What's stopping a jam band from busting out a sampler?

Anyway, some of them do, but it still doesn't make the music good in most cases. Even John Scofield's band uses a sampler.

TS: Orbital working a festival crowd vs. Phish doing the same. I think I know where my sympathies lie.

`cos, like, the Dead never used one, etc.

bela fleck t-shirts.

I promised one of the operators on this forum, who moderated a post of mine, that I would behave better, so I've cleaned my act up.

If you still want me to leave, by all means, I will. Just delete my newly registered account and I'll be off in a puff of smoke never to disturb ye all again.

It's up to y'all.

I'm just firmly against attaching such stringent labels to anything. I don't believe genres have inherent superiorities either myself, and I dislike scenesterism, but for those who oppose me, I haven't constructed a strawman to define and tear down.

I think "rockist"/"rockism" can be a really useful way of looking at Why Music Is The Way It Is, for example why people feel that some career artists in other fields need to be "rescued" or "legitimized" by the great healing hands of the rock 'n' roll pantheon before they can properly get their due.

back to our regular programming...

I for one do not like much that's on the airwaves right now. I think most of it is atrocious. That doesn't mean I hate everything on it, or go around chastizing it for not being "art". But I dislike the majority of it because of how watered down and boring commercialization has made mainstream music. Not that this is a new trend. In the 70's, for every good Stevie Wonder song, you had to sit through Bread and Gerry Rafferty too.

And that includes rock, too. I hate today's rock radio as well.

I think there is a definite difference between music with clear-cut artistic intentions and entertainment, and that one listens to both on two different levels. Each serves its own purpose. I enjoy both, though admittedly I'll prefer something that reaches for the skies and attains its lofty goals over something that just aims to entertain. It doesn't devalue the latter, but you can't compare the two on even ground.

But, where the problem lies is that when I bash an artist who is popular, I get told I have a snobbish attitude and that I can't appreciate entertainment, or that I'm an elitist because I call somebody a "sellout". But perhaps it might be because I've grown tired of the homogenization of music, and that I dislike THAT particular artist on legitimate grounds.

In fact, I'm not really into solos these days in any kind of beat-based music. I'd prefer to hear stuff that's written a la Tortoise or some real-time development of riffs, themes, layers, etc. a la, um, the band in my head.

yeah man, sample the jams, then jam on the samples.. for hours

This is a good description of my homieses band Tryptamine Arkestra. Most people call them "hippie techno".

"Leave the gun. take the canoli."

Anyway, the real answer here - because most "jam bands" seek to groove, at best, rather than beat. Would you criticize soukous stars on the same ground? Also, the idea that "jam bands" as presently understood cleave more to the Grateful Dead than anyone else is quite wide of the mark.

Staying simple, leaving space, and not changing up a beat/groove too much makes it stronger.

Add more and more notes, and more syncopation usually ends up diluting the power of the beat.

Of course, the real trick is to only play the variations/solos that do make stronger, which is what's so great about hip-hop, James Brown, New Orleans brass bands, etc.

i really don't think they look at it that way. they enjoy what they enjoy, and they let other people worry about whether one band they like should be called a jam band or not, and whether another band they like shouldn't. they probably like some bands that use samples and some bands that don't. just like everybody else.

why haven't belle and sebastian explored heavy metal? why haven't mogwai used a steel guitar? why haven't the new england patriots tried running the option?

how many trained, accomplished musicians (many of whom embrace the jam band as an platform to show their expertise on any one instrument), have embraced the sampler?

or is the sampler mainly used by UNTRAINED, self-taught musicians, therefore circumventing all things jam-bandish?

Isn't this the heart of the Rockist position? The problem is not that people criticise those who dislike "entertainment" but that you are positing a clear difference between Entertainment and Art, a difference which many of us find illusory.

For example, prior to the late 18th Century, there was no distinction between Art done for money and that done for its own sake. Bach, Mozart, Handel, Haydn: all sellouts who composed for money. The truth would seem to be that all composition has a complex range of motives, and that even if the motives were purely financial that doesn't devalue the work produced. Bach was on a salary, for God's sake.

Now assuming this distinction between Art and Entertainment does not exist, those who defend their musical preferences on the grounds that they are Art need to find a new reason for doing so. If you want to say that you like Phish more than, say, N'Sync, then there are multiple reasons you could use. But to define the former as Art and the latter as Entertainment and claim that this immediately makes one superior to the other just won't stand up to even the simplest scrutiny.

Sorry, this is a bit off-post. But c'mon, if you're going to moan about people disliking the mentality of some Jam Band fans, at least understand clearly what the objection is.

Sellouts are capable of writing good music. I've said that in other threads. But many of them lose their focus the moment they embrace the mighty dollar as their primary means of getting into music.

Music should not be a business, but it is. Of course I understand artists wanting to get paid. I don't find fault with those who choose to make a living off of music.

But I'm insulted by those whose primary drive in becoming a musician is more the money, glamour, and the fame, rather than the music itself, and oftentimes, it shows in the end result.

"If you want to say that you like Phish more than, say, N'Sync, then there are multiple reasons you could use. But to define the former as Art and the latter as Entertainment and claim that this immediately makes one superior to the other just won't stand up to even the simplest scrutiny."

Except that I already clearly defined that I, and many of my ilk, treat music in both categories differently. I'm not going to listen to Pain of Salvation the same way I do The Darkness, now, am I? Nor will I get the same experience out of listening to both groups.

Note I said in the message before I'll have more respect for a band with artistic inclincations that REACH their lofty goals over a group that merely exists to entertain. That does not say I praise all those with artistic inclinations over those who entertain.

Because while I like seeing artists reach for the stars and experiment with their music, I'm going to have a lot more use in my collection and in my life for a band like The Darkness who don't set out to redefine music at all except make fun, catchy music, and succeed at doing it, rather than a band that attempts something artistic but fail at their goal, and come off clumsy and over-pretentious or just fail miserably.

But pardon me all to hell if I'm bored with the general homogeneity of mainstream music right now.

isn't radiohead our only example of this?

You haven't defined any difference as far as I can see, other than your own assumptions. You also side-stepped the pre-Romantic thing: are you saying that Mozart is purely an entertainer and therefore unworthy of your fullest respect?

I think Pain of Salvation's One Hour by the Concrete Lake is an album that reached it's goal.

It's called "context clues". One can generally get a clue inside an artist's intentions by reading articles about them, reading/watching interviews, and reading articles that they wrote. One is also left clues by suspect stylistic shifts. If a band known to be suffering financially puts out an album that sounds boy-bandish after 9 years of playing folk music, one has to raise his eyebrow.

About Mozart, I don't have issue, as I said, with those who compose and receive money for it or make a living off of it. I don't consider Mozart to be in the same category as Jewel, who ditched her singer/songwriter motif to go commercial dance-pop a la Lee Ann Rimes simply because it's the new in thing and the record company advised it.

If you come across a piece of music when you know nothing whatsoever about the artist, I assume you're unable to make a judgement about it?

I don't think I'm being a Pop Elitist. I'm listening to Bitches Brew at the moment. I've just yet to hear a convincing definition of Art that separates it from its lesser cousins. Provide one, and I'll erase me Kylie mp3s.

If you found out that your favorite band was in it for the money all the time after reading an interview, would you no longer like them?

But let's be realistic. Are you going to tell me you'd pick up a Pain of Salvation album, listen to it, and somehow doubt the fact that they didn't know ahead of time they wouldn't be selling 100,000 copies of their album? No. Likewise, would you look at one of the manufactured pop stars of today, who seem to have every bit of them defined by their publicist and whatever "angle" they want to take, and assume the three minute nuggets about shaking booty that they wrote were written with the intention to challenge Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd score?

Since most of my favorite bands are generally on labels that consider an album selling 100,000 copies as a "complete success", and oftentimes have trouble paying their bills, I would sincerely doubt that, but for the sake of argument...

Have you completely ignored the part of the post where I said sellouts were capable of writing good music, or in the Beastie Boys thread where I've admitted that professed "sellouts" have written music that I've liked before? You should have had your answer right there.

I'm not going to train my ear to dislike a song merely because I dislike the musician or his intentions behind it. But my respect for the musician himself will be affected.

Regardless, I sincerely doubt I'm going to find out Immolation were writing their music to get on TRL anytime soon. After all, the time I saw them perform in 1999, the audience was about 20 people.

(on a side note, though, look what happened to Carcass when they sort of 'sold out'. Columbia told them what they could and couldn't do and they ended up releasing their worst album before retiring.)

I'm really doubting that I'm going to find out that Sigh were trying to get on Hit Parader the whole time.

Art is not a set of timeless values. The whole notion of Art was pretty much created during the Industrial Revolution, when artists moved from creating work for a single patron to being forced to push it onto the market economy.

In a market economy, it makes perfect sense for some artists to sell to niche markets rather than the mass. It makes no more sense to suggest that somebody who sells a small number of units has integrity than it does to suggest that somebody who sells a large number of units has talent. If you believe that record sales are no indicator of quality of product, I'd agree with you. But that argument applies at both ends of the sales curve.

Stephen Sondheim writes for money. As does R. Kelly. If their motivations are the same, and I cannot see how you can offer any evidence that they're not, then what makes one better than the other (if that means anything) can't be motivation.

Making a living from music does not mean the person's primary drive is to make money, artistic inclinations second.

Why in the fuck, if Stephen Sondheim was merely out for money, would he have written Assassins around the time of the Gulf war, a musical that truly alienated a lot of people and had extremely low attendance it's first time around? He had something to say. why would he have created a musical about a wronged man who returns from exile to achieve murderous vengeance and bakes his victims into pies, instead of writing a fluff piece?

As far as sales indicators not indicating quality, of course I agree with you, on both ends of the spectrum.

Something not selling well doesn't make it a piece of art either, of course. Mortician sell very poorly, and I think they're an atrociously shitty band. That doesn't mean I consider them sellouts, though, and nor do I think they had artistic inclinations.

I'm not strictly tying "entertainment" to commercialism and money-grubbing, either. I'd consider stuff like Cannibal Corpse to be mere entertainment (NOT death metal in general, I'm talking about the specific band here), yet they're not financially successful either.

I was never meaning to argue, either, that if one is not attempting lofty artistic goals, one is merely out to make money. That's not the case.

Nor am I a fan of elitism in any form. I used to get in arguments with fellow metalheads who always argued metal was inherently superior to other genres, a higher "artform", when in reality, a lot of the bands these guys were putting forth, bands I even liked, were truly ear candy.

Purely out of interest, and not, I swear, as a parting jab, have you read any Raymond Williams? (Keywords, Culture and Society etc.) If yeah, what are your thoughts?

Something I should read? (not a jab, either, just curious).

Much more so than I could hope to be in the Real Time of a messageboard ;-)

- phish is in love with their own playing (they consciously seek - via practice drills and performance rules - to reduce the role of "ego" in their collective improvisation; maybe there's something revealed by that, but they're certainly not, say, metallica)
- jam band members are trained musicians devoted more to professionalism than the DIY aesthetic (peronally, i think phish are defined by their amateurism)
- radiohead are "artistic," at least moreso than any other more-pretentious-than-usual, if halfway decent rock band
- radiohead have achieved their aspirations (well maybe on Kid A, but I imagine their aspirations are much loftier)
- he is cool because he likes mogwai
- his coolness is threatened by the fact that more than a few jam band kids like them too (along with tortoise, as hstencil noted, and more than a few similar bands; personally, i have no need for any of them though i don't hate millions now living)

i have no problems with jam bands, or people who like them. (i was the first who shouted out lake trout)

the only negative thing i said was hippies dancing to mogwai are scary.

what's you real problem here?

meaning of the " made with electronic gear by non-jam-band-types and mostly played in clubs" variety

Haha, I haven't heard that name for years and years. God, how I disliked that album in high school (back when all I listened to was metal and prog for a good two years!).

MPC beats and bass + dub vibes + beautiful soul singing + a brass section of INCREDIBLY talented jazz musicians. Check 'Hope', 'This Room', 'Midnight Marauders' 12"s on Sonar Kollektiv/Best Seven.. two of these are on the Best Seven Selections comp.

Their live gigs tend to be three-hour affairs involving extended (20 minutes+) jams over the wickedest bass riffs you've ever heard. They're currently on tour too: I seriously recommend checking them out.

30.05 Detroit/USA Detroit Movemement Festival
28.05 Brighton/England Jazzbop/Brighton Festival
27.05 Manchester/England Band On The Wall
26.05 London/England Neighbourhood
24.05 Glasgow/Scotland TBC
22.05 Alicante/Spain Mestival
21.05 Barcelona/Spain La Paloma
20.05 Madrid/Spain Moby Dick

Sound Tribe Sector 9 are nice too.. a little non-gutsy in the rhythm department but not bad otherwise.

their newer/live version of this has stripped the bassline right back to just 6 notes at the end of every 2 bars... oooh, wish they'd come back to Wellington, they haven't done a gig here since February.

"Both of the band's sets were standard lengthy jams that worked around songs from the new album. Included were well-known favourites like "Deep Sun" and "Back To The Middle," both of which cater to the jazzier sounds of fusion-era Herbie Hancock. "Techno Beam," an effective cut at old-school Detroit techno, came alive with Shields' ping-pong keyboard effects. During the second set, the band even moved into Giorgio Moroder territory with a cover of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love." While Shields did his best to replicate Summer's euphoric vocals on the keys, the band captured Moroder's rubbery groove with striking precision".