Controversial Music Opinions On BEA!

[cestuneblague]

Oh yeah I forgot that she is single-handly reviving... Goth, so I guess we can expect that A Blaze in the Northern Sky cover sometime soon.



ALso my controversial opinion is music is not a thing, but a being

[cobbo95]

Might not be that controversial but who knows?

Joy Division - Few good songs mixed in with too many sparse ones that don't really do much

New Order - Dated 1980s production masked in 'post-punk' clothing

The Brian Jonestown Massacre -Bad drawl singing stretched out over long (but fairly well produced) albums

Arcade Fire - Normal indie rock shadowed by a slightly pretentious front-man and some folk leanings

Buffalo Springfield - Standard 60s country/folk rock which is done much better by The Byrds

The Cure - A less interesting version of The Smiths

Jay Z - An average rapper with cliched rhymes. More of a brand than a person these days

Frank Zappa - A few decent, whacky ideas spread over an entire career. Great musicianship though

Mumford & Sons - If Chris Martin took up the banjo and became even more insipid.

My Bloody Valentine - Noise & incoherent vocals. A good concept but testing over an albums worth. I prefer Ride for shoegaze.

The Velvet Underground - I do quite like their first album but only in places. They're alright and fairly important for rock music but are ranked way too highly on lists.

The 1975 - Shite

[AfterHours]

[AfterHours]

Re: Velvet Underground ... Totally subjective and okay not to like them much but "fairly important" is a massive understatement. They basically are the lifeblood of most essential rock music as we know it, especially from the mid-70s through the 90s.

I would also recommend re-listening to their first album (the more times the better) with a new/altered criteria in mind: they are expressing scenes/states through emotions and concepts, as complete incidents, each instrument and vocal playing its part in the overall expression. The emotional/conceptual depth of the work is astonishing. It is immersive and evocative, dangerous, exotic, shocking, touching and traumatic -- a lot like Expressionist theatre/cinema. They are not trying to catch your ear. They are not trying to make standard, catchy songs for the sake of sing-alongs or radio play, for consumer interest and consumption, etc.

[cobbo95]

[quote="AfterHours"]Re: Velvet Underground ... Totally subjective and okay not to like them much but "fairly important" is a massive understatement. They basically are the lifeblood of most essential rock music as we know it, especially from the mid-70s through the 90s.

I agree with you that they are important and maybe I criticised them a bit harshly - out of all the overrated artists I put they're probably the ones I like the most. But like I said, I appreciate some of their first album and quite like most of the songs (Heroin, Venus, Sunday Morning, Femme) but for them to be ranked so highly on most charts (Rolling Stone being one example) baffles me. They were largely ignored when they first came about but it seems to me like publications jumping on a bandwagon once a few trendy and respected artists mention them as an influence.

[AfterHours]

[quote="cobbo95"]

[AAL2014]

[AfterHours]

Re: The Velvet Underground and Nico

Perhaps Piero Scaruffi's descriptions of its significance are the most perfect encapsulation of the most important aspects that makes the work so amazing -- the key things to understand in order to unlock its full emotional and conceptual significance. If you listen for and assimilate the facets he is describing while listening to it, I wouldn't be surprised if it grew on you exponentially (though admiration is subjective, so no worries if it doesn't).

... ... ... ... ...

"The Velvet Underground with Nico debuted in February 1966 at the Cinematheque, but the first official showing of Andy Warhol's multimedia feature was held in spring, at the DOM Theater. In May the caravan of actors, movie-makers, dancers and musicians was set in motion for a tour that carried their exhibition of perversion and depravity all the way to the West Coast.

On stage, the music converged in a fusion of personalities. Nico became a member of the Velvet Underground and their sound became an amalgam of the musical backgrounds of each one the five members: Reed's metropolitan existentialism, Cale's avant garde, Tucker's primitivism, Nico's "verfremdung", and Morrison's rock and roll. Obviously they all took their cues from Andy Warhol's hyper-realism.

Their musical sources went from Berlin's expressionist cabaret (Brecht/Weill in particular) to Paris' anarchic proletarian songs, from LaMonte Young's minimalist avant garde, to the Byrds' psychedelic folk-rock. But the Velvet Underground had little regard for tradition and absolutely no fear of experiment. From the very beginning their sound included distortion, feedback, Oriental drone, Middle Eastern scales, mantras, raga, free-jazz improvisation, and the tribal rhythms of American Indian pow-wows and African folk.

Reed was a free-jazz aficionado who listened to Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler. Cale was the avant garde expert. Morrison was the rocker. Never before had existed a more unconventional band.

The Velvet Underground were among the first bands to conceive rock music as creative art, not as a commercial product to sell in this or that format. As a consequence, they were also among the first bands to show total disregard for the charts. The aim of their music was to transmit emotions, to express uneasiness, to communicate within their environment. The early albums are first and foremost examples of creative freedom: the band wrote what it felt like, arranged it as it pleased, and played it how it wanted. The only rule was not to play blues, because too many bands were already doing it.

The Velvet Underground are the chroniclers of vandalism, of alienation, of perverted eroticism, of aristocratic decadence, of all the obscene rituals concealed by the metropolis. They dig into the intricacies of vice, reconnecting it with the great French tradition of De Sade and Baudelaire. They undress the desolation of modern life, the frustration of the denizens of the technological ruins, the tenebrous ambiguities of "la dolce vita" of the middle class. So much sickly inspection into the degradation of customs yields morbid songs and prolonged delirium, altered by a sound pushed to the limit of tolerance. In these incurable abscesses of sound the Velvet Underground revealed themselves as first radical prophets of improvisation, of dissonance and of "deafening" rock.

On their first album, The Velvet Underground And Nico (Verve, 1967), recorded in 1966 during the Californian tour under Tom Wilson's aegis, and released in January of the following year, the protagonists of those legendary comic-theatrical musical phantasmagories first appear. Andy Warhol produced the album and created one of his banana designs for the jacket, the phallic symbol that in time became his trademark. Nico, naughty brat and tenebrous angel, elegant and sinister, fatal and elusive, emits tone-deaf Teutonic laments in a neutral and wordly-wise tone. Reed, composer of the melodies and the lyrics, inflicts atrocious gashes of anguish in the slums, an infernal comedy on the moral misery of the nocturnal masses: ruin and desolation, solitude and paranoia, the beauty and the salvation of evil. Cale arranges the sound and the atmosphere with an infinity of strategies, from raw noise to the thinly perverse and seducing, exotic sound of the viola, leaning repeatedly on the most grinding notes, delving into electronic avant garde and repetition. Maureen Tucker beats on the drums with frenzied hysteria, desperate and obsessive,but also subtly exotic, martial, imitating African drums and Oriental gongs, supplying, along with the keyboards and Cale's viola, a constantly pulsating base that is perhaps the most revolutionary innovation of the album.

On one side there are the spectral melodies for feminine voice, the chamber lieds that Nico sings in ambiguous tones with minimal accompaniment: the autumnal paradise, the cold lunar landscape of Sunday Morning, a tenuous fairy tale told by a cursed fairy with infinite nostalgia, with a refrain suspended in emptiness that wraps itself around endlessly in a thick jingling of metal; the smoky vision of Femme Fatale, set in a depraved Parisian bistro, soaked in delicate melancholy whispered by Nico, part angel of evil and part mournful damned; the funereal All Tomorrow' s Parties, a ceremony of ghosts and vampires elected to collective sacrifice, a debauched apotheosis of an orgy sung with emphatic detachment by the hostess Nico; and the sudden, candid folk simplicity of I' ll Be Your Mirror, where the treacherous witch Nico disguises herself as a princess.

On the other side are the repellent groans of male confessions: the dissolute effrontery, the throbbing addiction of Waiting For My Man, the first "Reedian" street poem, the supersonic boogie that for the first time experiments with the technique of pure percussion by all the instruments; the sadomasochist incubus in the Oriental gardens of Venus In Furs, one of the masterpieces of rock music, a lascivious madrigal that swings frightfully between life and death, the epic fatalism of Bob Dylan married to the moral decadence of film noir, both liberating cry and brutal physical abuse, a dark fresco of tormented libido sung by Reed in a desperate tone, accompanied by Cale's stiff viola longing to imitate the sound of bagpipes, set to the rhythm of Buddhist tom-toms in religious procession; the demonic chaos of Black Angel' s Death Song, an heretical litany declaimed by Reed in the style of the beatniks.

High above any other desolation are two long electric opuses. The psychedelic delirium Heroin, is a wild evocation of the cathartic trip, with percussive crescendo that borders on vertigo and orgasm, a music stripped of every harmonic code, employing tribal tom tom, scraped viola, and ringing guitars. In the noisy carnival European Son, dedicated to the poet Schwartz and influenced by Ornette Coleman's free-jazz, Cale and Tucker set out to produce the highest commotion possible within eight maniacal minutes of distortion and percussion. The album, completed by two alienating ditties, Run Run Run and There She Goes, is perfect from all viewpoints, and ought to be placed among the masterpieces of expressionist musical theater, alongside, if not above, Weill and the "Pierrot Lunaire."

From this perfect fusion of music and words gushes a pathos that captures the metropolitan reality in its most secret and depressing folds, an atrocious, dark fresco of modern mankind, a poetic documentary celebration of street life in the slums, after the example of the cinema-verite', amplified through the deforming lens of drug addiction. The tension manifests in sexual fetishes and cathartic sadism, in latent orgasms and unnerving noises; and in the living contrast between the urban ways of Reed and the patrician ways of Nico, between Berlin in the 30s and New York in the 60s, between the subculture of crisis and that of the apocalypse. The seduction of the album is derived not only from the quantity of ideas in it, but from the fusion of so many strong artistic personalities, all directed by Lou Reed, who functions as catalyst.

The impact on the external world was traumatic: the innovative strength of their words and music created a mixed response of astonishment and hostility, even from the intellectual fringe, who became aware of their dangerous and decadent temptations."

--Piero Scaruffi
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[Kool Keith Sweat]

Stop quoting yourself

[AfterHours]