The old man still has a thing or two to teach the Gaga Generation: Mick Jagger.
Update: As the original Youtube video was taken down, here’s a different link for now.
The old man still has a thing or two to teach the Gaga Generation: Mick Jagger.
Update: As the original Youtube video was taken down, here’s a different link for now.
I have no problem being stuck in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.
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Just one more thing the Left is to be blamed for Mamaba, the idea that all cultures are basically the same, arbitrary, weak and of no real consequence. that’s what they actually mean when they say “equally valid”.
Culture is not neutral, nor is all of it safe to be let off the chain.
Erasure now, “A Little Respect”. ~:D
You know who I think never gets any respect but always is on the radio? Vanilla Ice.
coach – start with The Roots. YouTube has a lot of clips from them. If you like them, I’m sure Indiana knows a dozen other hip hop artists with a similar style.
Indiana Homez, you are using the oldest trick in the book, which is to presume that someone who thinks that the music today is not as good as what came before is an old fart.
That tactic is no different than screaming “racist”, and it is another form of relativist bullshit. Just one more reason why Western culture is in decline – we don’t value things based on their actual worth anymore. We value them based simply on the fact that they are different than what came before, and therefore must be good. That relieves us of the hard task of actually trying to determine the worth of something, which we are too ninny scared to do today.
This same self-defeating strategy is used in education all the time. New ideas in education are not employed because they are actually *better*, they are employed because they are different than what came before, and therefore must be good. How else would all those individuals doing “research” in education have jobs?
Same thing in music. How would all these new less-than-talented musicians (with some exceptions), make the record labels rich unless society was foolish enough to presume their music was actually worth something.
In most cases their music should be used as toilet paper, but due to very clever marketing by record labels, and due to the modern notion that all new is good, and all old is bad, the lousy “music” actually sells.
TJ – agreed. To paraphrase from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “We ask what’s new, not what’s best.” I am a Stones fanatic but appreciate the strength of Industrial.
It’s all a metaphor Mamba, all of it; and you are free to muse as to why people love hip hop, but you are wrong.
You never once consider that Tu-Pac is a legend. His music lives today, through kids that never heard him alive, contrary to the opinions that ‘classics have no staying power’, because what he says means something to those that listen to rap. That’s why Hip Hop rules, because it speaks to us. Can you say the same about John Lennon? Does it speak to you “conservatives”?Hip Hop is not negative, it’s positive, and it’s rooted in family, friendship and community. Hip Hop has given me strength when I was feeling down, the same as the music you love has done for you I suspect. If any of you EVER listened to an Eminem album(not a song), you’d know this simple fact. Hip Hop has been the most influential music genre world wide for the last 20 years for one simple reason, it’s been the best and most original genre over that time; and more importantly, the experiences of the artists speaks to us in a way that the nonsensical daisy-aged rock & roll can’t. For me, a melody full of BS doesn’t speak to me; but the struggle and the life stories of the rappers does.
Also, rap music is very contextual; therefore, if you are unfamiliar with pop-culture, Hip Hop, black culture and sports you are more than likely to miss most of the witticisms. It is very similar to an HBO series like the Sopranos where if you drop-in for one episode in season 5 you’re likely to miss a lot, think it’s too violent, think it objectifies women too much, and perhaps won’t like it at all.
And, it’s a lot like video games where if you’ve ignored them from Atari to PS3; you’re hooped. We’ve gone from a single joystick and one button to needing a degree in modern-day video game controllers. This ain’t PacMan anymore, and this ain’t RUN DMC. Rap/Hip Hop has been evolving for decades, and one likely needs to know the classics to a) know what rappers are talking about; and b) to simply understand the speed, flow and slang. Hip Hop history is passed from brother to brother, uncle to nephew, and father to son because Hip Hop hasn’t had the support of the establishment like other genres. We can’t go to Itunes and or HMV to get underground classics. You don’t pick-up War & Peace for your first novel, nor Talib Kweli for your first rap album.
BTW, check-out this amazing song called Gun Music by Talib Kweli. Listen closely and he touches on something very close to what you’ve said.
The bottom line is, it’s only the ‘geezers’ that have this issue. People under 40 have no issue with hip hop, rock or country; we just accept them as different and appreciate them for what they are. This discussion of rap vs. whatever is akin to the NFL vs. CFL debate. The debate is old & tired; or to quote Hanna Montana, it’s so “Yesterday”.
The energy! Yes! I’ve got something to say! Listen to me! Mick’s giving to his audience (well, as only “you’re so vain” can!), whereas the new crop are all saying “Look at me in my bizarro getup, whacky hair, and x-rated lyrics!!!,” while they suck the air out of the stadium — at least that’s how I see it.
Way back when, when I worked in a London emporium where Bianca and Mick came to buy stuff for the baby they were having (Jade), Mick was actually very soft-spoken and polite, which kind of surprised me! (I often wondered why I was surprised: Was I expecting him to rip off his clothes buying a bassinet for his baby?) Bianca was distant and patrician, in a camel hair coat, looking distinctly un-hippie.
Another alumna of the ’60s music scene who could teach these youngstas a thing or two, who could hold the stage with her presence and talent, wearing an off-shoulder blouse, long skirt, and bare feet, was Laura Nyro. Just her, her piano, and her amazing voice. No prancing (though, I kinda like Mick’s), no alien outfits, no crazy shoes or hairdos, no backup, no light show.
She was one class act.
As for Dylan: Hey, lousy, lousy voice but, boy, can he write lyrics that make you think, that plumb the depths, that make you laugh out loud — and then wonder why you were laughing, knowing that whatever it was, it tickled your psychic funny bone. ‘Love the guy. ‘Loved his Things Have Changed, for Wonder Boys, a movie I also love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgn23hb3du4
Gun Muzic link.
No I’m not TJ; I was just running with Kate’s ‘geezer’ comment.
In the Hip Hop world, I’d be considered middle aged(36). The rappers of the 80’s are now well into their 50’s, and so so are the fans. When I tune into shows and awards specifically for Hip Hop the crowd is usually 40+. Just consider the ages of some of music’s stars today: Jay-Z 40+, Eminem 40+, Black Eyed Peas 35+. These artists are fans of Hip Hop themselves and looked-up to groups Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, NWA and Rakim; who looked up to RUN DMC, Dougy Fresh, Kool Moe Dee and Tone Loc. These pioneers are well into their 50s, and so are their fans.
In reality TJ, the issue really is how some folks can’t look past their own obtuseness and accept that they could a) be wrong; or b) can’t accept that there’s something good that they don’t like; so, they do as you accuse me of doing, use Leftist tactics, and say things like “all the good music has already been made” and the sheeple all agree.
This age issue, only manifests itself as you move from large centers like NY to smaller centers and eventually into no-man’s land like Saskabush. Anecdotal speaking, the Rap crowd in Edmonton for example is about 10years older at the forefront than here in Saskabush; and the crowd in NY is about 10-20 years older at the forefront than in Edmonton. This is a result of how the music filtered through the different demographics. Saskabush was still well in the 90’s Country music phase well into the 2000s when it had completely flopped everywhere else, and when people were Hip Hop-ing in the 80’s and 90’s in NY and Cali, Edmontonians were still head-banging.
Well, I may not be a snarky geezer, Kate, and there may be more than three dance (style)s in these videos; that said, here’s Judson Laipply’s Evolution of Dance & II. Now 😉 my comment is that I think that many folks are confusing what constitutes good music in the long run with what they personally like in the short term, not that there’s anything personally wrong with that (de gustibus non disputandum est and all that), it’s just that it’s incorrect to project personal preferences onto the judgment of history.
Music that will be judged good by history will be that which has passed the test of time. There were many contemporaries of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, yet they are best known because they got the highest scores in the test of time. Other of their contemporaries are less known, others are lost to history.
Just about any temporal fashion genre in music will produce some good works & some bad, even jazz, rock, electronica, disco, punk, and taiko. The final judgment will always be in the form of the long-term survival of the knowledge & celebration of the composers, compositions, and performers across multiple varying longitudinal histories & human generations.
Indy, I’m younger than you are. Why is Tupac a “legend” to Australian Aboriginal kids in the outback who might not speak English well, who still live in a clan kinship-system, have never seen a city, and couldn’t find New York on a map? Kids who will be lucky if they make it to 15 without brain-damage from huffing gas?
They like the aggressive imagery, the dark skins, and the dance rhythms.
I’m not saying I hate hip hop. I like some of it okay. But the negative aspects are real.
Homez what I meant by “all the good music has already been made” should be clarified. If you take all the music that has been written over many hundreds of years, across all the genres, and through different periods in history – war, peace, etc. – the collection is enormous. And the collection contains many beautiful creations that represent pinnacles of musical genius.
It therefore takes extraordinary musical talent to compose new music that is of high quality,
The talent required to do that exists in extremely limited numbers today, hence we see instead that the music business has become a marketing business. Even in the classical music area it is becoming a marketing business (see for example what Simon Cowell has done).
The fact that those who don’t like most of what is produced today get labeled as being behind the times is part of a very clever marketing strategy.
I have always appreciated a wide array of music, and am pretty proud of what I have opened my mind to over the years. But on the balance the music generated today is pretty awful in my view, and the musicianship even worse.
I believe you can rank one piece of music as being better than another, and in the last 20-30 years the music biz has run dry of talent. That is in large part I think because – and I return to my original thesis – the musical universe has been well-explored.
Vίt, your points are good.
Awards shows are, well, gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I went to the Stones twice in Vancouver, in the 80’s and 90’s. I always figured that if I could be rocking like Mick, 30 years later, I would be doing okay.
Well still here and rocking……….Thanks Kate, Mick still has it. Lady Gaga, Pink, and Eminem, they are this generations music. I really like them too. You have to have music in you soul, old and new; it keeps you young.
I realize this is overkill, but what the heck?
Try to imagine Lady Gaga or Eminem or Whoever Else is on the musical stage these days: Just them and a piano (or a guitar)?
I don’t think so.
I don’t watch awards shows.
I don’t think many straight males do.
But, I did watch the Super Bowl, and the halftime show with the ‘Black Eyed Peas’ was the worst that I have ever seen.
I understand the NFL needed to go a different direction than Dinosaur Rock.
But, there doesn’t seem to be a lot out there!
What Ratt said @ 4:28 plus classical.
I know, I know, showing our age. You younguns are saying sheesh pops, get with the new stuff already.
Thanks, TJ, yet I still think you’re projecting your personal
preferences onto the judgment of history. How can we not, unless we say about
modern music nothing more than “I do like this” or “I don’t like
that”? One can only say that something relatively newly emergent is really good or really bad according
to classical standards long after one is dead (that’s what classical means);
one can easily see the problem with that.
Thus it is so that while you may
not like what has been composed, performed, produced, & marketed over the last
few decades, in comparison to what you like about what has come before,
you (and I) aren’t relevant to the judgment of history. Moreover, since you
(and I) aren’t tuned in to all the underground explorations that are being
undertaken even as we speak, neither of us can possibly know what music of
today will survive the test of time.
It is better to just live,
learn, & enjoy what one likes than
it is to project one’s preferences onto
all matters natural,
to die a grumpy old man.
OTOH, I like (there you are, Vίtruvius, personal preference: What else could it be?!) Rufus Wainwright’s Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk (did he ever win a Grammy>):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6N0sNMKFO4
He should have based his opera on his life.
Vίtruvius, surviving the test of time is of course an important property that should be used to measure the quality of music, but there are other measures as well.
Music composition is a non-linear optimization problem. It’s very hard to do well, even for brains that are particularly well-wired for the task. That non-linear space is large, but not infinite, and most of it is not worth exploring. It takes a genius to find a sweet spot in that space. Today it is much easier to find an average spot in that space and then market the hell out of it.
I don’t intend to die a grumpy old man, my kids will make sure of that. But my kids will know what good music is, and they will be the better for it.
I’m not so interested in the debate about what one likes or doesn’t like. There are times when I’m in my car and I’ll turn up the radio even though the piece of rock or pop music is really an awful composition. But what the hell, it’s fun, a bit like eating a Big Mac when you know the damn thing is unhealthy for you.
However to imply that a composer like Eminem is worthy of a serious discussion about music is simply not sensible. No “test of time” is required.
They used to call it stage presence. Only acquired by talent with experience.
Ive seen some actors enthrall a whole audience for more than an hour, by their shear delivery of just personal anecdotes. The real talents don’t need gimmicks.
JMO
I generally agree with you, TJ, and I don’t like Eminem either. Yet if in two hundred or two thousand years Eminem is considered to be a sensible contribution to the history of music who is worth noting, then your sensibility judgment will turn out to be wrong, and my de gustibus argument will not be wrong, because as BATB notes: what else could it be? Some people like the Quiet Life, some don’t.
And, for the record, eating a Big Mac is not unhealty, living on them is 😉
Though Quiet Life isn’t so quiet and the boys in the band are quite rambunctious … it’s OK. 😉
I prefer to not read politics into music until they start re-writing the lyrics to make them foucking PC correct to the listing police. I’ve got all my original 33’s and have gone “Galt” on this topic and Mick forms a big part of that collection.
http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/FCYRdPfJbi08X2WY?ref=nf
Listen to the words of Mocking Bird. Unfortunately this is a true story about what the young people face. Drugs, Divorce, Fame, Fortune and the most important, the part children. This is a story about life. It makes my heart ache. There are too many children growning up these days in situations like this. At least he was able to put it down in words. Maybe, it’s not to all’s, liking but it life.
I have enjoyed this discussion very much, although in general I disagree with the relativist view of music. After 30+ years of playing, studying, learning and listening to music (from the electrifying tribal rhythms of Africa to Beethoven’s untouchable piano sonatas), my thinking has matured to where I believe music can be graded, and a “test of time” is not always required.
In the end, much of the music composed today leaves much to be desired, even if it my be fun to listen to. That does not make me an old fart.
For something slightly different, here is Raymond Kurzweil at a young age playing a composition generated by his own homemade computer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn7ImsFM13k
Liberace
I was raised by elder parents. I Listened to: Liberace, Hank Williams, Dean Martin,ect. I have my parent entire record collect. My musical training is classical guitar. Music is about life and its story. With time it changes. Rock, Opera, Jazz, Classical, yes even Rap.
I have enjoyed this too TJ, and I agree that always required is too strong a constraint, yet as to where that test will (in every case) turn out to be eventual: I think that’s undecidable a priori. I agree that there is an ante-relativist base to music, at least within species as determined by the nature of the species’ brains, and across species as determined by the physics of resonant rhythm. It’s just that we humans are, thank god, pretty good at sometimes going around our bases, rather than always going through them.
You touch on this with your Kurzweil reference, TJ: most of the great advances in music have been based either on some advancement of technology (such as the stretched drum skin, the pan flute, Bach’s German Baroque pipe organ, Adolphe’s saxophone, De Forest’s vacuum tube amplifier, or Lilienfeld’s transistor switch), or on the evolution of the relationships between ethnic cultural traditions (such as Vaudeville + African + Yiddish evolving into Jazz). Who knows what will happen if we re-engineer our brains and jam with aliens 😉
And Rambunctious is, I think, a brilliant word choice in that context, BATB; very droll! Yet so it remains: will Japan be notable In the Year 9595? I don’t know. That said, I’ve got the Battle Pork Belly waiting for me as I continue to work through the Iron Chef episodes in alphabetical order, so I’m going to over-and-out here for tonight, folks. Thanks as always, Kate, for this opportunity, and now I’m off to more Life in Tokyo. G’night, y’all.
PS: Here’s Liberace’s 1969 Boogie Woogie, Mary, along with MarÃa del Rosario Pilar MartÃnez Molina Gutiérrez de los Perales Santa Ana Romanguera y de la Hinojosa Rasten’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and Tina Weymouth’s bass work in Born Under Punches.
‘Great opportunity to say it’s good to have you back, Vitruvius, and to thank you for your posts in which there’s no opportunity to comment.
Thanks Vit, I agree with batb. Your posts are most enjoyable. Thanks for the links. I love Liberace…………..
Thanks for the respectful discussion folks.
C’mon Mamba, there are many not rap American musical legends world wide ie Micheal Jackson in many non English speaking countries. Why is MJ a legend? Why is Mick Jagger a legend? Also, I love Latin music yet understand hardly a word.
listen to this song from Canadian/Somalian rapper k’Naan, who IS one of those dark foreigners that grew-up listening to rap in Africa. Take his word for it, not mine(last verse 3:30). You’re argument is akin to Leftists accusing us of being on Big Oil’s Dole. I find him very inspirational and fresh(although it’s a few years old). Listen to the song, and then get back to me with the same opinion as to the motives of people who listen to rap music. You presume too much, but you’re still my bud:)
People Like Me
Here’s another fav of mine called Somolia
Batb
You assume too much.
Lady Gaga and Elton John
If Elton’s got no beef, why should you?(kidding)
skip to 2:14 for piano featuring Sir Elton.
today’s artists are just as talented as yesterday’s, some people just have a hard time seeing through the bright lights.
Indy, you’re the one who came out with the Sopranos analogy – subtlety and context and all that. Personally, I cry myself to sleep every night because The Sopranos is no longer on the air (and even House has jumped the shark). But look, if some group of people who were about two generations away from being totally stone-age had adopted just this much of Western culture and not much more, that they were going around pretending to be Ralphie Cifaretto murdering a whooo-er behind the Bada Bing and… well, you get my point, but actually I don’t think my analogy holds. The Sopranos was violent, but it wasn’t an endless, adrenaline fuelled glorification of violence. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind said of Rock and Roll: “These are the three great lyrical themes: s@x, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.” For rap, take out the “brotherly love” stuff and multiply the rest by ten. Hip Hop has its good points but its themes, the things about it that reach out and grab a person (a child) who has no sense of its context, are violent, flashy, misogynistic and frankly sociopathic. The kids I was talking about had never heard John bleeding Lennon, let alone Mozart. They weren’t from the ghetto, they were from the outback. They deserved better, but now whitey’s a villain so they won’t get better.
Anyway, perfect Sopranos parody, and strangely, no language warning at all.
Indy – I like the K’Naan link. Probably wouldn’t have appealed to the Oenpelli kids, which is kind of my point.
” For rap, take out the “brotherly love” stuff and multiply the rest by ten.”
HERE’S THE CRUX OF OUR DISAGREEMENT
WHERE YOU SEE NEGATIVE MUSIC, I, AND HIP HOP FANS SEE POSITIVE MUSIC.
ANYWAYS, WE’LL SAVE THE DISCUSSION FOR ANOTHER DAY
AND SORRY ABOUT THE CAPS, I’M WORKING WITH ENGINEERING DRAWINGS AND EVERYTHING IS caps’on
I’LL CHECK THE LINK
LATER
BTW, GO AND GET THE BOOK “A GAME OF THRONES” BEFORE THE HBO RELEASE OF THE SHOW IN APRIL