Rock Albums People Who Don't Love Rock Like

"somewhat":P

(Thought you liked Yes and Rush, fgti?)

Oh, you made a sort-of-exception for prog.

Oh c'mon, you know, music that sounds like oppression and money making and raping women and spitting on poor people and kicking immigrants and running gays over in your car

that's basically an anal cunt tracklist! clink

*clink!*

I mean, you asked *shrug* The first time I heard INXS and Def Leppard at age 9 I was like "omg this is terrible" and now I have the words to explain why
An entire genre of music based on playground bullying

Whenever I see a car full of jocks cranking Mott the Hoople tunes, I run

trying to think of any aggressively masculine music i carry over residually from younger days

am listening to marina and the diamonds rn so it's hard, might need to pause this

xp I'm not talking about the context in which the music appears, I'm talking about actively going out and purchasing rock records and finding that they sound like excess and shittiness

I love The Cramps and Gun Club and hate Nick Cave

Was cool on Modern Lovers until I heard "She'd eat garbage, eat shit, get stoned. I stay alone, eat health food at home" now they're one of my favourites, that's probably a good indication of where my head is at?

Aggression isn't really what it's about, either, I love aggressive masculine music, it's more macho posturing

you put faith no more in that list; i'd argue that there's a lot more to mike patton's music, on the whole - it's slier & more self-deconstructive than that - witness his famously disgusted reaction on hearing wolfmother (a true cock-rock regressive pile of shit) at a festival

and yet i can see exactly why you've listed them as well; they're definitely playing with the idea of forceful, posturing masculinity. it's a fine line.

back in college in knew a lot of people who listened mostly to Norteno or Bachata music, and sometimes Hip Hop. But they all also loved Nirvana.

If you're applying a 'cock rock' formula to a sort of underground/alternative context there's going to be a whole load of arguments one way or another.

I'm not talking about the context in which the music appears, I'm talking about actively going out and purchasing rock records and finding that they sound like excess and shittiness

Only, you ARE talking about the context in which the music appears.

I have the exact same reaction you described to most metal pre-1990 with a few exceptions (mainly Iron Maiden and Anthrax) as well as most country because the vast majority of the people I grew up with who actively listened to it were the type of people who parsed the lines "Are there any queers in the theatre tonight?/Get them up against the wall" as 100% earnest endorsement of fascist oppression and used this as a mantra for how they lived their lives. In this context, INXS was an escape to something a lot more progressive than what everyone else around me was listening to, plus it was a lot more fun to dance to.

excess and shittiness

Immediately heard this to the tune of "Incense and Peppermints. "

Yeah I'm actually far less interested in typing about why I don't like rock music and volunteering myself as somebody who doesn't, but rides hard for those listed exceptions as well as non-square rock like Queen, Heart, Hole, Bowie, etc

I'm inclined to think there may be as much correlation with bullying (or lack thereof) in your exceptions as there is in your offenders.

Same with posturing, macho or otherwise.

Also a little resentful of the "square" vs. "non-square" characterizations, honestly.

My favorite Dance Music is Square

"it's like those hip musicians with their complicated shoes!' -- george costanza

much more interesting to hear what music sounds like macho posturing to people than to hear lux aeterna rush-in of "that's not objective" from rock's wounded warriors

Listening to the guitars on INXS' "Original Sin" at 15 probably turned me gay.

no one actually said "that's not objective" and that wasn't the point of my comment, which was the assertion that you can't judge anything outside of your perceived context with a counter-example of how my context gave me a completely different perception of how fgti described INXS

I wanted to ask how many exceptions to your rule can you list and have your rule still be valid but given fgti's response to me, it felt unnecessarily antagonistic

An entire genre of music based on playground bullying

trying to think of what kind of music the people who bullied me in school were listening to and the #1 answer my brain can come up with is Lyte Funky Ones

My "entire genre of music based on playground bullying" is probably like, Tone Loc, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, Paula Abdul.

Lol xp

I missed the experience of someone bullying me by blasting "Animal" or "Hysteria" or "Armageddon It."

#notallrock

Ha, that's the closest thing I can think of too, how's life. Maybe bhangra/Bollywood in high school.

xpost

@DJP you can be antagonistic! I mean, don't worry abt coming off as antagonistic. INXS are I guess a weird one for me, I'm what, 3-5 years younger than Alfo and DJP? So I didn't really fully "get" INXS as an alternative to anything except what I was listening to at home (classical music and kid-rap).

I deliberately avoided citing just obv cock-rock examples and tried to go broad.

I could make a list of rock bands I like and explain why! Stooges and Sonics that stuff just sounds aggro and new and fun and fantastic. Never liked "Raw Power" tho. Most of the bands I listed kind of come from that realm of rock. I like Big Star because it sounds wimpy. I like Black Sabbath because Ozzy sounds genuinely scared of Satan and that is very powerful and beautiful.

Also @ Tim I've been using "square" for years when talking about music with fellow musicians to avoid running into "not all cswm" territory. It works because it doesn't necessarily include cool cswms (not does it let uncool not-cswms off the hook).

"Bullying" I mentioned in the larger sense, the sound of accruing capital, life of excess, patriarchal oppression, and I don't like stoner rock or hippie rock either

don't know why you're bringing the Cowtown Society of Western Music into this

music that sounds like oppression and money making and raping women and spitting on poor people and kicking immigrants and running gays over in your car

this deserves it's own thre - oh wait GnR already have a thread

I don't know what a cswm is.

certified social work manager

I think it's Crosby, Stills, White & Man

Oh c'mon, you know, music that sounds like oppression and money making and raping women and spitting on poor people and kicking immigrants and running gays over in your car

― fgti, Monday, November 10, 2014 8:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Walking across the sitting room / I run gays over in my car...

Obv I'm not indicting rock fans or rock musicians of anything. There's a sound and it sounds like something terrible. Same as like classical choral music sounds "holy" and rap sounds like "a party" and twee-rock sounds like "impotence" and math-rock sounds like "body odour"

LOL @ body odour.

I do see what you're getting at (i think?), but you've placed your markers rather wide here if you're going to include Genesis and, like, FNM under the same 'bigoted (just typoed 'bigtoed'!), aggressive' music and then everything from Meatloaf to Sonic Youth into another category, which I don't really understand. And yeah like you say, it's the equivalent of a non-rap fan boiling that genre down to 'It's all just bragging about money and bitches etc...'

I'm not a fan of all these bands, especially not RHCP (because, get this, I was once bullied by a kid who listened to them a lot) - but didn't this band have songs that were actively about anti-homophobia? Same as FNM. Both bands had gay members.

The only band mentioned who had outwardly aggressive views expressed in their lyrics were Guns'n'Roses AFAIK. Maybe it depends on where you're from but going back 20 years, most rock fans at my school were bookish/nerd types whereas generally the more aggressive kids listened to dance and chart music.

I keep saying "context has nothing to do with it" and I mean it. Gay members? don't care. My ears politicize everything that I hear, the way one person mics and mixes a kick drum sounds like "bwow" and suggests comedy and fun and being social and going to house shows, the way another person mics and mixes a kick drum sounds like "thuck" and suggests radio rock and money-making working out at the gym over a guitar solo.

"Rap music is all bragging about money and bitches" is something my mom would say. "The sound of rock music makes me feel like I want to see civilization crumble and fail" is what I'm saying.

So it's the actual 'sound' you don't like and/or has certain negative connotations, as opposed to the overall message/look/aesthetic. Guess that makes sense. One of the key anti-popist arguments that I can get behind is the homogenised nature of pop radio production and how similar a lot of it sounds thanks to this.
That said, I'm not sure where money-making comes into it. Do people really listen to rock music at the gym? Is rock music designed, primarily, over other styles to make money? Or even to oppress people? Or to appeal to aggressive masculine tropes? Many would argue they find the rock sound liberating in exactly the opposite way.

fgti: I don't understand the "context has nothing to do with this" argument because I don't understand how you can assign emotional value to a sound without placing it into some kind of context. I think I would express your position as "intent has nothing to do with it"?

Yeah! there we go. That's what I mean.

But I mean, obv, it doesn't seem that preferring Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin and Magma to Genesis and Jesus Lizard to Sonic Youth makes you a non-rock-fan. I would think that it makes you a rock fan who has preferences, like any fan does. I like PJ Harvey and hate Sleater-Kinney (and could explain this by saying something about how Sleater-Kinney sounds like privileged coastal groupthink and snobbery or somesuch) but I don't think that would make me a good example of someone who doesn't appreciate modern rock or indie.

xp DL: "The sound of money-making" is something everybody hears, when they use words like "slick" or "overproduced", which don't actually describe the content of recorded material, but rather an impression that a series of choices were made to try and make a piece of music more digestible + widely consumable.

Well, this is veering dangerously into a good old fashioned ILM debate about what constitutes 'selling out' so I'll stay off the point. Some overall sounds/frequencies/timbres just don't appeal to people. I know there are couple of particular production 'things' I find I can't stand e.g. that wispy, impressionistic vibe you get on Grizzly Bear and War On Drugs records where there's evidently loads going on but you can't quite make out any of the individual sounds. To me it just reeks of laziness, like they couldn't be bothered to sing their lines properly so they just chucked on a load of extra vocal layers and smothered it in churchy reverb to cover it up.

Selling out = delivering your fan base to suppliers of incidental products, goods or services.

Or charging $6 a ticket for your shows

or releasing a hand-pressed debut EP

It's not the same as "selling out" though. Selling out is cool. Reverb can be awful, though. That music will work great at a wedding or something, you'll see, one day it'll sneak up on you and you'll be like "oh I actually love Beach House".

xp to something imago posted way upthread but there is no difference between Jet and Wolfmother and something like "Carry On My Wayward Son". I played Guitar Hero 2, I know Jet and Wolfmother songs and played them right next to so-called rock canon classics. (The only songs worth shit in that game were Pretenders, Heart and Lamb Of God imho.) But the way that rock discussion will fuck with one thing and not another when they are functionally identical is mysterious to me. When you say "Mike Patton is cool" I know he's cool! you think I don't have all his records? Love Mike Patton, Mr. Bungle is the only zany music in my record collection. Ween and Zappa came and got kicked to the curb but Mr. Bungle stays. But yeah, the only time when I've thought "oh? maybe Mike Patton is ~not~ so cool" are those moments when he turns and addresses the camera and tells RHCP or whoever to suck his dick. Or that situation you're describing with Wolfmother. Or when Nick Cave said the same thing about RHCP, that infamous dis, "whenever something shitty is on the radio it's always RHCP." That kind of talk doesn't make me think any better of anybody. And weirdly is exactly what I think of when I hear the sound of a guitar solo: competition, this-is-cool-but-not-that, band beefs, impermeable monoculture, men pushing each other around, etc.

that's a fair point - when it becomes expressively a dick-measuring contest, nobody wins.

i'd like to try you out with potential exceptions to that guitar solo pavlovian abreaction, but that's probably for another thread!