Rock Albums People Who Don't Love Rock Like

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!

I think that the more interesting way to approach this debate is what qualities people hear in the rock music they DO like that redeem it, or set it apart from the rest of the genre. Otherwise you're going "yeah but there's essentially no difference between that and xyz bands".

Like, I get what it is that the Lex gets out of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or early PJ Harvey. I don't necessarily understand what redeeming qualities he hears in, say, Queens of the Stone Age or Sonic Youth.

>_< that was the thread I kepf trying to have but everyone is annoying >_<

Hey! That's what I wanted to talk about too!

Lex likes QOTSA and Sonic Youth?

it was pretty obvious this thread would be bad the minute everyone ignored non-rock fans bringing up ashlee simpson

xp i don't especially like sonic youth and i like one QOTSA song

The idea that Paramore Ashlee et al are in the lineage of Hole is a strange concept that I don't get at all

Try as I might, I still can't help but feel that at this stage the 'All rock music is essentially the same' opinion is as much of a challop as 'all jazz music is the same' or 'all dance music is the same' or 'all Chinese people look the same'. It reminds me of when my dad used to tell me that Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter II were essentially the same game, and 13 y/o me just couldn't work it out until I lost interest in video games and they all started to look exactly like variations on 'man with gun, runs round maze, shoots baddies'. If you distance yourself from something enough, it's all going to blur into one. Spend enough time with it and those narcissistic differences become cavernous. And yeah, I don't think it's possible or fair to separate physical sonics from the intent behind them. You may as well be saying 'all paintings are the same because it's paint on a canvas' as far as I'm concerned.

xp: Heh, I got all three Ashlee albums out from my library based on lex's "part of the lineage from hole to paramore" post and it felt like the time xhuck eddy convinced me to buy a Foghat album.

Not "the same" but not functionally different enough for lines and swords to be drawn

it's really the second album where ashlee really sounds like she's channelling the courtney rasp (rather than just her confessionalism)

xpost, but can you see why someone might LOVE Faith No More and really dislike the Chili Peppers, for example?

My favourite Hole song is that comp version of "Olympia" where Courtney overdubbed her rasp 20 times. (Seriously) I'd love to pass that track to Ashlee

xp of course yes, I was specifically referring to the ""vast gulf"" between Wolfmother and any other song I hear on classic rock radio

Try as I might, I still can't help but feel that at this stage the 'All rock music is essentially the same' opinion is as much of a challop as 'all jazz music is the same' or 'all dance music is the same' or 'all Chinese people look the same'. It reminds me of when my dad used to tell me that Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter II were essentially the same game

Ladies and gentlemen... Dog Latin!

i think a lot of the time the reason bands like Wolfmother suck is because they produce a recycled version of a 40-year-old idea without improving on it in any way whatsoever.

That is completely irrelevant if you don't think the 40-year old idea was any good in the first place though.

fine you don't have to like Led Zep, of course, but that's where the line in the sand comes from, and it does boil down to historical context and intent as with all art and music.

"The sound of rock music makes me feel like I want to see civilization crumble and fail" is what I'm saying.

Isn't that what it sounds like to good rockers too?