"Well, thats just WEIRD..."

category (2): beefheart of course. also syd barrett. sometimes robyn hitchcock (when he isn't singing about his wife the corpse).

1) They're *deliberately* TRYING to be weird "Ooh, look at me, I so KER-AAAAAYZEE!!!" = BAD weird.

2) Weirdness just being a natural extension of who they are, i.e. naturally mad, eccentric, acid-fried, etc. = GOOD weird.

Examples of good weirdness = Barrett-era Floyd, Julian Cope, etc.

Bad weirdness = Primus, Beefheart, the rest of Nickalicious' record collection. ;-)

However, there are these sort of grey areas, along the Edmund Lear sort of lines... where does nonsense verse fit in all this? Early Flaming Lips, for example?

And don't make me bring notions of "authenticity" into this, cause I know that's a pile of pish. In some cases, it just seems contrived. I cannot qualify this. It's like they're using "weird" as a lazy shortcut to being "clever". And that irritates me.

Bad Weirdness: Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa; Zorn & Zappa seconded; Radiohead at their worst (Pull / Pulk Revolving Doors).

Good Weirdness: :zoviet*france:; the first two Cluster albums (Kluster = Bad W.); most NWW; Radiohead at their best (Everything In Its Right Place).

(apparently our individual definitions for what makes the specific musicians accused-of-weirdness "naturally mad, eccentric, acid-fried, etc" are what are at conflict, that or our individual tastes [no way! *wink*])

(ps I don't and never have owned a Captain Beefheart rekkid)

Cause I see him as wonderfully "the boy can't help it" odd, which makes him good weird.

'My Perception Is Bigger Than Yours'
- exemplification of intelligence as ability to pattern order out of chaos and/or dignity of 'difficulty': i can make sense of or enjoy struggling to make sense of the unexpected, the thwarted expectation, the unfamiliar, so SEE how much more hungry-minded open-minded capable-minded i am compared to consumers of easily digested pre-arranged pap haha

'Abstract Impressionists'
- dissonance of form and content is what proper h'educated academic clever types do => haha sounding like or liking that makes me as clever as them

'The What-care-I-for-your-petty-conventions-I-am-an-ARTIST Dept'
- if 95% of ppl hate it and of the 5% that do >90% are Edgy Style Lab-rats then I must be doing something right

'Oh I'm just bonkers, me'
- in which madness is adjacent to genius instead of adjacent to damp chemical stains

crappy psycho-logic, cultural ideologies, social awareness etc. - but then what else do we expect in music appreciation hoho

'ladies & gentlemen we have discovered a scientifically infallible way of sorting genuinely weird sheep from merely clever goats.
unfortunately until we can isolate aesthetic impurities involving the ascription of motivation, notions of the 'genuine', permitted levels of self-consciousness, and who's allowed to be big & clever - we shall remain confused over the relative merits of each.'

Heh, you don't have to tell me twice, I love their last two albums about as much as anything I own but I especially love em live. Though I would say all the fake Bungle bands like Estradasphere or whatevah belong in the "bad weird" category people often put Bungle in. I just don't feel the same appreciation for lots of different music that MB obviously seem to have.

Honestly, I think their name doesn't really help matters but I remember hearing about how Warner Bros. convinced them to stick with it since they wanted a namechange themselves.

Good and interesting.

'Abstract Impressionists'
- dissonance of form and content is what proper h'educated academic clever types do => haha sounding like or liking that makes me as clever as them

Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate! I want to wrap them in kerosene soaked Rothko canvases and set them on fire.

'The What-care-I-for-your-petty-conventions-I-am-an-ARTIST Dept'
- if 95% of ppl hate it and of the 5% that do >90% are Edgy Style Lab-rats then I must be doing something right

The reason that I HATE experimental music, part 223...

'Oh I'm just bonkers, me'
- in which madness is adjacent to genius instead of adjacent to damp chemical stains

Depends, but usually good. I don't like the Canonisation of Madness (IIRC, this was partly what originally caused me to disagree so voiciferously with Doomie all those years ago) but sometimes it is a shortcut to genius. (See Louis Wain and his creepy catz...)

This emotional-expressiveness thing then might be able to explain my strange "good/bad" weirdness-appreciation split:

"Good" = Ani D, Mike Patton, John Zorn, Roland Kirk, etc...sure it's strange stuff sonically, but it delivers emotionally

"Bad" = Zappa, Beefheart, O'Rourke, etc...stuff that's strange and isn't really particularly expressive

(NOTE: I'm not particularly fond of using the words 'good' and 'bad' in musical discussions, in that I don't believe that music is a thing that can be measured qualitatively in an overall sense.)

p.s. Beefheart rools! = good weird(well maybe just a little elitism but just a toach. there are bagillion of non weird acts that are a bagillion times more elitist than beefheart)

DAMM i write slow in english! you beat me to it nickalicious.

Some people are put off by the Fall's weirdness which they claim has no emotion attached to it. Well hear this! CYNICISM AND SARCASEM ARE EMOTIONS TOO!

But they are not. They are responses to emotion - but they are distancing responses to emotion. Anger, fear, frustration - these things are emotions. Cynicism and sarcasm are tools that people use to *suppress* emotion. I see the weirdness of The Fall as a way of trying to deal with bile and anger that would otherwise consume and destroy them. (Him, really, I suppose.)

naturally, i'm biting my tongue re: people's comments about zappa.

seems that some notion of 'authenticity' may have a hidey-hole after all

so: the one true weirdness is that which cannot speak its own name - that which is lacking in the exercise of choice or the self-and-others awareness that enables guile

and that is something we can approve of as 'genuine'

any work produced under intense concentration, as a result of exercising choices, with education and craft and awareness of place-in-the-world, if it sounds 'weird' then it is to be suspected as guilty of impure motivations

haha weirdness as purity of purpose
or just something that 'sounds' like it ?

Actually, they'd been playing together (regularly, and in public even!) for about two years.

Residents = bad weird. I just cant get them, and I've tried.

Then again, notions of sanity are in the eye of the beholder so we're back to the "authenticity" thing, I guess. Pretense is only good if it's well-done, and therefore indistinguishable from the "real thing".

Oh, my head hurts again.

doesn't deserve its own thread, but h'WAT??!?!!!?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/anti-vax-trucker-convoy-porno-metal-ram-ranch-1297926/

i listened to the song. it's bad weird, but is ultimately more performance art than music.

but most importantly— WAT???!?!

(has rolling stone ever made up stories before or are we really living that life in 2022?)

(also co-sign on john zorn and nine inch nails being "bad weird.")