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Dellinger

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Topic: What's happening?
Posted: June 18 2017 at 20:03

Replayer wrote:

jude111, for someone who espouses
liberal values, you seem to make many sweeping generalizations about historical trends.
Don't forget that same conservative,
satanic metal-listening suburban whites (?!) are also
responsible for hip-hop's mainstream popularity.

You previously stated that rockers who
had a protest message "were contemporary and relevant,
politically engaged, fiercely liberal, inclusive, pro-civil rights,
anti-war. All the things that rap is today - and which you seem to
both fault Roger Waters for, and hate rap for."

What exactly is fiercely liberal,
relevant or inclusive about a genre in which so many of the songs
display misogyny, homophobia, racist slurs, vulgarity, boasting and
glorification of gang violence, "thug life", drugs and
conspicuous consumption? This is a over-generalization, but you
cannot deny that these have been issues that have affected hip-hop
culture ever since it entered the mainstream consciousness.

And before the "don't knock it
before you try it" argument pops up, I want to mention that I
did listen to a hip hop and R&B radio station for three years
during high school and it did not appeal to me at all.

Regarding Roger Waters' latest album,
I've felt that even while he was part of Pink Floyd, the message
gradually became more important than the music, so I elected to vote
with my wallet and focus on my existing list of 410 albums I plan on
purchasing.

This post took 4 Captcha attempts.

Is rap still all agbout protest and politics and violence? I know little, mostly the popular stuff I may end up having to bear, but I understand it is mostly about vulgar sexist stuff now, or just stupid things. Just like most popular music now, I guess.

Replayer

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Posted: June 18 2017 at 17:10

jude111 wrote:

"This post took 4 Captcha attempts." Yes, what's up with that?!? It's driving me nuts. I've posted several times, only to have them lost. I'd be happy to have just 4 attempts; usually it's like 10 per post. Usually I give up. I thought it must be a problem with my computer; I didn't know others are having this issue as well. Angry

This might be the last time I even bother trying to post in PA, until they get it sorted.

Rest assured, you are not alone. The Captchas have been plaguing PA for around three months now.

As I understand it, there was a surge of snake oil spamming originating from India and the Captchas were introduced to remedy that. However, for some unknown reason, the validation more often than not fails and the user loses all their post content, so many members now copy the post contents before submitting it. I think posts containing images have a higher chance of triggering a Captcha check.

There are even a number of threads dedicated to complaining about the Captchas: here, here, here, here and here.

This post took 2 Captcha attempts and 2 more for editing.

Edited by Replayer - June 18 2017 at 17:16

jude111

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Posted: June 18 2017 at 16:44

Replayer wrote:

What exactly is fiercely liberal, relevant or inclusive about a genre in which so many of the songs display misogyny, homophobia, racist slurs, vulgarity, boasting and glorification of gang violence, "thug life", drugs and conspicuous consumption? This is a over-generalization, but you cannot deny that these have been issues that have affected hip-hop culture ever since it entered the mainstream consciousness.

Sure, those issues have plagued hip-hop, particularly the sub-genre known as "gangster rap." On the other hand, there were and continue to be a slew of socially-conscious political hip hop artists. Gangster rap itself was deeply misunderstood by whites, and was often more socially conscious then it was initially given credit for.

From Wikipedia: "Early gangsta rap often showed significant overlap with political and conscious rap. Pioneers in the gangsta rap genre such as Ice-T, N.W.A., Ice Cube, and the Geto Boys blended the crime stories, violent imagery, and aggression associated with gangsta rap with socio-political commentary, using the now standard gangsta rap motifs of crime and violence to comment on the state of society and expose issues found within poor communities to society at large. These early gangsta rap artists were influenced in part by the bleak and often "revolutionary" crime novels of Iceberg Slim as well as hip hop groups such as Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, groups that mixed aggressive, confrontational lyrics about urban life with social-political commentary and often radical political messages. The controversial Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. brought gangsta rap to the mainstream, but it also contained harsh social and political commentary, including the confrontational track "F tha Police." Ice-T's work would sometimes focus on other topics: for example, he rapped about free speech on his third album, and about drunk driving, domestic violence and Nelson Mandela on his fourth album."

"This post took 4 Captcha attempts." Yes, what's up with that?!? It's driving me nuts. I've posted several times, only to have them lost. I'd be happy to have just 4 attempts; usually it's like 10 per post. Usually I give up. I thought it must be a problem with my computer; I didn't know others are having this issue as well. Angry

This might be the last time I even bother trying to post in PA, until they get it sorted.

Replayer

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Posted: June 18 2017 at 13:35

jude111, for someone who espouses liberal values, you seem to make many sweeping generalizations about historical trends.

Don't forget that same conservative, satanic metal-listening suburban whites (?!) are also responsible for hip-hop's mainstream popularity.

You previously stated that rockers who had a protest message "were contemporary and relevant, politically engaged, fiercely liberal, inclusive, pro-civil rights, anti-war. All the things that rap is today - and which you seem to both fault Roger Waters for, and hate rap for."

What exactly is fiercely liberal, relevant or inclusive about a genre in which so many of the songs display misogyny, homophobia, racist slurs, vulgarity, boasting and glorification of gang violence, "thug life", drugs and conspicuous consumption? This is a over-generalization, but you cannot deny that these have been issues that have affected hip-hop culture ever since it entered the mainstream consciousness.

And before the "don't knock it before you try it" argument pops up, I want to mention that I did listen to a hip hop and R&B radio station for three years during high school and it did not appeal to me at all.

Regarding Roger Waters' latest album, I've felt that even while he was part of Pink Floyd, the message gradually became more important than the music, so I elected to vote with my wallet and focus on my existing list of 410 albums I plan on purchasing.

This post took 4 Captcha attempts.

moshkito

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Posted: June 18 2017 at 08:41

Hi,

I'll review it when I get it, but being on SS and a limited income, also means that acquiring CD's is no longer a sure thing right off the bat. Based on what I have heard, I'm not sure that I am that impressed, and I tend to look at Roger the past several years as too busy doing The Wall and then PF to be able to concentrate properly on a new album, and not just rehash stuff that he has in his closet, is my thought.

He has always dedicated some serious time and effort to his work, so seeing this come up in the middle of everything else ... is a bit strange.

Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told!
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AndyWalkman View Drop Down

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Posted: June 18 2017 at 08:04

Hmm... I have a point. That is quite a few. Maybe they are scared to do that :)

rogerthat

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 22:30

Dellinger wrote:

And even what's not suposed to be prog metal, but just new prog, often has heavy guitars bordering on metal.

Yup. Metal is the baseline now, not an extreme.

Dellinger

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 22:13

And even what's not suposed to be prog metal, but just new prog, often has heavy guitars bordering on metal.

rogerthat

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 22:03

jude111 wrote:

How many people in Mumbai do you reckon are listening to rock and roll on their iPods? BTW, there's a fascinating series on youtube called "Hey You! What song are you listening to?" Basically, people in a city (Barcelona, Paris, Milan, etc.) stop people and ask them what they're listening to. I love it!:)

Mumbai is Bollywood city anyway, so if by rock and roll you mean English language rock music, it has always been a small minority but almost all would be listening to it on an Ipod or a cellphone. Most people in Mumbai use public transport to commute which takes up 2-3 hours in a day back and forth. Add a 10 hour workday on average and practically the only time you can listen to music is on the go. When you're getting crushed in peak hour load, who gives a sh*t about the environment; at least that's the way people here see it. Now as far as Bollywood goes, the rock quotient in our music is greater than in the 70s, if anything. Again, in a kind of metal-like way.

jude111 wrote:

I see what you're saying. The fact remains, though: White people in America fled the northeast and headed to the suburbs and south. As I said, I know the UK was different, and rock remains vital in urban centers such as London and Manchester. But in the US, whites fled; whenever a black person moved into the neighborhood, whites put their houses up for sale and moved out. This wasn't just racism on an individual level, but also at a structural level: When a black family moved in, property values dropped, and whites panicked because they were losing equity, and there was a race to sell off quickly. I saw this firsthand. The cities very quickly became ethnically diverse, and new music rose up to replace rock and roll, whose audiences and producers were now dispersed into the suburbs and exurbs.

I am not disputing that this happened. I am just saying during the same period, rock continued to thrive. Through the 70s, 80s and even into the 90s, rock was hugely successful both in terms of album sales and in terms of filling stadiums. Again, we have to abandon the distinction between rock and metal to see how this works. So if it was Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple in the 70s, it was Scorpions, Iron Maiden and a host of pop/glam metal bands in the 80s. In the 90s, it was Metallica. And these other bands like Scorpions or Maiden continued to fill stadiums. It's the AC DC/ Thin Lizzy like blues based rock music that died out with GNR being the last mega band in this format. Rock has a certain visceral quality that electronic music lacks so it will continue to attract teens and adolescents. It's just that today's adolescents want it more metal for reasons explained earlier.

jude111

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 21:54

rogerthat wrote:

If you take the city I live in, Mumbai, the traditional business district has remained almost unchanged for the last several decades due to heritage preservation rules.

rogerthat wrote:

So the same set of buildings have formed the backdrop for old fashioned waltz in the 50s, rock in the 80s, EDM these days. I could say the same for London. London was essentially the same city when Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote A London Symphony in 1913 or in 1977 when UFO wrote Lights Out. What you say may fit in the case of fast changing cities (or countries in the case of China) but some of the great cities of the world have been around for a couple of hundred years or so (many more in the case of Delhi, London or Rome) and they didn't change face every time to suit the new music in town. Frank Sinatra's supremely unfashionable New York New York was also dedicated to the same Big Apple that much later birthed hip hop.

rogerthat

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 21:33

jude111 wrote:

Ah, sorry, I guess I did misunderstand. I see your point now:)

What interests me is the geography and demographics of rock and roll. Generally, social scientists consider the City as being the center for innovation and economic activity. When rock moved out of the city, it lost that innovation and urban dynamism. The effects take awhile to set in; it doesn't happen overnight; but stagnation and decline is sure to set in, just as surely as suburban malls are dying.

There is more to this, though. This aspect really complicates things: the relationship between the automobile and rock and roll. The first rock song was about a car, and from the Beach Boys to Beatles and everything after, so much of rock was about cars. Detroit itself was an important center for both industries, cars and rock. Rock music and the car industry literally developed hand-in-hand. Kids in cities owned cars, and soon they were growing older and using those cars to migrate to the burbs.

Also, an important ingredient to music is functionality: How it's listened to and received. Rock music was made to be listened to in cars - on radio stations and cassette decks. Both rock and cars promised the same thing: Freedom. When you're riding in a car, window open, you want your music to be energetic and loud. On the other hand, as Stanley Kubrick noticed, rock music didn't make any sense on a space station in the future.

And now we're at the end of the car era, especially outside the US. Honestly, I used to hate electronic music, but when I moved to Europe and then Asia, it suddenly made sense, and I learned to appreciate it. When you're riding the TGV or travelling on a sleek futuristic bullet train through Japan and China, techno is the music you want to hear; it's the music that makes sense in that environment. Rock suddenly seems anachronistic. (Techno too developed in Detroit - but the post-car Detroit, after the factories closed and it became a dystopia; it was a form of Afro-futurism that then migrated to Germany.) Or when you're walking through the city at night, dubstep and other electronic genres suddenly seem more relevant to the experience, more appropriate soundtracks.

All of these might be contributing factors to rock's decline...

That is an interesting viewpoint. I disagree completely; I mean I guess things like walkman or ipod were invented so that we could personalise our music and take it wherever we wanted without worrying about disturbing others, in other words whether or not it fit into the environment. If you take the city I live in, Mumbai, the traditional business district has remained almost unchanged for the last several decades due to heritage preservation rules. So the same set of buildings have formed the backdrop for old fashioned waltz in the 50s, rock in the 80s, EDM these days. I could say the same for London. London was essentially the same city when Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote A London Symphony in 1913 or in 1977 when UFO wrote Lights Out. What you say may fit in the case of fast changing cities (or countries in the case of China) but some of the great cities of the world have been around for a couple of hundred years or so (many more in the case of Delhi, London or Rome) and they didn't change face every time to suit the new music in town. Frank Sinatra's supremely unfashionable New York New York was also dedicated to the same Big Apple that much later birthed hip hop.

Do I think rock in the classic rock vein is anachronistic today? Heck yes, a band like Wolfmother sound like misfits in the noughties. But that is more on account on rock itself changing into metal and alt rock, covering the hard and soft extremes of the spectrum and leaving little need for plain vanilla rock with just guitars (and without the violence of metal).

Edited by rogerthat - June 17 2017 at 21:34

Luqueasaur View Drop Down

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 19:47

Really? Seven reviews and almost 80 ratings in two weeks aren't enough? It's doing just fine. Check the rating/review ratio, in general, on here. It's not much different from 10. Actually, I think that's a good number, considering that a. the person needs to have access to the album b. the person must KNOW progarchives c. the person must ACCESS progarchives and d. the person must remember to pour a rating in progarchives.

Besides, I think you don't seem to visualize a hard truth: prog metal >>>>>>>>>>>> prog rock nowadays. It just gets so much goddamn love it hurts me

octopus-4

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 12:50

Blaqua wrote:

chopper wrote:

I blame the captchas.

Very crap, indeed... Dead

Curiosity killed a cat, Schroedinger only half.
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octopus-4

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 12:49

An Italian painter, Emilio Isgro' has started a lawsuit because the album sleeve design is a copy from his work. A judge has stopped the sales in the whole Country.

Now the question: who the hell is this guy?

Curiosity killed a cat, Schroedinger only half.
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Blaqua

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 12:01

chopper wrote:

I blame the captchas.

SteveG

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 11:49

I agree 100%. It's sometimes easy to lose track of the blues migrating to Chicago because Chicago blues evolved along with the electric guitar, where as folk stayed acoustic. However, you're right on both counts.

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jude111

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 11:39

SteveG wrote:

The contrasts between city vs country as relate to music is not always so straightforward. Country bomkin philosopher Woody Guthrie was nearly adopted by the NYC social intelligentsia in the 1940's. He was not of the city but considered a truthful representation of the thoughts and desires of country folks. That impression carried over into the folk revival of the late 50's and early 60's that flourished in NYC. So, the divisions are never quite so straight forward at times.

Yes, you're definitely right. Folk music, blues, and rock itself originated in the countryside before migrating into the cities. This occurred with the rapid industrialization in the US, and the great migrations from the rural south to the urban north - such as acoustic Delta blues ending up in Chicago and becoming electric. Folk followed a similar trajectory.

SteveG

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 11:30

The contrasts between city vs country as relate to music is not always so straightforward. Country bomkin philosopher Woody Guthrie was nearly adopted by the NYC social intelligentsia in the 1940's. He was not of the city but considered a truthful representation of the thoughts and desires of country folks. That impression carried over into the folk revival of the late 50's and early 60's that flourished in NYC. So, the divisions are never quite so straight forward at times.

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jude111

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 11:22

rogerthat wrote:

I think you've missed the essence of my post, which was that the turn to conservatism did not in fact cost rock music its relevance. It remained hugely successful in terms of album sales through the 90s and is still a good draw as far as live shows go.

Ah, sorry, I guess I did misunderstand. I see your point now:)

All of these might be contributing factors to rock's decline...

Edited by jude111 - June 17 2017 at 11:28

SteveG

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Posted: June 17 2017 at 10:53

jude111 wrote:

More and more, I wonder if the problem isn't America: The constant craving to bulldoze the past, and start anew. I see this in my own city in Greater Boston, where two historic churches built by European immigrants and worthy of standing in Florence, Italy are set to be demolished. Britpop was accused by Americans of being an exercise in nostalgia, of returning to a mythic past. On the other hand, in the UK it was viewed as being part of a continuum, building upon the foundations not just of the Beatles, Stones and Kinks, but also glam, the Smiths, the Madchester scene, Big Beat, etc. Sadly, because of America's economic clout, their narrative tends to exercise hegemony and win out.

Americans love to bulldoze their history and re-do the past. Look at Star Trek: endless remakes, do-overs and prequels. (Another prequel's in the works as we speak.) This is in contrast to the UK's Doctor Who, where re-generation ensures continuity, as the past is constantly alluded to, and new plots add to its mythology.

These are good points worth considering on many different levels. America is relatively young compared to the countries in the rest of the world and see themselves as history makers, not history preservers. This plays into many different spheres of influence and alters perceptions of art as well as politics.

Also, know this. American artists are perceived to be left wing, or right wing or patriotic, etc. by their fans. If a fan from Nebraska wants to see Springsteen as a right wing American troubadour, then that's what he sees regardless of the reality. The same deal exists when viewing politicians and political parties. What Americans want to see is what they get. Hence Trump.

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