what's surprising is that, in an age in which tribal allegiances and genre boundaries among listeners are breaking down, the same isn't generally the case within most artists' recorded output

Discuss, with reference to contemporary music.

soo ur saying music is still very much divided into genres?

in an age in which tribal allegiances and genre boundaries among listeners are breaking down

dubious. not convinced that tastes are broader now than they were before this age supposedly began.

this is an m the g quote, not my own statement. but it would be interesting to discuss it, both as valid analysis and as challengeable opinion

the troll has opened up new relms of discorse

good post

Artists might have quite a bit to lose by switching up styles, even ones who follow a nominally non-commercial path. People who just listen to music... don't

xp the original statement was mine. it's not a concrete rule, but an impression based partly on accessibility (t'internet, etc.) and partly on observation from experience... for example, my nephews are in their teens and don't discriminate between pop, indie, R&B, house, punk, hip-hop. it's all accessible to them, so they take it all in.

similarly, I genuinely don't know anybody IRL who is into a single genre in a tribal fashion. even those who wear a tribal uniform, e.g. metalheads, will also profess a fondness for chart pop or jazz or folk or techno.

that was very much not the case when I was a kid. you stuck to your genre or two, as did your peer group. there was just not this casual omnivorous quality to youth culture that there appears to be now.

of course, your experience may differ...

my apologies, please continue with the ***deep thinking***

xp

Artists might have quite a bit to lose by switching up styles, even ones who follow a nominally non-commercial path. People who just listen to music... don't

reposting because it is a massive truth bomb

Most artists are lucky to find one thing they're good at. If Bon Iver suddenly decides to be a drill n bass producer, he's not gonna magically become an amazing drum programmer/MaxMSP overnight. Similarly, most singers are limited in the genres they can pull off by their voices. Don't hold your breath for Sufjan Steven's Barry White tribute.

I know all this sounds obvious, but I think a lot of people think in terms of artistic intent rather than basic craftsmanship.

xposts

this thread is an offshoot that comes from the freeform 90s thread.

def think that in the pre-soulwax, pre-electroclash, pre-Firestarter(?) pre-Eminem mid-nineties, you had a lot more people listening to "just trance" or "just r'n'b" or "anything with guitars". i know at my school you could easily divide a classroom into those who liked indie, punk and metal, and those who liked jungle, the Fugees and Wu-Tang. Like it or not, it was very straight-cut and I even remember being dissed and called a "raver" by rock pals for saying I liked Cypress Hill, which even then I found a bit o_O

Anyway, I noticed, around the early 2000s that the rock kids in the neighbourhood (the same who would have been heavy into Marilyn Manson in my time) weren't just listening to Staind or My Chemical Romance or whoever was popular in rock circles at the time. I guess via Eminem and Limp Bizkit these kids must have delved further into hiphop. Electroclash's flamboyant avatars were also drawing people who would have listened to bands like Placebo into the dance fold. If anything helped to bring rock and dance fans together it had to be 2ManyDJs and the DFA movement.

Of course it didn't happen all of a sudden - plenty of examples of dance acts who appealed to rock fans in the mid 90s - Underworld, Chems, Aphex, Bentleys, but I think these acts kind of only appealed to one or the other.

So yeah, I'm sure there was a certain amount of tribalism whereas today having a wide musical palate is pretty common. People who go around saying they don't like any rock music or hate all electronic music are becoming less and less common.

Most artists are lucky to find one thing they're good at.

Even massiver truth bomb

xxp i wouldn't mind an example that wasn't a personal one... but i don't think its a stretch to think that the amorphous blob that is the internet and all the information it carries with it has made liking more than one genre at a time really commonplace, and that the music being made by purists is in some way reacting to that genre-bending with conservatism. i've seen a lot of genre protectionism/conservatism in music writing lately, but i can't really pin that on being a result of the internet or because genre boundaries are breaking down elsewhere. i really haven't been paying attention long enough to really tell.

yes xp

whoops, i was responding to m the g in my post.

I see what you're getting at. Artists aren't being as varied & eclectic as they could be given the wide-open, increasingly genre-less nature of the music world. And this despite the fact that you had artists like Frank Zappa and Sun Ra that were all over the place before the CDR cottage industry age. Its a good question & I'm not sure if it can be answered...

Could it be that they (artists that is) are less ecelctic? Wasn't only guys like Zappa and Sun Ra who were all over the place.

it's not the responsibility of any one artist or group of artists to cater to the changing boundaries of music in the world. i mean, you find something you can do, and you do it. frank zappa, it just so happens, could do a lot.

Artists might have quite a bit to lose by switching up styles, even ones who follow a nominally non-commercial path. People who just listen to music... don't

^^^ as HI DERE observes, truthbomb here. Lots of artists (raising hand here) would love to branch out beyond their safe constraints, but who wants to get clowned/get accused of changing styles for commercial gain/risk everyone saying they've lost their gift/face the hard fact that a large % of their fanbase would prefer they remain a known quantity? unless you've managed to get rich enough to not care what kind of a hit you take on these fronts, you're risking whatever career you've built up if you color too far outside the lines.

xp artists FEAR that they have a bit to lose, etc...

considerations of career prospects aside, this was really speculation about the relationship between listening habits and creative urges, i.e. whether there's a natural relationship between absorbing a broad range of genres and the desire to work in many styles.

as we were talking about on the FREEFORM thread, being a fan of lots of different music is now considered the norm, but back when Mike Patton was mixing up genres, even fucking Pitchshifter and Apollo 440 were being applauded for trying to mix dance and metal (awfully btw). It's actually much more plausible for bands to find a sound that encompasses influences in homeopathic amounts and stick to it. So The XX may display influences as varied as Mariah Carey, Young Marble Giants and minimal house, but it's all blurred into one sound - not some genre-hopping confuse-fest.

considerations of career prospects aside

easier said than done

people in the past listened to different sort of music

my nephews are in their teens and don't discriminate between pop, indie, R&B, house, punk, hip-hop.

they must on some level know that these are different things

dog latin's last post houses a good point - but 'finding a sound' can easily work out as regressive unless you craft that sound - merely coasting on it rapidly loses my interest

it is true that Beck has become a lot more boring in the past 10 years

I have always been fascinated by how people look at artistic livelihoods and mentally redact the word "livelihood" from them; a certain amount of what you are doing as a professional or even semi-professional musician is going to revolve around identifying the intersection between "things you're good at" and "things people want to hear you do" and pumping as much energy/effort into that seam as you can.

Given this, a big chunk of the speculation behind this conversation is barking up the wrong tree; artists don't stick to genres because they aren't interested in anything else, artists stick to genres because that is the safest way to make money, and most of them are doing this so they can make money.

lol Beck

genre boundaries have always been artificial constructs created by the market in order to maximize sales to particular demographics. with the destruction of the market and the flattening out of demographics, genre has become meaningless. the audience understands this.

gah, Modern Guilt was flat-out unlistenable

it is true that Beck has become a lot more boring in the past 10 years

I haven't been paying too much attention, but hasn't he hopped around from one genre to another?

He has, but he hopped into some genres where he just sucks.

"Lots of artists (raising hand here) would love to branch out beyond their safe constraints"

would totally buy your goth/darkwave metal side-project, just so you know.

http://colunistas.ig.com.br/obutecodanet/files/2009/07/alter3.jpg

SMC, that's idealistic! If only it were so. If only all bands operated to their ideal sound(s) rather than preset expectations.

Cornelius is better than Beck anyway

It's actually much more plausible for bands to find a sound that encompasses influences in homeopathic amounts and stick to it.

^^^this is what's happening. expect more of it. also don't expect most bands to last more than a few years, so once they hit on the right formula they will stick with it more or less until they get tired of it, give up, split up, quit, etc.

xp

He has, but he hopped into some genres where he just sucks.

Indeed. And that's a guy who's fairly talented too.

when i was growing up and had musical aspirations, I always wondered why if a band said they liked Metallica and the Cardigans and Squarepusher, then why didn't they try their hands at all of these? These days I admire bands for their focus. I mean, doesn't (random example) Thom Yorke wake up some mornings thinking "You know what, I fancy making a comedy record, how about that?". Doesn't Thomas Fehlmann sometimes think "I am soo sick and tired of ze same 4/4 beats - I'm going to take up guitar and write a soft rock ballad"?

@ scott - that'd make 1 sale, anyway! :)

@la senora: Agreed. However, all I'm talking about is a willingness to experiment a bit with different instruments, rhythms [or lack thereof], etc. Not necessarily something that you're predisposed to do or knowledgeable in...

I mean, doesn't (random example) Thom Yorke wake up some mornings thinking "You know what, I fancy making a comedy record, how about that?". Doesn't Thomas Fehlmann sometimes think "I am soo sick and tired of ze same 4/4 beats - I'm going to take up guitar and write a soft rock ballad"?

That way lies the (horrific) latter day career of Elvis Costello

the flaw here is that i dont think that the commercial success of a mr bungle or whoever the stand in for the former embodiments of this is all that far off of the commercial success of say a sleepytime gorilla museum or U1v3_r (thx dan) in the modern day. in other words, i think experimental boundary pushers are prob having about the same impact as they always have, its just that hindsight makes it seem like bungle or whoever you pick was REALLY IMPORTANT AND NOTICED, but iirc at the time basically me and 4 of my friends cared about them and that was about it.

personally, from my particular musicians' POV, it has always been part of my musical philosophy to jump around a lot stylistically but mostly people find this confusing. while audiences no longer feel allegiance to one specific genre, they do prefer their bands to be known quantities. they'd rather listen to a lot of different bands then one band that plays a lot of different styles, imho.

xp

sleepytime gorilla museum

felt genuinely offended having to watch this band perform fwiw. absolutely horrible.

I am reasonably certain Mr Bungle at least initially did better than Sleepytime Gorilla Museum if only due to bleedover from Vaith No More fans following Mike Patton to his new endeavor.

ps: ULVER ULVER ULVER ULVER HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

He has, but he hopped into some genres where he just sucks.

― Marriage, that's where I'm a Viking! (HI DERE), Thursday, April 29, 2010 5:20 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

rofl on the inside

i mean i remember boredoms opening for lollapalooza one go around and the big ol' alternative nation mostly yawned and wandered off with the exception of 2 dudes going fucking nuts because they were seeing the boredoms and a small crowd of peeps basically pointing and going "look at that funny japanese guy running around with a cardboard box on his head"

xpost jesus christ shakey u r insane

also dan yer prob right but man oh man did that drop off once disco volante hit the scene.

sorry goth clown metal with some Tom Waits thrown in is like having a vomit cocktail poured into my ears

what's surprising is that, in an age in which tribal allegiances and genre boundaries among listeners are breaking down

specious opening statement imo

but also misses the point that listening to music (passive) and making music (active) are two diff things

plus when people try to mash up genres the results often suck for reasons pointed out above

Guess I don't hear how artists are being any less eclectic / more genre-bound than they've always been (and eclecticism has been a cliche in rock and pop music for nearly half a century now.) If anything, seems like pop/rock/r&b/dance/country barriers have broken down some. Also skeptical about the "listeners are suddenly listening to stuff from all over the map" claim; I'm not sure most listeners were ever tied to just one genre -- if they were in, say, the past couple decades (which I'm not convinced of), that was a new development. (And "metal heads," say, are not the same as the population as a whole.) Also seems curious that, in this age when listeners are suddenly supposed to be so open-eared, the list of top finishers in the world's biggest poll of music critics was actually less varied than it's ever been, in the previous 30 years. (Of course, critics might not be representative of listeners as a whole, but part of me does think that, to a certain extent, at least for younger people who consider themselves serious music afficiandos, the Internet has a tendency to prevent fans from finding out about music outside of their chosen stylistic sphere, since stumbling across songs by accident isn't as easy as it used to be when everybody just listened to car radios or watched MTV or whatever.)

Gotta say, Ulver's omnivorous and volatile approach to genre or style is a RARE example of the sound-splatter not only sounding great but COHERING into compelling album-length narratives - probably explains why Blood Inside is my record of the 00's tbh

Guess I don't hear how artists are being any less eclectic / more genre-bound than they've always been (and eclecticism has been a cliche in rock and pop music for nearly half a century now.)

^^^OTM. and I disagree w/xhuxh like 90% of the time

my nephews are in their teens and don't discriminate between pop, indie, R&B, house, punk, hip-hop. it's all accessible to them, so they take it all in.

My 16-year-old says most kids in his school listen to pop/top 40 but do not listen to r'n'b or rap that has not made the pop top 40. He also says most of them do not listen to indie. He knows others his age who just listen to commercial rock.

Guess I don't hear how artists are being any less eclectic / more genre-bound than they've always been (and eclecticism has been a cliche in rock and pop music for nearly half a century now.)

I don't think that's the assertion being made at all; what's being argued is that having broad musical tastes is currently "in" among consumers, but the music being produced by musicians still tends towards genre boundaries (which, when you consider that the majority of people selling music are attempting to market themselves as a recognizable product, shouldn't be particularly surprising).

pop/rock/r&b/dance/country barriers have broken down some

Toss in hip-hop, indie, metal, and folk, too, probably. Guess what I'm saying is that I sense less of an emphasis on purism, all over. (Not saying this has necessarily made the music better or worse, though.)

It's also gotta be said that my 3 favourite bands, Cardiacs, The Fall and Van Der Graaf Generator, ALL have COMPLETELY unmistakeable sounds/styles which they don't really contradict, even while stretching them to delirious limits. There's a LOT to be said, as stated upthread, for crafting what one is good at.

Overt eclecticism CAN work beautifully, but only when it's incorporated. Most artists aren't up for this complex and often unrewarding challenge, so they don't bother, and I have nothing against them. When it's done well it can be awe-inspiring. There aren't any rules as to what sounds should go where.

Trying to find a unique sound in itself can be overrated (see: dubstep). Hitting on a sound that works for you and your band, and working from there, has produced some of the best music I know. Maybe most of it.

xhuxk and I were there for this so it seems worth mentioning:

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2010/04/the-quiet-revolution.html

the other thing (which has been touched on but cant be repeated enough) is that doing super-genre skipping requires kind of superhuman technical skillz (and no im not talking just geetar shredding, composition and sequencing and vocal reach also) which means most people, let alone bands, really arent up to doing it much.

ie like them or not, bungle/SGM/zappa projects/beefheart/zorn members are ultra proficient because they have to be.

I'm still pissed at the members of New Order throwing away tracks that sounded too much like 'New Order' for the last couple albums. Guess what you fat bastards? Your remaining fans just want to hear shit that sounds like New Order.

So The XX may display influences as varied as Mariah Carey, Young Marble Giants and minimal house, but it's all blurred into one sound - not some genre-hopping confuse-fest.

otm, and that's way more interesting and progressive than what lj seems to want (isn't one artist bouncing around between discrete genres only helping to maintain genre boundaries & conventions?).

xp

as far as bands mixing styles/playing different styles goes, there is a big difference now in the level of training too. a lot of bands, indie or otherwise, simply CAN'T play lots of different styles successfully. they don't know how. punk/indie taught people how to play punk/indie. lots of bands from the 60's and 70's, rock or pop or whatever, were filled with people who had been playing music for YEARS on stage and they learned how to play all kinds of stuff. when i pick up random 70's rock albums i'm always amazed at how many talented guitarists/drummers/etc there were out there! they were everywhere. and they could do pop, rock, soul, etc, etc. they could be funky! genuinely funky. they came of age in clubs and bars and they had to learn how to play whatever it took to get paid. now, people go straight from a bedroom where they were recording their lo-fi anthems to clubs and it shows.

lol scott, thank you for making my "punk help ruin music" argument for me

otm, and that's way more interesting and progressive than what lj seems to want (isn't one artist bouncing around between discrete genres only helping to maintain genre boundaries & conventions?).

I never said I wanted this, and indeed have openly contradicted these words in this thread

You're kinda right, though - it depends on how the 'genre' or style is interpreted - and whether it's given a fresh treatment.

Guess what you fat bastards? Your remaining fans just want to hear shit that sounds like New Order.

in a perfect world this is the new ILM board description, and probably the permanent one

scott 100% OTM, the fact that playing in a cover band is the modern equivalent of being a whore means that most peeps never get forced to pull their shit together and go outside of their comfort zone.

lots of bands from the 60's and 70's, rock or pop or whatever, were filled with people who had been playing music for YEARS on stage and they learned how to play all kinds of stuff.

There are downsides to this

quoting myself from the other thread:

op is otm, as far as the death of zany pop eclecticism goes, and i suspect that it's a direct product of the boundary-blurring 90s. i often look back at rap-rock and funk-punk and techno cross-pollination with a kind of aesthetic revulsion, and i don't think i'm alone in that. the naivete and cloddishness of a lot of 90s pop experimentation seems to have scared its descendants into a more careful and aesthetically rigorous stance. hence a tendency to find a perfect sound and explore its subtleties, rather than just throw everything into a blender to see what happens.

you maybe find the strongest remaining thread of this in "hipster" rap and dance music (diplo, justice, m.i.a., etc). plz to forgive scare quotes, they mean no harm.

lol aerosmith

Also yeah, I saw you make that post on the 90's poll thread contenderizer, and it's a fair point, although there ARE sorts outside of a populist realm who are still merging all sorts of recognisable styles into one whole (Thomas White being a very good example).

what are some examples of naive cloddish 90s pop experimentation?

the genres have changed a lot as macro (or market) (or uh memetic) phenomena over the years any way. you can be solidly inside the boundaries of country, but that already contains all kind of boogie rock and aor balladeering etc that it didn't in previous decades -- though of course those things were based in things that had earlier country in their genes to begin with. or you can operate within the boundaries of R&B, but that of course has rap and club music embedded in it already, today -- and, similarly, those things were rooted in R&B to begin with.

the point is the boundaries shift and recombine based on audience prerogatives, not whether a given artist tries to "break boundaries" all by his lonely heroic self.

i look at the '90s attempts at genre-mixing as mostly clumsy and awkward, but necessary. i think we're seeing the fruits of that now, when it's being done a lot more naturally.

xp

here ARE sorts outside of a populist realm who are still merging all sorts of recognisable styles into one whole...

― sausage s4rgent (acoleuthic)

granted, given that everything is necessarily happening at once. i guess my main point is that, in american pop & indie music, i suspect that the death of wide-eyed eclecticism has less to do with an acknowledgment on the part of most artists that they have limited gifts than to a fear of being dismissed as dated, corny or insufficiently serious about their sound.

xp Yeah, obviously I agree with Scott, in that I really miss the days when hard rock bands could switch into funk or disco or country or disco at a drop of a dime, and make their albums sound all of a piece (not "eclectic") anyway, since it was all just rock.So I'm probably contradicting myself a little. But that's compared to, say, 35 years ago; over the past 10 or 15 years, it's still hard for me to think of a genre that's become more purist than it was, say, in the mid '90s. I mostly hear genres crossing lines -- or at least trying to; I don't think many indie bands are sucessfully making dance music, because like Scott says they're inept at it, but I also don't hear them blocking dance music from their sound. And I hear genres like country and metal and hip-hop opening up, not shutting down. (Pop has pretty much always been opened up; you don't have to be Frank Zappa to draw on music from everywhere. You can just be Pink, or Shakira. Well, hip-hop's always been opened up, too, I guess. Except when it isn't.)

as far as bands mixing styles/playing different styles goes, there is a big difference now in the level of training too. a lot of bands, indie or otherwise, simply CAN'T play lots of different styles successfully. they don't know how. punk/indie taught people how to play punk/indie. lots of bands from the 60's and 70's, rock or pop or whatever, were filled with people who had been playing music for YEARS on stage and they learned how to play all kinds of stuff. when i pick up random 70's rock albums i'm always amazed at how many talented guitarists/drummers/etc there were out there! they were everywhere. and they could do pop, rock, soul, etc, etc. they could be funky! genuinely funky. they came of age in clubs and bars and they had to learn how to play whatever it took to get paid. now, people go straight from a bedroom where they were recording their lo-fi anthems to clubs and it shows.

can't keep up with this thread but this is massively OTM

i look at the '90s attempts at genre-mixing as mostly clumsy and awkward, but necessary. i think we're seeing the fruits of that now, when it's being done a lot more naturally.

xp

― emotional radiohead whatever (Jordan)

this. and i could swear i've said something similar around here in the past, but god knows where. probably some other 90s thread...

critics might not be representative of listeners as a whole

Gee, ya think?

I have no real substantive contribution to make to this thread, though I find the discussion interesting.

xp (And right, indie bands have been trying to draw on dance music for 30 years themselves, since the dance-oriented post-funk/post-punk early '80s. So that's probably nothing new, either. Seems it let up some in the '90s, but that may have just been my perception; by the early '00s, there were obviously lots of indie bands trying to punk-funk all over again, though most of them not doing it very well.)

And country is picking up some of that old '70s hard rock slack too, obviously, even working in funky beats now and then.

what are some examples of naive cloddish 90s pop experimentation?

there's so much, but aside from the obvious ROCK + RAP stuff, i'm thinking of the LOOK IT'S JAZZ + DRUM & BASS records that i fell for at the time (a la graham haynes, erik truffaz). so '90s.

90s pop experimentation could mean/makes me think all great sorts inc. bjork, madonna, st etienne, stereolab, coldcut, 'windowlicker', timbaland, the shamen, beck...so would appreciate clarification! genre-mixing is a bit different if you're talking 'rock-rap', 'rock-dance', industrial, jazz-rap etc. on the whole but again seems like there are enough good examples amongst the bad.

xp Jam band rock probably still draws in music from everywhere, too, obviously; and plenty of those musicians have been seasoned for years on the road just like '70s rock bands used to be. (I go on the working assumption that it mostlly all sucks regardless, but I don't actually listen to it much so I don't really know.)

t's still hard for me to think of a genre that's become more purist than it was, say, in the mid '90s.

― xhuxk, Thursday, April 29, 2010 10:00 AM (2 minutes ago)

speaking of which, this is a terrible '00s trend (jams bands w/synths as far as i can tell): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livetronica

oh god yuck

how many different ways of smelling bad can they get into one genre

00s eclecticism, enjoy it while you can fellas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb9jY8yAxgs

genre-mixing is a bit different if you're talking 'rock-rap', 'rock-dance', industrial, jazz-rap etc. on the whole but again seems like there are enough good examples amongst the bad.

― mdskltr (blueski)

mainstream hip-hop seemed less sure of its voice and cultural position, more open to varying points of view and aesthetics (pm dawn to snoop dog to digable planets).

― contenderizer

aaargh! this is horseshit, so plz to forgive me and move along. i happily grant that hip-hop is at least as eclectic and experimental today as it was 10-20 years ago.

nd metal was VASTLY more open to non-metal sounds and approaches. it's hard to imagine music as impure as rage against the machine or infectious grooves arising out of and being accepted by metal fans today.

no offense, but this is kind of crazy talk. part of the reason i spend so much time w/metal these days is that it seems way more open than so much other stuff.

so basically the moral of the story is that it is very easy to view a genre as closed off and/or monolithic if you don't spend very much time with it

as far as bands mixing styles/playing different styles goes, there is a big difference now in the level of training too. a lot of bands, indie or otherwise, simply CAN'T play lots of different styles successfully.

― scott seward, Thursday, April 29, 2010 12:45 PM (15 minutes ago)

i think that's a load of crap. take a band like dirty projectors, who were the epitome of popular indie band last year. like them or not, they have an incredible ability to shift between styles, (r&b, afrobeat, and jazz to name a few) and do it really well. not only do they have a huge amount of styles in their repertoire, but they're also amazingly technical, with most of the members spending YEARS on their preferred instrument. i think your argument adds up to lame nostalgia, and you're not really looking in the right places for the kind of technical proficiency you're linking to genre-hopping.

xp I dunno, I heard all sort of folk metal and forest metal and space metal etc in the '00s, and seems to me that the late '90s was when lots of extreme death-metal/black metal bands (Tiamat, Gathering, Therion, etc.) turned "dark metal" and started listening to Joy Division and Kate Bush and Enigma and the Swans and My Bloody Valentine and Fairport Convention (or whoever), and trying to work that kind of beauty and ambience into their sound. (I'm conflicted on this, because I haven't noticed much advancement in the past few years -- maybe because I've been paying less attention -- and my favorite years for metal are still obviously, uh, the '70s. Also, I probably stumbled onto that folk-metal and dark-metal stuff a couple years late. But metal definitely seemed "purer" to me the '90s than it does now. Though right, I'm probably just also blocking rap-metal from my memory. Did metal people even consider Rage Against The Machine a metal band at the time?)

As for "rock", I guess it depends on how you define it. Rock radio obviously seems more reined in now than ever. (I'm not sure whether girl-led band like Paramore change that at all.)

Hip-Hop? I dunno, OutKast, Kanye, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Black Eyed Peas, Akon -- none of those people seem like purists to me. There's all kinds of Eurobeats in hip-hop too, right? And people collaborate with Coldplay and John Mayer and Maroon 5, and the wall between hip-hop and r&b has become completely fluid. I don't like a ton of it. But I don't see how it's constrained by some pre-prescribed genre definition.

hip-hop is at least as eclectic and experimental today as it was 10-20 years ago

possibly the commercial appeal/success of such range has dwindled since but would apply to other genres

i think that's a load of crap. take a band like dirty projectors, who were the epitome of popular indie band last year. like them or not, they have an incredible ability to shift between styles, (r&b, afrobeat, and jazz to name a few) and do it really well. not only do they have a huge amount of styles in their repertoire, but they're also amazingly technical, with most of the members spending YEARS on their preferred instrument. i think your argument adds up to lame nostalgia, and you're not really looking in the right places for the kind of technical proficiency you're linking to genre-hopping.

Bands like Dirty Projectors have always been anomalies.

people collaborate with Coldplay and John Mayer and Maroon 5

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JbyPVYCF9CE/R7q8Cq8Y0JI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/M8krgUunC00/s320/SSW.jpg

wait dirty projectors spent actual YEARS learning to play their instruments holy fuck how astounding

xp Yeah, not saying that's a good thing. (Also has anybody actually "collaborated" with Coldplay? Did I dream that? Or is Kanye just a fan? I'm not gonna check. Doesn't matter, anyway; the point is influence, and soaking up other sounds, no matter how shitty they might be.)

"Did metal people even consider Rage Against The Machine a metal band at the time?"

yes, or at least sufficiently metal.

"This point you are making about 70% of bands is totally invalidated by this one band who are famous mostly because they aren't doing what 70% of the bands out there are doing. Making defensible arguments, that's where I'm a Viking!"

ratm to me is basically about how "alternative rock" c. 94-97 was a really anomalous format.

Making defensible arguments, that's where I'm a Viking!

lol Dan stop spreading this awful misinterpretation, cmon!

haha sorry

how much more eclectic could it get than this? you guys didn't know how good you had it

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/619UHEahACL._SL500_AA280_.jpg

I mean, mudhoney and sir mix-a-lot sharing the air, can you imagine

I dunno, I heard all sort of folk metal and forest metal and space metal etc in the '00s, and seems to me that the late '90s was when lots of extreme death-metal/black metal bands (Tiamat, Gathering, Therion, etc.) turned "dark metal" and started listening to Joy Division and Kate Bush and Enigma and the Swans and My Bloody Valentine and Fairport Convention (or whoever), and trying to work that kind of beauty and ambience into their sound.

want to take this opportunity to stain my "never otm'ing xhuxk" record

xhuxk otm

how many different ways of smelling bad can they get into one genre

― goole, Thursday, April 29, 2010 12:22 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

i lol'd

Bands like Dirty Projectors have always been anomalies.

― Marriage, that's where I'm a Viking! (HI DERE), Thursday, April 29, 2010 1:36 PM (54 seconds ago)

i don't buy that, not when bands like here we go magic or extra life are doing very similar things and are getting just as much praise.

even if you look at a pretty MOR indie band like grizzly bear, and their preferred instruments, their voices, you have to admit that theres skill there. they have such a huge emphasis on voice, and harmonies, which takes a lot of coordination and skill. they're not singing all over the place or doing vocal cartwheels, but i wouldn't say that they're any less skilled at doing harmonies than a band in the 70s.

i take issue with what sharey had written above about today's indie bands having less technical prowess than bands from the 70s ("punk rock destroyed music yawn") and that's whats preventing them from being as adventurous with genre. i don't believe that at all. i think that a lot of bands are fairly rigid, but there's not way you can attribute that to their being amateurs, or less skilled at what they do.

wait dirty projectors spent actual YEARS learning to play their instruments holy fuck how astounding

― Varg Vikinem (jjjusten), Thursday, April 29, 2010 1:39 PM (1 minute ago)

i emphasized years because shakey had done so above me. it sounded equally ridiculous when he wrote it that way, but i guess you just let that one slide...

yah but that quote was actually about playing for YEARS on stage, not just taking the requisite time to learn an instrument.

no offense, but this is kind of crazy talk. part of the reason i spend so much time w/metal these days is that it seems way more open than so much other stuff.

― Varg Vikinem (jjjusten)

i just can't see this. metal nowadays only fucks with a few non-metal sounds, and not with anything that might be considered truly pop. i mean, you've got a lot of ambience and folkiness, but that's really just the mainstreaming of a 90s black metal palette. and it doesn't threaten to turn metal into country, or disco or hip-hop or anything legitimately cross-cultural, cross-pollinated. plus black metal has infected basically everything at this point, not just metal in general. saw a fucking terrible mount eerie show the other day, and found them trying to pull off some kind of emo/black metal/badalamenti pop hybrid that eclipsed in true eclecticism (and true awfulness) any metal i've heard in the last 10 years. and i listen to a lot of metal.

I heard all sort of folk metal and forest metal and space metal etc in the '00s, and seems to me that the late '90s was when lots of extreme death-metal/black metal bands (Tiamat, Gathering, Therion, etc.) turned "dark metal" and started listening to Joy Division and Kate Bush and Enigma and the Swans and My Bloody Valentine and Fairport Convention (or whoever), and trying to work that kind of beauty and ambience into their sound. (I'm conflicted on this, because I haven't noticed much advancement in the past few years -- maybe because I've been paying less attention -- and my favorite years for metal are still obviously, uh, the '70s. Also, I probably stumbled onto that folk-metal and dark-metal stuff a couple years late. But metal definitely seemed "purer" to me the '90s than it does now. Though right, I'm probably just also blocking rap-metal from my memory. Did metal people even consider Rage Against The Machine a metal band at the time?)

speaking as a huge fan of that particular "gay-ass indie/punk thing"

sounds like someone has been smoking pot

xxxp

whoops, it was scott, not shakey, my bad.

still, by that logic, the mars volta should be a really great band.

yeah, I fail to understand why this eclecticism is such a good thing when every physical manifestation of the impulse is a load of donkey dicks

lots of bands from the 60's and 70's, rock or pop or whatever, were filled with people who had been playing music for YEARS on stage and they learned how to play all kinds of stuff. when i pick up random 70's rock albums i'm always amazed at how many talented guitarists/drummers/etc there were out there! they were everywhere. and they could do pop, rock, soul, etc, etc. they could be funky! genuinely funky. they came of age in clubs and bars and they had to learn how to play whatever it took to get paid. now, people go straight from a bedroom where they were recording their lo-fi anthems to clubs and it shows.

Sorry, buts lots of technically proficient '70s bands fit barband cliches and were dull or at least not creative.

THANK YOU

xp Actually, more the RATM, maybe contenderizer should go early '90s and mention Faith No More, Jane's Addiction, Living Colour, King's X -- all really self-conscious eclectics (doing all sorts of genres in boring ways, mostly). So yeah, in metal, just like in hip-hop and most other genres, it's an ongoing story, the balance shifting back and forth over time between being closed and open to other genres. Just still not sure why people think all the doors are suddenly closed now.

yeah but lots of technically proficient '70s WHENEVER bands fit xyz cliches and were/are dull or at least not creative

xpxp Yeah but, the cliches about barbands being cliched tend to be even more cliched than the bar bands themselves.

cant speak for everyone here, but im not saying eclecticism has intrinsic value - sometimes it works and is cool, sometimes its fucking abysmal.

even if you look at a pretty MOR indie band like grizzly bear, and their preferred instruments, their voices, you have to admit that theres skill there...i take issue with what shakey had written above about today's indie bands having less technical prowess than bands from the 70s ("punk rock destroyed music yawn")

First of all, I was just quoting xhuxh, so take it up with him.

Secondly, the drummer in Grizzly Bear is amazing. not so impressed with the technical chops of the rest of them... but we can throw up counter-examples til the cows come home. just as a musician if I look around at the pool of other musicians around me, they simply cannot play the same range of stuff that say, jazz dudes from the 60s or rock/r&b dudes from the 60s were accustomed to playing. they can do what they do well, but Animal Collective, for example, those guys are extremely limited in their drumming, keyboard, and guitar skills. they're great at programming and sampling and I love them, but the old school technique is not there. This is true of TONS of indie bands. Bon Iver? gimme a break that shit is simple. In some senses this is because technique has definitely CHANGED - previous generations didn't have to learn how to deal with the vast wealth of digital toys and recording technology we have now - pedals, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, etc. and those things count as instruments too. but in terms of old-style technical chops, like knowing your chord charts inside and out or being able to switch up a lot of different rhythms and syncopation patterns, or knowing how to swing or be funky or heavy ... that diversity is gone. people don't have the time and resources to put into learning that anymore, and it isn't worth it economically.

many xposts

lol I was quoting scott right sorry

i mean fucking crabcore is pretty eclectic, but its balls-out terrible so

xxpost

I'm pretty passionate about this kind of genre-stretching diversity within an artist's work being A Good Thing IF They Pull It Off. To me it's what connects the dots between people who are wildly different in terms of their audience, their context, their profile. Grabbing wildly, consider: Throbbing Gristle, The Beatles, The Magnetic Fields, Faust, Beck, The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, The Homosexuals, Joni Mitchell, Sun Ra, VU, . . . . Of course some people can't pull off more than one thing well, and there's no shame in sticking to what you're good at, but it ups the ante when people can do more than one thing really well.

i don't buy that, not when bands like here we go magic or extra life are doing very similar things and are getting just as much praise.

I am reasonably certain that if Here We Go Magic or Extra Life were getting just as much praise as Dirty Projectors, I would have heard of them before just right now this second. I have no doubt that people are praising, but it's nowhere near the same number of people praising Dirty Projectors.

^^^otm

people don't have the time and resources to put into learning that anymore, and it isn't worth it economically.

i've never gotten this sense, i feel like i'm around so many musicians who are amazingly overqualified, skill-wise. dudes who came up playing jazz and classical and then branched out into everything. of course, while some of these guys end up in creative bands people here about, most make their money doing under-the-radar stuff like music for commercials, session-for-hire, etc.

here = hear

A Good Thing IF They Pull It Off

ha that's the rub isn't it. the stones are a pretty good example -- they were always kind of technically half-assed! but they got really good at their own half-assed reading of their sources, it was successful (ie people bought it) and they kind of made a genre around themselves.

i dunno, i basically think genre divisions are good. they let you know what's going on as a listener, and they let artists act. i don't think they hinder creativity, they provide the grounds for it.

Secondly, the drummer in Grizzly Bear is amazing. not so impressed with the technical chops of the rest of them... but we can throw up counter-examples til the cows come home. just as a musician if I look around at the pool of other musicians around me, they simply cannot play the same range of stuff that say, jazz dudes from the 60s or rock/r&b dudes from the 60s were accustomed to playing. they can do what they do well, but Animal Collective, for example, those guys are extremely limited in their drumming, keyboard, and guitar skills. they're great at programming and sampling and I love them, but the old school technique is not there. This is true of TONS of indie bands. Bon Iver? gimme a break that shit is simple. In some senses this is because technique has definitely CHANGED - previous generations didn't have to learn how to deal with the vast wealth of digital toys and recording technology we have now - pedals, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, etc. and those things count as instruments too. but in terms of old-style technical chops, like knowing your chord charts inside and out or being able to switch up a lot of different rhythms and syncopation patterns, or knowing how to swing or be funky or heavy ... that diversity is gone. people don't have the time and resources to put into learning that anymore, and it isn't worth it economically.

many xposts

― the sound of a norwegian guy being wrong (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, April 29, 2010 2:03 PM (31 seconds ago)

that might be true, but that doesn't correlate to a performer's ability to whip genres/styles out of their hat, nor is it a surefire way to making good music. proficiency helps, but i would attribute the wild genre play of 90s bands like faith no more or blur to postmodernism. they did it not only because they could, but because it made sense to. just like irony, drawing on a whole host of styles and influences was a symptom of the 90s. you might not be seeing as much of it any more simply because the music thats being made now is reacting to that sort of schizophrenia with conservatism. i don't even know if we are seeing less of it though, or if its just harder to tell.

but in terms of old-style technical chops, like knowing your chord charts inside and out or being able to switch up a lot of different rhythms and syncopation patterns, or knowing how to swing or be funky or heavy ... that diversity is gone. people don't have the time and resources to put into learning that anymore, and it isn't worth it economically.

to draw a random (and kinda old and non-indie) example, I am reminded of a terrible Beatles medley performed at some Grammy ceremony a few years ago featuring Pharrell on drums, Sting, Dave Matthews, and Vince Gill that was fucking godawful. Sting, Matthews and Pharrell clearly had no clue how to play together or get out of their respective comfort-zones, each was locked into their little isolated track, stuck on the way they normally play, and the results were terrible. The one dude who clearly knew what he was doing was, not surprisingly, Vince Gill. Because good country guys tend to know their shit - their history and playing traditions.

I get the feeling that tons of indie/rock bands these days are similar. They find one guitar tuning or one particular melodic/rhythmic combination that works well and then they just do it over and over (the Dodos - who I like! - spring to mind), sometimes embellishing the edges but essentially staying within their limitations. It's like they don't bother to get a grounding in anything else - as young musicians they hit on something that works, and then never get past it. To me, it's a very strange and foreign way to approach making music. Often the results can be great, but as far as overall musicianship goes, I am rarely impressed.

xp

feel like i'm around so many musicians who are amazingly overqualified, skill-wise. dudes who came up playing jazz and classical and then branched out into everything.

lol yeah I feel you, but yr in a different environment than I am. classical guys have their own limitations in my experience ("what, you want me to play something that ISN'T WRITTEN DOWN?" followed by desperate fumbling)

Actually, more the RATM, maybe contenderizer should go early '90s and mention Faith No More, Jane's Addiction, Living Colour, King's X -- all really self-conscious eclectics (doing all sorts of genres in boring ways, mostly). So yeah, in metal, just like in hip-hop and most other genres, it's an ongoing story, the balance shifting back and forth over time between being closed and open to other genres. Just still not sure why people think all the doors are suddenly closed now.

― xhuxk

okay seriously at this point does the word "metal" actually mean anything distinct from "rock"

also i do tend to hang out with a lot of drummers, and drummers have always been more likely to be versed in a bunch of different styles

xp

I am reasonably certain that if Here We Go Magic or Extra Life were getting just as much praise as Dirty Projectors, I would have heard of them before just right now this second. I have no doubt that people are praising, but it's nowhere near the same number of people praising Dirty Projectors.

― Marriage, that's where I'm a Viking! (HI DERE), Thursday, April 29, 2010 2:05 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

sorry, i've just been hearing a lot about them lately. another highly praised band who are also technically proficient, from say, the year before, would be ponytail or sian alice group. even portishead, i would say, subscribe to that 'old school' kind of knowledge/mentality that current musicians are apparently lacking. the year before that, there was battles. i really don't think the dirty projectors, or bands like them, are any kind of anomaly or exception to the current state of "indie rock."

I'm not 100% sure this is really on-topic, but I would rather hear a band experiment, remain vital, flow with off-the-wall inspirations - some of which may sound nothing like what the artist has done previously. Even if it could be argued that the experiment, on some level, FAILED, this sort of inspiration can produce intense & transcendent moments. Sometimes I can respect the experimentation without really LIKING the results [Neil Young's Trans, for instance]. Also, experiments can have a certain vitality that well-rehearsed, perfect takes may lack.

Bon Iver? gimme a break that shit is simple.

BUT SHAKEY------- YOU ARE DISCOUNTING THE FACT THAT HE WROTE THE MUSIC WHILE SPENDING THREE WINTER MONTHS IN A REMOTE CABIN IN NORTHWESTERN WISCONSIN AFTER THE BREAK UP OF HIS BAND AND RELATIONSHIP, AND ALSO A BOUT WITH MONONUCLEOSIS

THAT SHIT IS NOT SIMPLE

to draw a random (and kinda old and non-indie) example, I am reminded of a terrible Beatles medley performed at some Grammy ceremony a few years ago featuring Pharrell on drums, Sting, Dave Matthews, and Vince Gill that was fucking godawful. Sting, Matthews and Pharrell clearly had no clue how to play together or get out of their respective comfort-zones, each was locked into their little isolated track, stuck on the way they normally play, and the results were terrible.

― the sound of a norwegian guy being wrong (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, April 29, 2010 2:14 PM (4 minutes ago)

you're talking about a band who had played with each other for years, and comparing that with a group of people who had never performed together prior, who were playing songs that weren't even there's? how is that fair, or even apt?

instead, i see a genre that's deathly afraid of speaking to anyone but a cadre of die-hard fans.

this is like crack smoking crazy. mastodon/high on fire/u1v3_r/harvey milk/torche/baroness/SGM/Sunn o)))/Boris and on and on and on

sorry what was that between high on fire and harvey milk, john?

(i bet dan changes the variation you use everytime so you will eventually get caught)

honestly not trying to be a jerk here but i think yer talking about something that you have like minimal current understanding of and are just taking at some weird stereotypical surface value, which is why im not all over here pontificating about modern pop country or whatever

xpost i know. sigh.

and comparing that with a group of people who had never performed together prior, who were playing songs that weren't even there's? how is that fair, or even apt?

those guys are all pros, who have been playing for years, and who (in some circles) are regarded as proficient on their instruments. And yet they could not play a relatively simple and canonical work (I believe it was "I Saw Her Standing There") - their personal technical limitations were all painfully on display. it was sad.

xp

also pharrell is terrible on drums

xp

I'm kinda with cabbage on this

also metal is going in all sorts of weird, crazy and unexpected directions. there's a perpetual backlash against this but it isn't stopping those who wish to apply heavy guitars to whatever the hell they like. nor is this application automatically producing great music. it's a question of conception and execution.

like even the idea that playing together for years is important/necessary for playing a work that EVERYBODY KNOWS is kinda sad.

xp

xp Three metal albums (by Mastodon, Baroness, Converge) finished in the Pazz & Jop Top 25 this year (which was unprecedented), and Sun O))) finished 42nd, so clearly they're reaching some non-metal fans.

I mean, jazz dudes jumped bands all the time! and even touring rock bands in the 70s could reliably draw on a pool of local musicians for a pickup band in a pinch! Nobody in the indie rock world can (or does) do this.

xp

Three metal albums (by Mastodon, Baroness, Converge) finished in the Pazz & Jop Top 25 this year (which was unprecedented), and Sun O))) finished 42nd, so clearly they're reaching some non-metal fans.

Clearly the people voting for these albums are metal fans. They are voting for metal albums! They enjoy (at least these four examples of) metal! What other qualifications does a "fan" need?

also metal is going in all sorts of weird, crazy and unexpected directions. there's a perpetual backlash against this but it isn't stopping those who wish to apply heavy guitars to whatever the hell they like.

just fyi the "backlash" is not against metal going in "weird, crazy and unexpected directions," it's against metal bands thinking that re-doing shoegaze with different pedal rigs is interesting

Shakey is pretty OTM here: there's a reason why people routinely list session musicians as being the most amazing, skilled people they know of/have worked with.

xp Well, right -- I'm a metal fan, too. But I'm not just a metal fan. (And contenderizer was arguing that people who listened to certain '90s metal bands weren't metal fans, which was my point.)

Also says something that you've got more and more jazz critics doubling as metal critics.

okay seriously at this point does the word "metal" actually mean anything distinct from "rock"

― Marriage, that's where I'm a Viking! (HI DERE}

Clearly the people voting for these albums are metal fans. They are voting for metal albums! They enjoy (at least these four examples of) metal! What other qualifications does a "fan" need?

― I just wish he hadn't adopted the "ilxor" moniker (ilxor), Thursday, April 29, 2010 6:30 PM (2 minutes ago)

pretty dope circular logic whirlpool right here

just fyi the "backlash" is not against metal going in "weird, crazy and unexpected directions," it's against metal bands thinking that re-doing shoegaze with different pedal rigs is interesting

haha this is true to some extent, although look at genuine visionaries such as dodheimsgard...complete ostracised, and not a shoegaze pedal in sight

and fwiw i was gonna add that some of the purist backlash stuff is vvv good (as long as it carves its own sonic identity with strong performance and narrative)

*completely

pretty dope circular logic whirlpool right here

pretty sure that was the point...?

Shakey is pretty OTM here: there's a reason why people routinely list session musicians as being the most amazing, skilled people they know of/have worked with.

quoted for truth - had the honor to work with a session guy recently & my whole band + the producer just sat there in open-mouthed awe

also DHG records bore me to fucking tears

"Digital HardGore"?

xp (And I'm a metal fan who's frustrated with metalgaze, too. And lots of other stuff in metal now. I don't even post on Rolling Metal anymore! But I still get the idea there's a lot going on, in lots of different directions, even if I'm not personally connecting with it.)

I did like the one Dodheimsgard album I heard, though!

I think I know why aerosmith didn't like DHG - the thrill is in the composition, rather than the performance. It's more impressive than gut-felt. Ulver are one of the few metal bands who revolutionised 'metal' composition techniques while still hitting the listener where it hurts.

The 'metal' bands mentioned above - like Sunn o))), Monarch, Gnaw Their Tongues, Boris, Hey Colossus, etc. have crossover appeal with drone & psychedelic fans. I know this because I come more from the psychedelic end of things than the metal end and I like that sort of thing A LOT.

oh yeah the Sunn O))) album from last year was brilliant in that gut-felt-but-sorta-unprecedented regard

the last Sunn O))) has more in common with Arvo Part than, say, Mastodon IMO

what exactly are we pining for with the session musician talk? there are still tons of those musicians out there, although i'd venture to say that most of them aren't involved in the kind of music that gets talked about here, at least not in obvious ways. are people disappointed with the level of musicianship in the music they listen to?

...and come to think of it, Boris [among others] comes out with some widely varied sounds too, which may help explain how the doomsludge tsunamis can still sound fresh when they fall back on them. Monoliths & Dimensions is a great Sunn o))) record, as is White 1.

julian priester was on the last sunn o))) album and he played trombone with sun ra, coltrane, ellington, etc, so it's not like they are really genre bound

this is like crack smoking crazy. mastodon/high on fire/u1v3_r/harvey milk/torche/baroness/SGM/Sunn o)))/Boris and on and on and on

― Varg Vikinem (jjjusten), Thursday, April 29, 2010 11:23 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

honestly not trying to be a jerk here but i think yer talking about something that you have like minimal current understanding of and are just taking at some weird stereotypical surface value, which is why im not all over here pontificating about modern pop country or whatever

xpost i know. sigh.

― Varg Vikinem (jjjusten), Thursday, April 29, 2010 11:26 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

i get where you're coming from, but i own and regularly listen to records by high on fire, ulver, harvey milk, baroness, sunn o))), and boris (not torche & mastodon so much cuz i don't dig em). along with nachtmystium, agalloch, jesu, neige/alcest skeletonwitch, ghoul, deathspell omega, melechesh, nile, etc, etc. i'm not claiming to be any kind of expert in the shit, but nor am i looking in from the outside. recent mastodon & baroness & (especially) ulver circa blood inside are the only bands you mention that are, in my opinion, taking the kinds of risks required to speak to a broad pop audience. i guess torche and boris are trying, too, but as far as i can tell they aren't succeeding.

what exactly are we pining for with the session musician talk? there are still tons of those musicians out there, although i'd venture to say that most of them aren't involved in the kind of music that gets talked about here, at least not in obvious ways. are people disappointed with the level of musicianship in the music they listen to?

I just think if we're looking to explain why today's indie/rock artists' are fairly conservative in their explorations of their preferred genre, their technical limitations are probably a contributing factor. for ex. if all you've ever done is compose in drop-D tuning, then a lot of your shit is going to sound the same.

xp Well, I guess -- and maybe this is part of contenderizer's point, so I'm playing devil's advocate now -- bands like RATM, Jane's Addiction, Faith No More, King's X, etc., had a kind of pop/radio/commercial outreach in ways that say Sun O)))) or Boris or even Mastodon or Baronness don't. Doesn't mean the latter are less adventurous, obviously, but it does mean that -- even if they're drawing in occasional jazz and avant-drone fans -- they're somehow limiting their audiences in ways those '90s bands weren't.

(I typed that before he made basically the same point btw.)

xhuxk otm. genre insularity is threatened by pop appeal. it is NOT threatened by the establishment of serious art-cred points.

{me too)

well ok but i dont get why pop crossover is getting the nod here over crossover to other genres (unless im missing the point of the original question). the whole discussion started thx to discussion of mr. bungle on the alternate album poll thread, so i dont think the intention was to talk about pop access in specific.

i'm sticking to pop cuz it seems to me that unapologetic mainstream appeal is the greatest heresy possible in any insular musical/cultural community. it's a betrayal of closed-door policies and outsider solildarity. to be pop is to be "untrue", polluted, compromised, etc. that's what makes it a good thing. and that, it seems to me, is the big difference between metal in the 70s/80s/90s and metal today.

in the 80s, you saw the development of extreme styles that appealed only to the cult. extreme metal flourished in the 90s, but there was still a great deal of conversation between metal and mainstream pop. this seems to have dried up in the new century, and i'm not sure why. blame nu-metal, i guess...

actually blame the entire hardcore/metalcore/emocore axis imo

that's pretty much where the conversation you're talking about went

all of the examples of technical prowess leading to eclecticism are leaning toward the jazz world. bands like bungle have a huge background in jazz music, so are they really being all that eclectic or daring, or are they just "doing jazz?" i mean, a big part of this discussion revolves around genre, and breaking from the confines of one to explore another, or several. yet, it's well within the limits of contemporary jazz to have a diverse form of eclecticism, and it has been for some time. so wouldn't our own preferences for session players, improvisation and the "old school" be a symptom of our own tribal allegiances? is that evidence against the claim that tribal allegiances are breaking down?

there was still a great deal of conversation between metal and mainstream pop. this seems to have dried up in the new century, and i'm not sure why. blame nu-metal, i guess...

not sure what you mean. you're saying there's a lack of pop-metal bands now, or there's a lack of crossover?

― borntohula

mastodon were poised for a crossover after blood mountain, but opted instead to make a shitty prog album about rasputin.

pretty sure "can i just get beyond this political point-scoring" counts as political point-scoring cleggsy

wrong thread (and board)!

see, i thought mastodon were poised for the crossover after leviathan, but opted instead to make an intermittently shitty/AWESOME album about corpuscles

i dissed mastodon earlier, but there's a lot of their stuff i do like. they've just never made a record i wanna listen to all the way through. or at least not often.

xp

hahaaha yeah leviathan was pretty solid too, but i just recall people calling them the "next metallica" around the time of blood mountain.

you're right about how inconsistent they are, that's for sure.

nu metal WAS pop, linkin park, limp bizkit

^^tru

How about some non-metal and non-jazz eclecticism:

So did any of you listen to Senegalese singer Baaba Maal's 2009 cd "Television" that he recorded with the Italian born female singer and the Argentinian born keyboardist from NY based Brazilian Girls plus guitarist/producer Barry Reynolds (who worked with Grace Jones and Marianne Faithful back when)?

i did not

It seemed to fly under the radar. I like most of it although it might be still too Senegalese afropop for some but it's not cliched 'worldbeat' or putumayo background music either. It seems to have gotten some younger Senegalese music listeners into Maal who had previously ignored him as old-school.

my favorite metal band is a pop metal band.

The Osmonds?

Music is still divided into genres, and audiences are too. In fact, probably more so than ever.

Is there even such a thing as a metal fan these days? Everything is so splintered and lots of people like certain styles of metal and despise others (nu-metal,hair metal etc)

Always looking for a chance to post this
http://www.penaltytime.com/images/232.jpg

Music is still divided into genres, and audiences are too.

o rly

What genre is this audience, Geir?

http://bit.ly/8ZSSam

How about this one?

http://bit.ly/9MoWSE

Pink Martini

Motorhead

so wouldn't our own preferences for session players, improvisation and the "old school" be a symptom of our own tribal allegiances? is that evidence against the claim that tribal allegiances are breaking down?

let me be clear that I'm not saying I prefer music by session players, nor am I speaking of a strictly jazz-like approach - I'm talking about musicians' having a drive to explore a wider vista beyond what comes easiest to them. In previous generations, when making a lifelong career as a musician was actually more easily attainable, it was readily apparent that if you wanted to make any $$$ you had to have some degree of chops, a certain level of understanding of the fundamentals of your chosen instrument, and a certain versatility was an asset. Because maintaining those qualities meant that you could get more work. You could entertain a crowd with a variety of different stuff, you could play in a variety of different bands, etc. And if you were good and got along with people and got a couple breaks, you could make a decent living. In rock/indie rock, this model basically does not exist. The genre is stuffed to the gills with kids who, as I said, figure out how to do one thing and then stick to that for a few years, put out some records (that probably don't make them any money) and then eventually give up as soon as it's clear that there's a new batch of kids behind them. And most of these indie kids have absorbed some kind of hand-me-down DIY punk ideology that you don't "need to know" how to play your instrument to make good music (which is true to some degree, but can also be taken to inappropriate and uninteresting extremes). And because of the internet/atomized distribution model currently arising, these kids can get instant exposure and credibility - and that will last for a little while, but not long, and then they're done. The end result is that you have successive waves of musicians who never really bother to, y'know, get GOOD and develop any kind of depth or breadth - you end up with a bunch of disconnected, atomized subcurrents within the genre, with very very few bands maintaining any kind of career longevity. So there's no motivation for indie to musicians' to develop the requisite chops to actually push themselves or take risks or break-out of their previous genre restrictions - why should they? It's difficult, it takes time and practice, and it isn't gonna make them any money.

xp

itt Shakey Mo explains Wavves

exactly

"The Osmonds?"

no. even the osmonds needed a ringer for crazy horses. (their touring guitarist at the time played on that album and he was an awesome hard rock guitarist)

katatonia. my fave rock band of the last ten or twelve years. they are my pop idols.

i disagree with lj about dhg. they aren't ostracized by metal fans. as long as you start out making genre-defining "canon" albums, then metal fans will follow you no matter what you do. they might not like everything you do, but there is respect there. dhg, ulver, manes, fleurety, beyond dawn, ved buens ende, anathema, and katatonia will always have cred in the metal world because of what they achieved early on.

all the wavvves type stuff is a pretty small subset of indie/underground/punk whatever rock...

i mean you could just as easily bring up, like minus the bear who are pretty chopsy, and i bet they are as popular as wavvves...

itt Dan makes yet another joke that bombs with M@tt

i got some garage rock album a while back and i thought to myself, man, these dudes were tight! they are seriously rocking, how old are they, they look like kids! then i noticed on the back cover THE BAND WOULD LIKE TO THANK: and then they named every member of the wrecking crew. hahaha! hal blaine is my garage rock hero.

doesn't really have anything to do with anything, just remembered that.

i guess the moral of the story would be: more bands should hire hal blaine.

itt Dan makes yet another joke that bombs with M@tt

― Anything With Bagpipes (HI DERE), Thursday, April 29, 2010 9:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no i got it, but then shakey agreed with you! and i think he was being serious

dude from battles/helmet would make my list of fave drummers. love that guy. more indie bands should hire helmet drummers.

oh shit THAT'S where the dude from Battles came from??????

Okay I MUST relisten to Helmet, like IMMEDIATELY

no i got it, but then shakey agreed with you! and i think he was being serious

I take Wavves jokes very seriously

oh shit THAT'S where the dude from Battles came from??????

Okay I MUST relisten to Helmet, like IMMEDIATELY

This was my reaction, sort of. Except I was more like, okay, I MUST avoid Helmet at all costs, like IMMEDIATELY.

It was because of him I listened to battles in the 1st place.

quick dude, start avoiding! I know it will be difficult, what with the market saturation Helmet is currently experiencing

i love meantime. i would marry that album if it were legal. don't care about any of their other stuff. (though i did kinda like the amrep album strap it on)

Is there even such a thing as a metal fan these days? Everything is so splintered and lots of people like certain styles of metal and despise others (nu-metal,hair metal etc)

Just because you like a genre doesn't mean you enjoy everything within that genre. There may even be subgenres you cannot tolerate.

Most metal fans still don't exactly listen to a lot of pop music and ballads though, which sort of proves that the initial post here is wrong.

SRSLY did you hear about the Lady Gaga/Helmet co-headlining tour?? I can't believe they had the nerve to bill them as co-headliners when clearly one of these acts is the bigger draw. For shame... for shame.

xpost to HI DERE

Meantime is one of my fave albums of all time ( and i better have fucking voted for it in lj's poll) Im even wearing my Helmet tshirt right now

you can't buy helmet records anymore anyway. winona stole them all.

http://www.variety.com/graphics/photos/vpage2003/vambassador_ryder.jpg

Most metal fans still don't exactly listen to a lot of pop music and ballads though, which sort of proves that the initial post here is wrong.

Not true in ILM's case. Chuck, Scott etc love pop, country, and other genres. Not to mention myself, phil etc liking jazz,funk and also many more genres!

dnftt

was not expecting to encounter winona at the end of this thread ... but I'm glad she's here. <3 you winona.

i don't share the perception of metal being ballad and pop-free

http://img702.mytextgraphics.com/sparklee/2010/04/26/5503f627b3643a8321b745cb77cc23d9.gif

Metal,thankfully, hasn't has had as many ballads since the early 90s.

let me be clear that I'm not saying I prefer music by session players, nor am I speaking of a strictly jazz-like approach - I'm talking about musicians' having a drive to explore a wider vista beyond what comes easiest to them. In previous generations, when making a lifelong career as a musician was actually more easily attainable, it was readily apparent that if you wanted to make any $$$ you had to have some degree of chops, a certain level of understanding of the fundamentals of your chosen instrument, and a certain versatility was an asset. Because maintaining those qualities meant that you could get more work. You could entertain a crowd with a variety of different stuff, you could play in a variety of different bands, etc. And if you were good and got along with people and got a couple breaks, you could make a decent living. In rock/indie rock, this model basically does not exist. The genre is stuffed to the gills with kids who, as I said, figure out how to do one thing and then stick to that for a few years, put out some records (that probably don't make them any money) and then eventually give up as soon as it's clear that there's a new batch of kids behind them. And most of these indie kids have absorbed some kind of hand-me-down DIY punk ideology that you don't "need to know" how to play your instrument to make good music (which is true to some degree, but can also be taken to inappropriate and uninteresting extremes). And because of the internet/atomized distribution model currently arising, these kids can get instant exposure and credibility - and that will last for a little while, but not long, and then they're done. The end result is that you have successive waves of musicians who never really bother to, y'know, get GOOD and develop any kind of depth or breadth - you end up with a bunch of disconnected, atomized subcurrents within the genre, with very very few bands maintaining any kind of career longevity. So there's no motivation for indie to musicians' to develop the requisite chops to actually push themselves or take risks or break-out of their previous genre restrictions - why should they? It's difficult, it takes time and practice, and it isn't gonna make them any money.

xp

― the sound of a norwegian guy being wrong (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, April 29, 2010 4:52 PM (35 minutes ago)

ok i can agree with that. before, i was under the impression that you were saying that those types of musicians don't exist anymore, and that's when i got all WTF, but you were really saying that there's no reward for musicians to push themselves to learn more and therefore be more likely to experiment outside their comfort zone. that idea sits a little bit easier with me. it's not as though those types of proficient musicians don't exist now, it's just that the amount of time they've put into their work isn't valued like it was.

it's not as though those types of proficient musicians don't exist now, it's just that the amount of time they've put into their work isn't valued like it was.

yeah, which means that they're getting (and will probably continue to get) rarer. Which is bad for any kind of music, on the whole. But I do have faith that there will always be a subset (however small) of musicians who are dedicated and devoted to their craft out of sheer love for it, regardless of lacking financial compensation.

i totally feel you shakey, but good ideas still trump chops, and good ideas can run out regardless of whether or not you have chops to fall back on.

very true. ideas first, chops second. (however if yr ideas are good and yr chops suck then yr ideas may not get across properly)

wow, this seems topical. its the promo blurb on the back of a 1970 promo 45 from columbia that features excerpts from records by terry riley, lasry-baschet, harry partch, berio, reich, nancarrow. i'm gonna type it up:

"over thirty? stuck in the same musical bag for too long and getting a little twitchy? have you run through the three Bs and back to monteverdi and forward to mahler and ives? are you bored with perry como but not desperate enough to embrace the stones or janis joplin? peace.
under thirty? are you getting bored occasionally with jimi hendrix, maybe a little put off by jim morrison? jaws tired of "bubble gum music"? want to broaden your horizons without getting trapped in that square symphony and opera stuff?
good news! there's an area of new music growing that you can listen to without your friends accusing you of selling out to the other side. WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO CALL IT YET AND WE PROBABLY WON'T UNTIL STRICT "POP" AND "CLASSICAL" AND "JAZZ" CATEGORIES ARE GROUND INTO DUST BY THE ELECTRONIC AGE. but just because we don't have a name for it is no reason you can't go ahead and enjoy it.
its borders are very hazy and loose. some it is being written NOW by people like terry riley and mort subotnick and luciano berio. some of it a decade or two old, is just now being discovered: like blood, sweat and tears uncovering erik satie or kids grooving to the sound of harry partch or varese.
so, if you've got the musical "blahs", listen. there's enough on this record to keep your adrenaline pumping through 1970. come on, get with it!"

*gets with it*

I used to be with "it", then they changed what "it" was, now, what I'm with isn't "it", and what's 'it' seems weird and scary

lol scott, i can just picture the team from columbia's sagging classical division sitting in don draper's office...

Scott that was SO worth the work of typing in, thanking u, all-time classic copywriting.

hee hee, yeah: want to broaden your horizons without getting trapped in that square symphony and opera stuff? A+++

"You can call him Mort"

Genres functioning in the forms of radio/MTV playlists, magazines has broken down a bit, but there are still other tribal allegiances in play in '010, hence xhuxk's complaint about Pazz&Jop reaching all time levels of consensus. The way ppl are listening is doubtless still fluxin, maybe now comfortable superficially screening a wide range of sonics at youtube bitrate, but that's an irresistable starting point imo. Bands having less live experience seems inevitable if ppl are moanier about going to shows, which seems the case on ilx sometimes, tho I'm not old enough to have much to compare to.

Also curious about contenderizer's mount eerie metal experience. Microphones always had pretty heavy distorted drums/guitar noise in parts, was it more of that?

i don't share the perception of metal being ballad and pop-free

Well... Unless you count hair metal as metal, I am not so certain....

genre boundaries have always been artificial constructs created by the market in order to maximize sales to particular demographics. with the destruction of the market and the flattening out of demographics, genre has become meaningless. the audience understands this.

Before I finish reading this very long thread, I have to say, this seems really wrong to me. Genre is only "artificial" in the sense that it is cultural, it is social. Much of music is tied up with creating expectations and then fulfilling them or surprising the listener by not fulfilling them. Beyond that, the idea that genre is just somehow a marketing thing rather than something that people naturally do together as social creatures is pretty nutty. As with anything else, people come together over shared affinities. They want music that does this, not that. They like a certain type of rhythm (maybe not just one, but a range). They want songs that unfold in certain ways, or they are attracted to some static, seemingly eternal, vibe. There is too much to be said about all this, but I have to catch a bus. I mean, people will argue over what a breakfast burrito should be, and you are telling me genre is an artificial construct produced solely by marketing schemers?

Robert Johnson fans wanted Bing Crosby covers.

Also, scott basically otm: the 70s rule. (Apologies if he doesn't consider that an acceptable paraphrase.)

I still maintain there was a conscious idea for a time in the 90s that the more genre-blending you could add to your plumage the better.

I listened to Pearl Jam's "No Code" yesterday - and yeah in retrospect it's a straight up post-grunge rock album, but in context it's a self-consciously eclectic effort. Heavy songs are strategically positioned so that they rub up against ballads, happy-clap-alongs next to prog-space outs.

Another band who consiously did this were the Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie being possibly the ultimate example of "hey, we can do anything and everything, and here's the proof!"

As mentioned upthread by various, I think this has become considered a largely corny attitude in the 00's. Bands are respected for having a uniform uninterrupted vibe running throughout their albums rather than blatant manicism.

For every example there's a counterexample tho - for every Blur an Oasis, if you want to keep it on the home front

I still maintain there was a conscious idea for a time in the 90s that the more genre-blending you could add to your plumage the better.

I listened to Pearl Jam's "No Code" yesterday - and yeah in retrospect it's a straight up post-grunge rock album, but in context it's a self-consciously eclectic effort. Heavy songs are strategically positioned so that they rub up against ballads, happy-clap-alongs next to prog-space outs.

Another band who consiously did this were the Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie being possibly the ultimate example of "hey, we can do anything and everything, and here's the proof!"

But wasn't this also the case in the heavy rock of the 70s? I mean, bands such as Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep and to some extent also Deep Purple had already crossed virtually every musical border there was to cross.

Uriah Heep's rap album wasn't v. good tbh

Yeah, Heep Hop never really took off

Rap wasn't invented in the 70s (or at least nobody outside the ghetto had heard of it) or I wouldn't have been surprised if some prog bands may have put the occasional rap sequence into their suites.

Thanx Geir, now I can't get Wakeman doing "Bitches Ain't Shit" out of my head.

geir, we're not really discussing the 70s (for once) in this thread... What's being posited here is that in the nineties there was a popular trend for genre-prankstering and wilful eclecticism which has either died out, dated or become so refined throughout the 00's that save a few examples (Ulver etc) it's now deemed more fashionable, or palatable, for acts to find a niche and to work within a tightly-controlled medium.

"Don't touch me 'cos I'm Closer to the Edge"

Tightly controlled niche acts Vampire Weekend and MGSMHT to thread

Think the premise of this thread is just plain wrong, tbh.

in many ways, yes. Basically all these Whig History versions of popular music end up looking a bit ridic.

What have Vampire Weekend and MGMT got to do with it? They both have a very defined sound. It's not the same as Mike Patton or They Might Be Giants - i dunno - even Blur were doing albums with a punk song, a waltz, a disco track etc. Bands today do evolve and change, but are more likely to keep their sound consistent within the space of an album. It's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but I think there's less to be said these days for showing off the fact that you listen to "all kinds of music", and more to be said about "I have an idea, it's my idea, sure it sounds like a cross between Steely Dan and Ricardo Villalobos, but here are 13 tracks that work within this aesthetic".

"and now here is another album that sounds completely different and will be accompanied by a 3000 post ILX throw-down"

Rap wasn't invented in the 70s (or at least nobody outside the ghetto had heard of it) or I wouldn't have been surprised if some prog bands may have put the occasional rap sequence into their suites.

Well, lots of people outside of, uh, "the ghetto" heard "Rapper's Delight" in 1979. But as for the second point, definitely:

And out on the subway,
Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid
Exits into daylight, spraygun hid,
And the lamb lies down on Broadway.

Still not convinced that bad '90s alternative rock albums were any more varied than bad '00s (or '10s) alternative rock albums. (Also don't think Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins had rap sequences; could be wrong though.)

I'm talking about musicians' having a drive to explore a wider vista beyond what comes easiest to them. In previous generations, when making a lifelong career as a musician was actually more easily attainable, it was readily apparent that if you wanted to make any $$$ you had to have some degree of chops, a certain level of understanding of the fundamentals of your chosen instrument, and a certain versatility was an asset. -Shakey Mo

Because of my interest in Fat Possum Mississippi blues and obscure soul, I somehow end up on e-mail lists for 50-something and up blues-rockers, because the labels and concert calendar people think I will like that stuff as well. Unfortunately, many of these folks, just like the stereotypical 20-something indie kids Shakey derides, never got the clue that versatility was an asset. These folks stick to generic baby-boom blooz-rock that demonstrates a bit of chops but nothing more.

Also don't think Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins had rap sequences; could be wrong though

they do in the 00s thanks to Girl Talk

do actually love the use of '1979' on Night Ripper

In previous generations, the various pop genres at the very least shared common instrumentation & musical vocabulary. Not so much anymore.

Harder to diversify if you need to learn a whole new discipline.

I don't really hold with this idea that Mumford & Sons experimenting with dancehall and reggaeton on their next album is a desirable outcome, but I still think people are wilfully ignoring the things that don't fit their thesis. Like, say, Radiohead.

one of my favorite 70's rap songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwBFWJCqp6U

this all reminds me of a friend who used to insist the phrase was "music gender"

Not sure I even buy what Thus Sang Freud is saying. Haven't lots of emo/pop-punk bands trying to cross over into rappy/electro-pop and Top 40 pop stuff the past couple years? Thinking of 3Oh!3 (who've collaborated a couple times with Ke$ha), or Cobra Starship doing stuff with Leighton Meester (who has also recorded with Robin Thicke), or Boys Like Girls with Taylor Swift, etc. Also seems to me the equivalent these days of Smashing Pumpkins type '90s alt rock might be My Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy or Panic At The Disco -- I don't like much any of that stuff, but I don't get the idea those bands' songs all sound the same, either. And neither do Vampire Weekend's, any more than Pearl Jam's did. They both have a basic sound, and they vary within that sound. (Again, not defending those bands; most of their music is awful. Just doubt it's as one-dimensional as seems to be being implied here.)

"1979" is a prime example, and goes completely against xhuxk's "lol grunge" argument.

On Mellon Collie, which came out at what was arguably the height of the nineties eclectic boom, every "rat in a cage" doorslam-a-thon was juxtaposed with something quite outside the Smasho's usual aesthetic; in this case it was some techno-nostalgic take on Gary Numan with hints of disco.

The mid-late 90's felt like a time when rock bands were looking to make their White Album. Beck, Aphex, TMBG, Blur - even Oasis were showing pretentions of trying to get out of their pub-rock doldrums, banging on about how they were going to make a Beta Band album etc (didn't manage it though)...

I'm finding it hard to think of too many successful 00's bands that actively sought eclecticism as an aesthetic, other than maybe a few metal bands (most of whom, such as Ulver, Mike Patton and Sigh began their careers in the 90s anyway). Random brit-rock examples - the Arctic Monkeys, afaik, never did a techno track; while the Horrors did reinvent themselves but released an album of tracks that were a consistent piece of work.

xposts

how are you defining "successful"? Do you mean getting commercial radio and video play or do you mean critics fave?

does it matter?

the 90's is also when U2 invented electroclash.

god i wish that wasn't true...

I like "1979", but c'mon -- it doesn't sound like music from 1979. It sounds like a a pretty '90s alt-rock song that maybe tentatively nods to the Cars and "Cars". And bad rock bands still do that. (Shiny Toy Guns just covered Peter Schilling's "Major Tom," for crissakes.)

And shitty rock bands have also been incorporating turntables for ages now. And Taylor Swift covers Eminem and Def Leppard in her shows and makes country records that sound like '90s college radio folk pop, and Sugarland cover Beyonce' and the Dream Academy. (And when rock bands and country bands nod to hip-hop, right, they don't sound like "real" hip-hop, just like the Pumpkins' "1979" didn't sound like "real" new wave, just like '70s rock bands getting funky usually didn't sound much like the Ohio Players. That's how music changes, for better or worse.)

Weird that I'm taking so much time to defend current music, btw, especially since I think music tends to be really bad now, for the most part. I spend more time listening to records from the '70s and early '80s now than I have in ages. So I'm not saying '00s and '10s music isn't missing something; it's missing a lot. (So was '90s music, which is one of the recent I'm so "lol grunge.") But "eclecticism" and "openness to other genres" isn't it. That's everywhere you look.

i'm not sure i understand anything about that post.

Sugarland also cover R.E.M. and the B-52s, fwiw. (And that's just the tip of the iceberg; there are tons of examples of that kind of thing.)

Btw, goes without saying, but Nashville is probably one of the last places where seasoned, road-tested rock chops do still tend to matter (and not for their own sake, either -- in the service of songwriting and well-sung hookful songs.) I get the idea that's where lots of old session pros have ended up, and it's not hard to guess why.

1979 always reminds me of sonic youth. schizophrenia, maybe.

"1979" doesn't sound like music from 1979, no, but it really didn't sound like the Smashing Pumpkins when it came out, save Corgan's vocal (which in itself had been tempered from the usual nasal caterwaul to a breezy new wave cool).

1979 does have that blippy synth bit at the end which probably means something

the various pop genres at the very least shared common instrumentation & musical vocabulary. Not so much anymore.

i think the complete opposite e.g. same shrill synth presets on so much chart shit over the last couple of years.

Well, for example, Duane Allman could take his chops & walk into an Aretha Franklin session & make "real" r&b. That probably couldn't happen nowadays. He'd have to learn how to program a synthesizer. It's almost a completely different language. It's not like people have lost the desire to diversify, they've lost the ability. Most of the examples xhuxk mentioned are collaborations -- maybe the only way you can hop genres today is to borrow someone who knows what the other genre is all about.

Even modern country, when it rocks itself up, does so via 70s vocabulary (power chords etc). That's common language. I've never heard country that borrows from '00s metal.

it really didn't sound like the Smashing Pumpkins when it came out

One reason I bought the single, probably.

I'm finding it hard to think of too many successful 00's bands that actively sought eclecticism as an aesthetic

It usually takes a few albums into an act's career until this becomes much of an option at all. Usually, the first couple of albums are spent establishing your style before you start improvising. Franz Ferdinand, however, have been more stylistically eclectic with every album, the first album being very stuck in that post-punk/Strokes style, the second one adding the occasional ballad and the third one adding a considerable electro element.

Maybe metallica vocal harmonies, but that's as close as it gets.

Franz Ferdinand, however, have been more stylistically eclectic with every album, the first album being very stuck in that post-punk/Strokes style, the second one adding the occasional ballad

I could only make it this far before the giggles overwhelmed me

sure enough Franz Ferdinand have been noticeably less successful with each album

"Hmm, this sounds just like their first album, only with BALLADS! How eclectic!"

I've never heard country that borrows from '00s metal

Does Back In Black count? (Oh wait, I thought you said '80s metal. And I pretty much do agree that '00s country's rock is Bad Company-era '70s rock. Maybe very slight melodic or harmony nods to '90s Metallica or Alice In Chains, but even that's arguable.)

(Oops, didn't see Thug Sang's Metallica mention.)

Well, '70s rock and (maybe even more so) '80s hair-metal. And some Nickelback/Collective Soul type fake grunge. But right, very little post-Slayer extreme metal, at least not yet. (Give it a couple years though.)

hey, when did this become the pop-country music thread? :-(

I don't agree that bands aren't diversifying because they can't. Nothing technology-wise has changed that much since the early-90s, and more and more rock-bands are learning to adapt to technology as well as learning their dexterical (is that a word?) chops on tour.

Plus, y'know, anyone can do a pastiche or genre-exercise if they want to, regardless of how well they play. Just get the right producer in and you can do it.

the taylor swift covers reign in blood nashville style album must be just around the corner

I keep thinking of David Cantwell's presentation from EMP, xhuxk, less musically than lyrically but even so.

He had a great line -- "Country music is where old genres go to die." (And he said if you want to hear blues chords on the radio these days, just turn on a country station.) (Though to be fair, White Stripes and Black Keys still know a few, too.)

And ha ha, Black Keys just did an album collaborating with hip-hop guys, right? (Haven't heard it; expect I wouldn't like it. But still.)

Have Keane released that hip-hop collaboration album yet?

Plus, y'know, anyone can do a pastiche or genre-exercise if they want to, regardless of how well they play. Just get the right producer in and you can do it.

This is a bit like saying "anyone can build their own house if they want to, just get in the right builder and you can do it".

Keanye West

xp No it's not. All music is a collaboration between different people, unless it's just some twerp recording in his bedroom. (Or I dunno, Prince once in a while maybe.). Why shouldn't producers figure in when musicians want their music to branch out? They always have, at least in my lifetime.

"Hmm, this sounds just like their first album, only with BALLADS! How eclectic!"

For me, that is an important difference, not least because slower and more mellow songs usually tend to be more melodic. So they have to show off songwriting abilities to a certain different extent that is less important on faster songs.

But it seems "mixing hip-hop into the music" is the only thing those who post in this thread want. As in "if you want to develop you hvae to become hip-hop". That is of course an extremely narrow-minded way to think, as if no other genre is relevant in the 00s than hip-hop.

This is a bit like saying "anyone can build their own house if they want to, just get in the right builder and you can do it".

― Matt DC, Friday, 30 April 2010 15:41 (7 seconds ago) Bookmark

But that's true isn't it Matt? What I mean is that if I was in a band, could play a bit of rhythm guitar, had no knowledge of pro-tools, but had an idea for a great hip-hop style track, I could technically get a producer to help me create it - if I had the gumption.

What surprises me sometimes is that bands, featuring members who probably do listen to a lot of different music, don't often try this out - even as an experiment. They'll continue to focus on their own signature sound

Radiohead are an anomaly, surviving in their own vaccuum that doesn't really acknowledge trends, hence why they haven't been afraid to branch out. Still, the last big stylistic step they took was in 2001, and they've always had a lot of technical and production help, even though Yorke did go to great lengths to learn the software he needed to go "IDM".

Anyway, there are thousands and thousands of ways to be eclectic and experimental and developing musically without including even the slightest element of hip-hop, funk or R&B.

oh shut up geir.

I am not shutting up because people here are saying being varied and eclectic and what they mean is involve hip-hop, funk or rhythm in general.

Damon Albarn and Timbaland are nowhere close to where they started.

Timbaland has had a more positive development the past 5 years than Albarn.

geir, most of the conversation upthread has revolved around country and metal. if hiphop's been mentioned it's been used as a random example.

Well, OK. I know metal has increasingly involved other styles, but I think sort of the theme here is that no other genre is supposed to have done the same.

I mentioned Franz Ferdinand which I definitely feel have involved, but I guess some refuse to acknowledge that because they haven't involved in the way they define as the only relevant way to evolve now.

I think Ashlee Simpson incorporating Franz Ferdinand style guitars and rhythms (which Franz had probably swiped in turn from the Gang of Four) on her third album was a relevant way to evolve. (Didn't make for a better album than the first two, but I didn't mind that much.)

Franz Ferdinand have evolved?

Who knew!

Geir - evolution does not equal eclecticism though. developing your style throughout your career is one thing, experimenting with style and genre throughout an album, or even a single song is completely different. Franz Ferdinand are actually a good example of the former - namechecking lots of dance and r'n'b music in interviews without deviating too much from their chosen indie-dance/post-punk dynamic. Compare this to 90's self-conscious genre-hoppers like Mr Bungle or Jim O'Rourke or bands who made "chocolate box" albums like "Parklife" or Aphex's "I Care Because You Do" where there's a marked stylistic change between tracks. To over-egg the confectionary theme - 00's bands seem more interested in making a rocky road than a Quality Street tin.

I was being facetious with the housebuilding thing.

xp So basically, you're saying you can only perceive music as being varied when an art band is beating you over the head with the concept and saying Look How Eclectic We Are Aren't You Impressed? That's sad.

i know this is a long thread xhuxk, but i've been saying all the way through, and we're goign back to the original point here, that in the 90s it seemed just fine to beat people over the head with it - commendable even - but this no longer happens so much. You don't get Zorns and Pattons and D. James's trying to subvert genre boundaries in the way they used to. Acts will tailor their sound and curtail their influences in a more refined way. This trend works inversely to the amount of music that's ostensibly available to listeners via the web, and perceived listening habits in general.

new board description!

"I am not shutting up because people here are saying being varied and eclectic and what they mean is involve hip-hop, funk or rhythm in general."

xp And I've been saying all thread that there have always been plenty of ways to make your music varied and omnivorously incorporate other genres besides making cornball "eclecticism" your primary reason for existence, and anybody who doesn't get that isn't listening very hard.

i don't think anyone's arguing against that point xhuxk.

namechecking lots of dance and r'n'b music in interviews without deviating too much from their chosen indie-dance/post-punk dynamic.

I would say they have changed. Yes, they still have melodies. Yes, they still have verses and choruses. But for your information, electronica is also getting more and more melodic. This "get away from melody" thing that was around in the 90s was a blind alley that was a 90s and 90s only thing.

for the record, i'm not arguing for or against so-called "cornball" eclecticism, but the fact you call it that just goes to show how unpopular this type of thing has become. I used to love it when bands diversified in this "corny" way - i.e. "woah they just did a dub track, now they're doing ambient, next it's a shoegaze thing, whatever next??" - and people did do it and it wasn't necessarily considered that corny at the time. Aphex and Weatherall were seen as genii because of his stylistic hopping about from release to release. Mr Bungle changed style every two bars. The 00's, being the decade of subtletly, was more about blurring things together to form a uniform sound and to develop it.

I would say they have changed. Yes, they still have melodies. Yes, they still have verses and choruses. But for your information, electronica is also getting more and more melodic. This "get away from melody" thing that was around in the 90s was a blind alley that was a 90s and 90s only thing.

Sometimes I'd be better off blowing into a violin.

Not a "00s act", maybe, but this album was more eclectic than anything they released in the 80s or 90s:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/03/28/stadium_arcadium.jpg

standing in line at the movie show with a monkey, heavy load! whatever happened to the chili peppers?

they got shit

If we want to talk dorky IDM then Squarepusher and Luke Vibert both dicked around with way more styles in the 00s than they did in the 90s - like I said, counterexamples everywhere

are you guys arguing "in the mainstream" or "underground" btw?

i forget what the argument is.

i never knew what the argument was to be able to forget it

What surprises me sometimes is that bands, featuring members who probably do listen to a lot of different music, don't often try this out - even as an experiment. They'll continue to focus on their own signature sound

many examples of rock bands trying this and it not working out eg Strokes with Nigel Godrich (aim of going proggier? fuck knows), Blur with Fatboy Slim (aim of going dancier presumably), Franz Ferdinand with Xenomania (more electro/pop), Oasis with Richard Fearless (could've worked but 10 years too late).

dog latin is dropping truth bombs

the original question was "why are listeners more obviously eclectic than performers" and it was answered about a bazillion posts ago

so what are we doing here?

ILMing

Squarepusher - not really. Always been about trying to keep a free-jazz plate and a drum'n'bass plate spinning at the same time. Not that I haven't noticed a little speed-metal creeping in on the last record, but that was a singular statement afaic.

Luke Vibert - he's always mucked about with genres to some extent or another, and is a product of the nineties that kept going.

Geir - evolution does not equal eclecticism though. developing your style throughout your career is one thing, experimenting with style and genre throughout an album, or even a single song is completely different. Franz Ferdinand are actually a good example of the former - namechecking lots of dance and r'n'b music in interviews without deviating too much from their chosen indie-dance/post-punk dynamic. Compare this to 90's self-conscious genre-hoppers like Mr Bungle or Jim O'Rourke or bands who made "chocolate box" albums like "Parklife" or Aphex's "I Care Because You Do" where there's a marked stylistic change between tracks. To over-egg the confectionary theme - 00's bands seem more interested in making a rocky road than a Quality Street tin.

This argument is complete bollocks. It's just plain wrong. Just off the top of my head I can think of four Basement Jaxx albums, two Outkast albums, three Radiohead albums, two LCD Soundsystem records, three Hot Chip albums, the last Dizzee record, hell if you want to get really obvious pretty much every Girls Aloud record all from the last decade that do exactly what you're talking about.

i can't argue too much with those examples i guess. first sensible response in about 100.

if i was going to be a cunt about it, i'd argue that radiohead's more recent stuff has felt a little more consistent in mood and style than usual, but that would shoot down a lot of what i said before.

Jim O'Rourke also not a '90s thing' by def'n and Mr Bungle ----> Fantomas which does the same thing as you're lionising them for

also, just in case anyone cares, there is a LOT of really great experimental and eclectic music being made out there in the world on a smaller/more underground level. right now. as we speak. i hear all kinds of great stuff every week. just so you know. art music is not dead.

three Hot Chip albums

My god, have they really been around that long?

I don't know that I've ever knowingly heard Hot Chip.

The answer to the thread question is:

Because it's easier to listen to music than it is to play it.

just for fun, listening to the St Etienne re-issues as I often do, anyone got a 00s album contrast as great/wide as that between 'Stoned To Say The Least' and 'London Belongs To Me'? I guess it helps that one is an instrumental tho (in turn, it remains odd that Hot Chip don't include at least one instrumental on their albums)

saved em all up for that joe goddard solo album.

caveat: I'm sure there are loads, I probably just wanted to posit that St Et represent(ed) an approach to eclecticism that DID become unpopular by the end of the 90s

i've only really heard the one with Mario's Cafe and a greatest hits comp so can't help you.

but out of interest, what is this sort of eclecticism that did die?

That one with Mario's Cafe has one track that's a dub reggae instrumental. As well as the ones that have some girly vocals on.

@Geir: That's not what I'm talking about. I think lack of rhythm is perfectly fine. One point I'd like to make is that if an artist is following his/her own particular muse in any given moment, using the materials at hand, eclecticism might tend to be a natural result. [As opposed to second guessing & feeling like one should alter things to fit what one expects of oneself based on previous inspirational moments.]

xp hard to define because in St Etienne's case they are often thought of as primarily indiepop but had Actually Credible dance tracks on their (first 3 at least) albums and had a better connection to/with stuff outside of their primary association than any other UK act i can think of from the last 25 years.

maybe part of what i mean is a shift away from instrumentals by bands who might benefit from doing this when setting out their eclectic/genre-hopping stall.

obviously there are a lot of exceptions to what dog latin is saying about the '00s not being about genre-jumping within the context of an album, but i still feel like artists are rewarded for keeping their sound consistent (maybe because it's easier to write about?).

however, that goes hand-in-hand with all the blending of sounds that's been happening. depending on who's doing it, dance/rock/hip-hop/dancehall/pop/dubstep/whatever can all feel like the same thing (in a way that feels smoother and more homogenous than, like, basement jaxx).

matt's point is a fair one. it's obvious that musical eclecticism persists in the new century. western pop is a huge umbrella, and whatever one is talking about, it's all but certain that someone, somewhere is doing it. which refines the question: is there a difference between 90s and 00s eclecticism, and if so, what is it?

it seems to me that the difference (to the extent that there is one) has to do with the way rock musicians approach genre insularity and cultural tribalism. thus the tendency to see the 90s as "more eclectic" relative to the present is probably rockist. in the 90s, rock was still semi-dominant in american pop, but its hegemony was threatened by the rise of hip-hop. perhaps as a result, perhaps coincidentally, the 90s saw a great many attempts to bridge the gaps between rock and other musical cultures. not to put too fine a point on it, geir's right: the 90s saw a great many attempts to bridge the gap between ostensibly black and white musical cultures, to produce (specifically) rock music that reflected and could speak to heterogeneous, multiracial and multicultural audiences.

The judgment night soundtrack is the classic go2 example, but that was the final statement of something that dates back at least to the mid 80s and run-dmc's cover of aerosmith's "walk this way". which led to anthrax's "i'm the man" and eventually to stuff like follow for now's "she watch channel zero". but follow for now fit more comfortably into another narrative, that of "black rock" (as in vernon reid's black rock coalition). the brc was formed in 1985, the year that fishbone released their first ep, featuring the college radio hit "party at ground zero". and maybe you can trace the sort of eclecticism i'm talking about forward from the intersection of early fishbone and that goddamn aerosmith cover. not to slight the bad brains or anything...

and yeah, as that suggests, this isn't just rock i'm talking about, it's hard rock, even metal. for whatever reason, hard rock and metal became one of the primary zones for intermixing funk, hip-hop and rock influences in the late 80s and early-mid 90s. in saying that, i'm thinking of the influence and ongoing work of 80s acts/artists like the red hot chili peppers, living color, fishbone, faith no more, 24-7 spys and michael franti, evolving into the likes of cypress hill, rage against the machine, mr. bungle, primus, 311 and limp bizkit in the 90s. and the judgment night] soundtrack, of course.

what seems distinctive about this era and approach is that it can't be reduced to musicians adopting influences of this or that sort. many of these crossovers were motivated by a conscious and often successful attempt to unify disparate human cultures. black and white, to put things in simple terms, but also punk and metal, rock and hip-hop, pop and "alternative". it seems to me that there was a spirit of activism and optimism at work in a lot of this music, an implication that by bringing together supposedly "different" musical styles and youth cultures, energy and enthusiasm for positive social change might be cultivated. there was some suggestion that this wasn't merely aesthetic experimentation, but rather a kind of quasi-political movement. the cultures in question were thought to be unified by a spirit of political opposition and discontent as much as they were by their shared musical interests.

in the end, i suppose all that political idealism came to naught, and in retrospect, it's hard to see it as anything more than the standard sort of open-eared musical cherry-picking that all pop artists engage in. but i don't hear much of that kind of radical openness in american rock anymore. especially not in heavier, harder rock. and maybe that just means that the locus of transference has shifted. but if so, what's the ground on which radically different musical and social cultures now meet and intermix? Not denying that there is one, but curious...

i don't hear much of that kind of radical openness in american rock anymore. especially not in heavier, harder rock.

Maybe because bands that have come along since look at all that '90s genre-hopping and fusion and eclecticism and don't like it, so they figure they'll play to their strengths instead of risking a humiliating artistic bellyflop? Put another way, I don't think the Faith No More reunion is winning them new fans; I think it's tickling the nostalgia bones of people in their 30s.

what seems distinctive about this era and approach is that it can't be reduced to musicians adopting influences of this or that sort. many of these crossovers were motivated by a conscious and often successful attempt to unify disparate human cultures.

This is hardly unique to the 90s. Maybe the 90s was a last gasp.

Yeah it'll never happen again, that would be preposterous.

we will never see the likes of the beastie boys again what with their beats and activist guitar samples bringing us all together.

If only there were more visionaries like Mr Bungle we could have ended the conflict in the Middle East by now.

total minor point here but:

many of these crossovers were motivated by a conscious and often successful attempt to unify disparate human cultures. black and white, to put things in simple terms, but also punk and metal, rock and hip-hop, pop and "alternative".

the punk/metal hybridization all happened in the 80's - hardcore/grindcore for sure, but y'know death metal and speed metal are overlooked synthesis points too.

like all things everything eventually comes back to S.O.D.

was S.O.D. also responsible for there no longer being distinctions between parody bands and non-parody bands?

(was kinda kidding about the Sui generis sod thing tbh, but they were certainly vocal about the punk/metal distinction of the time being kinda dumb)

this thread has me revisiting some jams from Toxicity, so thanking u all for that

the 90s saw a great many attempts to bridge the gap between ostensibly black and white musical cultures, to produce (specifically) rock music that reflected and could speak to heterogeneous, multiracial and multicultural audiences.

Except I don't like the use of "white" or "black" (I prefer "song oriented" vs. "rhythm oriented"), I think this is basically impossible. It may be partly possible to get "rock" audiences into hip-hop to a certain extent (that is, the live instrument feeling must be kept, and it sort of requires the song structures to be kept, at least to be able to appeal to those of us who care about melody and harmony), but it seems completely impossible to get fans of rhythm oriented music interested in melody oriented music other than as a source of possible sample material.

I don't like the use of "white" or "black" (I prefer "song oriented" vs. "rhythm oriented"

keep yr racist codewords to yrself nazi

but it seems completely impossible to get fans of rhythm oriented music interested in melody oriented music other than as a source of possible sample material.

hahahahahaha this is so dumb

This is hardly unique to the 90s.

Well, basically all rock music builds upon it. Rock itself is a fusion of "black" and "white" styles of music. And 60s R&B (such as Motown) would also get a considerably slice if influence from "white" music styles.
And then, maybe the truest fusion happened in the UK in the early 80s where a lot of UK groups (some of them interracial, others just whites) were mixing traditional "white" new wave and pop songwriting with funk and disco elements, some even adding the occasional reggae or latin element. So I guess the only unique thing about 90s is they were trying to fuse rock with "purist" genres such as hip-hop and dance/house/techno. Which is harder, after all, because fans of the latter will not accept anything that doesn't keep to its purist values (including lack of melodies)

keep yr racist codewords to yrself nazi

Shut up! This has absolutely nothing to do with racism. There is no race in music.

ok wait that is even more dumb xpost

Well, I know I am right. If somebody wrote a strongly Beatles-influenced song with traditional verse-bridge-chorus, plus a middle-eight and a lot of vocal harmonies, and then added a hip-hop beat, it might appeal to pop/rock fans, but never to hip-hop fans.

I mean, just look at Jesus Jones, who did exactly that. How many hip-hop/dance fans enjoyed Jesus Jones?

This is the first time I've ever seen Geir get angry and tell someone to shut up.

hey guys remember when the rhythm purists caught jay-z letting beyonce sing on those tracks and they dragged them out behind the shed and turned them into the romanovs of hip hop

xxpost uh raises hand shamefully

Beyonce is hardly Beatles-influenced.

yes she has a dreadful lack of melody i am undone

Mostly, yes. Although some of Stargate's later work for here is a partly successful marriage of "black" soul and "white" melody.

geir there is no race in music

Thus, the quotation marks.

For instance, Lionel Richie and DeBarge were great examples in the 80s of black people making great, melodic pop music. But I know some funk/R&B fans disliked them because they weren't purist enough.

pretty sure no one disliked debarge

They weren't as famous as Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, so they didn't have to put up with the same criticism, but I was around, and I know a lot of 80s black pop (which for me was mostly brilliant) was criticized for not being "black" enough. As if music has a skin colour.

Anyone who saw The Last Dragon and doesn't like Debarge, doesn't have a soul.

Btw. back to the original subject, I guess "Speakerboxx/The Love Below" may be the answer (it was at least eclectic enough to appeal to me as a non hip-hop fan while still being obviously hip-hop)

nobody liked jesus jones.

Well, a lot of people bought their music back in 1990-91.

that's an interesting point. on the other hand, you're a creep.

This is the first time I've ever seen Geir get angry and tell someone to shut up.

O_O

"Shut up! This has absolutely nothing to do with racism. There is no race in music."

new board description!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2024/1554413832_9ea7953457.jpg?v=0

I'm just sick of Geir's bullshit. at this point, it just derails threads.

"but I was around, and I know a lot of 80s black pop (which for me was mostly brilliant) was criticized for not being "black" enough."

on the mean streets of oslo, debarge got no respect.

I'm just sick of Geir's bullshit. at this point, it just derails threads.

otm

'at this point' = 'always' but it's esp annoying w/ an otherwise interesting thread.

the joke just isn't funny anymore

I'm just sick of Geir's bullshit. at this point, it just derails threads.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:Mz46ZJA5p0o_KM:http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg

i don't hear much of that kind of radical openness in american rock anymore. especially not in heavier, harder rock

Just out curiosity, Contenderizer, what do you think of Kid Rock? Who pretty undeniably continued to combine most of the genres you're talking about, all through the '00s, and managed to connect them with country's opening up to hard rock and even (at least tentatively) rap. And he kept selling records, too -- last album went triple platinum.

I mean, I get the idea most people here don't like him much. And guess you could argue that he never had anything to do with "punk" or "alternative," not that I care. But the music he first hit with definitely evolved out of the whole Aerosmith/DMC juncture you talk about. He just figured out somewhere else to take it from there (and what he wound up with, as often as not, wasn't really all that far from the open-ended funky '70s hard rock that people rave about upthread.)

accept that kid rock is an important link in the chain i was describing. left him out cuz i've never been a fan and don't really know what his deal is, but he clearly helped push that 90s rap/rock conversation through to country. i dunno, maybe he did it singlehandedly. who else?

eminem, who was mates with kid rock and came through the Michigan MC circuit together, combined rap with dido.

if genres were not clearly distinguished from one another then the concept of the "omnivorous' consumer whose tastes span multiple genres would be impossible/nonsensical (has this been mentioned already?)

also known as "the cultural logic of late capitalism"

my scare quotes are even scarier when they're half real quotes

have we talked about the interweb yet? cuz i think it does a lot to strengthen existing genre cults and this may have something to do with uniformity within genres. but i'm kinda drunk and yak snot are playing in my record store, so i'll have to elaborate more later.

I think on balance the internet has done more to break listeners out of their genre straight jackets, but I'm not drunk so I could be missing something.

i'm kinda drunk and yak snot are playing in my record store

Would like this on a t-shirt.