"Good live"

- live venues are either a) massive stadia with crap sound where you can't see anything, or b) vile, unhygienic dives with crap sound where you can see too much
- i don't like standing up for so long, my feet hurt
- bands hardly ever as good as on record

there are exceptions obviously. i have enjoyed most of the small number of gigs i have been to this year.

I agree with lex on stadium gigs though. I will never, ever go to a stadium again. this I vow.

There are a lot of bands that fall into this category for me; my canonical favorite is the Modey Lemon. There's another, more famous rock band though that often gets mentioned in conversations about bands who were apparently mind-blowing live, but who never made a recording that matched that: the MC5. Not having seen them live, I wouldn't know.

For awhile I was against all recorded music. I thought there was too much of it. I was sick of hearing music pumping at me from little black boxes mounted in the corners of the room. I was sick of it all sounding the same every time. But mainly I was sick, sick to death of the collector's impulse to hoard, categorize and preserve my artifacts - frozen, changeless, call-uppable in an instant. Preserved forever (if I was careful) in little plastic or cardboard coffins. Zombies that could be made to speak. My zombies. I was repulsed by my decadence and resolved only to listen to live music. My wiggle room was that records played on the wrong speed on Technics counted as live.

better live than on record: radiohead, broadcast, goldfrapp...in each case because there's license to 'rock out' more (whether with a guitar, theremin or whatever) and branch out vocally too - but this is true of many bands - i just picked these three because they're bands i've seen in recent years in big venues and really loved their shows as much if not more than their albums (rare for me).

not better live than on records: kraftwerk - i suppose because they're deliberately trying to replicate the recorded experience so much and this is the point...but you still get to watch them with awe i suppose, and hey cool visuals...

really? and what's your point?

I'm neither 'popist' nor 'rockist'. both terms are lazy, execrable and restrictive. the discourse at this site would be vastly improved were they never to be invoked.

I'm not making any grand claim for live being intrinsically 'best', whatever you mean by that, in and of itself...it's just that I am personally more susceptible to the charms of the live experience than I am to recordings, for the reasons mentioned.

which probably has more to do with oldster stay-at-home attitudes like "my feet hurt" and "i'm not going to go out and meet people because i already have enough friends and i don't even like the friends i already have let alone people i don't know yet" which i know to be wrong but nonetheless I can't escape these long enough to enjoy a show very often anymore. god that sounds horrible. i do enjoy listening to records with my wife and kid a lot though, and even people who come up to the house

Precisely why I asked the question. I think the relationship between whether people like live or recorded music best expresses something very deep-seated about an overall attitude to music.

but then again I don't tend to see many gigs by bands I don't like on record, so there's little basis for comparison.

Stevem - not hype so much as their venerable and reclusive status (I don't recall the reviews Kraftwerk got last time out, maybe they were bad)

I guess that argument could be applied to any piece of recorded music, but I've always thought of improvised music in terms to, say, an unfolding conversation.

Also, don't discount the actual physical sensation of seeing music live. Noise bands are almost always better live because you feel the noise in your gut. You can turn up the volume on your stereo, but it's never going to equal the pummeling you'd get in a club, with nowhere to escape the sound.

As a musician, I also have the added incentive to want to see musicians play because, well, I want to *see* what they're doing, how they're reacting to each other and to the sounds being made.

Live shows have the ability to turn a record into more than just an aural experience and make it a visual thing too, i.e. making it more into theatre than just music.

I tend to judge a lot of live bands on their visual show as much as how they sound (i.e for a constant quality of music, an interesting looking band will always >> four blokes in jeans and t shirts--another reason why Kraftwerk pass despite accurately depicting the recorded versions).

http://21361.com/images/store/graphics/00000001/TFunk-full.jpg

A lot of the best acts I've seen don't particularly do it for me on record - and this particularly holds true for some of the larger arena/stadium acts. (Pink, Neil Diamond, latter-day Rolling Stones, White Stripes, Duran Duran.) A different set of skills come into play, including the ability to form a personal connection with a large audience. (In this respect, Neil Diamond has no peers. Well, maybe latter-day Bowie.) This is where Madonna falls down badly, of course - and after last night, I'd reluctantly add the Scissor Sisters.

Anyway, where else can you hear analog these days?

Having no stage prescence and little personality of any stripe, let alone their own.

No idea whatsoever of how to structure a set with a beginning-middle-end and bring the audience with them, just "here's a song" "here's another" to infinity (it feels like).

I don't really get as much opportunity to see music I consider good (on my hi-fi) performed live as I'd like tbh, so it's hard to say which I prefer. I think this is a bit of an apples vs. oranges question when you factor everything else about "live" in though (people (irritating and cool), environment, one-time-only... being outside the house etc).

-- struttin' with some barbecue (takeyourmedicinelikeacham...), November 13th, 2006.

must have been a bad venue...cuz when i saw em they were awesome! and i'm not even a huge fan of their records.