Monday, February 17, 2014

people seem to think i care about genres. if i were to place my own music in one, it wouldn't otherwise exist. i call it "blender rock" in that it takes in influences from all over the place and melds it all together. it's a concept that roughly encapsulates the idea of "progressive rock", but explicitly rejects attempts to stabilize progressive music as having a defined sound. other artists i'd place in this genre would be zappa, beatles (66-69), hendrix, floyd, genesis (gabriel), can, elo, mahavishnu, crimson, bowie, queen, oldfield, cardiacs, cure, u2, swans, sonic youth, coil, foetus, neubauten, flaming lips, key/goettel, mbv, nirvana, nin, pumpkins, tool, tori, tortoise, mr. bungle, squarepusher, radiohead (-01), bjork, asmz, 65dos, keneally, mars volta, lightning bolt, spiral beach, man man, fuck buttons, genghis tron, battles, ssris, indricothere, st. vincent, pepepiano and la dispute. all are influences.

i'm interested in hearing about further examples of blender rock.
TAKE THAT YOUTUBE HIPSTERS.

man, i'm telling you. a hundred ad exec brains just exploded. there's no way to place this in a demographic.

i'm basically convinced at this point that youtube is swarming with "suits" that are going around ensuring that their products don't get bad advertising.

so, i'm trolling them. well the idea is to draw attention to myself in hopes that people might click through and listen to my own, but i find what i'm *actually* doing is arguing with ad execs that are trying to maintain the sanctity of their ads (which is what youtube is to a marketing douche - it's a way to upload advertisements for their records/products) while i convincingly insult their products.

of course, they need to find creative ways to defend their ads. so, they go looking through my shit looking for a way to create a caricature of me.

i'm on to you, fuckers.
man, this is an acid trip i'm tempted to actually do. yikes.

ok, it's hilarious in a zappaesque way. i'll give them that. but this kind of thing only works if it's the last or first song on an otherwise smokin' disc. i refuse to criticize them for this. instead, i'll criticize them for releasing this with a shitload of filler.

deathtokoalas
the people that censored this didn't understand it. strangely, that's often the case with artistic censorship.


it's anti-hierarchical, but it's explicitly rejecting violence as a means to that end and pointing out that attempts at violent revolution always backfire.

also, for those that are arguing about it, the offspring were, from the start, a middle point between old punk and what i'm going to call corporate punk. they have a certain affinity with the ending points of the first wave of punk - later damned, some dead kennedys and certainly bad religion. but from the very beginning they infused it with a very pop aesthetic. that's not to say they engineered the idea, but they certainly took it to a different level. strangely, though, the thing that made them stand out was a softening of the crossover sound. there's a really strong thrash narrative through their early work that clashed really well with the poppier influence that wasn't just from stuff like the descendants but also bands like the police.

think of it like this: you could very easily take out the lyrics on any offspring record up to 1997 and insert blink 182 lyrics and it wouldn't really stand out that much. it's like they had a pop-punk sound with an anarcho-punk ideology.

that being said, you can tell holland didn't lean completely anarcho-punk. people are often shocked to learn that there were actually republican punk bands in the period. southern california was a very wealthy area, and a certain right-wing subculture did arise from that. my hypothesis has always been that holland started there and grew out of it. you can hear it in his later stuff, like "why don't you get a job?", for example. that's kind of a conservative tune. even 'come out and play' has a certain right-wing vibe to it.

...and it landed them in some hot water with their peers. they really wanted to be on epitaph and eventually got there but gurewitz always hated them, initially rejected them repeatedly and literally sold them to columbia the first chance he got.

so, they don't really fit into either category. along with bad religion, and to a lesser extent fugazi, they form a bridge between punk and pop. the difference is just that they were way more successful than the others...

i don't know how much of their fan base really followed them back to their punk roots. i'm sure enough did. for me, they were the first punk band i really heard (well, excluding nirvana). smash was out when i was 13. had the disc. had the shirt. just from looking around at the other kids around me, it seemed like the same kids that were listening to offspring in grade 7 were listening to avril in grade 12. it seems like most people followed the punk pop trend forwards the way that mtv presented it to them. i hope they weren't listening to thursday after they graduated :\

but i have to say that if i were to run across them today as a new punk band, i'd be a lot more critical of what they have to say, and i can entirely understand why they were rejected by so much of the punk rock community. they were always half very punk, and half very not punk and in a very strange and almost contradictory way.

but i'm glad i'm not a trendy asshole :P

slumdog
Well maybe violent revolution always backfire but maybe killing a president or two would not harm, after all now they can just fuck us in the ass as long and as hard they want without any consequences but maybe if a couple of heads rolled just maybe they'd think twice..

deathtokoalas
nah. you need to think structurally. the president is the fall guy. you're supposed to hate him; keeps the oligarchs safe.

lincoln's death accomplished nothing, and they took out kennedy from the inside.
this is so ridiculously unforgettable fire.

but who else would think to follow it up with an early psychobilly tune.