JSngry

To complicate matters further... http://www.dustygroove.com/browse.php?kwfi...&format=all

I'd feel better about Ron Carter playing the Personal Bitch Card if he played the Musician Bitch Card more often.

Do you mean "between" as an absolute either/or, or as some point on or between these two poles?

Well, ok, that's just about exactly what it is. You've identified what "it is", as well as your current level of attachment/attraction to it. Nothing really "difficult" about that, eh? More like the act of a mature "listening artist" (apologies to Elder Dahn). What can, and often does, change is how far into that rarefied bubble you want to go/feel comfortable going at any given juncture of your life. And that is a function of your life, which is, as they say, subject to change without warning (and boy howdy is it ever...), not of the music, which by nature of it being a fixed quantity (i.e. - a recorded document/performance of certain specific people doing a certain specific thing at/in a specific time/place) is what it is. So really, the question you're asking is a fair one, but any insight gleamed from the answers is inevitably going to be about the individual who's responding, not about the music itself. A corollary set of questions that might provide a more provocative range of responses would be to ask to purveyors of generally-perceived "difficult" musics why they do what they do, does it bother them that their music is peceived as difficult, do they feel that they "should" have a larger audience than they do, is their "message" one that can only be delivered in one specific manner, and who, if anybody, do they blame when that message is not successfully conveyed? I think, based on both perception and experience, that a lot of people who provide us with this "difficult" music don't really, as a matter of principal, give too much of a shit about its "difficulty", and that is how it should be. Why they don't give too much of a shit is where things open up into some pretty interesting and widely diversified territory, not all of it necessarily "healthy", yet some of it being gloriously so.

"I got sunshine..."

Hey - I hear "Helen Wheels" on the radio last week and it rocked like crazy. Close enough. (P.S. - anybody ever notice that McCartney never lost the abilty to, when push came to shove, "rock" really well in the good ol' "old fashioned" sense? Or that that he's the only one of the X-Fabs to seemingly have retained this primal skill?)

Dude! Take preventitive measures, please!

In my world, thre's two things that make for difficult music. The more the emphasis is on "style" over "substance", the more difficult it gets for me. And, the more that somebody tries to convince me that nobody else has ever felt/heard/whatever this way before, the more difficult it gets for me. I guess in both cases it comes down to using music to claim an identity rather than to express one. Now, if you want to say that that's kind of vague or generic, fine. It probably is. But I can tell you from experience that thre's lots of music that I don't like that I also don't find "difficult". Similarly, there's plenty of music that challenges me, but hey, I welcome that, if that's difficult, then it's a pleasurable difficulty, and I really don't think of it as "difficult". And like Rod, there's music that I like a lot but just don't/can't/won't listen to all that much, simply because once you get it, you've got it. That type of music can range in degree of "difficulty" (as well as what it is that is being "gotten") from The Ramones to Cecil Taylor. No, what constitutes "difficult" music for me is shit that leaves no other impression than wondering why the hell anybody would do anything like this and jeeeeeezus when is it going to end and are they really so clueless as to think that anybody, especially me, is going to give a shit about what they're doing? And inevitably, 11 times out of 10, that reaction is stirred by my perception of one or both of the two elements mentioned in the opening paragraph.

Classic! Gee, what are they trying to sell here? Corrective footwear?

Ugly? Like hell! That's one of the most beautiful album covers ever!

NES didn't age well. SNES, by and large, has, at least in terms of # of quality games that still are fun to play. Maybe I'm too old school, but that's how I feel. My son has bought every (I think) damn system that's come out the pike since then, and they all have, at best, a "few" games that are long-term keepers. But he still breaks out the SNES stuff and still has a blast. He's only 21, so it's not like he's ancient like I am. I will say this - the Wii sports thing is a gas, especially the bowling.

Howzabout we shift the foucus of this thread to Miniskirts on Blue Note?

Absolutely. Ignore her at your risk.

Do you mean "Always There"? Don't know if you could call that a jazz standard per se, but there's been about a bajillion dance/house/acid-jazz/smooth jazz versions, Incognito's being perhaps the most famous.

Guilty as charged. Next up - Miles, Monk, Ellington, Archie Shepp, & Sonny Rollins.

Sorry, can't go there. Just can't. To me they're like parts of the best Beatles albums expanded into full albums.

And that, I think is where so may people went wrong in their expectations. The Beatles were always a pop band. And after the band broke up, the four members essentially remained pop artists, John's & George's forays into non-pop musics notwithstanding. When it came time to do something "for the public", hey, Plastic Ono Band, as raw as it is, at the end of the day, that's still a pop record. The focus is on the star, and the songs are all aimed at focusing the attention on the star. It's not "music for music's sake", it's "music for personality/attitude's sake". Which is beautiful, I mean hey, I love me some pop music, always have, always will. But to dis on the Beatles solo work for not being profound or anything is to perhaps operate from the assumption that the group's work was beyond or otherwise different from pop. It wasn't. It was just pop at an incredibly high level of inventiveness, and as afate would have it, it "spoke to the times" to a degree that pop seldom does. But it was still pop, and Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, & Starr were all pop musicians and songwriters. So it stands to reason that they would continue to be that after the band broke up, and they did. Lennon wrote pop songs about inner pain & political wrongs, McCartney wrote pop songs about domestic bliss and the joys of all things mundane, Harrison wrote pop songs about God and Life, and Ringo....Ringo made perhaps the best pop records of any of 'em. But they were all pop, and as such, hey, it's only gonna be so much unless you're at a special place at a special time. If you never were, and you put out a good run of well-written, well-crafted singles plucked form a bunch of so-so albums like all four or 'em did, hey, you're gold. Singles are the lifeblood of pop, artists and audience alike. But if you were in a special place at a special time, and you go on to make the same records, somehow it's a "disappointment". Well maybe, just maybe, the disappointment is due to unrealistic expectations and not subpar perfomance. Pop will never change the world, nor will it save your soul. The best it can do is give you some good energy to get you going on your way to someplace. The rest is up to you. That's really true of any music, but especially of pop, whose Conveniently Utilitarian Jiffy-Lube-ness is to be neither over- nor under-rated when it comes to things in general.

Well, yeah, maybe, if you think albums, definitely. But 70s Top 40 radio was full of ex-Beatles hit singles, and not too many of them out and out sucked. Most of them were damn fine pop singles. It's just that, hey, "we" were expecting "more" from ex-Beatles, and that just wasn't gonna happen. Really, what "we" were expecting was for The Beatles to happen without The Beatles. In retrospect, that was really stupid on our part, but oh well. Clueless idealism will pimp you out just as much as anything else will. And now we still look at it like is could have played out that way, should have played out that way. Well, no. It couldn't have, it shouldn't have, and that's why it didn't.

Best wishes to all!

It's just a blues.

If this is another FS pirate job, who are they pirating from? Who owns the Jazztone masters anyway?

Yeah, the whole "Saint Lennon" trip is a bunch of bullshit. Sorry. Don't get me wrong, some great, honest music there, but also some overwrought, oversimplistic, self-indulgent bullshit as well. I mean, anything more than a month or so after the fact, "How Do You Sleep" is...silly. Meow. meow meow, who gives a shit anyway? When Lennon hit the bullseye, as he often did, he hit it hard, but when he didn't, as he often didn't, it could get...silly. Or ugly. Or both. Paul got shit for "Silly Love Songs". Well, ok, "Whatever Gets You Through The Night" is a Silly Hedonism Song. Silly is silly, period. They, all four of 'em, were better, much better, together than apart. And they, all four of 'em, did post-group solo work of widely varying quality. And now, two of 'em are dead, one of 'em's not really "active" except as an occasional "attraction", and one, only one, of 'em's still making music on an ongoing basis. Let it be indeed.

Now, here's a man who knows what's important in life.

Reeds. But then again, I'm a gambler...

There was a 12" of that that sounded really good on the radio back in the day. Remixed to be more of a pure dance record. More disco, less puff. Check it out though - McCartney has consistently been a better bassist than generally given credit for. No, he's not a "heavyweight" or anything like that, but his basslines are quite often interestingly quirky. Like in this one, he emphasizes the b9 on the V chord. Not something that would "generally" be done. McCartney's a lot like Sinatra in this respect - his "image", his place in popular consciousness has gotten so large for both his fans and his dtractors that their fundamental musicianship is seldom examined the way it maybe should be. And for both of them, there's enough there to make blanket dismissals very, very difficult. The guy's stayed on the chronic for waaaaay too long, that's what I think. Still functional, still in touch with his creativity, but unwilling/unable to shake his residual silliness. The chronic'll do that to a man with eyebrows like that...