For me : Trippie Redd’s “!” Is actually a great album
That rap is absolute garbage. For reasons I can’t explain it makes me unbelievably angry to have to listen to. It probably has something to do with a combination of my anxiety and sensitivity to loud noises, but I don’t know. I do like metal, although I don’t like it particularly loud.
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Satriani is a great guitarist, but a mediocre song writer. He suffers feom what I like to call The Solo Syndrome (not a reference to guitar solos). A song tends to be better when multiple musicians have had input, otherwise there’s too much focus on only one instrument.
Take for example Satrianis “Made of Tears”. How much better wouldn’t the song have been if an actual basist had written a cool bass riff to go along with it?
Or another example from Satriani: “Searching”. Excelent guitar hook in the beginning and the end, but I would’ve loved it more if there were other bandmembers who could tell him that the middle section is long and boring and would be better spent playing WITH other instruments instead of TO other instruments.
I fund that Steve Vai is a better (and comparable) songwriter (although a lot of his songs aren’t to my taste)
100% technique, no soul
That’s how I describe his music
For me, that description fits Yngwie more than Satriani. Satch had at least 1%, maybe even a whopping 2% soul. Vai is probably sneaking up on double digits.
I really hate the “soul” accusation. It’s so arrogant and pretentious. Look, I get it, their music doesn’t tell you anything, it’s not your thing, it’s OK. It’s about you, it’s not about them. Not saying there’s anything wrong with you because of it. There’s a lot of great music I simply don’t like. It’s normal.
You don’t feel anything with their music. I do. Lots of people do. Is our “soul” bone defective? Are you the judge of musical taste? Can’t you see we laugh and cry with their music just as easily has you do with what you consider “music with soul”?
My experience is that the same people who accuse them of being 100% technical and souless are precisely the ones so fixated on the technique they can’t actually just see past it and just listen to the music itself. Do you think we get goosebumps because of how fast we see the dude fingers move?
Regarding the actual musicians. I can’t say much about Malmsteen because it’s not my taste but the dude singlehandedly created a new genre. I can’t put him down just because his music is not my preference.
Satriani is certainly the most melodic of them. The guy launched multiple great albums. Until the early 00s. Every album until then was simply amazing. Vai could only launch 2 or 3 with the same quality. But after Super Colossal he lost his edge. He still makes good stuff but never like what he made between 1984 and 2006. It was out of this world (wink, wink).
That’s a big reaction for a tongue-in-cheek comment on an unpopular opinion post! Joe, is that you? I’m sorry they used Steve in Crossroads instead of you, but you gotta let it go! Sometimes the student becomes the teacher!
Joking aside, the whole “soul” thing can be seen as somewhat of a compliment in a sense. Blackmore, Yngwie, Satch, Petrucci, Vai, Johnson, and other neoclassical players strove for technical perfection. The bits and bobs of music that are generally lumped into the idea of “soul” are the mistakes, the imperfections, the unintended, the miniscule fuckups. As an off the top example, think of Merry Clayton’s voice cracking as she belted out a vocal masterwork in her pajamas and curlers after being dragged out of bed at midnight to back up Mick Jagger. It’s imperfect, it’s unrepeatable, and it’s amazing.
Contrast that with what the technical shredders were intending to do: they wanted to hit every note with exacting precision every time they played. It’s no less impressive than those one-off moments like Gimme Shelter, but it’s markedly different. Listeners who don’t identify with the sound sometimes perceive a sort of sterility in the style, whether deserved or not. The degree of technicality alone can almost come across as machine-like. That doesn’t mean that it has no merit, or that anyone who feels it deeply is in some way “defective”. These guys wouldn’t have had 40+ year careers if nobody was feeling what they were doing.
Enjoy what you enjoy, groove to what grooves you, and above all else, be secure enough in your own taste that a bit of banter about a genre doesn’t seem like a personal attack. Remember: Barry Manilow has sold over 85 million albums, so there really is a market for everything!
Satriani is a great guitarist (among the best)
That’s very far from true. The last decades have brought forth countless young talents. Every single one of them smokes satriani in a pipe. Easily.
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Satch for sure is an extremely talented guitarist and understands that the key to a good song is a melody (or “hook”) that is simple, memorable, and catchy. Almost every song he wrote has this at its core. The problem is simply that this is insanely difficult to do and he struggles with it, especially on his later albums
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They have their place. Which is a hill far far away and not indoors.
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You might like this line from Arrested Development, Season 4:
And, like all bagpipe music it was hard to tell if it was good music played horribly, or horrible music played well.
I’m Scottish, so I felt guilty for laughing at that as much as I did :-)
On rare occasions, I do think bagpipe music can be spectacularly beautiful and moving, but it takes a really talented piper and/or some contextualising occasion (like a major sports event) to really make me like it all that much.
I fuckin’ love bagpipes… but I also love Xiu Xiu so I wouldn’t trust my musical tastes.
I think even bagpipe players agree with you.
How do you feel about Tuvan throat singing? I feel like both sounds are complex and deeply interesting but I also think it’s an acquired taste.
Baroque music sounds absolutely shit. Composers try to mix in so many different voices that it’s the musical equivalent of a TV panel show where everyone is shouting over one another.
On that note: harpsichords in ensembles are background noise at best and very few people would notice their absence.
Many of my friends get super personally offended when I say that phish isn’t a great band
Phish is great at what they do, I just find their music dreadfully boring and long
People like Hip Hop because it makes them feel cool for listening to it.
Classical music, while historically significant, is actually mid and there’s nothing uncultured about not enjoying it.
There are great songs and albums in all genres.
There are terrible songs and albums in all genres.
Listening to an album as it was released, front to back, is the best way to consume music.
People who suscribe to Spotify don’t give a shit about musicians.
There is, in fact, good country music that isn’t just about trucks, beer, flags, and right-wing U.S. propaganda.
People have a lot of hate for the genre due to the mass appeal, common denominator examples. But like with all music, dig a little deeper beyond what gets radio play and you can find some good shit.
Had a chat with a coworker about this. I’m not a bug fan of the genre as a whole, but something happened to the genre around 20ish years ago. The country twang went from being a natural signature of some artists to being something everyone emulated while singing their bird cage bottom piece of shit piece about their truck.
My grandparents used to watch this show on TV called Club Dance. Imagine Soul Train for old white people; it was shot in a fictional “saloon” and they’d have both professional country dancers and amateurs who wanted to be on the show. Most of the music I remember hearing about the show was basically about dancing. The whole “truck jeans beer girl creek boots truck” phenomenon hadn’t been invented yet.
dig a little deeper beyond what gets radio play and you can find some good shit.
Don’t leave us hanging! What are your suggestions?
Here is a random list of songs I like, in my opinion under the umbrella of country in one way or another (though some stretch that a little. Or a lot. Don’t @ me, die-hard country fans).
Some may, indeed, involve beer, trucks, and American Christian propaganda - but pleasant sounding at least. I’m also confirmed to be pretty lame, and that may be reflected in my choices here.
I also never said you needed to dig deep - some/most of this is like, a fingernail scratch. But if you find something here you dig, strongly recommend diving deeper into the artist.
Merle Haggard - Mama Tried
George Jones - White Lightning
The Highwaymen - Highwayman
Dick Curless - The Heartline Special
Eddy Arnold - Cowpoke
Conway Twitty - Hello Darlin’
Townes Van Zandt - Waiting Around to Die
Sons of the Pioneers - Empty Saddles
Marty Robbins - Running Gun
Willie Nelson - Bubbles in my Beer
Hank Thompson - A Six Pack to Go
Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down
Sonny James - Baltimore
Del Reeves - A Dime at A Time
Dale Hawkins - Everglades
Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West - Blue Bonnet Rag
Tim Carroll - I Think Hank Woulda Done It This Way
Buddy Emmons - Orange Blossom Special
Tommy Collins - You Better Not Do That
The Louvin Brothers - Satan is Real [here’s that propaganda I told you about - still love this song]
Eddie Noack - Psycho
Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed - Jerry’s Breakdown
Tom T. Hall - That’s How I Got to Memphis
Roger Miller - Dang MeGo listen to Ray Charles’s album covers of country songs, “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.”
And then go listen to Sturgil Simpsons “Meta Modern Sounds in Country Music”, both incredible albums
I have a real love hate relationship with country music, I love almost everything except it feels very low energy most of the time and like you said the classic truck songs
I’ve found bands like poor man’s poison and the dead South, hurry up and wait by ben miller band is a great example of something decent
When someone dies or leaves the band, you have a new band and should give it a new name.
“A three-legged dog is still a dog. It just has to learn to run differently.” - Michael Stipe
But when every leg is replaced? When head is replaced too? When torso is broken and remodeled? Is it still that dog or something different?
I’m ok with band switching members, but there should be a limit…
Good question, but the comment I was replying to only mentioned a single band member change.
Philosophically it’s hard to say at what point it stops being the same band. It’s the Ship of Theseus, or as it’s often known here in the UK, Trigger’s Broom, after a scene in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses.
Meanwhile, the ship of Theseus…
I had to google whether this is some idiom unknown to me, or if you’re mocking me, or what it really is. I’m no philosopher, but at one point it’s not the same ship for me.
Oh, not mocking you. It’s just a semi famous Greek thing about when changing the parts of a thing changes the thing. It’s hard to draw clear lines about it.
Especially in the case where you take the parts off the original ship one at a time and replace them, while reassembling them somewhere else. Now you have two ships and it’s unclear which is the “original”
It applies somewhat well to a band changing members, but I guess if your band is only like 3 people it’s less fuzzy. A symphony of 100 people that changes one member every year, though, would be harder to call.
For anyone else who doesn’t know: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Yeah. I was thinking like the usual 4 piece rock band. You switch one member and it’s ok. Let’s say next year one member dies, so he’s replaced. Still ok. But when there’s ultimately nobody from the original lineup, it’s just not the same band for me. On paper it is, but for me it’s just milking the name…
when there’s ultimately nobody from the original lineup, it’s just not the same band for me
I agree in general, but I think longevity comes into it too.
If the band lost a couple of members early on, but replaced them, then had decades of success and eventually replaced the remaining originals, you still have the early replacements there, who were involved for most of their career.
It would seem harsh to say it’s not the same band just because none of the original members are there.
Music is distracting and hinders conversation
The Beatles are pretty lowbrow compared to the hype given to them which is based mostly on charisma instead. If they made their song debuts on The Masked Singer, not nearly as many people would be particularly drawn to them.
I say that if you want to appreciate the Beatles for the first time in 2024, spend a solid month listening to nothing but popular music from the 1950’s (and earlier), then put on one of their albums.
The older music is fine and enjoyable, but you’ll hear why, the Beatles still get regular airplay today, and e.g. Pat Boone does not.
If that’s the reason, where does the idolization come from? Even as human individuals, the Beatles members are worshipped to the point they can save a dying business by talking about it. It’s suggestive of the fact there’s some unspoken gimmick at play.
My take is that people value music both for the music itself, and for the social identity that comes from how we relate to it. The Beatles benefited from Beatlemania back in the day, which was the same as the Swifties phenomenon today: a social-identity group of fans. There might have been better bands in the early '60s, but the music of the Beatles was really quite good, and still holds its own today. Tons of great music has come along since then, so the Beatles catalogue no longer stands out, but they still benefit from the social-identity hype of Beatlemania, and are still revered because they were (lucky enough to get to be) pop-music pioneers.
Taylor Swift is fine, her music is enjoyable, but ultimately kind of forgettable. Her popularity comes from the social-cohesion function of popular music.
I think The Doors were awful.
Awful people or awful music?
