TS: normal people music vs. weirdo shit

As someone whose first (long-deleted) blog was called Mostly Weird, Some Normal, my vote should be obvious.

music by weird people pretending to be normal

otm

power ballads only

https://www.nme.com/features/tv-features/normal-people-soundtrack-music-sally-rooney-2655491

‘Warped Window’ – Anna Mieke
‘Did It To Myself’ – Orla Gartland
‘Hide and Seek’ – Imogen Heap
‘Horn’ – Nick Drake
‘Angeles’ – Elliott Smith
‘Hey Now’ (Arty Remix) – London Grammar
‘Only You’ – Yazoo
‘Locked In’ – The Lock-In
‘Drop’ – Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions
‘Undertow’ – Lisa Hannigan
‘La Lune’ – Billie Marten
‘Skate’ – Tycho, Saint Sinner
‘Make You Feel My Love’ – One Brun
‘Too Much’ – Carly Rae Jepsen
‘We Played Some Open Chords And Rejoiced, for the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year’ – A Winged Victory for the Sullen
‘Metroma’ – The Sei
‘Dandelion’ – Jealous of the Birds
‘Rare’ – Selena Gomez
’99 Luftballons’ – Nena
‘Berlin’ – RY X
‘Scene Suspended’ – Jon Hopkins
‘Everything I Am Is Yours’ – Villagers
‘Strange Weather’ – Anna Calvi, David Byrne
‘Dogwood Blossom’ – Fionn Regan
‘Sometimes’ – Goldmund
‘If You Stuff It All Down Deep Inside’ – Department of Forever
‘Hate Dah’ – Super Silly
‘Dear SJ’ – Alex Gough
‘Never Ending Circles’ – CHVRCHES
‘Maybe’ – SOAK
‘Gimme Life’ – TNAN, Viktoria Liv
‘I Know’ – August Roads
‘I Never Got Off The Bus’ – Tebi Rex, Local Boy
‘Alone’ – 7th Obi
‘Deep Blue’ – Mango X MathMan
‘You and I’ – Caribou
‘Tell Me So’ – Herb Johnson
‘Highs and Lows’ – August Roads
‘Dance 4 Sorrow’ – Francis Lung
‘Go Wild’ – Friedberg
‘Nikes’ – Frank Ocean
‘Hazeldene’ – Royal Yellow
‘I’m Happy Without You’ – Ann Byers
‘Smoke’ – Gia Margaret
‘It’s Alright’ – delush, Strange Boy
‘It’s Okay With Me’ – Broadway Express
‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ – Nerina Pallot
‘Old Bear’ – Cloth
‘Klangfall’ (piano version) – Joep Beving
‘Groovy Train’ – The Farm
‘Cannibal Tree’ – Yenkee
‘Good Times’ – Ellie Mae Rose
‘Breathe’ – CamelPhat, Christoph, Jem Cooke
‘The Subterranean Heart’ – Mount Alaska
‘No Such Thing’ – Yumi And The Weather
‘Can’t Move On’ – Wild Youth

i need a definition of both terms first with some examples and some work showing

music by weird people pretending to be normal

― brimstead

i'm a big brian wilson fan too

was just thinking about the beach boys specifically

There is no such thing as a normal person. Therefore, all music is weirdo shit. QED

The Beach Boys Holland

"Sail On, Sailor" normal people music
"California Saga (The Beaks of Eagles) Weirdo shit

freak shit

The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly
The motor and the plane and the great war have gone over him
And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died while the mother-eagle hunts the same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry
And is never tired, dreams the same dreams and hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats of these living mountains
It is good for man to try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish
Not to go down the dinosaur's way until all his capacities have been explored
And it is good for him to know that his needs and nature are no more changed, in fact, in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles
The eagle's plight, we know that nature's balance is undone
Though it's the birthright of man to unify and live his life as one
A whisper of the word will let you soar with your soul

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61IjBjQS3TL._SR600%2C315_PIWhiteStrip%2CBottomLeft%2C0%2C35_SCLZZZZZZZ_FMpng_BG255%2C255%2C255.jpg

Latin Freestyle megamixes only

I tend to think I listen to mostly normal person music, but whenever I'm in a situation where I put on some music where there are other people I get accusations of weirdo shit

The biggest most popular music ever was made by the weirdest dude of all time (MJ)

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-age-of-shitpost-modernism/

peggy lee -vs- boredoms

see, it's hard? i can't choose.

'so normal it's weird' seems like a particular new-wave thing, like a backlash against the self-consciously freaky 60s counterculture, that had become a cliche and so being straight was the real rebellion. Talking Heads seemed interested in the normal/weirdo binary, looking like these very clean-cut unremarkable young people, but in a context where that marked them out as odd, or all those songs about big city underground artists but also small town middle American ordinary folk, or people switching from one to the other.

lots of 80s - 90s indie seems defiantly self-consciously 'normal', rooted in the real world and everyday life rather than glittery showbiz world, but also striking the post of sensitive outsider, the exception?

TS the weirdness of everyday life vs showbiz and celebrity, which is in one way reality with all the weird bits smoothed off and made more normal, but is also deeply weird and populated by deeply weird people

peggy lee -vs- boredoms

see, it's hard? i can't choose.

― scott seward

now i want to hear peggy lee fronting the boredoms

my tastes are probably more normie than I realize. i mostly listen to metal and hip-hop, but metal has a template at this point and although I like some out there stuff, most of what I listen to fits within that template. same w/ hip-hop, probably moreso even.

to me 'weirdo shit' is like, Metal Machine Music. I do listen to a fair amount of stuff like that (though not specifically that), but it's still quite the minority in collection.

voted Minnesota

xps "shitpost modernism" is a good term and it strikes me as the natural result of an oversaturated attention economy. It's hardly a new thing, but there's definitely more of it in the mainstream then ever. Whatever the "mainstream" is these days.

Weirdo music is normal music to weirdoes.

Good question, though, especially because weird plus time often does equal normal.

'so normal it's weird' seems like a particular new-wave thing, like a backlash against the self-consciously freaky 60s counterculture, that had become a cliche and so being straight was the real rebellion.

when rick wakeman says it it comes off in a "cis is a slur" sense

or even worse maybe like a "what's wrong with being proud of being white" sense

or more like... brian wilson is a fucked up weirdo who's trying his hardest to be a normal person and live a normal life, and that's a lot of what makes his music brilliant. that's... not the sense i get from rick wakeman's stuff. that said i know brian wilson's stuff a lot better than i know rick wakeman's stuff! i guess mostly i'd just say that song pisses me off.

Talking Heads seemed interested in the normal/weirdo binary, looking like these very clean-cut unremarkable young people, but in a context where that marked them out as odd, or all those songs about big city underground artists but also small town middle American ordinary folk, or people switching from one to the other.

― soref, Thursday, March 14, 2024 11:10 AM (six minutes ago)

david byrne was just weird in a sense that wasn't accepted as "weird" at the time. his approach to life is... pretty well aligned with a lot of autistic people's experiences.

and then he started doing lots of cocaine, which, like. i'm sorry. when you're on cocaine you don't make "normal people music". you make cocaine music.

what interests me about "normal/weird" is the existence of the _dual role itself_. the difference between the drag queens who put on men's clothes and went home and the street queens who lived the life 24/7, whose existence was a criminal act. and yes, there _is_ a lot of overlap between "weird" and "queer". always has been. they're not the _same_ but there's lots of overlap. there's also lots of overlap between "weird" and, like, trauma and abuse. after what brian wilson's dad did to him, well, being "normal" under those circumstances seems like it would be next to impossible. he keeps trying, though! and i love that. i find that inspirational. like the goal isn't so much to take one side or the other but to _integrate_ these dialectical opposites into a cohesive whole. which i think is a lot of what talking heads was trying to do. coming from a place where they _had_ normal lives, and then they're playing CBGBs and all of this weird shit is going on. being normal in weird times. trying to live a normal life when you live in Bellona. not because you _want_ to be normal but because god-damn _somebody_ has to do the washing up.

and then you have someone like brian eno, who started off very queer and somehow turned into a techbro. one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, if you ask me.

Good question, though, especially because weird plus time often does equal normal.

― Josh in Chicago

the reverse is also often true! there was that whole "old, weird america" thing. people weren't necessarily trying to be weird. listened to les paul and mary ford doing "how high the moon" lately? when i first heard that, all i could think was wow this shit is _weird_.

Ha, I think a lot of that Les Paul stuff, especially when he's showing off effects and technique, was often trying to be weird!

Or, you know, novel.

I don't know if "turned into a techbro" is accurate. Whatever 1970s/1980s equivalent he was already it. Technological panaceas obsessed him.

As y’all probably know Peggy Lee got pretty weird sometimes… the Sea Shells LP, “The Siamese Cat Song” etc.

Cilla Black "Abyssian Secret" is mentally filed in my "when norms go zany" folder

Les Paul did much more varispeed tape stuff, and loads of it is fantastically weird, all worth checking out imo

anyway the answer is: if you can do both at the same time, THAT is the golden shit right there

weirdo shit 4 eva

I don't believe there is barely such a thing as "normal people", the people on the weirdo spectrum are most of humanity imo.

an example of mainstream weirdness

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=562N5IAP5vs

The Old, Normal America

Weirdo music is normal music to weirdoes.

Good question, though, especially because weird plus time often does equal normal.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 15 March 2024 04:29 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Very happy about this phenomenon. It means you can always play your favourite music from 15 years ago in the car

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

weirdo shit but I listened to Foreigner 4 today

Fuckin weirdo

voting weirdo because it's just more fun, gosh darnit.

for consideration into the "weird person pretending to be normal" canon, i nominate prince.

friends of mine usually play this festival near me and i feel like it has a nice balance of normal to weirdo. i might have to go to see nina.

https://www.novaarts.org/thething

i could hitch a ride with snbrnd...

for consideration into the "weird person pretending to be normal" canon, i nominate prince.

― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Wednesday, March 20, 2024 8:48 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

you know whats funny is both Prince and Todd Rundgren were mentioned together in a different thread and there was something I was trying to figure out, there's a lot of similarities between the two but in some way they're kind of polar opposites. I think this is maybe it, Prince is weird but tries to do normal stuff, while Todd is normal and tries to do weird stuff

"pretending to be weird" isn't a thing any more than "pretending to be queer" is. if you do weird shit, you're weird. maybe not in the way you're trying to be weird, but weird nonetheless.

"pretending to be normal", on the other hand, is just as much a thing as "pretending to be straight" is.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

take that, you fucking squares.

Wait, are you guys all weird?

no, just irrationally angry.

I don't know if "turned into a techbro" is accurate. Whatever 1970s/1980s equivalent he was already it. Technological panaceas obsessed him.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i feel like this "dramatic crossroads" meme best explains my take on this

https://imgflip.com/i/8k4n8z

of course that didn't work

https://imgflip.com/i/8k4n8z

Imagine how weird you have to be to self-describe as a normie.

fuck it it's a pretty obscure shitpost anyway, i should probably explain it

i kind of like know your meme... memes are kind of street lore, i never know where they come from or what they're supposed to mean. they're just there. so trying to find the meme template in question i learned a lot of this stuff for the first time.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dramatic-crossroads

anyway the dramatic crossroads meme is apparently based on an artist's fan mockup of a card used in the yu-gi-oh anime. it's not one of the better known meme templates, but it's prevalent in the trans community, probably in large part because the first well-known meme using the template is a trans meme, broken image embed follows:

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/046/344/598.jpg

alt text being popular anyway, the scenario is: "tfw you are a broney in 2012", with the two options being "become trans girl" (good) and "become white supremacist" (evil)

the meme - and this is why i tried to do this as a meme, because when i write it out like this it's boring and didactic - is me trying to depict that there are two divergent approaches to the use of technology, roughly analogous to the "trans girl/white supremacist" divide in the original meme.

so for the left position of my meme i put "cyborg manifesto", which is maybe a little bit of a deep cut for anybody not versed in the history of academic feminist leftism in the 20th century. it's a 1985 essay by donna haraway which suggests the possibility that technology can be used to resist patriarchal capitalist oppression, rather than to enforce it. its famous concluding line is "i would rather be a cyborg than a goddess". she was an advisor to sandy stone. stone, a recording engineer who worked with jimi hendrix, among others, and then in the 70s transitioned mtf, lost her job with a lesbian recording collective after being attacked personally by janice raymond in her 1979 book _the transsexual empire_. stone went back into education and as a result of her experiences wrote "the empire strikes back: a post-transexual manifesto", which is one of the cornerstones of trans studies and was one of the major academic influences on what came to be known as "transgender" identity, along with works like leslie feinberg's 1992 pamphlet "transgender liberation: a movement whose time has come".

all of this is meant to signify that there is a robust and well-established tradition of queer technophilia, one which i see myself as belonging to - i frame myself as a "cyborg witch" on occasion. this tradition is _particularly_ linked to the synthesizer, going back as far as its inception, with robert moog delivering one of his first moogs to wendy carlos in person.

on the right side of the meme is "peter thiel", who needs perhaps somewhat less explanation. this isn't to suggest that eno is a fascist or a white supremacist. i do, however, think that once one removes or decentres the queer and feminine aspects of techonology, one is on a path that will inevitably take one into the realm of thiel. perhaps this is an unfair suggestion on my part, but it is what i believe.