ILM Call My Bluff

Aha. Its a red herring. You actually DO dig Radiohead, so its obviously (eeny meeny miney mo...) ROYAL TRUX is the phonus balonus here!
Am I right?

2. Igor Stravinsky - I don't profess to be a Stravinsky expert, but his music awes me. If I could study with one dead composer, it would be him.

3. Arnold Schoenberg - I like Shoenberg because of the way he turns academic composition on its head. He manages to break every rule set forth by ten generations of theorists before him, yet his 12-tone work is formally airtight.

I pretend to like Radiohead. I don't dislike them, proactively at least, but they don't fit in with my personal aesthetic tastes.

B) Avril -- Complicated: She's got that "how did I get here" casual attitude and those crunk super-synth guitars.

C) Miles Davis -- Miles Smiles: tight freebop makes my head hurt in a good way.

Yes!

Like Horace said, if I can only spout the facts about someone, I'm pretending to like him.

Low - warm and sad simultaneously. Luxurious!
Beck - wonderfully vacuous fun. Pop's most gifted magpie!
Galaxie 500 - it's the deliciously dreamy vocal stylings of Dean Wareham that do it for me!

How do you make Redman's "Let's Get Dirty" even more delightfully gross than it already is? Add a diva who's completely out of her friggin' mind.

Black Dice, "Endless Happiness"

More bands should add six minutes of breaking waves to their tracks.

Audio Bullys, "We Don't Care"

I don't care what you do -- just wear leather when you do it.

2] tortoise - avante-guarde minimalist drone-jazz, yeah, man.

3] hypo - chopped-up glitch in a new order in a blender stylee, dude

U2 - "Where The Streets Have No Name": Yearning vocals, plangent guitars - and a great hook!

Coldplay - "In My Place": Yearning vocals, plangent guitars - and a great hook!

(ok sorry I'll do one with different reasons later)

I'm guessing Black Dice for you coz I don't think that you really like all those frikin breaking waves.

Kate: I'm guessing Tortoise coz it's not really that droney and you wouldn't name hypo coz that's too obscure.

I was trying to be generic!

OK, Gershwin's melodies seem very feminine to me, and I don't really know how to explain it. Take a song like "Nice Work if you Can Get it": it's niiice woork if you-can-get-it...it sounds like something my mother would hum, and it feels warmer than the melodies of Cole Porter, which remind me of drunk single male gadabouts. But I couldn't write that above because I thought it would stand out too much from the other descriptions.

a) Jan Jelinek -- because I love crackly, mysterious DSP-scapes.

b) Jim O'Rourke -- because I love crackly, mysterious DSP-scapes.

c) Pole -- because I love crackly, mysterious DSP-scapes.

2.

a) DJ Spooky -- because I love it when music and theory are all of a piece.

b) Kraftwerk -- because I love it when music and theory are all of a piece.

c) John Cage -- because I love it when music and theory are all of a piece.

O'Rourke = too indie rock. Plus Jelinek/Pole too similar to discard one.

DJ Spooky = complete antithesis of analog baroque. Plus Cage/Kraftwerk too similarly canonical to discard one.

2. Bjork -- because she's the coffeetable Madonna.

3. Bjork -- because she has her ears wide open.

4. Bjork -- because she's bonkers.

5. Bjork -- because she's Matthew Barney's bird.

6. Bjork -- because I feel sorry for her getting her flat broken into.

7. Bork -- because she listens to field recordings of voles.

8. Bjork -- because she looks a bit Japanese.

9. Bjork -- because people from Scandinavia and beyond tend to be social and aesthetic liberals.

10. Bjork -- because who needs drugs?

11. Bjork -- because the idea of music progressing lives on.

12. The Boo Radleys.

Steve Earle: Dusty geetars and a raspy leftist recall-from-arms pissily provokes the Southern swarm.

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead: Throat lozenges, band aids and earplugs all requisite standbys for their near dadaist brand of Southern alarm.

Streets - cuz I like it when you can tell what rappers are saying
Fred Durst - cuz I like it when you can tell what rappers are saying
Ice-T - cuz I like it when you can tell what rappers are saying

But I'll guess Ice-T nevertheless. (Streets too loved, Durst too obvious.)

Van Halen - "Panama": From the very intro, you know something's up. Ultimately, it's all about that desert-cruiser riff just before the spoken bit.

Queensryche - "Jet City Woman": A lump in the biggest throat ever.

You could only call my reasons for liking Bjork 'non-musical' if you define 'music' in such a narrow way that it excludes almost everything that makes most of us here like it.

Avant plunder, coffeetable-ness, ears wide open-ness, progressiveness, a taste for field recordings of voles... these are things we hear. They are audible.

the answer was #2 btw

hey. i can dream, can't i?

They Might Be Giants - for the way they bridged heavy lyrical concepts with sunny easily-accessible melodies and arrangements

Dead Milkmen - for being funny fuckers

Siouxsie and the Banshees - "Cannons" (rolling bombast in the rhythm section turns an exercise in rainmaking into a barbarian invasion)

Depeche Mode - "Home" (desperate loneliness and utter self-loathing is answered by an anthemic chorus and a cup of cocoa)

and dan i think you don't like strange attraction coz the blurb seems somewhat dissociated.

And here's my three:

XTC - "Mayor of Simpleton": Underdog song set to a simple but irresistable melody = awesome
Depeche Mode - "Stripped": Anthemic chorus let loose in a slow, relentless grind = awesome
Underworld - "Born Slippy": Half-comprehensible vocals in a blur of chords and pounding drums = awesome

Cypress Hill: "How I Could Just Kill a Man." I just like it because it's catchy and I like saying the refrain over and over again.

Eric B. & Rakim: "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em." I like the rhythms, the flow, and the little bit of electric keyboard that stands out at the end.

EPMD "Gold Diggers": I like it because it was the first song I heard that had that sort of drill-like synth. sound in it.

1) Money Mark: His keyboardery is a highlight of many a Beastie instro, and the muddy strangeness of his MoWax debut Mark's Keyboard Repair is one of the best atmospheres in a record I've heard, a sort of "abandoned roller rink taken over by pot-smoking jazzbo squatters" vibe.

2) Crystal Method: They take a simple formula and run with it -- vamping acid freakouts with hyperactive breaks and a knack for putting together everything a song needs to stick in your brain, which in turn relays signals directly down to your ass declaring "OK, you start shaking now". Sounds at home on crowded dancefloors or bumping through the speakers of your brand-new WRX, aural caffeine befitting of the band's name.

3) Van Halen: Classic pop cleverly disguised as flashy metal theatrics. Roth's vocals straddle the line between "not very good" and "confoundingly, stridently great"; Eddie crams six minutes' worth of Jimmy Page guitar theatrics into a minute-at-most solo with Hendrixian efficiency; arena rock and cartoon blues supercollide and drop an A-bomb of burnout manna on semi-suburbs everywhere in Mid-America.

[JBR and Matos are verboten from guessing.]

I have to confess though that it's been a while since I've heard any of them, though I think I would still like the first two, and still not like EPMD.

(This is all of course for the purpose of making a handbook on how to detect when people are pretending to like stuff.)

Personally, with a name like that, I think they should live the gimmick of their nomenclature and wear Chevy logo muscle shirts and frosted permullets.

Okay, here's another one:

1) Sarah Vaughan--if she'd croaked when Billie Holiday did, everyone would love her twice as much as Billie.
2) Peter Stampfel--if he'd croaked when Phil Ochs did, everyone would love him twice as much as Phil.
3) Janis Ian--if she'd croaked when Sandy Denny did, everyone would love her twice as much as Sandy.

1) The Coral - sea shanties in the top 40? Come on then!
2) Super Furry Animals - make Welsh cod-reggae sound like something other than an unbearably horrendous ordeal
3) Beck - Disco? Jazz? Blues? Folk? Whogivesasheeeit?