Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Wed, 6 Jan 1993 13:02:19 EST
From:         "Michael H. Bloom" <MHB@MITVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      What is there for an escalator to bring to him?

From:         Leonard Watkins <ISTS024@UABDPO.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Class warfare

> I don't think metal purging itself of Blues, it's impossible, because most of
> the changes they're playing is no different than the the blues changes
> BTW i do like Queen and Brian May, I think he deserves a better audience
> than the GnR audience, i also like GnR to some degree, (except Axl) I think
> Slash has played alot of blues as has May.........L.W.

Well, if you remember Gary's post about all the gazillions of categories of
modern day metal, only half of those categories still play the blues changes.
The death metal guys only want to play semitones, E to F and back again, or if
they really wanna get pumped they might do that classic tritone from the first
Black Sabbath album. The thrashers and the "progressive" types play all over
the map, artificial scales a la King Crimson. And at the other end of the
I-beam, groups like Poison play pure pop changes right out of Tin Pan Alley,
they just got their amps turned up so their blow driers won't drown 'em out.

From:         Scott Hammer <SCOTH@WMVM1.CC.WM.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Saffire degrades men

> As for what song of Saffire's degrades men, I'm not familiar enough with their
> repetoire to know song titles, but, taking the stuff they've played the two
> times I've seen them live as representative, just about anything from their
> entire oeuvre will do.  For example, take their number about why younger men
> should prefer older women.

Would you clue me in here? How is Saffire's schtick different from Bessie Smith
singing "I need a little sugar in my bowl" or Janis Joplin's "Move Over?"

> As far as their record sales go, they are representative of popularity and of
> the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.  To assert that sales means anything
> else is dangerously naive.

Not to be a nag, but this approaches tautology. Of course the popular artists
are the ones that sell records! The question that one should ask oneself as a
good ALLMUSICer is, is the artist popular for real musical achievement, or for
playing the celebrity game and/or simulating masturbation on video?

> It is a given that women have been degraded by music, as well as by just about
> everything else in society, but I don't see how that fact applies here.  I
> always thought the goal of the so-called women's movement (it is actually a
> movement for everyone -- not just women) was to treat *everyone* with respect
> in  thought, word, and deed.  I don't think that Saffire does that, and I fail
> to see any other redeeming value in their sexist attitude towards men.

Again, I wanna say "Yeah, but..." And here I wanna get into some stuff about
why we have rock'n'roll, what good it does us. There's certainly a component
of it that you're supposed to respond to bodily-- makes ya dance, makes ya
sweat, makes ya think about attaching yourself to the bodice of the goddess
across the dance floor, etc. A popular music that ignores sex is only going
to appeal to nerds like Olivia Newton-John and Tipper Gore. (Unfortunately,
a popular music that ignores brains has a regrettably wide appeal. I'd like
happy medium, please.)

So is Andrea Dworkinism the politically correct response? God, I hope not!
I agree with Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of
your revolution!" Or in other words, kiss that frog :-)

From:         mjferzig@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU
Subject:      Re: Class warfare

> Hey Bloomie! A post full of stuff of mine! I feel so honored!!!

Well, heck, least I can do for the rookie of the year...

> Thanks for the great laugh on this...what city were you in? You never
> mentioned...

Cambridge, Massachusetts. I always assume that everyone knows where MIT is.
(It's also why I feel like I have to dazzle people-- the MIT reputation...)

> BTW - I'm intensely curious where you picked up all the knowledge...

Truth be told, I don't know. But I recall some peculiar attitudes I've always
harbored. I used to think that Rolling Stone was the modern equivalent of the
New York Review of Books, as in, this is where the culture lives, what every
modern thinking American should be reading. By the time I got to write for it
myself (1979), it was already over the hill, and now it's utter twaddle-- one
commentator spoke of "post-literate journalism," and I'm tempted to agree :-)
Fortunately, nowadays there's this net and this list, an electronic salon we
can all hang out in...

> 2Questions: 1) What is your profession? 2) How old are you? Inquiring minds
> wanna know....

1) Computer nerd, although I'm ripe for a career change. If I disappear from
the net one day, I may have retired (or been laid off).

2) I'll be 40 in March-- not quite old enough to go to Woodstock, but that's
kinda where my heart is :-)

> As usual, you're dead-on on this one....I hope to be an intellectual
> property attorney! I figure when you guys make it big you'll need copyright
> lawyers!

O God. I hope you'll be kinder and gentler than the prevailing standard. Have
you read the position papers of the League for Programming Freedom on software
patents and the look-and-feel issue? How do you feel about sampling?

> Interesting....I admit, I haven't heard much of Glass's stuff...but I've
> never heard anything I like! _Glass works_ was my least favorite piece that
> I ever had to sit through in a music class. I will say one thing for
> it...It's really easy to identify on a listening exam....

Well, it's still not certain that you're gonna like the good stuff either.
That frog's eye kind of listening is certainly not for everybody-- and it's
arguable that nobody should have to devote that much time to glean so little
information out of a piece of music! But _Glass Works_ is certainly not the
good stuff. It occurs to me that a good example of bite-sized Glass exists:
_North Star_, a set of ten little pieces Glass wrote for the soundtrack of
a film about sculptor Mark DiSuvero (which I never saw, and may not have
spelled his name right either). The tracks are the length of pop songs, 3
to 5 minutes, and they use the classic minimalist instrumentation of voices
(a couple of them are tape loops), saxophone, flute, and organ. Great stuff--
maybe the cut called "Ange des Orages" should be one of my contributions to
the compilation.

> Yes, but this wasn't meant to be all-inclusive. You'll hear some a cappella
> on the comp tape. If you want more, you can have a copy of my compilation
> set...
> As a matter of fact, you don't even have to trade for them, if you'll
> promise to give me a full review - I'm dying to hear what the Bloom-meister
> thinks of my tastes!

Sorry, that's the one thing I can't promise right now. I'm feeling like I'm
written out-- temporarily, I hope! Got up early to finish the Curlew article,
and I'm afraid it's garbage, overly adjectival and just bloodless writing,
for a record that I really want to shout from the housetops that everybody
ought to run out and get! (Curlew's _A Beautiful Western Saddle_, settings of
poems by Paul Haines, sung by Amy Denio, coming out this month on Cuneiform.)
Still have to do the Negativland story, my column, the Birdsongs reminiscence,
and maybe some record and concert reviews...

There's a bunch of stuff I really want to treat as well as it deserves: just
in the last 24 hours, we've had Ken's excellent questions on why some music
is immediately recognizable, and Dave's post about minority listener elitism
(who, moi? :-), and I really want to say something substantive about both of
these topics, but by the time I get around to it, a dozen more equally cool
topics will have come down the pike-- damn, dealing justly with ALLMUSIC is
a full time job by itself, and one that, regrettably, doesn't pay :-(

From:         Adam Levin <Adam.Levin@LAMBADA.OIT.UNC.EDU>
Subject:      Re: New Thread....

> Marsha shamelessly lays the bait:
> >                ... Anyway, I'm curious what you folks would nominate as
> > wastes of vinyl....or magnetic tape, or whatever CD's are made
> > of......Should give you something to think about at work....
>
> Hehe. I'll tell you what. Go find yourself this weeks listing of Billboard's
> Top 40. That'll give you a good head start. 8)

You beat me to it.

I do think popular music is worse than ever. This is as much as I'll let
myself say now about the characteristic sounds of songs: modern artistes on
the radio and MTV today don't have any such thing. I can never remember what
Madonna sounds like (and she changes her hair etc. so much I have no idea
what she looks like either :-). Neither is there anything characteristic in
Michael Jackson-- I don't hear an individual aesthetic, I hear Quincy Jones's
sumptuous but homogenous production. This is increasingly true of Prince too,
albeit he's his own Svengali. G'n'R is to me a marginally slicker example of
a jillion pimply gas station attendants all hitting power chords. Ditto NiN,
except the job category is white collar (but no better paying). Even REM is
losing their uniqueness along with their religion-- now they're annoying in
a much more mainstream fashion :-)

> I picked up:
> Joe Ely _Love and Danger_
> King Crimson _Lizard_
> Carlos Santana and John Mclaughlin _Love Devotion Surrender_
> Richard and Linda Thompson _Shoot Out the Lights_ (MHB is bankrupting me!)

Does that make me a co-dependant? Should I start going to 12-step groups? :-)

> Black Sabbath _Paranoid_  (to replace a 15 year-old cassette)
> Robert Fripp and the Crafty Guitarists _Live_

Interesting bunch of records here-- three of them I actually have!

Last year, when Rykodisc bought out the Hannibal catalog, there was talk of
a Richard (and Linda?) Thompson boxed set. So you may want to hold off on
buying more of his stuff, you might be able to do a total immersion if this
set ever sees the light of day. (I came up with a 4 CD program I would like
to see, but given how likely it is that people agree with my tastes, it was
just a gedankenexperiment. And I still hope to start an RT tribute band.)

From:         Paul Heroy <HEROY@LSUVM.BITNET>
Subject:      BBC One recordings released

> There's a blurb in the latest Rolling Stone about a company named ROIR
> (Reach Out International Records, I think) which is about to issue a series
> of recordings made live in the studio during BBC One radio broadcasts. Some
> of the artists were listed, and a few really caught my eye: XTC (who haven't
> performed live for years, so a *real* treat there - I think theirs is from
> a 1980 show), Soft Machine, Caravan, and a couple I can't remember. Of course,
> there were several others that didn't catch my eye, too. Be on the lookout for
> this series, which should have some real gems for collectors.

These are something different from the Peel Sessions series? I have the Soft
Machine Peel Sessions double CD, which I like a lot, especially the version
of "Moon in June" where Wyatt wrote a whole new self-referential lyric about
appearing on the show and how nice the BBC was to work with-- "Not to mention
the extra facilities, such as the tea machine just along the corridor..."

And the thing I meant to mention last time I picked up the XTC thread is,
there's a faux XTC out there now, a band on the Knitting Factory label called
Fertile Crescent. You can definitely hear licks off _English Settlement_ in
their work, among other alienation-rock from Violent Femmes to Gang of Four,
but they're not stoopid, and if you've really got an XTC jones, you might
give Fertile Crescent a whirl...

From:         Ilia <CC29@IONA.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: New Thread....

> ONFC> (Obligatory Non-Frippian Comment) Got myself a schedule of the
> upcoming events at the Knitting Factory. Some notable figures there -
> Eliot Sharp (hmmm), Jazz Passengers, Sonny Sharock, maybe even John
> Zorn... If somebody is interested, I can post it on the net, and then
> you people will tell how to make the best use of my ten bucks. Yeah, and
> BTW, what hides under a mysterious name of John Zorn's Cobra? I think, I
> am aspiring to cluelessness on this one. :)

Sharp's an acquired taste, and a random Knitting Factory appearance is not
the way to acquire it. When he's good, he's very very good, but he's horrid
more often. The Jazz Passengers are real good, but they tend to demand the
utmost of your own jazz literacy-- at least, they always leave me feeling
ignorant, as surprising as that might be to the ALLMUSIC voting public :-)
I'd like to read a Beer report on them, he's probably got the literature
down... Sharrock may be the pick hit here.

I don't think Zorn has to be present for Cobra performances. Cobra's the
best known (although not by me) of his "game" pieces: the score describes
strategies the musicians should pursue, rather than specifying every note
they should play and when and how. But it's not pure aleatory like Cage's
star chart tunes or Stockhausen's radio mixes: there's definitely a vibe
Zorn's after, a way of reigning in the chaos to depict certain states of
being. Some performances are more successful than others; the musicians
definitely need to be capable improvisers. The guitarist in Judas and
Natasha Experiments got to play in a Cobra at Harvard, and he said the
students didn't have enough of a clue and it was entirely too feeble--
he and his buddies invoked the "guerrilla" option (if you meet certain
requirements, you can go "guerrilla," which entitles you to ignore what
the score and the conductor want you to do) as early as possible. I saw
there was gonna be an all-girl Cobra led by Zeena Parkins, and then an
all-critic Cobra in February. Maybe I should call them up and see if they
can use me for the latter (and whether they'll pay my freight down from
Boston, or just perfume my burning flesh :-)
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