everybody always talks about things that can influenced, rather than things that influenced can.

the shaggs >>>>> the velvet underground.

the rumour at the time was that this was created by cevin allowing his cat to walk over his keyboards, but it's hard to believe that it's actually true.

deathtokoalas
i personally find the memes a little annoying and distracting, but it's something that is probably necessary to get people's attention nowadays.

the only way to get around this is to teach it in high school. that's easier said than legislated, but it's the harsh reality of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bXpOUYrr1c

Wayne Vernon
The problem is I have never met a high-school economics teacher who understands economics. =P

deathtokoalas
they didn't even offer the course at the school i went to, which was quite large and well-funded. i mean, i took two years of classical guitar and a year of electronic music design (think john cage, not deadmau5).

Wayne Vernon
That is such a shame - I use to teach AP macro, but the class only reached a small minority of students.

High schools need to teach students about money, debt, and financial planning - people make such bad decisions. Every student should know how to calculate the costs and opportunity costs of debt. =/

I do, however, see the value of music also. ;)

the 80s were such a terrible time for pretty much everything, but the result is that the counterculture was more substantial than at any other time in the 20th century. and, comedians are necessarily counterculture. until it was stamped out in the 90s and the dictatorship of capital took hold under the clinton administration - a dictatorship that is going to require a revolution to overturn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ-6TCPdbl0

there were more top notch comedians in this film than i think even exist at all nowadays...

wow. grown-up punk show....ahaha...

but, it's more fun to blame...everything...

i don't think grandma made it.

unfortunately.

while the disc is a little prodding, there are a handful of very interesting left-field math tracks on this record; it would be nice to hear a more detailed exploration of those more left-field elements.

big songs with slow, grinding guitar parts work better when they have a little shape, like this one does.

this is a very interesting record, but the best of it is not currently up on youtube.

this track has such a remarkably forward thinking drum machine application - maybe not what you'd intuitively expect from a shankar/glass collaboration from a distance, but it makes a lot of sense upon a little reflection.

a lot has been stated about minimalism's influence on techno.

but this is techno...

are you sure you want the sheeple to wake up?

yeah, this is the good shit.

you know, i really liked this record, and it really hit me by surprise that i did. i'm not generally a spencer krug fan; the songwriting tends to overpower the musicianship, leaving these sonically limp narratives. it's music for english majors, basically. and who wants to hang out with english majors? fucking hippies, the lot of them...

by swinging a little more prog, it's like the opposites cancelled. he got some nice energy in crashing positive and negative.

and it might end up being his best record, if not his most popular or his most influential.

i hope they eventually twist their way back to this bigger musical style...

this is a better example of the more character-based writing, but you can also hear how the music and themes are largely moving in opposite directions. see, they manage to converge, here, though - the delivery and musical development on the central question of the song is amongst the most powerful sections of music released so far this decade.

as it is with their contemporaries, the lyrical component of this band is something that is often interesting to approach from a distance, as though you're reading a novel with intersecting character arches. it's necessarily intellectual, which i think is a part of the problem the band ended up having.

this particular track, though, hit me on a more personal level...

MichiganMikeKid
Is it weird that I get into Bad Religion, and punk music now at 23, then I would at 13

deathtokoalas
you don't really get it at 13. you might think you do, but you don't. this was always the real "college rock". i'm still listening at 33...

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
no, i was about 13 or so when i started getting into punk. but, your comments indicate that you must have been an exceedingly smart kid to understand the topics being discussed - or that you still don't understand it.

it's not a question of "appreciating it" (like it's some kind of abstract art...) or being "narrow minded" (as though the topics on the record don't have a high school diploma as a pre-requisite to understand them).

i mean, if you think being open-minded means you don't have to learn the high school curriculum before you take on the university curriculum, that's fine. personally? i consider that stupid.

lots of good beats though, right, james? lots of fun to skate too, eh?

fwiw, i was a smart kid. i consistently tested at the 99th percentile on standardized iq testing until they stopped doing it near the end of high school. say what you will of these things regarding race and class and whatnot, but when you score in the highest 1% it indicates you're a smart kid. and, i came out of a low income neighbourhood, fwiw. i went through gifted/enriched programs. etc.

...and i can look back and realize i didn't fully get it. i could connect with broad themes. i had a sense of social justice. but, i didn't have the life experiences necessary to put the presentation together properly. which isn't a question of intelligence so much as it's one of maturity.

it's one thing to be able to read above your grade level. it's another to be able to place what you're reading into a valid context that is defined by the sum of your life experiences.

it's not just punk rock, either. i read the grapes of wrath for my tenth grade independent study. i got the themes and the plotline and everything. sure. but i reread it recently, after spending a few years homeless, and can state that i didn't fully get it in the tenth grade.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
and, now we have an entirely irrelevant response.

but, i'll give you some advice: it is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

if i were you, i'd tend to keep my mouth closed.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
typical corporate/jock response. yeesh.

you're in the wrong place, james. i believe you should be listening to slayer.

i repeat: what you ought to learn from this is to not randomly criticize people on youtube.

now, fuck off.

and go away.

Ivan Wind
I'm 13 listening to this pennywise misfits nofx rancid T.S.O.L. dead Kennedys and many more i cant name then occasionally listening to the offspring or green day

deathtokoalas
forget about misfits and rancid, though. green day is fun, and there's nothing wrong with having fun. but pay attention to jello - he's proven himself prophetic.

misfits were a very right-wing band with borderline fascist politics, while rancid were pretty much just cashing a pay check. whomever gave you those discs is doing this wrong. there's nothing worth remembering there.

it kind of demonstrates the point, though.

"i like dead kennedys, misfits and rancid" indicates that you don't really understand what they're talking about....

that's true of a lot of people older than 13, though, too.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
actually, i think i can make some reasonable deductions.

you probably pulled those discs out of one of your parents' libraries. maybe an aunt or uncle. if you're thirteen now, your parents are probably about the same age as i am.

i obviously don't know your parents. but i think i can state with a high level of certainty that they grew as people as they aged. whether that was the right way or not, i can't say - i don't know them. but their record collection is going to reflect that growth. i know my dad had a collection that ran through 60s rock like the who when he was a kid, into progressive rock in the 70s and a lot of blues in the 80s. i pulled a lot of stuff i liked out of it, and a lot of stuff i didn't. it's maybe a little unusual to see robert cray listed beside robert fripp. but, people grow as they age.

my progression through punk rock was something like rem (when i was a precocious child in the mid to late 80s) --> nirvana -> offspring/green day (always found rancid a little tepid...) --> dead kennedys/bad religion/black flag. well, i got into stuff like skinny puppy and ministry at the same time as the 80s socal stuff. it was a rejection of 90s culture, in favour of the underground music of the 80s. i didn't reconnect with the present tense until the very late 90s, when i started getting into post-rock bands like gybe!. but i wouldn't have known who the dead kennedys were without that spoken word introduction to the fourth offspring disc.

the point i'm getting to is that if your parents have a bunch of 90s "pop punk" alongside a slew of 80s hardcore, chances are they were listening to green day when they were your age and got into the older stuff as they aged and understood it. that might not be obvious to you as you're sorting through their library.

Ivan Wind
ok even if they don't have a good point in their music, they still sound awesome just like NOFX. No, my dad is thirty grew up as a drug addict and with no parents just 2 sisters and 3 brothers. I do get the music. But thats not always the only reason to listen to a band. You can listen to a music just for sound. Like, even SUBLIME. Sublime is awesome and they don't really have that kind of topic in their music. So no, I will not stick with those two or three, and I will spread through all punk rock ex: Black flag guttermouth descendents

deathtokoalas
nofx kind of sometimes have a point, though.

i smoked two joints with sublime a few times...they could have been a little less shameless in the hendrix rips, though.

there is of course a whole group of punk fans (and the descendants are an early example of it) that'll argue that punk shouldn't be political in the first place, it should just be fun. and again: there's nothing wrong with having fun.

it's still weird to me that you're listening to music that discusses topics that were current twenty years before you were born, though. the whole rock against reagan thing was a long time ago. i guess a lot of the same bands showed up for rock against bush, but even that was a long time ago, now. there's not a lot of newer punk bands that make music in the old socal vibe anymore. it's all gone through an emo filter. i can't help but think you should be listening to touche amore or something. but a current band you might want to check out is night birds. they tend to mix up the misanthropy of the misfits with an early kennedys sound.

anthony Hehl
Fat Mike has nothing worthy or Relative to say. He just spews shit. You want meaningful lyrics? Listen to PROPAGANDHI.

deathtokoalas
meh. they're kind of too doctrinal, not really very free thinking. it's more about brainwashing people into the collectivist hive than trying to instigate a process of individualist thought. not really the kind of thing you want to give a thirteen year-old kid, unless the aim is to have them grow up as a maoist...

it's the general problem with the second wave of hardcore.

i mean, you can't call yourself an anarchist and try and tell me what to eat at the same time. sorry.

anthony Hehl
i know wat u mean , for some bands the preaching can be too much but their not really anarchists. Freethinking is also about change and shedding light on the fact that most of what were taught in school, media, and mainstream culture is false. If you look at the overall message its very enlightening and darkly comedic.

deathtokoalas
oh, i wouldn't argue that propagandhi are anarchists. rather, i was suggesting that they're very explicitly not, that they're even directly opposed to the general crux of anarchist thinking and (for that reason) it's not the kind of thing you want to give to a kid.

propagandhi exist in the bluntly scary point where the authoritarian left meets the populist right. historically, this kind of "right wing collectivism" has been a necessary component in building fascism.

is the bulk of what they say worthwhile? i'd argue it isn't. their pop marxist analysis of systemic hierarchy mostly draws on the anti-science perspectives coming out of critical race theory, which makes it largely worthless coming from an anti-establishment rock band (and worthless all around, because it's total bullshit). that is, listening to propagandhi doesn't get you out of the government enforced scholastic narrative. propagandhi is the government enforced scholastic narrative.

now, i'm not arguing you should steal all your kids' propagandhi discs and burn them as fascist propaganda. the kid has to figure it out on their own. but, for fucks sake, don't give it to the kid from some place of authority and tell them it's good shit.....

it's really not.

they've addressed some of this in the past in their songs, but they've just demonstrated the validity of the accusations, in my view.

if you like your pop obnoxious and hyperactive, this is about as good as it gets.

fwiw, i think the basic influence here is a mix of kmfdm and foetus, it's just spliced with some later dance-punk style influences.

see, if only wilco could release an entire record this good...

deathtokoalas
obligatory influential on the track of week post.

i'm struggling to find my guitar influence in this track. the general construction is very edge, and the feel is largely corgan. i've kept track of this repeatedly on multiple videos though so i'm not going to post it again. there's also an extra sort of jazzy sophistication to this, though. keep in mind i'm still 17 on this track, and maybe a little shy about doing things with the instrument, so it's a little bit stifled.

i think there's some gilmour in there in the lyricism of the playing, but i hadn't hit that heavy animals period yet. i think that what i'm hearing is more the kind of thing that fripp did in something like starless, but interpreted through my suspicious-of-prog punk rock filters. so, it's a little grungier sounding.

(relevant tracks: idiotic, untitled, evil is a human construction, liquify, book it, all of the symphonies, most stuff after 1999)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRHvD6h3-C0

i think the bassline in the blues guitar solo near the end of the track is a good way to explore how some people misunderstand a small handful of prog acts - king crimson and genesis in particular, to be very specific. ironically, i think missing the point comes in overanalysis.

if you sit down and try and figure out what the fuck it is that you're listening to on a mathematical level, you're going to hear a confusing time signature and an agile scale run and it will appear boring and academic. it's only when you step away from that that you can hear the bassline as controlled collapse framing the mayhem around it. these increases in the complexity of the music actually begin to affect the feel of the piece, which is what the tools of course have been developed for in the first place.

i've pointed out repeatedly that the critics of prog were often right. but these two acts in particular really legitimately went over people's heads, and that needs to be corrected and reevaluated. i think this is slowly happening, and i'm actually reinforcing something that's already happening. but i think it can't be said enough until the narrative really changes.

holiosys atRandom
drummer here and I totally agree, the mid song bassline is like 13/8 and as a drummer I'm quite amazed, but yeah, take a step back and let it all unfold and you shall see.  tip, give reflection from tool a listen, beautiful.

deathtokoalas
i've been a tool fan for many years (although i found their last disc to be mediocre), but i consider them to be a grunge band with little influence from something like this. you could confuse a lot of people by telling them undertow is a soundgarden record.

tool's biggest influences were bands like melvins, black flag and swans.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
again: the only trace of crimson you're going to hear in tool is a bit of syncopation in the rhythm section. this is bruford/levin period crimson. but it's not dominant. tool is, first and foremost, a hardcore punk band...

fripp has stated he doesn't hear the similarity, either. and it's for good reason - there really isn't one.

i'll be a little more detailed.

the primary reason it's a bad comparison is that tool basically never plays in overlapping timings. they'll mix it up a little. but, again, i'm going to point to soundgarden or black flag (or led zeppelin) for that. the "crimson sound" is a sort of corollary to minimalist music theory - each instrument plays in a different time, in a way that unfolds metrically, but seems somewhat chaotic. fripp has claimed he developed this independently of steve reich, but i've always been skeptical of the claim.

the "tool sound", on the other hand, is very monolithic. when they play in off times, everybody is playing together. it's a full band attack. because it's punk rock...

now, yeah, you'll get this flashy bass part here and there, or this drum excursion jumping out from time to time. but they're fills.

so, when fripp claims he doesn't hear it, he's right. there's really no similarity on a compositional level. even if you can hear that touch of bruford & levin on the odd offbeat or in the odd figure...

obligatory influential on the track of the week post.

sunday bloody sunday. could i be more iconic? well, it's sort of the point. that martial drum beat exists in many places (before and after 1983) but is likely forever attached to this specific track.

(relevant tracks: idiotic, others)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQZLPV6xcHI

obligatory influential on the track of the week post...

it's right about the point in time where my concept of sound and music was being entirely reshaped by this band. i'm pulling out riverz end, specifically, though, because the track was removed of samples in the final version.

(relevant tracks: idiotic)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84fvBST9o0w

i think these studies that suggest that people that listen to specific types of music are more intelligent because they listen to that music are getting the causality backwards.

first, if you're focusing on a specific genre, you're doing this wrong. if the idea is the abstraction in the music, no specific genre has a monopoly on that. you may get different correlations, depending on personality. debussy is going to appeal to a different type of person than mozart does. and skinny puppy is going to appeal to a different type of person than genesis does. but, it's all abstract music and it should all have basically the same effect, if the factor is the abstraction in the music.

focusing specifically on "classical" music is going to mostly simply produce class differences, which are well understood as having an effect on test scores. it's a situation where x is correlated with y, y is correlated with z and a fallacious conclusion is being drawn that z is therefore caused by y - when it could very well be that x and z are where the causal relationship is occurring.

but the point of this shouldn't be to isolate "intelligent people". "intelligent people" is a pretty broad category, that encompasses humans with a wide variety of tastes. rather, the useful conclusion is something like as follows:

"if you actually legitimately enjoy mainstream pop music, it is probably because you are not of above average intelligence."

but you don't need a study to understand that.

even that's maybe a little unfair, as it's not impossible that you could be into abstract music and still like pop.

maybe something like...

"if you *only* listen to pop music, then chances are high that you're not that bright."

i think the key thing that bugs me about the studies is that they tend to focus so much on mozart. mozart was not the most abstract, creative or interesting writer of his era from any perspective. even people that really like mozart will acknowledge how prodding he could be from time to time. if the studies were based on something a bit more difficult....

i'd expect that if they did a direct comparison between kids that listen to mozart specifically and kids that listen to a spectrum of other "classical" composers, mozart would actually rank near the bottom in terms of test results.

i entirely agree that things are constantly in flux, and the causal model has problems at the micro level. i think the intuitive understanding is that things are happening too quickly for causality to apply. i say intuitive, but that's a tricky thing to understand if you try to break it down, despite it being the intuitive way to kind of understand it.

i think you can try and put some kind of conceptual bounds around it, though. every causal reaction requires a finite amount of time. if there's so much energy in a system that it pushes the cause through faster than a reaction can occur in, then you'd see causality seem like it's not working. you could think of it like a censor failing, by missing a signal because it's too fast - or in some cases like a censor exploding by taking in a signal that zaps it like a laser.

depending on the scale of the subject, the micro might be very perceptible to us. so, the question of how music affects intelligence is micro on this scale - it's reinforcing each other, because it's happening at a time scale that is shorter than a reaction can develop in.

but i think you can still pull out patterns, and the patterns are still meaningful, even if they require some careful analysis.

i wasn't as impressed with the rest of this ep, but this track really hit me in the right way. this kind of interesting, hyperactive pop music is hard to find, nowadays.

what if they made everything up?

david bowie - pallas athena

still hilarious...

deathtokoalas
the title of john maus' new thesis has been leaked:

"On Projecting Pseudo-Intellectuality Through Performing Bad Retro for Stoned Teenagers."

RedPill Swallowed
Jealous.

deathtokoalas
naw. even in my late 90s synth-pop phase, i never had any aspirations towards this. and while my background is in math, and math is kind of like philosophy, my epistemology has always been empirically driven. i'm just dismissive.

RedPill Swallowed
I'm not even going to pretend that I don't need to google some of those words, lol....I'll just agree.  Have a nice day. :)

deathtokoalas
it's not that rough. if you ignore silly people like kant, like you should, and like maus doesn't, mathematics and philosophy share an approach to understanding knowledge, which is based in deducing things from assumptions with logic. this is somewhat - albeit not entirely - contradictory to a scientific worldview, which attempts to understand knowledge through experiment.

it gets confusing when you acknowledge that there are quasi-empirical branches of mathematics (like constructivism). but that can kind of be glossed over for the purposes of getting to my point.

....which is that i don't really have time for speculative branches of philosophy. well, i guess it's fun to read sometimes. and you have to define questions before you can test them. but there's not much room for jealousy, there, as a result of that.

accidentalprotégé
I don't agree with everything that comes out of John Maus' mouth but what makes his music "Bad Retro?" As someone who dislikes socialized medicine I still think Rights For Gays is a banger.

deathtokoalas
i'm a fan of the period he's drawing on, but i just don't hear anything except watered down emulation.

Me Ear
Do ya get out much? Me neither. I'm a fat, damaged idiot tho. And your aspirations to truth are fine if it gets you thru shit. Really. I'm not being sarcastic. Even your aspirations to a superiority over others are harmless here in youtube comment sections. Bluntly tho, you don't know shit. Humanity is a tribe of monkeys that fell out of a tree one unfortunate day. And there's good folks and cunts. That's it. But what do I know? lol. Best wishes.

deathtokoalas
yeah. i'm post-godel. i get that. that doesn't have much to do with what i was saying, though. if anything, it's an argument in favour of empiricism.

Me Ear
Well, thanks for replying. 1 or 2 folks were nasty to you on here. I can be nasty too, very. Godel? Not heard of him, if it's a dude. It's in humans to value truth, yes. But there isn't any. And what you believe? It's not important. I'm exaggerating somewhat, yes.

Religion, philosophy, science, can have a place, yes. But anyway, one guy, or girl, sees a cat with 3 legs, kicks it across the road. Another guy or girl feeds it. All the rest is theory, in my view. And, no, I wouldn't kick the cat, on my worst possible day.

deathtokoalas
godel was an early 20th century mathematician that produced a series of important proofs. he's been described as the most important logician since aristotle. and, in some sense he defined a type of thinking that is necessarily post-aristotlian.

i have to oversimplify dramatically. but, he demonstrated that we have a choice between completeness and consistency. what that means is that there are necessarily true statements that can never be proven true - and that we can in fact prove can never be proven, despite being true.

that has a lot of implications to the axiom-deduction approach to epistemology. it throws kant out the window, to begin with. his whole concept of synthetic a priori knowledge being superior is rendered ridiculous.

again: i don't really see any point where you're disagreeing with me. you're just displaying that you didn't really understand what i typed.

Me Ear
I drink, listen to music and type shit for something to do, which I don't usually remember because I'm mentally disordered, damaged and drunk.

A serious (not sarcastic) question - why post clever stuff on youtube? And, again seriously,  where can doing so lead to?

(There's clever folks on youtube, yes, but most of them seem to end up wanting to die fairly soon after they've posted on the toob amongst folk like me, don't they?) 

deathtokoalas
see, here's the thing: maybe people reading my ranting might click on my name and check out my channel, and then go to my bandcamp site. the more places i leave links, the higher the possibility.

it's a benevolent type of spam/marketing, in the sense that people get something out of it. and, i don't get deleted or marked as spam, either.

Me Ear
I'll look at your channel then. I used to rant til I got a troll. Who had a channel. lol. I looked at it eventually, worst music ever. lol again. You know what tho? Your enemy is your helper too. I imagine you're smart enough to have heard of the concept. Except young kids are killing themselves coz of trolls now.. There was a case of somebody in this country who trolled somebody on 6000 websites. Those 2 should've got married, they had very similar interests.lol. Peace. xxx

what i said about the other one...

this snuck under far too many radars. good stuff.

if you were a dog, you'd realize that pineapples have a very strong piney odour that could be easily mistaken for another dog. see, it's a weird dog though: spiky hair, stationary. and on the counter. da fuck?

dogs operate almost entirely on smell, and they can pick up things with their noses that you can only contemplate in the abstract. it's not reacting to the way it looks...

but, put your face up against a fresh, unpeeled pineapple the next time you get a chance. you'll only get a fraction of what a dog will get. but it's enough to demonstrate the point. it has a very territorial smell.

i mean, if you have a better idea i'd like to hear it, but just keep in mind that it's going to be smell-related rather than sight-related. i think we all know this, but i think we easily forget it - because we're so vision-centric, ourselves.

you'll notice that when she puts the pineapple down, the dog smells it from a distance and instantly reacts. that's what's going on...

now, it doesn't have to think it's a dog, exactly, to get that kind of confused reaction. i'm sure the chemical reaction happening in the dog's brain is fairly specific in it's "that's a dog" reaction. i don't know if the glandy smells coming off a pineapple are chemically close enough to trick the dog's brain in that respect (and if it's just a few bonds off, that confusion is entirely plausible - it's about the geometry of the molecules sticking together). but, given that pineapples have such a territorial almost urine-like smell, i'm fairly convinced that it's interpreting it as some kind of living thing, and is just unaware as to how it should react.

put another way, i think the idea that this is a territorial reaction is correct. that pineapple's territorial smell is invading it's turf.

from a class war perspective, this is rather intriguing.

so, years ago people started drawing connections between violent behaviour and violent messaging. so, studies were done and the conclusions come to were largely that the violence in these kinds of games act as an outlet for rage at a system that treats us as worthless commodities. that is, the evidence seems to suggest that video games do more to prevent violence than they do to create it, thereby creating a pliable and subservient population that takes out it's anguish on a screen rather than on the system that produced the anguish. it's kind of marxist, really. video games are a sort of opiate of the masses...

now, if you extrapolate that to something like this, you can construct a kind of sedative out of it.

so, are you done clinging to the one aspect of your humanity that you have left? good. get back to fucking work...

ok, here's the thing: elephants are remarkably intelligent. they've recently been classed with apes and dolphins, and it's becoming clearer and clearer that they really belong in a class of their own. they are the animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind. there's some evidence that they're able to understand syntax. that's extremely rare. really, we can only be sure that humans can do that.

what does that mean? well, you can teach a dog to fetch a stick, and you can teach a dog to fetch a beer. but the dog doesn't understand that fetch is a verb. it takes the two commands as independent things. so, you'll need to teach it to fetch a third object as a new task. it seems to be that elephants can be taught what the idea of fetch means, then apply it independently to different objects without being explicitly taught. that's a remarkable level of cognitive advancement.

so, all these comments that are like "look. even a dumb elephant can figure this out." are really missing the point. smart ass comments about bratty kids aside, the reality is that full grown elephants are as intelligent as toddlers.

ok, i can understand why she decided to make a song like this. it's an ego trip, sure, and that's been the dominant theme in mainstream music for nearly forty years now. but there's a point to it. so, it has a purpose as a statement. i can argue that the statement is pompous, boring and irrelevant - but it's there.

what i don't understand is why the fuck anybody would want to listen to this as a form of entertainment. maybe somebody can explain this to me. musically, it's pretty much flat out boring. there's nothing to really relate to on a conceptual, political, emotional or any other kind of level.

i mean, it's one thing to make something like this. i can get that. it's another thing to consume it. and i don't get that....

can somebody explain that to me?

it's still hard to believe that this was the lead single on the new record from the biggest selling rock band in the world.

in 1993.

and it was a hit...

despite being a rather ruthless parody (as much of their 90s stuff was), it's almost 20 years later and this seriously stands up better than virtually anything else in the genre, then or now. the production still blows virtually everybody else out of the water, and nobody's really managed to get that big stadium rock anthem sound in the way they were consistently so good at...

all those subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, guitar effects are taking the instrument into the digital universe in a way that had really not been done previously, and has rarely been done since - especially not in pop music.

publishing atom’s / taught to twist the affected so low (inri060)

this is two conceptually linked outtakes from mid 2002 that document an event that i'm going to be vague and obscure about.

written in august, 2002. track one was mildly remixed on dec 12, 2014; two and three were uploaded unmodified. final completion date is dec 12, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitar, effects, bass, drum sampling, drum and other programming, digital wave editing, vocals

released august 31, 2002

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/atoms-taught-to-twist-the-affected-so-low



1) i've been very apprehensive about publishing this, but i want to be complete and it was a long time ago.

the summer of 2002 is pretty messy for me. i was very isolated, going through hormone therapy and on the brink of psychological collapse. so, my memory over those months is quite blurry.

for this reason - and others - i'm going to withhold the back story to this track. part of what i'm doing here is writing a biography, and the purpose of that is obviously for readers at some point in the future. that's inevitably going to lead to me framing certain things in a specific and subjective way. as far as this track and these months are concerned, something happened that i'd rather is just simply forgotten. i'd prefer to leave it at that, and for readers and listeners in the future to simply respect that.

to be blunt, it would be difficult to make much sense out of the situation by interpreting these lyrics, anyway. they in no way reflect anything close to an accurate analysis of the situation. it is better to interpret them as rambling lunacy triggered by a schizophrenic episode than to try and make any actual sense out of them as a reaction to something that happened in real life. i was simply not living in the condition of sanity at the time.

i do want to point out that i'm taking some poetic license in the lyrics - you can't really make literal scientific sense of it, so don't try. i was actually more reflecting on my feeling that this science/math education thing wasn't really getting me where i wanted to get to in life. there's a few layers in there, but it's the last line that's the key one.

this was completed in a messy state over a few days in august, 2002. i mildly remixed it to turn the rest of the track up relative to the vocals on dec 12, 2014.

spinning alone
through an empty shell
a sole electron
moves out of it's orbit

the number is zero
this is the covalence
a bond is impossible
while surrounded by neutrons

yet a sole positron floats
in and out of the sphere
the attraction is strong
but it never comes near

the laws now collapse
as the electron moves out
the positron senses
and runs in fear

electrostatics
multiplicity
inverse attraction
the smaller repelled by the larger

physical laws only mean so much
even an electron seeks a positron's touch
the purpose of living is to lose what you crave
bohr, bohr, bohr, BORE spins alone in his grave

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/atoms


2) the effected solo. i thought it was clever at the time.

this was recorded in one take while i was doing guitar parts for the untitled techno tune. my head was blurry and i needed to just stop and jam. i then took the part (which was isolated from a much longer improvisation) and ran it through a series of effects to create this soundscape. dated to august 25, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/taught-to-twist-the-affected-so-low


3) i was doing bass parts on the untitled techno tune when i received the wake-up call...

dated to aug 31, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/wake-up-call

"i'm full of myself.....i'm full of myself......"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aumesNKKo3E

i still don't understand why they don't use soy....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o6Hh6tQj2w

i'm actually rather convinced that matt lee's purpose in these daily briefings is to waste time in order to prevent legitimate questions.

the question deserved the response it got, as a consequence of it's utter naivete. how are the iranians supposed to know what the americans don't want them to do? yeesh. the subtle propaganda in the question isn't the idea that the iranians are malleable to american influence - for in truth they are, and anybody that knows the situation knows this (despite matt's enforcement of the axis of evil narrative). rather, the subtle propaganda is the idea that the iranians can somehow get out of the situation they're in by playing along - that the americans are reasonable actors in the conflict, driven by rational concerns and a desire for dialogue. ask ghadaffi or saddam or even assad how well that worked out.

it's not a question of whether the iranians care about or know what the americans want. it's a question of whether the americans care if the iranians are being co-operative. the answer is they don't.

and i'd have laughed at him, too, if i were her.

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

the "incentives" driving the sanctions are not to change the behaviour of the regime, they're to try and incite the population to revolt.

this ends one of two ways...

1) the regime is overthrown.
2) iran becomes a russian protectorate.

....and the "detente" driving talks is a reaction to the increasing likelihood of the second option, not something coming out of a desire to bring the iranian regime back into the international community. on that point you have to give the obama administration a little bit of credit. that's something successive american administrations have not really taken seriously.

"if you grab his tail, he might take off..."

yeah. take off, eh.

hosers...

deathtokoalas
we've seen a few videos of these "crystal clean" lakes, and...

clear water like this is generally not indicative of a healthy lake. a healthy lake has plant-like stuff floating around in it.

you know what actually creates that kind of a situation? acidification. the clarity is generally a response of the ph sinking to a point that it can't support any kind of life. these crystal clear lakes that have been destroyed by acidification to the point that they cannot support life are called "dead lakes".

that doesn't mean that every lake that looks like this is the result of acid rain. there are other factors that may create the same result. but a lake in a mountain in slovakia would likely not be this clear unless it's been destroyed by emissions floating south from germany.

Michal Špondr
Maybe there are just no plants in such height. :-P And maybe it's a melted snow which got frozen again, snow doesn't contain animals. If you were right, Europe should be full of such lakes because of the emissions.

deathtokoalas
europe is full of these lakes, and slovakia is the most affected area.

Nox Solitudo 
I mean, Slovakia usually gets a lot of emissions floating SOUTH from Germany, and probably north from France too.

deathtokoalas
yeah, it's not like this is something that hasn't been studied to death. there's a lot of industrialization in the east of france, but it's the tremendous industrial production in germany (and, to a lesser extent, production in russia) that are the culprits here. really, it's a little surprising how few people have an awareness of this. if you google something like "acid rain europe", you'll see a number of maps that designate the worst areas as existing in a swath through the center of europe that includes sweden, poland and the former czechoslavakia.

SuperMegaUltraPigeon
I thought it was clear because of the shear altitude meaning there is little dirt or plant/animal life, sort of like an isolated lake.

deathtokoalas
yeah, i know this is an idea out there, but i don't think it's really accurate.

so, why do some high altitude lakes lack fish? obviously, fish need a way to migrate to the lake - they can't fly in. they could maybe get dropped by a bird, but that's a fluke thing, and unless they're asexual or pregnant they can't breed alone anyways. so, a relatively new lake that has no way for fish to get in to it will not have fish in it. but, those factors don't apply as well to other types of life. the idea that high altitudes eliminate soil, plants, insects, mammals, etc is not accurate. these kinds of things exist at all altitudes...

nor is there any connection between the glacial origin of a lake and it's ability to sustain an ecosystem - except that sometimes these lakes have unique ecosystems. there are glacial lakes all over canada with elaborate ecosystems. some of the best fishing is in the rocky mountains.

similarly, high altitudes are not a buffer against the high acidity in the rain in the region - which is well established. looking at pictures of the lake doesn't tell me anything. but a google search for tatra mountains and acid rain pulls up several results.

i'm acknowledging that i'm putting two and two together, here. but acidification is really a far more likely explanation for the clarity of the water than the idea that there's no life or soil because it's an isolated glacial lake. glacial lakes are isolated from the waterways in the region. they're not isolated from all the other ways for life to find their way to them. and, they're generally not void of life - unless they've been acidified.

SuperMegaUltraPigeon
You are probably right, i was just doing my bit of speculation. However i imagine even at such altitudes if the lake wasn't acidified then even some form of algae might live, causing the lake to not be clear.

deathtokoalas
ok, i've deleted enough people regurgitating something they read at some pop science website to make a final point and close the thread. just because you've found a link to something on slashdot or reddit doesn't mean the information in the link is worth reading. and, it's certainly not a reason to swing it around the internet like a biblical quote.

my point is that the popular media perception of this is probably wrong.

yes, black ice is more transparent than snow. but what this describes is how well you can see through the ice. it doesn't describe how well you can see through the water. a healthy lake full of black ice would be...black. because the water would be full of stuff. that's why they call it "black ice".

to get that kind of clarity through the lake, you have to be dealing with extraordinarily clear water - water that really only exists as (1) water coming from treatment plants and (2) water in lakes killed off from acidification.

thread closed.

deathtokoalas
i should maybe put this in my own post. the brilliance of zappa is that 75% of his audience never really figured it out. kids today are sorting through his work, and they still don't really get it...

so, what is this? what this actually is is frank going to a doors concert (or something like the doors, in los angeles in the mid 60s), saying "this is the dumbest goddamn thing i've ever seen", realizing he's gotta do something similar if he's going to gig and responding with a tongue-in-cheek parody of it.

it may come off as sort of groundbreaking. and it certainly is, in a certain respect. it's bitingly satirical, in a way that foreshadows punk rock.

but it's not meant to be taken seriously. like, if you want to listen to this and drop acid to it, go ahead. his estate'll take your money - in frank's name. but he's laughing in his grave....

like, if you can imagine being at a zappa show in the mid to late 60s...

it's full of hippies, of course. it's that place and time. but what zappa's doing, the whole show, is making fun of the audience. he's taking their culture, exposing how stupid it is by taking it to the most absurd extremes it can go and then selling it back to them...

...and they're largely just oblivious to it. hey, they're having a good time, right? too stoned to care....

as performance art, it's brilliant.

but it remains very poorly understood.

what i'm getting at is that you're not supposed to listen to this and think about how ahead of it's time and influential it was - despite it being influential and ahead of it's time.

you're supposed to listen to this and laugh at how blatantly idiotic it is, and by extension understand how blatantly idiotic the counter-culture of the time really was.

CommieCotch
What I like about you is you're smarter than everyone else who's ever lived.

deathtokoalas
well, i think i know a touch more than nothing at all. that's a little bit exaggerated.

Kian Stra
well.. It seems to me, that Zappa just like weirdness and absurdity in music. He didn't like the drug culture and he had conservative ideals (but not like any conservative), but I definetely think he liked the spirit of counter-culture of the 60's, as he himself was against alot of mainstream concepts both musically and otherwise.

deathtokoalas 
i think what you're picking up is that he was frustrated. he was ready to build a new society, as was promised to him growing up. but, he looked around at what he had to work with and he just laughed. you couldn't build a tree fort with these bozos.

frank wasn't really a conservative, he was more of an anarchist. and, this is the problem that anarchists consistently deal with: if the whole world was like us, we really wouldn't need a government. we could build a wonderful utopia. we would respect each other. we'd clean the fucking toilets, and we wouldn't even bitch about it. we're ready for this.

but, then we look outside our rooms and realize we're in this perpetual three stooges skit and have little choice but to shake our heads and resort to some kind of art.

Kian Stra

Zappa gets asked if he's an anarchist in this interview, and he responds that he's not, he's a conservative. I think it's honest, because they are discussing a serious topic (censorship/freedom of speech). He later gets accussed of being an anarchist, to which he shakes his head disapprovingly. He answers that he prefers legislation based on morality in form of behaviour as opposed to morality in form of theology (but whether this is his personal point of view or just the prefferable point of view in this context isn't clear).

Off course he might had changed his political views over the years, I'm not sure about that :)

also if someone is truly an anarchist, you wouldn't build a new society. You would destroy the structures that make up a controlling society. So a better metaphor would be destroy a new society, haha. Okay now i'm just fucking around. Have a pleasant New Year's Eve!

deathtokoalas
well, actually i think you've stated frank's view fairly succinctly in your second comment - he was all about destroying the "new society", because he realized it was the same as the old one. but, building and destroying are also the same thing.

anarchism is a really broad term, and i should have known i was going to get a reaction like this. but, there is a core streak in anarchism that overlaps with old-fashioned conservative concepts of upholding codes based on behaviour. in order to have a society free of governance, we need a behavioural process of self-governance - a social revolution. frank is denying he's an anarchist, then describing a key tenet of anarchism.

see, i think frank may have thought he was a conservative, and perhaps identified weakly with a concept of old democrat conservatism with strong roots in agrarian concepts of liberal anarchism, however warped they may have been, but he was highly critical of the conservatism of his own period. i know he self-identified. but, you have to interpret what he's saying correctly. and, the truth is that these words become very confusing well before zappa's period, and have remained confusing, in evolving ways, since.

so, i didn't say he was a raving anarchist. i suggested that it makes more sense to categorize his views as more anarchist than conservative, if you're going to throw the words around at all.

at some point, one needs to address a motive for the type of social criticism he engaged in. he's not demonstrating a passivity towards activism, he's demonstrating a sincere sense of disappointment in it's then contemporary form.

Kian Stra  
I think you're right. I also think what he describes in the interview is quite anarchism-related, but Zappa isn't only an anarchist - he's more plural ideologically, and that's probably why he doesn't want to get pigeonholed :)

deathtokoalas 
yeah. i'll grant you that the idea of defining anarchism is this constantly dangerous contradiction in terms, although i think it's less profound of a problem than a lot of people suggest. i mean, you don't want to go walking around saying "anarchism is this list of principles" - even if that list of principles is fluctuation to change, reaction to empiricism etc. although, at some point, you have to do that.

i think the reason he reacted so badly is because it was used as an epithet, rather than a description. and, that kind of thing resonates and has effects. i also think his decision to claim he was a conservative was more meant in the sense of contrasting him with his opponent. neither his denial nor his self-identification should really be read too far outside of the interview's context.

and, now we're about to zoom in on the mating rituals of the appropriating upper class american white woman. it may seem confusing, as there are no male suitors in sight, but the appropriating upper class american white woman is taught to perform and practice the mating ritual for many years before it is actually used. they must shape themselves into spectacular sex objects in order to compete with other appropriating upper class american white women and ensure access to a mate.

hearing the original ‘convoy’ for the first time

i thought i had lost it, but i've recently found the cover of this that i did in high school. i had no idea at the time that it was an actual song, i thought homer was just making it up as he went.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rTTC3M6lh4

updating inrijected (inri022)

so, i've added four more silly minutes to this silly release of silly rejected outtakes from the late 90s...

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected

rap news 30

as for the vid, it's a long debate that goes around in circles. i don't think anybody that can think clearly about it really denies our own role (although maybe a vid like this helps in holding that mirror up), but trying to address it becomes recursive very quickly, breaking down into the obvious statement that we have to change ourselves but without a clear approach on how to actually do it.

there's this whole gramscian view that we uphold the system because we're taught to. from this perspective, it's impossible to do this "the revolution starts inside" bit until we're able to abolish the institutions that put the bit of the oppressor inside of us. but, we'd need to transcend the condition in the first place. and around in circles we go, tracing out an infinite series....

the only way to break this is to acknowledge a vanguard or what could be called an anti-vanguard. i think vanguard politics are discredited, myself. the anti-vanguard takes us into post-leftist thinking. temporary autonomous zones. but this assumes real revolution is impossible. that sounds defeatist, but is it merely realism?

the expanded pyramid you put up is worth dwelling upon. i think that, existing in the middle of the pyramid, we lack the ability to really change anything - largely because we can't adjust to a system that we neither have the right to tear down nor the right to reconstruct. the best we can really do is stand in solidarity with the people at the bottom of the pyramid, in helping them reassert their autonomy, the meaning of which changes from situation to situation. it's only once we can start talking about labour rights in china or land-use rights in brazil that we can understand how we can adjust to a fairer globe.

in the mean time, it probably means that post-leftism is realism rather than defeatism. that's a level of humility that inhabitants of the heart of the empire are going to find difficult to adjust to. perhaps that humility is in truth the real necessary first step.

i mean, i think the expanded pyramid sort of obscures the controlling aspect. you see a pyramid like that and you think that each level is dominant over the next, but is it really so? there's little doubt that "debt slaves" in the advanced industrial world are heavily reliant on production outside of it, but it's worth pointing out that that's a situation that keeps them in place rather than one that empowers them. we're increasingly seeing a situation of structural high unemployment in the developed world that's a reaction to unionization and is directly caused by outsourcing the labour that would alleviate the unemployment; while the unemployed may end up consuming foreign products with what amounts to debt, that doesn't put them in a less dependent position, or in any kind of a position of control. the pyramid presentation is consequently somewhat inaccurate. but, it's inaccurate at the higher levels, as well - this absolutely ordered hierarchy is a gloss any way you look at it. we used to think of this the other way around - we used to think of colonial areas as places to dump goods, in order to enrich the colonizing powers. switching the relationship doesn't construct a power relationship so much as it exposes the underlying economic mechanism. that is, it's more accurate to think in terms of two ends of a market. in order to make money, you need to be able to produce goods cheaply and have a place to sell them. if you take either end point out, the whole thing collapses. it's not entirely fair to suggest that the consuming side of this is as well off as the producing side of it. but it is perhaps instructive to point out that the entire purpose of the new world order (if it's defined as advancing neo-liberalism in the post-soviet era) is to slowly place them on an equal footing. i'm going to agree that if you ask the factory worker in china what the nwo is, they'll tell you it's the consumer base in america. but, if you ask the mass of unemployed workers in spain, they'll tell you it's the absence of economic opportunity created by the globalization of labour. and, maybe they're both right. that takes away a lot of our own agency. and, again, i think that's even more frightening. but i think it's very true.

the idiots have a valid point: progress from where we are forwards happens when this kind of thing is no longer necessary. dude really shouldn't have to do this, and it shouldn't be effective as a ratings boost.

see, this is the good shit....

commenting on an effects pedal video

deathtokoalas
that's a cool sound and all (i created something similar in guitar rig about 2007 and use it in the "first movement" track at my channel), but the problem with something like this is that as soon as you package it it instantly becomes a cliche. with all the versatile tools out there nowadays, it's hard to see why anybody would want to go for this...

keep the boxes for distortion, kids. you can make your own effects, nowadays.

ShadicoTheHedgehog
maybe somebody just wants to buy an effect and use it and not go through the trouble of creating one

deathtokoalas
maybe. but, then i'm going to slam their record when i hear it for using stale cliches. i think guitarists operating in this space have a real civic responsibility at this point to try and do something different, because the form has gotten repetitive and it's going to be lost, otherwise. you could claim it's been commodified by the effects industry, even, who have standardized these sounds that were previously just experiments. getting around that means taking full advantage of what you have in front of you.

the way this process ought to work is that you have the sound in your head and you're using the tools to create it, not that the tools give you a sound. this wasn't previously possible for musicians without an electronics background. but, it is now with the electronics that are available.

you can only listen to a combination of chorus/reverb effects for so many decades before it's time to move on. 

MrSpreadem
i agree with you. For the $200 price point you might as well buy a multi effect for a bit more and get some weird sounds like this and way more. By the same token, I personally find it hard to get enough time to play so id prefer something simple that has "classic" tones.

But ya everyone who is serious about making a living in music, you really do need to innovate and you can't do that with sounds from the 60s/70s

publishing trepanation nation (inri058)

there are a few ideas in my discography that i've explored from multiple angles, but nothing else at all like this track, which has been through multiple complete rethinks involving multiple people over the course of thirteen years. as the revisions are so diverse, i think that a comprehensive collection of interpretations is a proper entry within my discography.

in the end, this emerges as my fourth symphony.

the collection is to be arranged chronologically in two discs, with the first disc consisting of mixes that were meant for inclusion in band projects* and the second consisting of mixes that were created after the track was moved into my own various one-person projects. i've placed the second disc at the front of the sequence to stress the july, 2002 release date.

further discussions of the various incarnations of the tracks appear on the track pages, or are linked out from the track pages. please click through.

written over 2001 and rethought repeatedly over 2002, again in 2007, a third time in 2009 and one last time in late 2014. final mixes were completed over the last week of november and the first week of december, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

*the classical guitar version and quiet isolation mix are available for download only due to space limitations on the physical media

credits:
j - guitars (electric, acoustic, classical), bass, synthesizers, drum programming, orchestral sequencing (10), drum manipulation, vocal manipulation, voice (8), live & digital effects processing, digital wave editing, loops, equalizers, soundscaping, sampling, composition, production, cover art

sean - vocals/lyrics (2,4,6), ring modulator (6,7,8)
greg - drum performance sample source (5,6,7,8)

the rendered electronic orchestra on track 10 includes tuba, saxophone, flute, clarinet, orchestra hit, piano, violin, viola, cello, contrabass and various full string sections.

numbers refer to the physical tracklisting, rather than the bandcamp ordering.

released july 4, 2002

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/trepanation-nation



1) it was around 2006 that i first decided to clear my discography of what had become irrelevant sample work - not irrelevant in the sense of the messaging being obsolete, but irrelevant in terms of listening value. i feel that listeners should be given the opportunity to choose. i've tried to keep instrumental mixes of conceptual tracks since that point.

however, i wasn't able to find the instrumental rabit is wolf copy that i knew existed so i tried to build the mix from scratch. i wasn't able to recreate large sections, or get the volume correct, so i put it aside until the the last few days of july, 2007 when i tried again. at this time, i was able to find an early instrumental remix from roughly april, 2002. this mix was only about half done. i added some of the remaining parts, but was still working in cool edit at the time and consequently had some difficulty syncing them well. i also added some extra production effects. however, i still wasn't really happy with the result and just put it aside.

i went back to school in the fall of 2008 with the aim of putting the music aside permanently. this didn't happen, and the truth is i never really thought it would. however, i wanted to compile a disc of symphonic shorts (jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/symphonic-shorts) as a last release. some further modifications were made at this time, but it still didn't really feel right.

it wasn't until april 24, 2009 that i got a mix together that i felt ok about. while it doesn't include every piece of the track, it includes everything i could integrate well. that version has been in the symphony's final resting place (jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ftaa) ever since.

unfortunately, some of the sequencing on the 2009 mix is suspect, and i ran it through a transform at some point that made the mix sound tinny at points, while introducing some digital noise. this mix has now been discarded.

in line with my decision to comprehensively complete my discography, i've completely deconstructed and reconstructed the track in cubase by carefully lining up the files using clues provided by the waveform. i've also deconstructed parts of it using the technique of digital phase reversal. this has allowed me to remaster it properly and also to ensure that it's completely in sync. this process included liberal use of digital effects to make it finally sound how i always wanted it to sound.

this is the final and definitive version of the track. the song was completed in this form on july 1, 2002 but the manipulations in the mix also date to (1) july, 2007, (2) august, 2008, (3) april, 2009 and (4) nov/dec, 2014. final mix completed on dec 7, 2014. no new sound was recorded after july 1, 2002.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/07-trepanation-nation

an open letter to the fucker at the mixing desk...

listen. people have been mixing things differently for different equipment for years. there's a substantial amount of 70s aor that's mixed for fm radio, and sometimes even specifically for cars. what that means is that if you're listening to your favourite zeppelin disk on a turntable then you're doing it wrong - pop it in your car, and you'll hear the drums and bass come out better through your trunk, if you still have that kind of system in your car (and you probably don't). in the late 70s, people started mixing things for clubs, and it's still something that defines essentially all dance music. when mtv hit, people started producing different video mixes for tv. you'll notice that if you track down old videos on youtube they're often mixed differently than the versions on the records, to compensate for crappy tv speakers. there was an industry built around "digital remasters", which was a reaction to the jump to compact discs. a lot of early idm is mixed specifically for headphones, and doesn't sound nearly as good when played through a set of actual speakers. more recently, some producers have started mixing tracks specifically for mp3, which means laying off the compression at the mastering stage because it's understood that the source is going to be compressed. i stumbled upon this myself in the late 90s, when i started realizing some of my songs sounded better through mp3. i didn't understand the role of compression in mastering at the time, and was essentially stumbling upon a crude form of mastering.

my music is eclectic, but it's broadly in a progressive rock tradition. what that means is that i'm mixing for reproduction. but i'm specifically mixing for reproduction over headphones. i make this very, very clear in my repeated requests for people to listen over headphones. but, you also need to be listening to it from a decent source - a stereo system, preferably.

it's not a question of one approach being better than another, it's just a question of how the music is meant to be listened to.

so, yes, i'm going to mix the bass in ways that may cause somebody's phone to explode. when i listen to my stuff on my laptop speakers, i often can't even hear the bottom end at all. but i don't fucking care about people that want to listen to music through shitty equipment. sorry.

i know that a lot of people want to be pragmatic about this, but i don't. it's going to be a function of any music that uses the spectrum in a complicated way - it's going to sound bad on cheap equipment. that's why it's cheap equipment...

as stupid as this is, you gotta understand it sounds better out of a car with a subwoofer in the trunk. it's easy to understand when you hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC-T0rC6m7I

and if you're trying to listen to this without phones, you're missing half the mix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRUREWB_sJw

this is such an absurdly influential track, with such a mixed legacy.

on the one hand, you have to give it credit for defining punk rock. i know this isn't done very often. zeppelin are usually cited as the antithesis of punk rock, and their own fans are happy enough to wear that designation. zeppelin and queen get skipped over in favour of garage rock and a collection of acts vaguely defined as "proto-punk". but, when you line this or stone cold crazy up against the stooges or the sonics, it's pretty obvious what was more defining.

on the other hand, it's the earliest example of nordic metal and, by extension, black metal. this song created a fucking monster of epic proportions. it makes you want to burn every copy of it in a fucking funeral pyre.

as for the song itself, it's a solid riff and one of the few examples where robert plant isn't overwhelmingly annoying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC-T0rC6m7I

i run into this story every now again and i just think it's important to point out that the experiment was flawed to begin with, and it neither would have demonstrated what it claimed to demonstrate if it were successful nor does it disprove the point by failing.

the idea is that if you raise a genetic male as a girl, the child will grow up to identify the way it was raised. but, let's think carefully about this. if that were true then, surely, it would follow that if you raise a genetic boy as a boy it will grow up that way. then, transgendered people should not exist. that is, if the experiment were successful in the way it were phrased it would suggest that transgendered people can't exist at all, not that it's a purely social question.

nor does it have anything to say anything about genetics. david was not given a vaginoplasty and did not undergo hormone treatment (during or after puberty). there's not any reason to think he grew up to identify as a male because he didn't have a transgendered gene. there's just too many factors to get to that end point; he did not have female genitalia and did not receive female hormones, both of which are important in determining identity. the only thing that can be concluded is that people do not necessarily identify with the gender identity that is thrust upon them, but that is the condition of gender dysphoria in the first place.

a lot of commentators have looked to the case and suggested it's a good thing that he never received the vaginoplasty or underwent hormone treatment, but i think this is a complicated point that they're over-simplifying. it's impossible to know how the experiment would have turned out had he had a vaginoplasty and received hormones, but it's reasonable to suggest it would have had some effect. as it is, david was never given the opportunity to become secure in any specific identity. he was only given a very confusing contradiction to try and work through.

i think there's plenty of research that suggests that girls with brothers that are close to their age demonstrate more masculine traits, and vice versa. his brother wasn't really a control, as he was one of the most important influences in his upbringing.

the takeaway to the experiment is consequently neither about conditioning nor genetics, but simply that you can't enforce gender identities on people. you have to give them agency in determining it on their own.

my understanding is that the "bad words" issue initially largely had to do with class, some of it ethnic-based. the etymology of the term "vulgar" has to do with the language spoken by the common people, as opposed to the language spoken by the elites. britain has historically had an english-speaking upper class with a specific dialect, with commoners that speak a melting pot of celtic and germanic languages in a wide variety of dialects, many of them coming out of quasi-pidgins: mixes of english, gaelic, welsh and norse. this has of course been twisted around through various filters. but the idea is really simply that the upper classes should not use the language of the lower classes.

when it comes to dick v pussy, i think it's interesting to reflect on penis v vagina. if you were to have this discussion ten-fifteen years ago, the feminist perspective would be to demand that you use biological terms. it's a vulva. it's a clitoris. it's a vagina. let's be scientific about this, alright? but, i don't think this discussion has ever really seriously been had with male genitalia. think about this: when was the last time you heard somebody other than a doctor use the word "penis"? it doesn't happen. take your pick of slang, but it's really ubiquitous.

i think part of this is that men actually desire the association of their bodily parts with dirty and violent concepts. dudes want to think of their genitalia as these blunt instruments, rather than as something physiological. penis is consequently somewhat emasculating. but, i'm not sure the opposite argument holds as well.

if i were to pick, i'd rather hear people use penis in place of dick more regularly than use pussy in place of vagina more regularly. but, if the crux of the argument is that there's a double standard, it's accurate.

i mean, there's a continuum of thought in trying to disarm the pejorative. but i think that arguing for liberalization of the term "pussy" is more likely to enforce the idea that women's bodies are dirty (as the various slang for penis enforces the idea of men's bodies as a violent tool of control) than to somehow take it away as an insult. sure, a lot of this has to do with context. but, once again, i'm not really comfortable with laci's rather unusual brand of feminism. it seems to be patriarchal thinking in disguise....

deathtokoalas
yeah, they give more than a few ships...

.....to totalitarian dictators, who use them to repress their own populations.

the army does that too, though.

Doug Magill
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/watch-out-we-got-a-badass-over-here-meme.png

Penguinpimp95
When did the US Navy ever give a ship to a totalitarian dictator...? Sounds like someone is a little butthurt over something

deathtokoalas
whenever propping up a dictator furthers it's own interests...

egypt is the prime example, but it's not the only one.

for those that are unaware, egypt is the second largest recipient of american military "aid", which essentially means that we give them money to buy equipment from us. it's a legal loophole, basically. the only country that receives more "aid" from us than egypt is israel, and the things are related - in return for this "aid", egypt maintains it's peace treaty with israel.

it's billions of dollars, annually. that's a lot of ships.

yeah, this is no good, and it's frustrating because the agent provocateur is a tactic the state uses (it was something bismarck's secret service first used against socialist revolts in germany) and stuff like this has the effect of discrediting the suggestion when it's actually legit. the balance of probability is that the cops are using similar tactics in the area, but be careful what you post, please....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT0uaZ5Ymeo

deathtokoalas
i haven't been to a dinner like this in years. when i moved out, i made it a point to avoid going home for christmas, thanksgiving, etc. for the last few years that i was at home, i'd avoid the family by sitting in my room and then wait for leftovers; a part of the problem was that holidays were the only really free time i had, and i didn't want to waste it with family. my parents would have preferred me to eat with the family and stuff, but they were sympathetic to my introversion, my preference to avoid children and the inevitability of every family get together devolving into a political argument due to the vast levels of divergence in basic thought. it doesn't really make sense to take people that are polar opposites and more or less hate each other 360 days of the year and expect them to get along for a few hours out of the sake of some stale convention.

but there was a brief period when i was about twelve-fifteen when this kind of thing was relevant. that's the most unrealistic part of this: the fact that this guy is in his 20s. by his age, his character and religious beliefs should be well understood and the family should have already made the decision to quietly accept or quietly condemn. if he was fourteen or something, but this should have been dealt with years ago...

that being said, i don't think he's really overreacting. i wasn't pushed very hard on the point. in fact, i believe my parents simply matter of factly explained it to people in order to prevent it from being a conflict; "she's an atheist, so don't expect her to take part in the prayers.". for my part, i just sat quietly and waited for it to be done. well, i may have eaten through a few prayers but it would have been out of honestly forgetting the convention, rather than an act of rebellion...

if my dad were to push me like this? i could see myself reacting similarly, and justifying it. overturning the second table was a bit much, but i think dad deserved a bit of pie in his face on this.

Molineux88
Why post something that long, this isn't war and peace volume 2.

deathtokoalas
i want you to paste that into a word document, note how long it actually is and then laugh at yourself.