It’s pearls before swine, Magnus. Jazz musicians don’t try to play what is most difficult… they play what they are able to play, which happens to be difficult, and then simpletons like you come along and, because they personally dislike the style, call it pretentious garbage.
But there is also a pride and joy in the virtuoso. Sometimes he wants to attempt the most difficult things on his instrument for the purposes of expanding his power over it. Take a bassist like Jaco Pastorius. Total showboat… one arrogant sonofabitch. In fact, he got beat to death by a bouncer at a club after jumping up on the stage and taking the bass from the bassist in the band that was playing there (so the story goes). But was Jaco pretentious if he was that good? Nobody during that time could play like Jaco, and this was known throughout the entire jazz fusion community. Should he not be that good so people like you don’t mistake him for trying to play what is extremely difficult to play on a bass guitar? But he could play that way, it came naturally to him. He’s not trying to be difficult; he’s being himself, somebody who’s style of playing happens to be extremely difficult.
How the fuck do you know what a musician needs? So anybody who plays an instrument needs to check with you first to make sure they are in tune with themselves?
You know what all this is? All this is rooted in this hedonism fetish you’ve been engrossed in for the past several months. Anytime you find something you don’t like about somebody, they’re a hedonist in some form or fashion. A guitarist who plays machine gun leads on his guitar is a hedonist, because you don’t like it (jealous?).
Really? Does this sound cool? This piece was composed by a jazz fusion band to be played with an orchestra. Is this music genuine, heartfelt and sincere… even beautiful? Nah… these guys just like to pose with their instruments, look cool, and play difficult things.
Yes, they choose to play what is interesting for them to play, which tends to be what is difficult because they are virtuosi. In fact, it does not even matter whether they choose to play what is difficult or what is easy or what is simply on their level. The main point I am making is that they choose their musical combinations in a way which is radically different from the way natural artists do. Nietzsche spoke against Wagner for the same reason.
Jaco is a bassist who played his bass like it was a lead instrument. That can be helpful in honing one’s skills, but can that help one make good music? No, it leads to bad music, because noone wants to listen to bass music. And he was musically illiterate.
I’ve been engrossed in this “hedonism fetish” for years. I am not saying anything I haven’t already said several years ago. Even the music I post here is exactly the same music I used to cite as an example of decadence in the past (Hiromi, Animals as Leaders, H2O, Aphex Twin, etc.) Not jealousy, my friend, but reality. I am simply being real and you are simply being Zoot Allures.
You are too attached to Zappa, too much in love with him to be able to see him for what he really is. Step back, open your eyes and PREPARE TO DIE.
Everything that is mind numbing, boring and dull about bourgeois culture is perfectly captured in that song. The only thing I could think about while listening to it was which is worse; those pork chops on the sides of his face, or that corset you’re wearing.
All the best composers were players too. But all Progresive Rock musicians of any stamp were all player/composers. WHERE THE HELL DO YOU THINK the music came from???
It’s not the music Magnus has a problem with, it’s the modern instruments. If you took [insert prog rock song] and arranged it to be played by woodwinds, brass, violins, cellos, nylon string classical guitar and some kettle drums, he’d feel sophisticated and anti-hedonistic while listening to it and eating his fish 'n chips.
Now take that gay ass waltz and arrange it for electric instruments and a trap set and he’d hate it. Why? Because Magnus is a hedonist. He exhibits no self control over his infatuation with classical music. The fact is, he’s just jealous because he can’t shred.
First, just because something is popular does not mean it is bad. Similarly, just because something is rare (e.g. a bunch of black dudes jamming in a bar) does not mean it is good. You are confused on this one. When attacking music you should always attack it based on its constitutive elements, on what is within it, not based on what is outside of it and certainly not based on a symptom.
Second, just because something is simple does not mean it is bad. Similarly, just because something is complex does not mean it is good. You need to forget about linearity. Ordered simplicity is superior to disordered complexity.
Third, though “Blue Danube” is one of the most popular and one of the simplest classical pieces, it is certainly not a pop song, in a sense that there is a great distinction between it and 20th century pop music, including contemporary classical music, neoclassical, minimal and the similar (e.g. Ludovico Einaudi and Philip Glass.)
Fourth, the best way to demonstrate the superiority of a genre over another one is to pick one of its weaker representatives. “Blue Danube”, whether you like to admit it or not, is above anything Mahavishnu Orchestra ever did (even Jan Hammer’s casualesque ambient music, call it elevator music if you will, is more engrossing.)
You are an imbecile, Lev. You should just stick to your jammers and forget about discussions.
There is very little challenge ( = unpredictability) in jazz music. It’s mostly an initial, temporary, phenomenon. There is more unpredictability in IDM than there is in jazz.
point 1. Mostly it is true that stuff accessible to all, is usually pretty bad, not always, but then I did not say it was.
point 2 I never said simple was bad; I said I prefer something challenging, as Simple gets boring quickly.
point 3 Actually Strauss is widely regarded as the birth of POP.
Point 4 - this is what you are doing, not me.
And BTW. What kind of a moron thinks that prog rock musicians are not also composers. Dim fuck
That aphex twin is trash… it’s not even music. Somebody mixed a bunch of tracks on some computer software and then called it a song. This generally characterizes what happened to music in the early eighties. The advent of these new recording technologies. Now anybody can be a ‘musician’. Then you’ve got the explosion in the music industry… easily accessible means to produce and distribute music in the free market. Anybody can step into a producer’s office with a demo tape and cut a record deal. Finally, the consumer public, being musically illiterate, will by anything that is marketed. Now every fifteen minutes some new group appears selling the same crap… only it’s a little different this time. There’s a rapper involved, so it’s not just house music rave techno whatever whatever, it’s house music rave techno hip-hop. Thirty minutes later something else comes on the radio and is popular for a week. This time there’s some distorted guitar. So we have house music rave techno hip-hop metal.
Your animosity toward this kind of modern music is warranted, Magnus, but you have no comprehension of jazz (contemporary or fusion) or progressive rock. It is precisely the unpredictability of these genres that is one of the most important elements. Breaking from conventional forms and patterns in song writing. Structuring songs differently, composing songs with many separate parts instead or using the mundane melody/chorus format used all the time in mainstream, commercial music.
By the way, Hammer played with Mahavishnu Orchestra on several albums. Don’t know if you knew that, but I found it ironic nonetheless.
Watch Billy on the skins. This dude is a better drummer with one hand than any drummer you’ll ever find on the radio or in an orchestra pit.
Freak Out and Absolutely Free were parodies of the sixties psychedelic hippy rock scene, but also a shot at the record industries and the values that were prevalent over the music of that period. Frank was against censorship of any kind… though not for the reasons we might suppose. His attitude during the early Mother’s Of Invention period was two sided; he didn’t want to enter the rock scene (because it was silly and below him), but he had to, to make some money. Nobody was paying composers back then. Pop music and rock was where it was at. So what does he do? He enters the mainstream scene with a card up his sleeve. He will write music of the appropriate genre better than the rest, but at the same time make a mockery of it. A statement is made to the music consumers, music genre, music industry and the dominant values of the time with this one gesture: this is what you are, hippies… this is how simple your music is… this is how cheap your industry is… and this is how lame your values are. He didn’t want to censor these trends… he wanted to indulge them, set them loose, let them play out naturally. He used all this as material to work with in order to show people what they were. He was the master parodist.
This one was a shot at the bands of that era. You see the parody of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover there. It was also a kind of tongue and cheek admittance to his being in the rock music industry for all the wrong reasons. Because this industry was a joke, he felt, he was only in it for the money.
You Are What You Is can be understood independently, but also understood within the context of Thing Fish, the concept rock-opera album of which it was a part. Independently is can be seen as a social critique of consumerism and consumer identities. As part of Thing Fish it is specifically for the purposes of criticizing American negro culture. Note the incorrect grammar; you are what you is.
Yes. Great. Much of the modern philosophy is social criticism, and based on that fact one can say Frank Zappa was at least a little bit a modern philosopher. I know Zappa’s biography and his attitude towards social conventions; so I can say that your interpretations of the said music albums (see above) and Zappa’s person are right.
Musically I do not like the time since about 1980 very much; so it is not really a surprise that I know Zappa’s early music better than his later music. However. I want to show you a video from the 1980s with Frank Zappa. The official title of that video is “Frank Zappa on Crossfire” (1986).
“We are talking about words. … The whole thing is words. …” (Frank Zappa, 1986):
Frank felt it was his duty to defend the freedom of speech in music (however much he thought it was mindless garbage), but he also enjoyed disagreeing with hard core conservatives just to be doing it. He couldn’t stand the church or evangelism, but especially not conservative’s attempts to censor music because of their religious agendas.
The fact that he didn’t want to be there in that video is written all over him. He didn’t like media attention at all, really.
You’ve seen the hearings with Tipper Gore, yes? Frank was one of the few musicians present at those hearings, in an attempt to stop the parental advisory which we now see on album covers. To show his gratitude he wrote this song for Tipper.
edit: two part objection there. He objects to government intervention into consumer freedoms, so therefore liberally minded people who push for music censorship. But he’s also objecting to the conservative religious agendas behind the censorship attempts.
With the 80’s came the advent of new electronic devices for making music. This attracted people into the music industry who aren’t musicians at all, so the quality and integrity of music from that point on gradually digressed. It became easier to design a piece of music… and as long as the format was simple and familiar, people loved it. Moreover, capitalism hit a boom during that period, so the mass production of music and distribution was greatly enhanced. Now you had a new group appearing every day with some mediocre crap on a cassette tape. They get signed by some producer and a million albums get sold to the musically illiterate consumer public.
