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Originally Posted by evollove
It is an American idiom. Hence it's rudeness and arrogance.
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ha ha ha
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Originally Posted by evollove
Not really. Without basic grammar knowledge, lit is incoherent. Without basic music knowledge, rock, even experimental rock, still makes sense.
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sorry, no. you "hear" musical structure even if you don't understand it. you "make sense" of grammar even if you don't understand what the fuck a dependent clause is. you can see the beauty of a building even if you don't know anything about construction. but you can get another level of enjoyment if you know the nuts and bolts. just like everyone can eat a delicious meal but the initiated can get the nuances of seasoning and technique on top of "yum yum!". what i'm trying to say is that this love of "mistery" is just antiintelectualism on your part. which i think you justify by saying "i'm not the antiintellectual, this music is supposed to be dumb". which is why i linked you the article, in part-- he agrees with you-- rock is here to appeal to our baser instincts (and he quotes ronan's father on it).
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Originally Posted by evollove
Why choose? That bio stuff is fun, sometimes enlightening, and again, when it comes to classical music, someone needs to explain to me how, for example, Beethoven's counter-point works in the late string quartets.
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Why choose indeed? But it applies both ways and that's what the author of that piece complains about.
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Originally Posted by evollove
By the way. last night I watched the very good 20 Feet From Stardom. I enjoyed the personal stories, I enjoyed learning how the craft of background singing has developed. But I'm not sure I'd read a 400 page book on the subject.
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and because you wouldn't, nobody else would? how about just 2 pages?
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Originally Posted by evollove
Sorry. I read the first three paragraphs, then skimmed. That's a long article. Fugazi's sincerity ruined the DC scene? Is that what's going on? And I have no idea how old the writer could be. I sort of don't get what I was supposed to take from that vis a vis this thread.
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not sincerity per se, rather their earnest puritanism-- the sincerity gets mocked only secondarily. i guess you had to be there. but i linked it cuz it's a bit of social commentary on both rock and dc, and the social role of music, and if you look at the dispute it points out at the larger role of a certain kind of music in the culture, and how generational attitudes have changed.
the author is of course a sex-drugs-rocknroll baby boomer (because after the boomers came AIDS-- people always forget the boomer legacy of AIDS).
but in a different level it's kind of the same disputation you're making-- rock is dumb, doesn't need or deserve analysis or understanding, you just need to feel like the dinosaurs are back on earth. which is at some level true (which is why i liked the article, people at dc shows used to behave like monks), but at some other level it is not true, in the sense that a) there is now a long tradition of complex, difficult, "intellectual" rock, and b) musicians and lovers of music will want a little more information than "wow, that shreds, maaaan" or whatever is it that people say when talking about "dumb" music.
and with this i'm not even saying that i am capable of understanding what people like tears o'rourke or john mcEntyre brough to dumb-as-rocks rock and roll, i am simply complaining because i'm missing out on the understanding (not the feeling, i get the feeling) of it. and i like to rant on the internets.
also, i think the high-brow/low-brow art distinction you're making has been abandoned for over half a century now. it's all culture.