Rock's appearance vs Jazz's appearance

[JSngry]

40 minutes ago, felser said:

Does that indict us, or does it indict the past 30 years of popular music?   Was anybody deeply analyzing Rudy Vallee's recorded legacy in 1969?    I don't need the records to be different, I just like to understand them better for what they are in context.  And the  context does evolve. 

Ok, what has happened over the last 30 years of popular music to "indict"? Please be specific, and please provide counter-arguments to any specific indictments.

And no, the context of the record does not evolve. A record made in 1969 will always be a record made in 1969, and if you heard it in 1969, you'll always have heard it in 1969. You might have changed a lot since 1969, but that record hasn't. And won't.

1969 is over. 2018 is almost over. Are we still "looking for ourself" in a record from 1969? That seems sad to me.

Hell, I watch those NPR Tiny Desk concerts every once in a while just to see a piece or two of what's maybe going on today. A lot of it seems silly to me (no more emo strumming folkies and or coy ukulele singers, PLEASE!), but that's a normal-enough old guy reflex. But the other day I saw Ill Camille and it was delightful. And it also had nothing to do with me personally, musically or lyrically, other than it seemed to be an honest and forthright exposition of somebody else's reality/truth. And that is something I hope that I always enjoy, not always the music itself, but the recognition of honesty.

Really, "liking" music is a game, oftentimes a silly game by the time it's over. It's ultimately not about the music, it's about the people, the humans doing this thing/these things. At some point, the music is just a transient delivery system for the intrinsic humanity. You don't have to like everybody to love everybody. Actually, it's probably best that you don't.

[Scott Dolan]

Interestingly, I don’t see myself in any music I listen to. Now, I did when I was a teenager growing up on Heavy Metal, but not since then. I wonder why? 

Music definitely speaks TO me, but not for or of me. 

[JSngry]

    

 

[Scott Dolan]

 

[JSngry]

Going out on a limb here, but speaking for myself, I get most of my "fun" and/or "meaning" from music these days from dethatching myself from any "narrative" I may or may not have with the records and just listening to the music like it's all more or less new music. Not the old musics I already know, because that's dangerous, really, doing too much of that. I mean shit that I've either never heard of have heard very little of or have not heard in alooooong tim, just listen to that like we're both (the music and me) just now happening. That's a great way to make friends with musics, friendships that can and often do develop into deeper more meaningful relationships.

But you gotta keep making new friends, that the key, gotta learn other vibrational pattens, other voices, other grammers, other syntaxes. I'm not nearly as good at doing that with peoples as I am with musics, but...it's a predicator for any further luck.

Same thing with food, gotta keep expanding that palate, no so much as to like more but just to be aware of more. Because when you die, if you're not kinda used to infinity, you're gonna be in for a rough time. Or at least that's what I think. I could be wrong. But yeah, that's what drives me in this life, to be ready to keep going once it ends, to have those molecules aligned to accept more, not less.

[Brad]

2 hours ago, felser said:

Another advantage of the European versions was that they had more songs on them!   Agreed on the White Album, it always has seemed like a collection of solo works rather than a group work.  Really not a favorite of mine, I like earlier Beatles. "Please Please Me" through "Paperback Writer" (and the accompanying albums) best.

Yes, they had 12 songs on them vs the US 10. Even though the WA is a collection of solo works, as you noted, it does have some notable songs that I like listening to from time to time. 

[Scott Dolan]

16 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Going out on a limb here, but speaking for myself, I get most of my "fun" and/or "meaning" from music these days from dethatching myself from any "narrative" I may or may not have with the records and just listening to the music like it's all more or less new music. Not the old musics I already know, because that's dangerous, really, doing too much of that. I mean shit that I've either never heard of have heard very little of or have not heard in alooooong tim, just listen to that like we're both (the music and me) just now happening. That's a great way to make friends with musics, friendships that can and often do develop into deeper more meaningful relationships.

But you gotta keep making new friends, that the key, gotta learn other vibrational pattens, other voices, other grammers, other syntaxes. I'm not nearly as good at doing that with peoples as I am with musics, but...it's a predicator for any further luck.

Same thing with food, gotta keep expanding that palate, no so much as to like more but just to be aware of more. Because when you die, if you're not kinda used to infinity, you're gonna be in for a rough time. Or at least that's what I think. I could be wrong. But yeah, that's what drives me in this life, to be ready to keep going once it ends, to have those molecules aligned to accept more, not less.

What do you mean by “detaching” yourself from a narrative? You can’t wipe your memory, so what happens when the familiar note patterns lock in with your memory? 

5 minutes ago, Brad said:

Yes, they had 12 songs on them vs the US 10. Even though the WA is a collection of solo works, as you noted, it does have some notable songs that I like listening to from time to time. 

I could likely boil The Beatles down to a 10 song album and not miss anything that didn’t make the cut. I’m usually one that appreciates over-indulgence, but that album is really a hot mess without the upside of say, Exile On Main Street. 

[paul secor]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

fwiw, the American & UK version of both Rubber Soul and Revolver are totally different records in terms of impact of concept.

and to fuck the mind a little further, Yesterday... and Today make for a whole other experience that existed only because of proprietary formulations of the marketing laboratory.

If you lived in those times and then only years later heard the official history as opposed to the manufactured history, hey...who knew that Rubber Soul was actually not a "folk-rock" album? I guess the rest of the world!

I'm probably in a minority, but I prefer the American version of Rubber Soul.

[Simon Weil]

33 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

But you gotta keep making new friends, that the key, gotta learn other vibrational pattens, other voices, other grammers, other syntaxes. I'm not nearly as good at doing that with peoples as I am with musics, but...it's a predicator for any further luck.

Got to have new stuff, new substance to keep you going. That's more or less it for me. It doesn't have to be in  Rock, Jazz, whatever. Just stuff, that you feel there's something happening here, something going on. In a way, that seems to me what life is about.

 But, yes, it can be old stuff - that you haven't "heard" before and suddenly becomes new to you. And then there can be stuff inside you.

[Contrary to  the quote, it was JSngry who said it]

Edited November 1, 2018 by Simon Weil

[Brad]

21 minutes ago, paul secor said:

I'm probably in a minority, but I prefer the American version of Rubber Soul.

From what I’ve read, it had two songs from Help but omitted four songs from the UK version, including Nowhere Man. I was going to say that sounds strange but if that’s what you grew up with and it’s now implanted in your ngrams, then it’s normal.  

Whenever I listen to a Beatles album, I know what song comes next and if I don’t hear the sequence I became accustomed to over the years, it messes me up!

[Scott Dolan]

3 minutes ago, Brad said:

From what I’ve read, it had two songs from Help but omitted four songs from the UK version, including Nowhere Man. I was going to say that sounds strange but if that’s what you grew up with and it’s now implanted in your ngrams, then it’s normal.  

Whenever I listen to a Beatles album, I know what song comes next and if I don’t hear the sequence I became accustomed to over the years, it messes me up!

Nowhere Man has always been on the North American release of Rubber Soul. Unless there was a different release than the one I’ve had on three different formats. 

As for the sequence thing, you are spot on. One recent example that really stands out to me is the “restored” version of The Final Cut from Pink Floyd. I simply can’t get When The Tigers Broke free to fit in mentally. 

[JSngry]

12 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

What do you mean by “detaching” yourself from a narrative? You can’t wipe your memory, so what happens when the familiar note patterns lock in with your memory? 

I mean when I'm checking something new/new-ish, I do my best to not buy into the preexisting historical hype. And when listening to familiar music (which I really try to do as little as possible these days, that can actually be unpleasant, to hear the same thing for the umpteenth time, no matter how "good" it is), I try to listen to the musical specifics of the record, the individual players, the production choices, technical things, not personal emotional histories. I do have a few things like that, but I usually have to be in a very dark or very bright place to go there. You know, for some things, reminders are unnecessary.

Examples of both types - my interest in "classical" music was wildly kindled by hearing Toscanini's reading of Beethoven 5 one afternoon while walking. I had put it on the iPod at some point for some reason and just decided one day, for no real reason, to check it out, because I remembered Beethoven 5, but hadn't listened to it in what might as well have been forever. I knew all the backstories and afterparties, but, you know, hell, let's see what's here, and WHOA - Toscanini played that fucker faster than was probably appropriate, but for some reason, those tempos made me think of Joe Zawinul's later work, and I go into this thinking that Toscanini makes Beethoven sound like Zawinul, how much more "Austrian" can you get, and then all this other probably completely inappropriate and probably inaccurate ways of hearing classical music, like, you know, Richard Strauss wrote some really hip changes, shit like that, totally not engaging in the narratives about what "classical music" is, was, or should be, at least not at the expense of a real time reaction. Of course, the more I learned, the more I learned, but even so, I can go to a concert or a record and hear it in an "unclassical" way, and that is, for me, a real delight. And it opens things up, because then you can hear other things in other ways too, and that is just plain fun.

And then...somehow I found myself having an Oldies CD single of Gene & Debi's "Playboy", a song which I had kinda liked back in the day for it's cheese factor. So one day, I said, hey, let's listen to the POS one more time and UH-oh, this drummer is kinda...unruly. Either he was really feeling it or else he was in a hurry to get the session over and was just driving that sucker to the door by any means necessary. And that fascinated me, because, you know, there are moments like that in some pop records, moments where the players are not well-oiled machines who can reproduce on cue, and this was one of them. and then, Debbi's voice just turned sexy as fuck. There's this throaty thing going on on some of the syllables that is just....delightfully erotic. And then Gene Thomas, there was a backstory there, but I had neither known or cared, this guy came early and stuck around. I now know and don't care about that specifically, but the image of some guy just always "being there", a little more visible than unknown but never really known, that not as much a "narrative" as it is an "archetype". And on top of that, the song itself is a weird motherfucker in terms of harmonies and structure and the arrangement, the way the vocals exchange the leads (solo and harmony) is really nifty. None of that was in my memory and I had been "hearing" that record for, like, at least 25 years without any of that being heard, much less thought about.

Now in both cases, yes, it was appealing to me that I was fining relatable things in the musics. But I was not looking for that. I found it, sure, but, you know, why the hell would I listen to "Playboy" at all, it was a cheesy single from my earliest teen years. And why would I randomly reach for Beethoven after spending the better part of a lifetime viscerally rejecting the whole Euro-nationalized concepts of things like correctness, meaning, profundity? In both cases, the answer was simple - it was there, so why not? Nothing to do with "narratives", everything to do with my own congenital musical promiscuity. And although, yes, I did see something in them, I don't think it was the thrill of "finding myself" as much as it was the delight of discovery of life on other planets.

In a manner of speaking, of course.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

When discussing how musical genres are "born" or created for the first time, I find it pretty funny that we center on Rock, a mainly UK/US creation. Back when the UK/US kids were spinning the Beatles, other countries were spinning vastly different records. Even today, pop on a Japanese radio station or an Indian radio station or a Chinese radio station etc. and hear a whole other world of popular music, some of which has been around as long as Rock.

In general, people often take a rather myopic view of the musical world.

[JSngry]

Desi radio is a gas!

And I confess, the discomboulation that comes with hearing Beatles songs "out of sequence" is not something to which I can relate. If you want to REALLY get your Beatlhead fucked up, check out the whole Beatles Remixers Group thing, there's been, I think, 6(" volumes. A lot of it is at best, uh...mundane. But when it happens right, it happens. And that's when a parallel universe opens up, all these Beatles records that were never made, yet here they are.

 

[Scott Dolan]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

And when listening to familiar music (which I really try to do as little as possible these days, that can actually be unpleasant, to hear the same thing for the umpteenth time, no matter how "good" it is)...

A couple of months ago it popped into my head, "I'm going to revisit my entire Coltrane catalog!" Two albums in, I bailed and moved onto something else. I just...couldn't. I found myself mentally disengaging from it because I had heard it all before, and SO many times! While I wouldn't describe the situation as unpleasant, I would say it was a waste of time (which I suppose is even worse). Seems to me the only way super familiar albums work anymore is as background music. 

The upside, for me, is with streaming it opens up nearly limitless possibilities. I'm no longer constrained by my physical collection of music. And because of that I've likely heard more music in the last year and a half than I had in the previous 10 years. No shit. Of course, there are downsides to that, which I won't get into now. 

[T.D.]

6 hours ago, Brad said:

...Re: the White Album, a Beatles album yes, but also, no, as the group was feuding and they each did their own thing, recording their parts separately in the studio. Not sure if this applied to all but it applied to Lennon and McCartney. 

I'm pretty sure I heard on some radio program or interview (years ago) that the Rolling Stones frequently recorded their individual parts separately. But I can't find any references/citations.

[JSngry]

23 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

A couple of months ago it popped into my head, "I'm going to revisit my entire Coltrane catalog!" Two albums in, I bailed and moved onto something else. I just...couldn't. I found myself mentally disengaging from it because I had heard it all before, and SO many times! While I wouldn't describe the situation as unpleasant, I would say it was a waste of time (which I suppose is even worse). Seems to me the only way super familiar albums work anymore is as background music. 

Well, you know, if you listen to something long enough and intently enough, it gets internalized. You know it's there and you know what it is. It's love of the deepest kind, like that line Donny Hathaway sang, you can't see t, but you know it's there.

Which is not to say that, as with any love, you can't grow apart. You can. And you can also rekindle an old flame. But like another one of those old sayings go, if you love something, set it free. If it comes back, etc.

Now, if I want to get narcissistic about it, I can claim that it confirms my humanity that I can keep listening to new stuff and keep growing, blahblahbla. What a good boy am I!!!!! Look, everywhere I go, I see ME.

But the reality is this - the more I find out I don't know, the humbler it makes me. not less confident, mind you. Just humbler. But it's a humility that brings joy, because instead of "seeing myself" in all these things, I see all the infinite possibilities that spring from the simple, basic fact of being a living human on planet Earth. There's nothing unique about that!

[Brad]

54 minutes ago, T.D. said:

I'm pretty sure I heard on some radio program or interview (years ago) that the Rolling Stones frequently recorded their individual parts separately. But I can't find any references/citations.

I generally stopped listening to them after Let it Bleed so I wonder if it was after that. I still enjoy everything before that. When I was in high school my friend and I used to listen to them religiously and we considered them better than the Beatles. In our high school, in Barcelona, we were a different minority.  As an aside, John Derek and Ursula’s Andress’ stepson, Russ Derek, was in our school. We had a lot of fun together.  

[Scott Dolan]

55 minutes ago, Brad said:

I generally stopped listening to them after Let it Bleed so I wonder if it was after that.

WOW! So no Sticky Fingers or Exile On Main St.?! 

Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile are the Big Four! One of the biggest win streaks in music history. How could you stop after the first two? 

[Simon Weil]

3 hours ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

When discussing how musical genres are "born" or created for the first time, I find it pretty funny that we center on Rock, a mainly UK/US creation. Back when the UK/US kids were spinning the Beatles, other countries were spinning vastly different records. Even today, pop on a Japanese radio station or an Indian radio station or a Chinese radio station etc. and hear a whole other world of popular music, some of which has been around as long as Rock.

Whenever I go up to my dentist (I cycle up), I go past Abbey Road. I actually turn off just before the zebra crossing on the cover of Abbey Road. It's always got a bunch of people standing there - having their pictures taken in the exact same position as the Beatles. Or I guess just being there in this iconic place (as they see it). They come from all over the world, making this updated version of a pilgrimage. There's always guys from Japan or China there.

[Brad]

1 hour ago, Scott Dolan said:

WOW! So no Sticky Fingers or Exile On Main St.?! 

Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile are the Big Four! One of the biggest win streaks in music history. How could you stop after the first two? 

I listened to them years later. My Big 4 are Aftermath, Between the Buttons, Let it Bleed and, even though it’s a compilation, Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass).  I like the earlier albums much more than the later ones. The first two I mentioned are, imho, superb. 

[Scott Dolan]

4 minutes ago, Brad said:

I listened to them years later. My Big 4 are Aftermath, Between the Buttons, Let it Bleed and, even though it’s a compilation, Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass).  I like the earlier albums much more than the later ones. The first two I mentioned are, imho, superb. 

They are indeed. 

What I meant was they are what most consider the big four. All released one after the other, and considered the best Rolling Stones albums. But hey, your mileage may vary.  If all I could listen to were the four you mentioned, I be perfectly happy with that. 

Did you not like Some Girls? That’s a phenomenal album, IMO. 

[T.D.]

2 hours ago, Brad said:

I generally stopped listening to them after Let it Bleed so I wonder if it [band members recording separately] was after that...

I got the impression it was well into the '70s. Exile on Main Street was my personal line in the sand.

[paul secor]

Between the Buttons and Exile are the only two I've kept.

[Brad]

2 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

They are indeed. 

What I meant was they are what most consider the big four. All released one after the other, and considered the best Rolling Stones albums. But hey, your mileage may vary.  If all I could listen to were the four you mentioned, I be perfectly happy with that. 

Did you not like Some Girls? That’s a phenomenal album, IMO. 

It’s been awhile. I will need to listen again.