musicianship?

at punk school being the janitor is surely more punky than being a lecturer, dr c!!

For some reason Royal Trux seems like a good band to bring up here. Because RT plays in a blues idiom, even if you've never heard their songs before you instinctively feel the "right" way they "ought" to be played, but it never quite matches up with the rhythmic and melodic idosyncrasies they bring to bear... the correct thing is like a ghost car puttering along beside you, racing the track at the most optimum angle, taking all the curves at exactly the right speed... but you're in the REAL car, which is swerving crazily... the difference between the two is what makes Royal Trux good.

Bri for the record I for one didn't say anything about Sting's ego. I said he's not a good bassist any more. There's no attitude there any more, no spiky energy. Sure, he might be as technically competent (you would have to make the case though) but he's not a session player, he's Sting. We expect more from him than competence. Or at least some of us did, once.

And the janitor would pass up prog and dance records to the kids "This is the real thing!"

Hmmm... I think this whole debate is a bit moot when an obviously cerebral musician like David Bowie thinks this version of his "Space Oddity" is "a piece of art that I couldn't have conceived of, even with half of Colombia's finest export products in me"!!!

― Old Fart!!!, Sunday, 7 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

(..End Tag)

Janitor at Punk School? Isn't that dangerously close to being Noodles from The Offspring?

Someone played me some Yngwie Malmsteen once. I was appalled.

As a Brit who generally seems to like a lot of unskilful music, I feel I have to point out that if you're as unmusical as me you simply CAN'T TELL when someone is a 'good' or 'bad' instrumentalist, so my preferences might well be purely accidental. I think they're not, though - the pop discourse I grew up on had a big influence on me in two ways. First off was people telling me the music I liked was crap because it was unmusical and too easy (eg. synthpop, programmed music, pop) - so to counter this there was a second strain of thinking picked up from the NME whereby musicianship was somehow suspicious or laughable outside certain carefully constrained non- rock contexts.

That second strain of thinking I gradually realised was itself a conservative holdover from an era long past - but deprogramming takes a lot of time and effort. I'm probably never going to want to take quality musicianship as anything other than a 'neutral' quality - can make for good music, can make for bad - because the evidence of my ears is overwhelmingly that low-quality musicianship or 'easy' compositional/creative practises can move me so much.