. that's really a very bad way to interpret this. yet, it is also unfortunately a very bad reflection of the public education system when somebody of no meaningfully advanced education that is just scrawling out thoughts as they come up is viewed as writing carefully presented essays and agonizing over every word in them...

i always knew i would be fucking miserable in the life of an academic, but i was balancing it off against other ways to be fucking miserable. in hindsight? i regret wasting my time with it. but, i can't say i ever had a lot of choice: the alternative that was presented to me was pretty shitty, too.

there were several years when taking student loan money was literally the only way that i could pay my rent, because i wasn't able to get a job in a coffee shop or fast food restaurant.

"so, why did you go to graduate school?"

"because mcdonald's wouldn't call me back. white, unfortunately."

"oh."

"the rent just keeps coming, y'know? every fucking month. never stops. the student loans are a steady pay check for somebody that can't find work."

"why not just try welfare?"

"well, that would be better. i could do what i want instead of studying shit i don't care about. but, welfare is something like half of student loan money. it's not enough to pay the bastards. if it was, i'd go for it."

"oh. disability?"

"well, i don't have one, far as i can tell."

today, i do live on disability. but the diagnosis is pretty weak. it's something i have to do this summer, actually - get a better diagnosis. i don't know what fits best. schizophrenia. bi polar. something like that....

TheVanillatech

Why? I know 4 months but why?

deathtokoalas

this post was to google, rather than youtube. it's just all cross-posted.

TheVanillatech

Still, why..... XD

deathtokoalas

i've been posting a lot to google over the last few months. i guess i have an internet addiction; before i was posting to google, i was posting to facebook, and before that i was all over the cbc (canadian state run media), and before that i was all over mailing lists and newsgroups...

but i've moved to youtube in an attempt to promote the music i've been spending more time with over the last few months.

i'm constantly being accused of being one of them no good book lerners. i've had dozens of people accuse me of sitting in front of my laptop with thesaurus.com open.

it's ridiculous. and false. but interesting. just reflecting.

mumble mumble mumble

THE MUMBLE HAS MY SOUL....

deathtokoalas
so tired.

enough of this. been going on too long, now. need a manic episode, please. five, six days without sleeping. that's the good stuff....

@michael huggins in addition to the synth, you're dealing with an expression foot pedal connected to a pitch shifter, although i feel that your initial idea of a sampler is probably pretty accurate. i don't think the solo is live, i think it's cut up and pasted back together.

but you probably don't need an actual synth to get this, you just need some kind of software system with a foot pedal and a whammy bar. i could get something close to it out of a digitech whammy/pitch combo.

also, fwiw, the whammy work screams belew rather than fripp.

let's all stop being silly now. the rhythm section has been clear that it will not reform. as if mccartney would ever agree to it. he should be applauded for taking the time to actually do this...

grohl is certainly an upgrade over ringo, though.

deathtokoalas
the only thing worse than shitty 60s folk with a drum machine and an effects rack is shitty 60s folk itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFp7W3PoNPI

it's like the cure.

...without the talent.

so, can we fix the history books, please?

Cristian Arantes
GFY, listen to the music you like and leave that for the real SHOEGAZE fans. That´s have nothing from The Cure.. nor the hair.

deathtokoalas
shoegaze, being defined as using robert smith's production techniques to gloss over byrds or velvet underground covers?

got it.

Elevant
That ain't a drum machine, that's Bobby Gilespie from Primal Scream

deathtokoalas
i know, but he sounds like he was programmed by robin guthrie.

bicklesby1
that's fukn hilarious

Tyler Nichols
I'm not sure that you know what folk is. If anything they were trying to emulate the Velvet Underground. Nothing folk about that.

deathtokoalas
i'd consider the velvet underground to be folk, absolutely. they really weren't doing much of anything all that different than the byrds.

to be clear: i explicitly implicitly meant the velvet underground when i said "60s folk". because that's what the velvet underground was doing...

Steve27775
You're either trolling or you've never heard any Velvet Underground songs. Or both.

deathtokoalas
well, i've certainly heard quite a bit of velvet underground (i might even come close to saying i've heard all of the velvet underground, but there's no doubt some obscurities i'm not familiar with) and i do stand by my assessment as entirely accurate. i could quote zappa on the topic, but, if we ignore the fact that he was an authority on the topic of musicology, who fucking cares, really?

"I liked that album. I think that Tom Wilson deserves a lot of credit for making that album, because it's folk music. It's electric folk music, in the sense that what they're saying comes right out of their environment." - frank zappa, on the banana album

you could take it a step further and point out that the byrds and bob dylan are dominant, overwhelming influences that could only be denied if you've never heard any byrds records.

trolling is only half right. i am trolling in the sense that i'm being consciously inflammatory. however, i do mean to be taken entirely seriously, and in that sense i am not trolling.

TomWHL
no, you´re just trolling. you cannot expect to be taken seriously. you claim shitty 60 s folk (velvet underground) to be the worst thing ever, yet you´ve listened to their entire backcatalogue! why? so you could be trolling on youtube I bet... get a life mate

deathtokoalas
but, i do. and i will be.

t adams
Correct! A drum machine was used for this album. BG was still a member during this period, nevertheless.

ditimely
You need to see the move A Beautiful Noise.  Robert Smith himself kneels to the alter of the sound of shoegaze.  He did not invent it but is a part of it.  

deathtokoalas
i think the argument over who invented this is going to inevitably be entirely contrived. but, there's little question that robert smith was doing this before virtually anybody else, and that the cure was the dominant influence on the sound in the geographic space it came out of.

that's not really my point. my point is how immensely superior his music is compared to a lot of the stuff that gets cited.

this was a long time ago, now. what's important is figuring out who did something interesting, and who was singing shitty folk songs over a drum machine.

this was 30 years ago. there's the same amount of time between this and now as there was between this and elvis, and kids growing up are going to look at it the same way that people living through the 80s looked at elvis. it's the time where we need to cut out the crap and pull out the stuff that's actually worth keeping. and, i don't think this makes the cut....

this is the first punk record.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8KgOduO2os

 

deathtokoalas
if only he'd stuck with pot...

kids don't realize how fucking weird this band really was.

MightyGoliath
Your weird

deathtokoalas
i'm guilty, even if i don't correct your broken homophone.

Akili Guy
It's not a law saying you can't be weird

deathtokoalas
there should be a law demanding we must be weird!

King Prince
Nirvana's weirdness is what made them great. I was 16 years old & in high school when Nevermind dropped in 1991 & it was awesome partying to that record with my school friends stoned!!!!! My parents gave me a really hard time but I didn't care. Wouldn't change that for the world. Glad I got to experience it.

Banana bobo
I like weird

willf3020
you mean't contraction*

deathtokoalas
no, there would have to be an e at the end to have it merely missing an apostrophe. this is a broken homophone.

ondd1
w'ere all weird in our own way.

just sounds like the fucking byrds played on a 8-track that was left out in the sun to warp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw4tHPUK6ig

guess i took a few days off. was super sore from walking, and more interested in reading. that's happened a few times recently, and i'm really not used to it. guess i'm out of shape from spending so much time inside and curled up this winter. and not smoking. seems weird, but if you're a smoker you get it. i'll snap out of it when i get my border papers and can start to get out to see some shows in detroit.

hopefully, the first one i'll be able to catch will be swans in late june. the time frames are sketchy. but hopefully. that's an excellent start, actually. and i'm gonna be pissed if i miss it. btw, there's a new swans record out today. so, you should stop reading my facebook page and go listen to it.

i've got acoustic strings, but they seem weird and i might replace them. haven't strung it up yet.

i otherwise think this track is going to complete itself pretty quickly.

the next one up is a short renaissance guitar piece that i've wavered about assigning to piano. there's going to be a few choice renders as well as at least one built up version of the track.

it's funny how quickly the machine will jolt you awake, though.

i seem to have forgotten to post this as influential on the track of the day, which is now track of the month in order to ease the tracks in a bit more slowly and get the counts up. i posted 70 tracks all at once. that was an error. so, now i guess there's going to be some retreading.

i'm picking this out specifically because the song of the day is full of flanging. and i know now that that's a cabaret voltaire thing. as far as the exact track is concerned, throbbing gristle is actually a better comparison musically - and einsturzende neubauten is a better comparison, thematically. but i didn't know that when i wrote it. what i knew at the time was this disc, which was pumping in the headphones every day for a year.

and i mean every day. for a year. at least. in hindsight, i have to say this record probably warped and damaged me pretty badly. or, to be more objective, that it really strongly shaped me.

(relative tracks: fire, most of the late 90s emo/noise/grunge/industrial demos that are at bandcamp but not youtube, bach goes loopy, happiness is a harsh gun, weed in the yard, all unauthorized remixes, the inridiculous compilation, the curious george suite, j's adventure in guitarland, schizoid, like divine amoebas, leonardo pisano, all symphonies and others that are not yet uploaded)

yup. shooting on the remembrance day ceremony is an absolutely splendid way to polarize the population, to usher in a civil war that will bog the russians down for the next decade.

what? you thought they were trying to do something else?

why do people do this?

although, i have to admit it'd be fun to stumble around pretending to be napoleon for a few days, snapping dry self-deprecating wisecracks at anybody that comes near.

bunnyhead71
Adrian Belew, Les Claypool & Danny Carey

deathtokoalas
not this track. this is just adrian.

adrian belew - op zop too wah

should have been an ep

so, frank zappa died in late 1993 and a debate opened up about who his most relevant protégé would be. steve vai no doubt had his proponents, but he's really little more than a wanky guitarist with essentially zero songwriting ability or conceptual vision. i don't think vai would challenge that, actually. twenty years late, it is clear that dweezil zappa has taken over on a commercial level, but the truth is that he was more influenced by vai than he was by his father and shares the same flaws as he does. that isn't preventing him from making a living playing his father's songs, and i'm not going to criticize the idea of getting the music out to a younger audience, but there isn't much carrying on happening on a creative level (and i don't think anybody is surprised by this). warren cuccurullo ended up making arty disco which, whatever it's value, doesn't resonate well as carrying on zappa's legacy. likewise, adrian belew had moved on by becoming an important new wave session guitarist. the one protégé that seemed mildly interested in carrying on frank's vision was mike keneally, his last (and arguably most musical) stunt guitarist. keneally, however, quickly aligned himself with the cultural values of alternative rock, which in many ways are in strong conflict with zappa's brand of shock rock, and in the process alienated a large percentage of the zappa fan base. however, out of the gate he was the closest on a musical level and that led to some articles being written and to some rather optimistic promotion. personally, i think keneally is absolutely zappa's most substantial protégé, but i don't think that view is widely held at this point.

ever the opportunist, belew seems to have attempted to take advantage of the situation by creating a parallel evolution out of zappa's late work that seems to want to try and compete with keneally for the post-zappa zappa market. the fact that he quickly moved on demonstrates that this wasn't as successful an endeavour as he hoped, but his fan base has largely applauded him for it. unfortunately, their excitement about this disc is pretty misplaced, unless you were a fan of his 80s bowie knock-offs to begin with.

first off, the idea that belew could compete with keneally is just more of his characteristic pretension and arrogance. belew is basically a really interesting hack that has a solid, intuitive grasp on the instrument. he's in a tradition of untrained blues guitarists that play by ear; where he stands out is that he's taken that approach into the technological era, whereas so many other blues guitarists completely reject doing so. keneally, on the other hand, actually knows what he's doing. this comes out pretty heavy-handedly when you compare belew's serious recordings to keneally's. zappa has a really geeky musical following and they fully realize, a priori, how comical the idea of belew taking keneally on really is.

if that isn't bad enough, the next hit on this disk is that it's a watered down retelling of joe's garage. it's almost like a censored version of joe's garage, designed for more of a family audience. this is a concept record about falling in love with your guitar, but it lacks any of the shocking escapades of it's source material. as with belew's first record, lone rhino, the shock has been replaced with dry wit. consider the following...

i love your back, i love your head
but i love it best
when i run
my fingers down your neck

but, it's about his guitar, not a person. see, it's funny because it's cheesy. but the joke's a little old, given that it goes back to zappa's most recognizable concept album, and that belew had even already ripped joe's garage off repeatedly in his work with king crimson, probably most notably in the bizarrely schizophrenic classic indiscipline.

so, the horse is fucking dead. which would be an ironic release from belew: flogging a dead horse. with naying sounds....

i'd be willing to overlook all of this (as i have in previous reviews) if the disc was creative enough. it's really not. it starts off fairly strong with a few interesting beatlesesque pop songs interspersed between different kinds of experiments but it unfortunately really falls flat on the second half of the disc, which begins by badly ripping on bob dylan for a few tracks and ends with a mild facelift on his bowie wannabe phase that is ultimately no more interesting or satisfying. the concept is also fairly muddy in the middle of the disc. there's consequently really nothing to be lost by cutting the disc off after the 8th track, which leaves about twenty minutes of music that is both coherent and interesting, if you like the weirder fringes of beatlesesque pop.

stream:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVPGzOHIIgz_Suw8ISx0o8J_9kH-LTH8F

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/music/artists/AdrianBelew/1996-OpZopTooWah/index.html

hey mozilla firefox...

if i wanted chrome, i'd run chrome. guess why i don't run chrome? yeah, that's right.

i hope it gets forked, 'cause the ui in chrome is just disgusting.

it's sort of hilarious that swans still manages to produce so much confusion and revulsion all these years later.

see, that means he's doing this right.

if i were to (constructively. this is swans.) criticize this record, it would actually be that it gets a bit too poppy in a few places.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1v3NeGtm_Y

deathtokoalas
lyric videos are so emo.

Zug Zwang
/Hug

Du kkha
This was the official video, when people didn't even use lyrics videos...

deathtokoalas
well, clearly somebody used lyric videos.

i'm sure the beatles used lyrics videos in their mid-to-late-60s videos, but i can't find a real one.

Du kkha
Sure, but nows is the age of lyrics videos like a pre-release of crappy music.

deathtokoalas
yeah, they're ubiquitous. hence my silly comment.

Arsène Devos
Lol I was actually thinking that REM might be the first emo band :p

deathtokoalas
depends how you define it. it's not dc punk, but i think it had a much larger influence on something like "american football" than ian mackaye did.

Arsène Devos
michael stipe looks like jeremy enigk btw

deathtokoalas
i don't see it past the haircut....

Dancing Spiderman
I need a hug I so emo

slycooper2002
That's odd. I just came back from listening to 'Straight Edge' and 'In My Eyes' by Minor Threat, only to see a comment about DC Punk and Ian Mackaye. 

"what we want and what we need has been confused"

it's really remarkable how many situations i've experienced where that line has acted as a source of wisdom, some pitifully trivial and some strikingly profound

deathtokoalas
sdre goes cock rock. lol. what is it with aging and penis fondling? why do so many musicians over 40 just feel this dramatic urge to pull it out on stage and start spraying all over everybody?

SouthernSouls
not cockrock at all

deathtokoalas
it's the epitome of cock rock, with the slow-moving high decay power chords. could've been an ac/dc demo, really.

davidmreyes77
Sounds more like the Replacements than anything "cock rock"

deathtokoalas
the replacements were cock rock, it was just ac/dc with a less annoying singer and a little less drama.

....but this isn't sappy like that. it's more alice in chains than replacements, and more ac/dc than either.

davidmreyes77
Could you compile a list of 100 guitar bands that you consider cock rock and post it here for us to review?

deathtokoalas
the replacements regularly did kiss covers. it's really not a contentious point - it was cock rock for pretentious rich kids.

davidmreyes77
Narrow minded pretentious rock snobbery aside, I think you're funny.

deathtokoalas
i'm none of those things, except maybe a snob.

davidmreyes77
When I was younger my friends and I generally associated "cock rock" with hair metal bands from the late 80's, eg Poison, Warrant, Cinderella, etc.

deathtokoalas
it's a variation on the same theme. whether the attitude is directed at pretending to have a lot of sex or pretending to read a lot of books, the pretension and over-inflated ego mostly comes off the same way. the replacements were always designed to be arena rock...

davidmreyes77
Yeah, but they sabotaged their own career early on.

Triangulove
The Rhythm section is way different than cock rock. The only similarity to something like AC/DC is the guitar sound during the verses. Specifically the distortion. But the rest of it has a post punk sound. 

deathtokoalas
the chorus is very stadium rock. there's no doubt a post-punk aspect, but it's very deeply subsumed in the cock rock.

Lee Fisher
i see you all over music videos you are fucked

deathtokoalas
when the world is presented to you through a haze of artifice and delusion, it is easy to understand why it might seem like the most down to earth and honest person in the room is a little bit loopy.

Lee Fisher
im on youtube, commenting on a music video. no artifice and delusion here amico mio, just fuckin nutters thinking they're fuckin diogenes of sinope 

deathtokoalas
well, you've certainly got me wrong if you think i'm a primitivist. i don't even like camping.

Vazz Deferens
I realize I'm months late for this conversation, but it's an interesting topic and I think you could probably write a thesis on it.  I believe the truth is this:  assuming you are a fairly young person, you should prepare yourself for a life of many musical disappointments.  The general trend I've noticed is that bands are at their best for their first few albums (often less) and then very quickly start to suck.  Not just at age 40 either....that's generous.  WAY before that, most bands just start to suck.  Even the best bands you care to name, almost without exception.

Why?  People change as they age.  I think it's as simple as that.  Good musicians don't want to keep rehashing stuff they did 20 years ago.  They run out of ideas, feel pressure to sound like whatever got them attention to begin with.  Goals, interests, and life get in the way.  A lot of times, older bands are just trying to recapture the past.

But not just that, listeners change too.  A complicating factor is that as you age, your own tastes evolve and perhaps a band that you would've loved at age 16 sounds repetitive and boring when you're old.  You could probably picture this stuff on a graph - time on the x axis, and some level of musical taste or evolution on the y.  At different points in your life, different artists will intersect and resonate with your taste.

That said, I actually like this song.  I don't see it as a major departure from most of their other stuff - which can be good or bad.  I can think of tons of other bands in a similar genre that started great in the early/mid 90's and quickly became much worse (shudder to think, shellac, and jawbreaker immediately come to mind)

deathtokoalas
well, i'm not particularly young, although i've been accused of not being particularly keen to "grow up". but i think you're sort of repeating what i've stated, with just a little bit more detail.

i think this particular type of aging is something inherently connected to the rock era, and has something to do with peeling off layers of ambition. younger musicians tend to be more attached to the idea of doing something different, which tends to recede as the musicians become somewhat jaded with age. with rock musicians, specifically, they tend to end up defaulting to rock in it's most generic forms, and i think it's actually connected to it being what they grew up with.

i don't think you'll see this pattern repeated, exactly, with younger bands as they age, because they didn't grow up listening to kiss or the rolling stones or bruce springsteen the way that most 90s musicians did. whether you're talking about pearl jam or sdre or the foofighters or the chili peppers or whatever else, that seems to be what they've all fallen back towards, as they've lost the revolutionary edge that came with the punk rock that they embraced in their late teens or early twenties.

younger musicians are going to be falling back to their own roots, which is gong to be something different - music of the 80s and 90s. i think you're going to hear a lot of aging indie bands starting to sound suspiciously like rem - or even more so.

for now, though, there doesn't seem to be a way to escape this age-driven regression back to cock rock...

and, there are a few counter-examples, coming out of a different upbringing. consider lee renaldo, who has been slowly turning into phish. it's no secret that the man was a huge grateful dead fan. recent swans is just remarkably indebted to can and pink floyd, in ways that were not previously as obvious. &etc.

where the cock rock comes out is specifically where it was the actual musical foundation of the band all along, but glossed over with then-contemporary ideas.

Vazz Deferens
True - and I still think that we as listeners are partially at fault here.  In retrospect you can probably go back to the early albums of bands that proved themselves to be crap and uncover hints that maybe went ignored initially.  I haven't listened in years so I can't say, but have you tried going back to Diary or the Pushead single and tried to pick out things that make you say "I shoulda seen this coming."  (again I'm not saying I think SDRE are bad...just following up on this idea of bands that ultimately disappoint).

At the end of the day though, I can think of very few bands that don't disappoint eventually.  Even if not in the way you mean.

deathtokoalas
i was a huge fan of the pink record, but could never really get into diary. it was for different reasons, though. i was introduced to sdre through the radiohead mailing list, and the pink album really fits together well with ok computer era radiohead, adore period smashing pumpkins, porno for pyros and other things of the sort that existed at the time (i had never heard the term "emo" and never really grasped how it applies to them. apparently, it had to do with a clothing ad using a buzz word that they didn't really understand well.). diary reminded me of something like ben folds five - bland adult contemporary pop music. but that's something removed from cock rock...

i think you can hear more of that in the pink record, but all the harmonies completely overpower it. and it's even stronger in the record after that.

Vazz Deferens
Well I can say for sure that Diary wasn't considered adult pop at the time.  It was all high school and college kids going to the shows.  I always did sense there was something kinda weird or different about the band.  It never seemed right to me that they were on Sub Pop, for one.  That label to me growing up was like Am Rep or Touch and Go, with some really awesome heavier and noisier bands.  There were some brief moments like that on Diary, but overall no....it's just as strange as Jawbox and Superchunk having songs on the Am Rep singles.  I always put SDRE in the same bin as Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, although I could never stand those two bands.  Built to Spill had the self-indulgent, 20-minute long guitar solos so it was always much easier for me to despise them.  Eventually this "emo" you mentioned became the buzzword, one of the most loathsome developments in all of music, and I just tuned out.

Also I was just thinking it's not just rock that turns to crap.  The first couple Public Enemy records were fantastic and then they spiraled into nonsense as well.  I think there's just a time when all artists jump the shark.

deathtokoalas
it was just how i perceived it, but you've gotta keep in mind that i was in my early to mid teens so i would have considered somebody in their 20s to be an "adult". i was into all kinds of noisy, chaotic music so these ordered piano-driven tracks were just total "pop rock" to my ears, and ben folds five was just the thing on the radio at the time closest to it. thinking back, it was actually the batman soundtrack that i first heard of them, but i only picked up the pink record after it being raved over by radiohead fans about 97 or so.

there's such a dominant perry farrell influence on the vocals, and there's some huge parallels in the vocal department with what thom yorke was doing through the bends and ok computer that i have a hard time taking them out of the "alternative rock" category. i think people that weren't on that list may be a little surprised about what else was talked about on there, though. sigur ros was also very popular on that list, to the point that i suspect that the list may have launched their career. it may have launched mogwai's career as well. and i was the kid from canada that was ranting and raving about how incredible godspeed you black emperor were at a time when they were still just flat out obscure - and really expanded their listening base. i can't confirm it, but i'm fairly certain that at least one member of 65daysofstatic was a prominent contributor to the list, as well - not to mention a certain bobby henderson from oregon that was studying physics and had this interesting analogy about god and spaghetti monsters. a great resource, while it existed...

i can get putting sdre in the list of 90s emo/indie acts due to the geography, but i just don't hear any remote similarity to those bands at all. i can't get into stuff like built to spill or modest mouse, either. sdre at their best, to me, sounded more like a vocal post-rock act - something like the sea and cake strikes me as a far better comparison.

but i think the absolutely correct, objective way to derive them is through jane's and porno for pyros. they're really a direct corollary of perry farrell. and, if basing your entire sound on perry farrell isn't alt rock, nothing is....

dogs don't have a maternal instinct to sit on their pups. conversely, dogs are known to smother their pups to death. there's various theories about that, from reducing the stress on the dog to killing off the runts of the litter.

judging from that reaction of sitting on top of him, i'd suspect that the dog is being teased by this child rather badly and that this needs to be corrected.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLCoTP2vf44

but, what about the fear of the underclass not producing enough slaves? it's amazing when you look at the history of homophobia. a consistent narrative jumps out:

1) in the early days, it was often used as a 'gotcha' type thing by the church. so, if you're a philosopher that's talking about all kinds of crazy things like atheism, and you happen to be gay, they could get you on that when they can't get you otherwise. it was often used as a pretext to shut down opposition.

2) during various phases when the empire was weak, it was attacked because it was viewed as hindering population replacement. so, if there was a famine or a plague or a disastrous war, they'd go after the gays for not doing their job in helping to produce more workers and soldiers.

3) under feudalism and slavery, it was attacked because it hindered the ability for the serf or slave's owner to produce further offspring (which would produce more wealth, or be sold).

4) then bondage became replaced by debt, but the prohibition continued for the same reason.

oddly, now that population control (rather than population replacement) is the dominant goal of the elite, the oppression has mostly slowed down, except religious opposition - which is the same basic idea as we've seen throughout history: gay people don't create a new generation of donating church goers.

well, and also in russia. where the population is declining.

i know that's grim.

here's a document that explains this in more detail:
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=310