Friday, October 17, 2014

avoids newfie joke


remember: if there's a hurricane, don't go out for supper. get delivery instead.
has taylor been listening to empty days and sleepless nights by defeater? or perhaps the downward spiral by nine inch nails? that abrupt stop is a useful device, but must be used carefully.

it's hard to approach something like this. i'm not a fan. i've heard bits and pieces of her work - never a full record. but she's as ubiquitous as diet coke. unavoidable.

as with the previous single, there are some decent ideas, but the production is very safe. maybe some day somebody might look at this as a transition record. i'm sure it will sell well. but what i'm hearing is ideas being lost in the recording process by a production team that is just looking to mass market something. my perception is that taylor shares that perspective.

you can get pretty far with very little substance nowadays, but it eventually catches up. i don't hear much here to justify the hype.

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

chief keef is the best comedy act around right now.

deathtokoalas
1) the stairway tele fender reverb intro is totally cliched, and sounds like a line 6 device on top of it.
2) the guitars are so perfectly in time and haphazardly played that i'm honestly wondering if it's put together with a sequencer.
3) when grohl screams nowadays, it's the kind of fake muffled/whispered scream that you do in your living room when your mom is sleeping with the intent of not waking her up. then he amplifies it through a limiter. honestly? that's no different than using autotune.
4) the little counterpoint in the guitar riff at the beginning would have been kind of neat if it wasn't so sterile and robotic.
5) the rest of it is just like...garage jamming on couches with cheap beer...and no effort....pulled directly from ass.

this guy is so beyond irrelevant that it's irritating that i need to bother. but he keeps selling records for reasons i don't really get. it continues.


Carnage Racing
Dude, it's just loud rock music, not something to be examined under a microscope. That's all Dave even meant for it to be... and THAT is why he keeps selling records. Quit over analyzing it. Listen or don't, but holy crap this isn't American Idol.

deathtokoalas
i suppose that puts the foofighters alongside whitesnake and kiss in terms of genre, purpose and fan base?

it's true, but it's very disappointing.

pointing out that it's cliched, generic and stuffy sounding isn't overanalyzing it. i didn't even mention the lyrics. it's just realizing that it sucks

Adam Green
Yet you came Herr to listen ? Keeps selling music because its a good song noon e said you had to like it but I'm guessing you do other wise why are you hear I don't go listen to Britney spears song's even if they are number 1 world wide

deathtokoalas
where is this idea of "coming here to listen" stemming from? this weird idea of youtube as a television replacement?

i didn't come here, the link came to me over a feed. i then checked it out out of curiosity. it was a long time ago, but i did spend quite a bit of time listening to the first foofighters disc back in the day, as well as records by that other band he was in. i have every right to listen to it and leave a comment, even if i haven't enjoyed anything he's done in over fifteen years.

i mean, you realize that when a band gets a million hits, it doesn't mean they have a million fans, right? it means they have an advertising machine behind them that convinced a million people to give it a chance.

from the band's perspective, this is an advertisement for their record. the audience listens to it in an attempt to decide if they're going to like it, not because they already do like it. if they already like it, they'll put on the record that they purchased.

right?

or, at least, that's how it's supposed to work...

so, if you're a fan, like, get off youtube and go listen to the record you bought and leave the conversation to those who aren't...

Carnage Racing
I just can't help but wonder why, if Dave Grohl is so iirrelevant you were still compelled to let everybody know that this song is beneath you. It's not a BAD song. In fact, the elements borrowed from other songs were done in tribute. That should be very obvious given that the entire RECORD was made to be a tribute to the history of rock music, you know, being that each song was recorded in a different studio in a different city featuring a different guest artist. Dave Grohl never claimed to be a superb musician. Never. He DOES, however, proclaim himself as a music lover, and everything he's been doing for the last 10 years or so has been about paying homage and respect to the roots of our favorite classic songs and artists. Foo Fighters themselves are a silly band, Dave admits this openly, but the one thing he's serious about is loving music. Watch Sound City and maybe you'll begin to understand what this is all about. 

deathtokoalas
if you take a look through my google profile, you'll notice that i post comments on a lot of current music that is popular, if not relevant. it's something that i enjoy doing, and my motives really aren't particularly relevant to the content of the analysis.

if you look at charts over the last ten years, you'll notice that the foofighters continue to sell absurd amounts of records. there are various obvious reasons as to why, but the band is in a category where the quality isn't really a dominant factor. anything grohl releases is going to sell. your reaction is a partial explanation of it.

now, i didn't really criticize the tune on it's lack of originality. i criticized it on it's lack of delivery. the riff isn't stolen from stairway, and i didn't say it was.

is it a bad song? it's pretty weak, for the reasons i mentioned. if you're looking for raw rock and roll, this isn't it - this is overproduced and lifeless. people age and their tastes shift and that's normal, but i continue to (perhaps delusionally....) expect a certain level of immediacy from his work that's been absent for years.

the take-away from the brief analysis is simply "more boring farty rock and roll from grohl, don't bother".

Juan Pata
im a big foos fan, and i have to admit this isnt exactly what LOUD rock and roll means to me, i cant really imagine myself gettin exited to hear this song in a show, this song is eally boring

deathtokoalas
it's not boring due to the structuring, though, it's boring due to the way it's being played. it's a neat, bouncy riff, but whoever is playing the guitars really does sound like a computer...

Juan Pata
yea thats what i mean, the structure is similar to but honestly but this one lacks power and feelindg that lookslike dave wanted to compensate screamin 

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
why do people have to be insulting? i keep blocking people that insult me out of principle, and nobody gets it.

i have a profile full of music. grohl was a bit of an influence on me up to about '98 or so, but i'm definitely not operating in the kind of commercial space he operates in. just because i don't write rock/pop music, though, doesn't mean i can't be a fan of it or criticize it in it's own space. i'm not looking to grohl to write symphonies, but it would be nice if he was a little less middle-of-the-road about what he does than he has been for the last forever.

also, i think you need to think carefully if you're going to start correlating quality with popularity. at that point, you're really going over the tipping point into farty rock music type thinking. nearly everything that sells as well as the foofighters does is absolute trash. grohl is coming from a different place, culturally, but there's an essay here i don't want to write - other than to plead with you not to make this argument.

Zach Farrell
i agree that this sounded over produced. Unlike their last album witch was just perfect in terms of production. Using old ways of producing rock is where it's at, as far as i'm concerned. It sounds better to me.

Elie Makhkouta
what about the small guitar solo?

deathtokoalas
what about it?

it's a good form, nothing wrong with using it...

Joe Blow
I'm a musician too bro! A+ for knowledge xx

deathtokoalas
don't bro me, dude. i'm thoroughly female.

Joe Blow
Whoops

Mango Supreme 
Do you have a source for #3?

deathtokoalas
if you know what a limiter sounds like, you know he's either using a limiter or he's amphibian. wait, maybe grohl is a lizard person.

probably not, though. limiters are widely used in recording. they're not often thought of as a production trick, but the truth is that they kind of are.

superstratman13
on number 3 could be just a chorus effect put in post production

deathtokoalas
a chorus does the opposite of what a limiter does.

limiters are useful. i use them for bass - virtually everybody does. with vocals, what a limiter allows you to do is yell into the mic without it crackling. with a really passionate, loud yell it's very useful. however, it can also kill the dynamics if it's used too heavily.

what the track sounds like is sort of barely yelling into the mic, then compressing it to make it sound louder than it is, the culmination of which makes it sound pretty fake.

it's not autotune in the sense of fixing a bad take. but it's no less processed, really.

there's a delay/echo or reverb on the scream though, too.

a good way to hear the limiting is when he says "someTHING for noTHING". the unprocessed take would hear the volume rise with "thing" in both cases, we'd have to talk linguistics to discuss that, but you know it's true through intuition and experience. that rise is then flattened out by the limiting into a steady flow. the whole thing is then boosted to give it more "grit". but the grit is in the processing.

i'm not a purist, or anything. the idea doesn't bother me on the idea level. it's just not meshing well in the track - it comes off sounding like it's trying to be raw, and not succeeding, rather than actually being raw.

excuse me, i have to take a call from albini on line two...

Solomon Kim
I watched your commentary on the sideline and I must agree with your points, though perhaps through different expectations, I am able to enjoy the song a little more "for what it is." You sound like a musician/producer (I have experience in both myself). Do you have anything online?

deathtokoalas
as i stated previously, i have a youtube channel full of music. it is crosslinked to a more comprehensive bandcamp site.

i'm currently in the process of "completing my discography", which ran from about 96-11. i got evicted in late 2011, lost my studio and had to re-evaluate the thrust of my existence. there's tons of half-finished ideas i'm completing and uploading. i'm currently in early 2002 in that process.

the earliest material (when i was around 15 years old) is coming out of a grunge influence, but it's primarily experimental electronic music and isn't going to be of general interest to most foofighters fans - especially not fans of post-shape foofighters. i'm not trying to stereotype, but it's the truth of it. 99/100 people viewing this thread are likely to merely be confused by it.

StripedDash
Man go and shit all pop music leave the only good nowaday music alone. Rest in peace , living monstrosity!

deathtokoalas
there's tons of great punk bands out there right now with heavy grunge leanings, if you'd take the time to look into it.

Solomon Kim
I'm a musician myself, primarily influenced by certain 60s sensibilities and modern sounds like St. Vincent and Kishi Bashi. I have a place for the Fighters somewhere in there.

Unexceptional Name
You're such a pessimist. On a lighter note, your profile picture (while creepy) fits very well with your attitude.

ChannelDead
you didn't mention he ripped the main riff from Dio's "Holy Diver"

deathtokoalas
i'm not familiar with dio, and wouldn't hear it if he did.
deathtokoalas
judging from the slur in his voice, my best guess is he was late because he was snorting cocaine in the bathroom.


Pat
He was waiting for a stimulant to kick in perhaps, the slur in his voice is from alcohol intoxication. Correcting the effects of alcohol intoxication on the speech centers is nearly impossible, no matter what drugs might be employed to do so. And he's just tumbling all over his words, nearly an incoherent speech pattern, certainly under the influence of something.

Philip
Because cocaine is notorious for making people slur their words....

deathtokoalas
it's a very common side effect, actually.

Philip
 I've heard of it with people who did huge amounts of cocaine at once, so I guess I've just never met a serious coke-head.

deathtokoalas
i've never tried it, but i've been around it. the immediate high - especially if it's a big line, or you haven't done much - is like a train slamming the side of your head. it's very disorienting. it doesn't last long, but you get most of the effects associated with inebriation for a short period.

most of the stereotypes of being jittery, paranoid, etc come from taking small dosages regularly. in that context, it's simply a strong stimulant.

it's possible that he may have taken a big hit knowing he was going on the debate, had it backfire and had to wait until he came down a little. cocaine is only a 10-20 minute high.

Philip 
Which is why you should always stick with nature's wonder-drug: dextroamphetamine.

deathtokoalas 
i'll stick with coffee, thanks.

Philip 
Coffee is a joke compared to amphetamine. I hardly even consider caffeine a stimulant.

deathtokoalas
i suspect you're very stressful to spend time with, then.

Pat
When one has been stone cold sober for 20 years, spotting these kinds of things at age 50 is like saying ... "That's red, that is a circle it's round, that's a stick, it's made of wood, that's dirty, don't touch it ... the stove is hot ... etc ..." It really is totally obvioius he's whacked. The speech centers in the brain and body are a major function of conscious intelligence and it takes an awful lot to screw them up, heavy drugs, like alcohol or big time pharmaceuticals. Valium maybe, some type of downer perhaps as that is commonly taken before a high stress public appearance, especially for those that sweat a lot at public events.

deathtokoalas 
i know you're pushing the downers thing, but, due to the fact that he's a republican, you're looking at two serious options: cocaine or oxycontin. but politicians tend to lean towards the coke. coke gives you that invincibility, that confidence. it's more what you want in a public speaking scenario than something that's going to knock you out or make you walk wobbly.

like i say, i'm convinced he took too hefty a line and had to sit down for a few minutes.

as people that know know, the "war on drugs" is just an absurd way to round up american blacks. the cocaine industry in the united states is basically interlocked with the republican party.

Pat
Bill Clinton ran billions of cocaine through Mena Arkansas for the CIA and the drug Cartel lords working together. Drug profits are so incredibly large the two major parties in the U.S. have to share the profits, or they would start a war, a civil war, there's just far, far too much money in the illegal drug trade for any one group to control it, they share. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth and they've been doing this for hundreds of years and it started with the Dutch East Indies company, opium, and cannabis.

TheBassAckwards
as It isn't just about being anti-black.. there's TONS of money is the industrial prison complex in America.  Private, for-profit prisons?  Noooo, I'm sure there's no corruption going on there!  Our county is going to hell.. well, it's already pretty crazy now.  I really wonder where what life is going to be like here in just 20 years, let alone 50 or 100.  1/2 of Florida will probably be washed away with Republicunts still saying climate change is a lie.
yeah, this is the version with the moody power chords that make the song. don't know what nellee hooper was thinking taking those out. massive attack or portishead would have made good use of them.

always thought this should have been a single, although you'll have to excuse the first few seconds.

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

she just about snaps when the background vocals come in and she realizes it's obvious.

everybody lip synchs these shows....going back to the 60s and continuing today...

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

deathtokoalas
it's not that they get away with it, it's that they expect they'll get away with it because they're taught they'll get away with it. so, perhaps they shouldn't be taught that they'll get away with it?

i'm not saying it's a good idea to shrug it off. i'm pointing out that it's well established that enforcement is not an effective prevention tactic, you need to get at root causes.

you look pretty frustrated. that's all the approach you're using is going to get you.


it's a losing battle; change your tactic.

in the broader scope of things, laci is a product of the failure of neo-liberalism. she's using very right-wing language, and i'm not entirely sure she really realizes it. it's just what she learned at school. i went through this somewhere else. all this stuff about victim rights is a product of the neo-liberal era. but, like everything else from the neo-liberal era, it's run into incredible problems in trying to reverse the decades of research that came before it on ideological rather than empirical grounds.

it's unfortunate to wake up in your late 20s or early 30s and realize everything you've been taught is bullshit. but, it's going to have to happen - and not just for laci, but for a wide cross-section of people her age that come face to face with it.

there may have been a sentence or two about weber and root cause analyses hidden in the back of your textbooks. your profs may have ridiculed it. but i'd really suggest picking up on that.

Samuel
I really don't think you can teach them "they won't get away with it" unless you actually provide a punishment for the act so they have real consequences for the act, and this wont happen unless there is a huge reform of the current system which protects and allows rapists to live free.

deathtokoalas
there's that "thinking" thing again. wrong way to try and interpret the world.

we're not rational creatures. we don't respond to incentives, and we don't respond to force. that is, enforcement has no effect on recidivism rates. it may seem logical to think that if you get "tough on crime" then the criminals will stop, but this has been proven wrong repeatedly. instead, what you get are smarter criminals. it's the most expensive, least effective approach. that's why conservatives love it so much - big contracts, no results.

yet, because the right-wing dominates the educational institutions nowadays and has since the rise of the "new right" in the thatcher-reagan neo-liberal revolution, what's being taught in schools nowadays is the kind of anti-science fundamentalist christianity that laci is articulating - without realizing it. it was presented to her as sociology, so she thinks that's what she's talking about.

but it isn't. it's christianity repackaged as science in this twisted orwellian manner. the sociological equivalent of "intelligent design".

the root of this starts when kids are young - it's the way they're raised. we need to get at the very root of the family unit, not just round people up for behaving the way the system expects them to behave. that is, when you live in a deeply stratified, hierarchical system you cannot be surprised when people treat each other poorly based on where they exist in the hierarchy or thinking that law enforcement is going to somehow abolish the hierarchy. it's only by abolishing the hierarchical system that produces the behaviour that we can expect the behaviour to cease.

again, that's not an argument for the legalization of rape. but the approach that laci (and the right, in general) is taking reduces to treating a corollary of a problem rather than treating the problem itself.
always thought this should have been a single.

best garbage tune - and there's a few pretty good ones. sort of a lost classic. somebody will eventually pick this up in a film, and it will take on a life of it's own...

ok, i'm not a fan, but i have to admit that this is charming in it's preposterousness.

as pop music, this is really top notch. it's a shame that so little pop music demonstrates this attention to detail. it's also frustrating how hit and miss this band has been for so long.....there's an amazing career retrospective awaiting to be compiled from their discography, but they never released anything better than a hit and miss disc.

but, it's the line "how you look and how you feel, they're not the same deal. let's live a lie together" that keeps me coming back. that's rock music theatrics at it's best...

there are two tapes i actually wore out in high school.

nine inch nails' fixed, and this one.


the second record was fun, but it didn't have the atmospheric charm of the first.

i really freaked out when i heard the third. made me very sad. i haven't kept up.
at my age, i'm now entirely used to wave after wave of bands eventually hitting the brick wall of suck, but we didn't even get three records out of most of the last wave...disappointing...