THis is a thread where you try and remember the soulless pap from the eighties

Actually, I really liked Tower of Strength, but in a Meatloaf/Jim Steinman kinda way.

You are now my enemy.

http://themissionuk.com/images/archive/8687/86mish.jpg

Red Box though, arrrgh

Deacon Blue!!!

Such a flagrant skewing of all semblance of logic boggles the mind.

Though I liked their song on Red Hot & Blue when I last heard it.

(b) Who is talking about haircuts? I'm talking about SONGS! Fuckin' "Lies," "Love on Your Side" and, yes, fuckin' "Hold Me Now" are LIGHT YEARS better than fuckin' "Shattered Dreams".

-- Kim Tortoise

I posted Deacon Blue a bit further up the thread and I think someone else mentined Hue & Cry. They were execrable, as is Peter Kane's music writing, which raises an interesting question: I have no musical talent whatever beyond being a reasonable DJ, yet have no problems seeing my opinions on music as being worth enough to be published. However when someone like Kane writes, I have trouble seeing his work as being worth anything, partly because I find him incredibly turgid to read, but largely due to the fact that he made abysmal music and this colours his opinions for me... is this wrong? By the way Johnny Hates Jazz were irretrievably crap and the Thompson Twins are categorically soulless! Dreadful bilge of the lowest order!

made me livid to hear that stuff dominating u.s. radio airwaves in the mid to late eighties.

robert palmer also made me want to kill, particularly "she used to look good to me, but now i find her...simply irresistable". AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm trying not to mention don henley "all she wants to do is dance"...like the way pious folk are terrified to even think of the names of demons

i used to loathe phil collins' eighties output like all other decent human beings, but now i have come to appreciate what i see as the weird sort of extreme repetition in a few of his songs...it's almost spiritualized-like or something... that "take, take, me home ('cos i don't remember)" song seems to repeat that bit for a really, really, really long time, and it's not just the fact that it's a crap song that makes it seem never-ending. weird production too, even by eighties too-many-lines-of-coke-laid out-on-the-mixing board standards. he's the jason pierce for your mom and dad?

I really like "Follow You Follow Me" by Genesis for all the same reasons Geir probably does.

phil collins' song persona is definitely freaky. remember the urban legend inspired by "in the air tonight"?

is it genesis or just phil who do that 'lonely man there on the corner' song? that song's kind of strange. especially the part where he starts shouting the lyrics. and the he goes to the quietly sung bridge...the lyrics are like a weird mish-mash of 'fool on the hill' and 'nowhere man', if you think about it.

i just remembered another unforgiveable one. that "future so bright, i gotta wear shades" thing by timbuk2 or whatever they were called.

Actually, no. Do tell.

a rumour started that the lyrics referred to some guy who had stabbed a friend or ex-lover of phil collins or some nonsense like that. i don't even recall the lyrics very well, so i can't remember if they even refer to the exact nature of the deed. maybe the villain pushed the victim off of a cliff...or it was a hit-and-run or something...a drowning, maybe?

anyway, supposedly phil wrote the song in an effort to get the baddie to confess to his dirty deed...the idea being that hearing this crap phil collins song played on the radio constantly would just overwhelm the guy with guilt. (the rest of us, of course, were overwhelmed with emotions of a different sort...)

there is an especially ludicrous/insanely dramatic thread to the tale, or possibly this is the main point of the story, wherein, supposedly during a performance one evening, phil had the spotlights strategically shine on the bad guy (who for whatever bizarre reason, was in attendance) during the most accusatory lyrical moment in the song. and then the music stopped or something...maybe he was pretty much doing it acappella by this point for dramatic effect...and then presumably the local authorities were on standby to shackle the guy and lead him off to the hoosegow. it's like a fucking twisted scooby doo episode or something. (in my revisionist version, they also haul off phil for assorted crimes against music...)

sorry for being too lazy to do the research right now. i was hoping everyone already knew the story/someone else would chime in with it. go to the snopes site and check it out. it's really pretty funny. (as are some of the other music urban legends there. like the one about ohio players 'rollercoaster' being a 'snuff song')

has there been a music urban legends thread on here? guess i should search.

other mentions -- information society; wild wild west; all of those third-rate late-eighties Madonna wannabes; winger.

Looks like snopes has it pretty much covered.

My favourite Phil Collins'urban legend' is about when he wrote that pissawful mawkish Moter Teresa effort about the homeless, and then announced that he would leave the UK for Switzerland if Labour got in and dared to raise taxes to address social problems.

Having said that, I have a very good older friend who still listens to his music. Some people have NO SHAME.

On the other hand, Rage Against The Machine would probably make great US presidents, while their absolutely terrible "music" is just tuneless noise and completely unlistenable.

I think the Pinefox missed one of I Love Music's very first FAPs in order to see a Johnny Hates Jazz reunion concert (if I recall correctly)??

Why did I have some vague idea that you might just pop up and say that Geir? The alarm were most definitely not brilliant! I have decided, on the strength of this comment, that you are making all of this up and I don't believe you.

Public Enemy
De La Soul
Run DMC
Beastie Boys
Europe
Cinderella
Poison
M/A/R/R/S
Bomb The Bass
Bros
New Kids On The Block
Breathe
Curiousity Killed The Cat
Samantha Fox
Sabrina

Public Enemy - You're a cloth-eared IDIOT if you can't hear the brilliance in Public Enemy's first three albums.

De La Soul - Not my favorites, but had some decent moments.

Run DMC - Ditto.

Beastie Boys - Fuck you. Beastie Boys are brillaint.

Europe - Crap.

Cinderella - Embarassing, yes, but had the odd decent track.

Poison - Utter crap.

M/A/R/R/S - Why are you picking on a one-hit wonder? You're a jackass.

Bomb The Bass - Produced at least two tracks worth hearing.

Bros - Never heard'em over here.

New Kids On The Block - Crap, of course.

Breathe - Don't know'em.

Curiousity Killed The Cat - Meaningless.

Samantha Fox - Crap.

Sabrina - Crap.

New Kids - pretty dross, but no worse than N Sync

Breathe - one hit wonder, dreary ballad

Curiosity Killed The Cat - Misfit and Down To Earth were big childhood faves, they can stay

Sam Fox and Sabrina - a modicum of camp and humourous value at least

The 80s Beastie Boys were about 8 trillion times better than the 90s Beastie Boys, and anyone who doesn't at least like "Fight For Your Right" is completely insane. That song ruined my life and I still love it. Geir in not liking rap music shockah, etc.

Geir, this statement coupled with your list makes it clear that you do not mean any of this. You cannot possibly use the words "best" and "of all time" in conjunction with The Alarm! Then saying that Public Enemy, Run DMC and De La Soul made bad music further reinforces the plain idiocy of this statement - if you are joking, then you are getting close to comedy genius, but if you're not I am quite frankly lost for words.
You are so wrong a deaf person could tell you so. I would venture to say that Run DMC were THE most important band of the past three decades, that Public Enemy made music that changed my life and De La Soul went on to make it even better.
While I don't normally set much store by notions of "taste", you obviously do and, I'm sorry to say, yours is truly abysmal! How do you place the aforementioned bands in a list with Curiosity Killed The Cat and Bros? Utterly dumbfounded...

the alarm's choruses ranking among "best" "of all time"...heh-heh-heh-heh-HEH...their song titles alone are hilariously bad...and PE, run-dmc, de la soul not making the grade, that's fucking brilliant.

incidentally, my girlfriend saw de la soul perform yesterday, and she said they were excellent. i have no reason to doubt her evaluation. she was stone-cold sober and it was the middle of the day.

this is like what, fourteen years or so down the road from '3 Feet High and Rising'?

dare i even ask what the current status of the alarm or its former members is? are they still coming up with choruses that are spoken of in the same breath as 'ode to joy'?

Keep telling yourself that.

PLEASE INSERT COIN

Alarm could have been completely crap, and still better than any hip-hop ever

Hip-hop is the worst ever thing to have happened to music since Schönberg invented his 12 tone "music".

dare i even ask what the current status of the alarm or its former members is? are they still coming up with choruses that are spoken of in the same breath as 'ode to joy'?

Everything that has happened since then (apart from Britpop, which was a retro thing anyway) has taken music in the wrong directions. In a fair world, everybody would have hated musically talentless crap like rap, R&B and funk while Alarm would have been considered one of the most important acts of the 80s. Not because of being "influential" (who needs progression all the time anyway?), but because of their great singalong choruses.

Titles of The Alarm's Greatest Choruses, err, Songs

"Where Were You Hiding When We Were Writing What Were Among the BEST Choruses of All Time, Whilst Putting Classic & Innovative Hip Hop Groups to Shame?"

"68 Guns (is Another Wretched Excuse for a Song Title, But it Matters None Because Our Choruses Stun All Human Aesthetic Sensibilities With their Heretofore Unparalleled Excellence)"

"Strength (Through Choruses of A Mind-Blowingly Wonderful Nature Which Erase Any Notions of Achievement by Genre-Transcending Rap Artists)"

"The Stand (Of The Best Choruses Ever Written and Performed, Against the Overwhelmingly Outmatched Hip Hop Artists, who Although Universally Acclaimed, are Actually Total Shite Because All Hip Hop is Total Shite, Owing to The Genre's Lack of Awesome Choruses, Such as We Possess in Extraordinary Quantities)"

"Spirit of '86 (A Year Known Only for Our Amazing Choruses and the Further Degeneration of the Already Illegitimate Music Genre Known as Hip Hop)"

your first sentence leads me to suspect that maybe you are liam gallagher writing under an assumed name. were oasis closet fans of the alarm? (is there any other kind? well, other than ironic ones taking the piss like i know you surely must be doing here...)

i know this will anger you, but, honestly, how can you make the statement in your second sentence and not be expected to be accused of being racist? "all" rap, r&B and funk is "musically talentless crap"??? i can understand those genres not being to your taste... but to deny that there is a tremendous amount of talent that went into the making of the countless songs in these categories is again, either you trying to be comical, or you being just bizarrely malicious...for what reasons, i can only surmise.

"Not because of being "influential" (who needs progression all the time anyway?), but because of their great singalong choruses."

with that logic, most football chants qualify as brilliant pop music, then, eh?

that does not compute.

putting fingers in ears and singing "la, la, la — i can't hear you!" for all i'm worth

If there will ever possibly be any hip-hop song which

- contains absolutely no rap at all
- has a lot of compilated and sophisticated chord changes
- takes zero inspiration from R&B and a lot of inspiration from European classical music and Tin Pan Alley
- Puts a lot of emphasis on melody and harmony and absolutely no emphasis on rhythm at all
- the melodic parts are one hundred per cent originally composed, there is no sampling or turntablismn at all
- is throughoutly pre-composed with absolutely no improvisation
- takes one hundred per cent of its influences from European, European and absolutely nothing but European music

....then I'd probably like it.

What, like gypsy folk music?!?

I love music, and music is European. Music was invented in Ancient Greece. What was before that wasn't called "music" by those who created it, and thus it wasn't music

By the way, is there any music which is 100 per cent European - I think not.

As long as the melodic and harmonic qualities of European music remains untouched, it doesn't matter whether other things are added in addition. There is nothing wrong with a drum pulse as long as it is kept in the background and doesn't disturbe the overall total dominance of the melody and its belonging harmonies.

You are mad... plenty of things didn't have European names until they were given to them. It doesn't mean they didn't exist before then...

Absolute total bilge... music has been with us near enough forever

I don't like Osmonds either. Those guys weren't melodically and harmonically sophisticated enough.

he still won't answer the question of why his side is losing

and why is your side losing the war?

I think you have totally lost the argument here. Beatles rhythms were often quite ferocious, particularly when they were at their best...

Technology is actually a keywoard here

Why? State your case...

In the past, if you wanted to become a musician, you had to start playing and listening already in your childhood. Now you may suddenly, as a teenager, despite having had a scant music interest during your childhoos, decide "I want to make music", and actually, you manage to make something that may sound like music to untrained musical ears.

But surely technological advances were at the heart of those mathematically inspired Ancient theories, meaning that all they did was change the way music was made/perceived. These are simply examples of music's evolution and you refuse to see the validity of one while droning on about the virtues of another. This is little short of hypocrisy and it fits in with an overall view that barely skirts racism as far as I can see.

They didn't change music, they invented music. Important difference.

An important misconception on your part Geir and total balderdash

On the other hand, when for instance Eminem or Beastie Boys makes typically "black" music, their music is not any better than what black acts have come up with within the same genres.

But critiques of it can and if this is the case then why does music have to be European in your view?

Hip-hop is more likely to piss off parents now that it has become dominant and threatening to more melodic forms.

Music is European.

This isn't as much about rejecting African cultural traditions as it is about defending European ones and keeping them alive forever.

Rock is actually a comination of African and European musical styles. Why, then, is it that all European elements should be taken away from music, which is the case with most hip-hop and R&B.

I mean, what is usually seen as "white" music is actually a mixture of European and African traditions, while funk, rap and hip-hop are African only with absolutely no European stylistic elements at all. Fine that, but not if it is going to replace the wonderful tradition of melodies and harmonics.

Whatever, we should all just give up, he won't be satisfied until we're all singing "Hongro, Hongro Uber Alles."

why is that pathetic? i'd say its healthy and nautral, even instinctive. the main reasons i loved the hip hop and dance, however unmusical (in geir's or the supposed official terminology) it was, is because it was new and exciting, politically charged, sonically innovative regardless of lack of melody/trad/conventional traits in music. maybe it isnt REAL music...so what? its still art, and great art at that. but i'll call it music because its closely related.

Non-melodic music will never replace melodic music.

they will co-exist just fine...if the former is outstripping the latter commercially then thats too bad but it makes sense

Oasis anyone?

It wasn't until the 70s that jazz started to be (at least partly) dominated by Europeans rather than (or at least in addition to) African Americans.

As for my attitude towards jazz: I dislike the improvisation and lack of emphasis on melodies, while I like the harmonic sophistication.

Eric Idle to thread, then!

even mere handclapping, finger-snapping, toe-tapping, or head-nodding could be deadly to the harmonic and melodic components. ideally, all rhythm, and hence all notion of reference points regarding constructs of time, should be obliterated from music. the best music is silence, since the vibration of the air that is involved in any aural phenomenon inherently partakes of the non-european disease of rhythm.

i was going to post a question to ile along the lines of "who is at the vanguard of comedy these days?...who is coming up with the most indisputably hilarious shit? absolutely essential yuks?" but i guess i've found my comedic saviour in geir's unrelentingly gut-busting deadpan shtick. he does it so well; never dropping character for a second, never skipping a beat...oops, didn't mean to upset him with that blatant reference to rhythm...

i wonder if he has initiated a campaign to rid the norwegian white supremacist black metal bands of any rhythm that exists in that sadly corrupted european artform. we all know that any overprominent rhythmic elements in the neo-nazi black metal stuff are the result of a sinister infiltration by non-europeans, or people trying to piss off their white supremacist parents, or some such conspiracy. heil hongro, etc.

Why does it matter where the tradition comes from anyway?

The point is that melody has proved superior to all other musical forms. And as such, it should be used universially. Never mind about ethic origin, because that isn't important. Music in itself is the only important thing here.

i've been forced to revise my take on the geir-as-comic-genius theory, after further viewing of these beyond-inanities that he keeps spitting out like clockwork. (oops, there i go again with the rhythm thing)

he is definitely a comic genius, but "he" is also in reality a computer program, as propounded above. the program is not fiendish, though, but is part of extremely successful AI research attempting to simulate absurd comedic personas. it's not unlike those computers that blow away the russian chess grandmasters. the geir program demonstrates a more consistent and speedier absurdist wit than any human would be capable of doing. the 'absolutist piffle' is not an earnest attempt to put forth a coherent argument but rather is meant to tickle the funny bone in a most sublime fashion.

This is really funny. I read quite a few websites and newsgroups which are full of extreme right-wingers - keeping an eye on the enemy, all that sort of thing. I can *easily* imagine these (mostly British) far-right apologists writing *exactly* those words as an explanation of why the Beatles are acceptable to them but hip-hop is not.

I wonder if Geir votes for the Norwegian far-right party (is it called the Popular Party? Populist Party? Peoples' Party? whatever ...)

I hate the three contemporary bands you mention (although I love the Beatles, precisely because they have more than one influence, more than one song, more than one emotional mood etc, whereas the other three are one-trick ponies). But I don't feel the need to rant against them on here. Suckers who relate to the plodding emotional nothingness of "Clocks", "In My Place", "Sing", "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" and the like can appreciate it if they like - I genuinely couldn't give a shit if they do. So why do you feel the need to rant against the music that *you* dislike?

Obviously, a lot of people think differently than you.

Pythagoras (dunno if that is the correct English spelling) was definitely among those who worked with this. He may not have been the first one, but he was the one that was closest to the harmony system still used in the West today.
― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Monday, 21 April 2003 21:23 (eighteen years ago)

Actually Pythagoras' tuning system is closer to Arab/african arab and asian tunings. You see dear old chap, the problem is Europe itself in a way killed melody by inventing equal temperality. An absolute development of harmony means absolute melody as pure unmodulated expression is radically underdeveloped (this is why The Beatles had to crib tips from Indian classical.) Terry Riley only half understood this, tablas are also melodic instruments. cordal counterpoint is the original sin, which was absolutely not invented by 'them Africans.' Bach's music only makes sense on harpsichord and nothing else! everyone who adapted his music for piano is to blame here. You killed melody Geir, you really did, chief.