Topic: The Music Thread

@TheIdleCritic I saw Groove Armada at a festival in 2019 and they were really great live. That festival was honestly great to be honest, De La Soul, Lauryn Hill, Hot Chip, Django Django and strangely Craig Charles did a DJ set!

@TheBrandedSwordsman I'm no expert, but I enjoy the cool jazz albums of Miles Davis and of course Kind of Blue, but I'm also quite enamoured with Brad Mehldau.

@ShaiHulud Oh yeah those Davis albums are classic for sure. Finding Gabriel by Mehldau is brilliant - do you know that one? You might also enjoy Ben Monder as he throws in the ocassional moment to headbang to!

@TheBrandedSwordsman Haven't heard Finding Gabriel yet, just put that on the list with Ben Monder. Thanks

@ShaiHulud Got another one for you - The Aristocrats are a band that mix jazz with metal, you'll love them I'm sure, try You Know What? or Tres Caballeros to start off with, then have a go with their self-titled record and see what you think. I'm not a fan of their album Culture Clash, but your opinion may differ from mine. The rest is gold, though. Let me know what you think once you've listened!

@Jimmer-jammer Have you heard Total Football by Parquet Courts? That's obviously another sports-related, and awesome rock song.

@Jimmer-jammer Glad you enjoyed it. Have you heard of a band called Meet Me In St. Louis? I went to college and appeared in a college play with the bassist, they have broken up now but were signed to a label and released one record, Variations on Swing. What do you reckon to giving that a go on Youtube or Spotify sometime? What have you been listening to recently, Jimmer?

@nessisonett What do you think of this analogy that I read somewhere - "Playing rock vs jazz guitar - rock guitarists play 3 chords to 5000 people, jazz guitarists play 5000 chords to 3 people"

@TheBrandedSwordsman I actually know the The Aristocrats - they're quite funky but I don't really listen to them throughout the day, when I listen to music the most during work. For some reason my brain can't really cope with jazz that's too busy, whereas blastbeats are fine!

@ShaiHulud Wolf's Lair Abyss by Mayhem more your cup of tea then?

@TheBrandedSwordsman Mayhem /../ Ha! Haven't listened to them in ages! Time to give De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas another spin and see how it holds up.

@Jimmer-jammer Thanks man! I hope you like MMISL, let me know what you think after you give them a spin, the best way to describe them would be tech-punk I suppose, but the genre doesn't really exist outside of that band Did you like the Weezer song that references him and is named after him as well?

@Jimmer-jammer That's interesting - where do you stand on metal then? I personally gave it up a few years ago and have been focusing on jazz, classical soft and avant-garde music almost exclusively since then, the odd band like MMISLor Parquet Courts often slips through the cracks though, I just can't help myself sometimes! and revert to my old ways, but, in all seriousness, I hardly listen to rock any more, I find a lot of it be just headbangy music for teenagers!

@TheBrandedSwordsman I think jazz guitarists can sometimes come off as a bit pretentious, writing off their lack of commercial success by acting self-superior. Plenty rock guitarists are as talented as jazz guitarists and honestly Prince is a better guitarist than 99% of rock or jazz guitarists.

@Jimmer-jammer I just don’t like making a link between technical ability and what makes ‘good music’. The tendency from jazz and rock fans to downplay pop music for example is just silly because there are probably more progressive steps and risks being taken by pop musicians than rock musicians just now. The fact that Greta Van Fleet have a career attests to that. Whereas Charli XCX can’t do a clearly Led Zeppelin inspired guitar solo but she can completely sell pretty wild and interesting music.

If we only paid attention to bands that could play their instruments like maestros then punk wouldn’t exist today as the Sex Pistols and their contemporaries wouldn’t have made it. The sad thing is that while someone like Prince can clearly play a guitar extremely well, he’s still left out of the conversation when it comes to the ‘best’ guitarists in favour of the traditional picks. Rock and metal fans make fun of Lil Wayne constantly for being bad at guitar but would never say the same about Sid Vicious playing the bass considering they’re both dreadful. There’s a fair amount of ‘genre wars’ and also considering metal’s very prominent ties to white supremacy, that probably plays a part when it comes to metal fans’ attitudes towards rap too. I wish people would just listen to whatever genres they want and not be a ‘rock fan’ or ‘metal fan’ or ‘rap fan’. It would be like only watching Westerns, you’re just missing out on stuff you probably would have liked if you’d given it a shot.

@nessisonett What genre would you say Prince fell into then? pop? funk? jazz-funk? I think he was his own man entirely. Also, with regard to your comments on metal fans, that's largely true but I also think, just to back up your point, that there is a strong belief in the metal community that one should only listen to metal and all the sub-genres therein. @ShaiHulud, you obviously listen to a lot of metal, care to weigh-in on this? You obviously like jazz as well, but I think I can safely assume you're probably in the minority when it comes to liking jazz as well as metal, and therefore can attest to the niche headset of the majority of metal fans out there, yourself excluded.

@nessisonett "metal’s very prominent ties to white supremacy"
That's quite a sweeping statement you're making there! I know there are a couple of extreme-rightwing bands out there, you'll find that the vast majority of metal musicians and listeners are quite emphatic and liberal-minded and won't have anything to do with such tendencies. They're quite vocal in condemning these bands.

@TheBrandedSwordsman Actually, the idea of metal listeners being more shallow-minded than people listening to other music genres is not something I've come across a lot. Sure, there are probably diehard Slayer fans out there or sixteen-year-olds claiming that it's not trve to listen to something non-metal, but on the whole people seem quite open-minded in my experience. Most people I know who listen to metal also listen to other stuff, eg electronic music, jazz, pop (even Coldplay!), classic etc. I don't think it's very fair to pigeonhole people like that.

@ShaiHulud I stand corrected, I was just basing it on personal experience where we were just 16-18 year old kids listening to rock and metal almost exclusively, at college, although I knew one guy who listened to the Beach Boys and loads of other stuff and I'm still in touch with him, we were even in a band together and the wide variety of music we listened to helped expand the sound of the band we were in. So yeah, in retrospect, there are actually a lot of open-minded metalheads.

@TheBrandedSwordsman Well, everything's in perspective of course - 16-year-olds might consider things differently nowadays but I've long since passed that age bracket

I have to say, I've known lots of metal fans who were totally closed-minded. I'm not sure if they're more or less or just the same level of closed-mindedness as non-metal fans though.