scott

Add Loose Furs to Jeff Tweedy

It depends on where you were at on the globe, western Europe, especially Germany, were very limited to the ruling class, or the church, Bach was a worker for (pretty sure on this) the protestant church, Mozart was funded by royalty and the very wealthy, and Beethoven was the first from that area to start to be able to fend for himself, and managed to grab some public attention (especially the 9th Symphony) Then France was all impressionism, that while beautiful, was not terribly popular with the middle/lower class Scandinavia and the Netherlands actually had a rich body of nationalistic symphonies that were popular with everyone. The only area that I can think of that had 'high art symphonies' that were popular with the working class was Russia, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and a handful of others were Russian folk heroes, and the symphonies were widely attended.

And listened to people besides his kitchen cabinet Unless Cheney and Rumsfeld had a fake news crew in the White House basement who taped a 'modified' chain of events every morning.

See symphonies follow certain aesthetic rules that can change, and have quite a bit from the baroque to the classical to the romantic.... well not exactly 'rules' but guidelines. Then folk tunes are all about monophony and story telling jazz has certain chords and scales and lots of performance stylings, be it with soloing or big band interplay. But jazz like symphonies has had many eras, each one with a little variation. Whereas pop has no rules, and that is what makes it 'pop' it can borrow techniques from symphonics, folk, or jazz, but it is distinguished by it's total lack of rules. Then in recent years there have been lots of cross-polination, like Neutral Milk Hotel would be a pop-folk album, folk because it uses basic two (occaisionally three) chord voicings, and the lyrics more or less tell a story But then it's pop because the story structures are hardly 'normal' and there are moments where Mangum experimented with polyphony and hardrock. Then there are moments in history where symphonic composers borrowed from pop and jazz Benjamin Briten's 'Simple Symphony' used pop minimalism with sing along melodies and it was... a simple symphony (fun fact, Give Up by the Postal Service uses a buttload of samples from Simple Symphony) Then there's George Gershwin who came straight out of tin-pan alley and wrote loads of symphonic works with a heavy jazz influence. Then there's pop artists who borrow from jazz, most notably Radiohead, especially on Amnesiac which is almost straight jazz, but the electronica would lend to an argument against the album being 100%. It's really hard to sort things, and when you get out into these reaches you wander into BS territory, but the general concensus among music professor types is that everything is basically pop, symphonic, folk, or jazz. There are of course variations of timbre and arrangement within each (such as electronica in the pop umbrella) but the chord structures and harmonies are pretty much the same.

Nope, back in the day 'pop' would have been ballads and traveling minstrels and stuff. Technically it is something that's 'popular' but it also follows a different set of musical rules ...to try and clarify someone can write a 'pop' song but it could fail to gain an audience and not be 'popular' Someone could write a jazz song or a folk song or a symphony that is (magically) extremely popular

There are so many things I would rather do than listen to tool. Like listen to a rock'n'roll band that actually grasps and understands that they are not an opera performance, and therefore should have vocals that don't have vibrato on every single note. Or listen to a band that doesn't use a single root note as the tonic for every single fricken measure.

Pop music is 'technically' anything that isn't symphonic classical (be it in gregorian or romantic complexity) folk or jazz. So yes, it's quite a broad range!

Well sin comes out of the other one

Which was 1A? What exactly is this 'traditional' marriage that we're trying to preserve? Because it seems that most faiths have a historical backdrop of bigamy and incest, seeing how a majority of anti-homosexual attitudes come from that front should we re-define marriage to hold more 'traditional' 'biblical' paramaters such as being able to hook up with 10 wives at a time and your daughter? Not to cast stones in my glass house, but it feels like a lot of the arguments being thrown out against homosexual marriage have an air of contempt for homosexual people, that someone is a 'better person' simply because they enjoy the 'proper' hole. Seems awfully... I dunno, hateful. Life should be decent for everyone, if someone honestly doesn't care about passing on their genetic seed (gasp, it happens, regardless if we are just replicating strands of DNA and that is our only purpose, if someone doesn't want to believe that, why force them? Exactly why some d-bag in a white button up and slacks shouldn't force everyone to believe that there is an invisible man in the sky and we should all act accordingly) and they happen to love a man, really love a man (or a woman who happens to love a woman I don't wanna be sexist in my anti-homophobe rant) and that is the only time they have felt that 1 in a million connection, you know, that feeling that's a million cliches rolled into one, their heart is all a flutter, they feel ten feet tall, so on, and so forth and they want to spend the duration of their life with that person (at that point; whether those feelings will last and the marriage survive is moot, seeing as the heterosexual marriage success rate is not exactly stellar, a 50% divorce rate or so, and think of all those wonderful loveless marriages that drag on for decades) then who really has the high ground and moral authority to declare their bond unsacred in the notso iron clad institution of marriage? Furthermore, if we wanna take this argument down the 'what's to prevent someone from marrying a horse or a comic book' road..... first off Well, it's good to know that you find a homosexual to be worth about as much as a goat. Secondly I'll take us down this road.... so what, if an even smaller percentage of the population wishes to marry a duck or a coffee cup, let 'em, if they don't feel the need for romance or procreation, who's it gonna hurt? I'm pretty sure that by and large our population will continue to make babies, and that a large majority will still seek to find romance (and a large majority of that large majority will be heterosexual... still!) and humanity will live on.

A bunch actually, really cool technique

It seemed like McCain had been practicing that speech for a few weeks.

But Led Zeppelin was being used as a prime example of a band who faded into mediocrity, not one that ended strong but only so due to a death.

I'd say that they're more like Malkmus than Pavement, cuz Malkmus focuses on folk and jazz much more precisely than when he was with Pavement.

Elliott Smith might still count then ....He did kinda stop. Pavement. a 9 year career that ended with Terror Twilight, which had some excellent tunes then the band broke up. The Beatles Let it Be was the final release, and it was sub-par (not bad, but not beatles good) but Abbey Road was the last thing they recorded, now I personally don't listen to Abbey Road all too much, but it definitely has some great songs on it, and a lot of people love it a lot.

Blitzen Trapper is on tour with Stephen Malkmus right now, and I'm seeing them in Denver on Thursday, so wahoo.

Elliott Smith From a Basement on the Hill was one of his best and he had a 8-10 year career.

1 Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain - Pavement 2 Sonic Youth - Sonic Youth 3 Revolver - The Beatles 4 Silver Apples - Silver Apples 5 Blue Lines - Massive Attack 6 Complete Recordings, The - Robert Johnson 7 Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys 8 Surfer Rosa - Pixies 9 Tommy - The Who 10 Trans-Europe Express - Kraftwerk I tried to be trans-generational

Spin and Blender are for indy-kids with their blinders on. Rolling Stone can get a little up inside it's own sphincter sometimes, but for the most part it's a good read, there's some humor, great stories, really great sometimes, and they have some good music articles here and there, tho sometimes they take a corporate slant and you have to look between the lines for a good music recommendation.

All it takes is an a**load of overdubs and some interesting tones. That lead guitar part that comes in with the drums, the real chimey one, is the result of my new VOX amp.... wonderful sounding.

oh, it got changed to Knives and the Cerebral Short Circuit

Oh, I'm sorry, LastFM either glitched or I saw the number wrong. The only thing I could find on In Rainbows was that it went gold, but, I'll trust you. That just makes Radiohead more badass, because their decision to release an album for FREE! worked I mean, what's more independent than shoving threemillion records down the record industries throat? Anyways I'm still going to stick to the idea that a musical artist should only be considered 'overrated' or not based on musical ability.

But what really matters is that Radiohead makes good music great music which just means that there is a fair amount of people out there who enjoy good music.

But LastFM doesn't mean anything. I mean, to look at the RHCP Radiohead comparison Radiohead has 500,000 more plays but only 30,000 more listeners which just means that people who like Radiohead like Radiohead more than people who like RHCP like RHCP On LastFM but only on lastFM In real life, Californication was certified 5X platinum within a couple years It's just that Radiohead listeners are more likely to be users of LastFM, being that Radiohead fans are generally tech-heads. In real life, Radiohead is not that enormous they just have a loyal internet/college following the fact that you inhabit both of those demographics means that you have a lot of exposure to it, but Radiohead means pretty much nothing outside of campus/internet life. You're just standing too close to the portrait.

And Radiohead only has 100,000 listeners on LastFM 100,000 is not a lot of people Yes, it's a lot of people if you put them in one room, but not in the grand scheme of things. The radiohead fanbase is indy large, but still within the limits of indy, even if one was to count the OK Computer sales, the number can get bumped to 2.5 million which is nothing when you compare it to say, Nickelback who's 05 album has sold 8MILLION! copies in just two years 8MILLION! I'll say that again 8MILLION! GAK! Now, that's large Let's take a look at radiohead's numbers, I think the easiest way to establish the number of 'psuedo' fans is to subtract the amount of people who bought The Bends, from the number who bought Pablo Honey and Kid A as PH and Kid A are the albums that received sales spikes from OK Computer 1Mil-500,000= 500,000 so, there are about 500,000 real fans. I would consider anyone who bought multiple radiohead albums because they liked OK Computer, but nothing else 'Psuedo Fans' but all those people who liked OK Computer, but didn't purchase anything else are simply 'OK Computer fans' why are they? because OK Computer is/was excellent So, let's subtract real fans and 'psuedo' fans from the OK Computer total The most recent numbers I've found have it at 2MIL so, we'll subtract 500,000 real fans, and 500,000 psuedo fans and we get 1MIL OK Computer fans. So, maybe you can call OK Computer overrated by your standards of non-musical musical critique. But, everything else has listening base of 500,000 enough to make a small dent in the industry, enough to shoot to number one for a week but 500,000 is not many people so radiohead has 1/16 the fanbase of nickelback meaning that they are about...6.2% as big

But it's not that massive In Rainbows is certified gold, which includes an estimation on downloads. Meaning 500,000 copies Radiohead is not that big, any sort of illusion you're picking up, is because you're on a college campus, and teh internets are geared, and places like Last.FM are largely inhabited by a tech-savvy 'elitist' crowd.