Tuesday 1 December 2009

i need something good to die for to make it beautiful to live

currently listening to " Them crooked vultures" album. Favorite album i have purchased this year that is current. So sick of all the wack happy music that sounds like the beach boys on loads of drugs and without the ability to play anything, or sing a note. It's like everyone thinks its so cool not being able to play. is that not the point tho? being able to play a bit? I mean there are some great bands that came about from not being able to play there instruments properly. But this is just getting boring!. I just want to hear a huge riff. So thanks Them crooked Vultures, you filled the gap thats been there for most of the year.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Completely know what you mean. Was on the bill with this band (won't mention names) but they really, really couldn't play and actually made my ears bleed - ok my ears didn't actually start bleeding, but I think you get the point - they were awful. Anyway their take on it was that they were re-inventing music, and that music is art and isn't about ability or being able to play fullstop, its about creation and going against the norm... ok I agree to a degree on SOME points, but does that really mean you can get away with being shit and subjecting others to it? The room was cleared by the time they came off Stage to which they announced that people clearly didn't understand artrock :o)

On a positive note, I've actually found quite a few bands that I love recently, so not all is lost!

I Am Mechanical said...

Hmm, probably my favourite lyric, like, ever. Was surprised to see it so felt the need to share. The Drums are shit. Which is whom I presumed you were talking about with the beach boys vibe thing.

Peter J. Schwartz said...

Well, on the one hand, part of the greatness of rock & roll is that unlike classical music it’s inclusive enough that one doesn’t need that much skill to make at least some basic version of it. With a few chords and a basic backbeat pretty much anyone can make something that sounds like a song, and as more and more technical effects become easily available pretty much anyone can make something with some form and a certain oomph. Ditto, sort of, post-pop visual art: after Duchamp & especially Warhol, everyone can make art. Which is good from the point of view of people’s wanting to make something & express themselves. Only that doesn’t mean that what they will make will be much good. Real skill and ideas are still required for that. Take a look at Warhol’s real early stuff, his drawings of shoes and so on: the man had skill, he could draw. I don’t think he could have had the ideas he did later if he hadn’t been able to draw, i.e. understand drawing & what it is to draw, i.e. the medium as a medium. And one really has to understand the laws & properties of one’s medium in order to do anything beautiful or interesting with it, including break the rules. The true definition of genius is not simply someone who breaks the rules, but someone who skillfully and intelligently breaks the rules in such a way as to make new ones, which others then follow (or break in their turn). There’s a kind of resentful resistance to the idea of genius these days – or, to take it down a notch: of aesthetic or intellectual quality. When it comes to art, one’s not allowed to say that some things are better than others: that’s elitist. But there’s a confusion there of several things (aesthetic, political, social) that I think may be ideologically motivated. The market says: one is not permitted to find anything that anyone else may want to produce or consume objectively inferior to anything else. It’s all a matter of preference & personal choice; no cutting into others’ niches. But, I believe, really, no: it’s perfectly possible to like & enjoy something you know is objectively unskilled; but it’s the things made with skill that are really beautiful, and those are what will last. To a degree, it’s taboo to say that, and this probably helps the market to react happily to garbage on a day-to-day level, but in the end, very often if sadly not always, people find out where the beauty is, because they need it.