I didn’t say it wasn’t, but there is a big difference between a plain with so many buffalo you don’t HAVE to look to find a good one, and having to sift through 2 tons of dirt to get a half ounce of gold.

Just because it wasn’t the song you lost your virginity to, or smoked dope with your buddies, doesn’t mean it’s not good.

I just explained that when 80% of all played music themselves, crappy stuff was HARD to find, then you point out that good stuff can STILL be found.

To say what you just said is to assume that the only reason someone thinks something is good because a pavlovian effect tied to orgasm and association, is to completely miss my point while pretending to get it.

What I mean is that music whose majority basis was written using only three chords, does not compare to Spanish guitar, ragtime, folk, Irish folk, etc… in fact, its ‘sound’ was a mish mosh of what they heard and could combine by ear. Last attempt at this was Paul Simons album as he searched for something new to steal from, cause unlike syphilitic Scott Joplin, couldn’t envision a whole new kind.

And if you think that musicians still aren’t making music for other musicians, that’s just wrong.

Ah.. again… take one basket with one loave of bread, give it to a youngster raised on crappy debate, and you get a enough loaves to feed an army.

I am not saying they don’t, I am saying that at one time; almost everyone played an instrument who was from a good family (which was most families). The number of people who can play an instrument today, can read music, is completely smaller than the number of people in the past. AND like in literature whats being written is much simpler. Yes there are pockets of other things, but the quality and quantity do not prevail as before.

People are still making buggy whips for those who still have buggies but it’s a nonsense argument to make todays buggy whip maker with the INDUSTRY that existed and is gone now, as in music.

According to a 2003 survey:

“half of all U.S. households surveyed (54 percent), had a member who played an instrument.”

We have a large number of ACTUAL players, but have no where near the number of professional level players as in the past. every bar that wanted music, had to hire musicians. Every club that wanted music had to hire musicians. Every place that wanted any music had to hire musicians to play. Depression era parents knew that a child who learned to play would potentially be able to survive playing for coins.

After mass production, you only needed a few musicians. Even on Broadway, they have cut them down to a few and a special machine that replaces them.

You’ve also made a case for the video medium with your argument.

Well yeah. Because video hastened the destruction… no longer was a person judged by the pinnacle of their ability and the quality of the music they wrote, they were now judged by how they looked, moved, played to the camera, and how funky their costumes were.

As the song said: Video KILLED the radio star.

You see, when it was radio, you ONLY cared about the quality… when it’s all performance, and quality suffers, you get todays grinder.

You get groups that are not natural assemblies of friends, but are auditioned and then put together to have a look. R-Angels was a group I watched being manufactured (that I think failed). That is, my friend was the owner of a top recording studio (and I mean top, with one of the best sound rooms in the world. Very famous). They never worked with groups like R-Angels, the level and quality just weren’t there.

Another way to look at it, yes they had hamburgers in the past, but they didn’t have McDonalds.

I don’t have time, but you can look up a interview with david Crosby where he explains how the suits came in and the suits didn’t care about quality. I think he puts it like this. he was sitting in the office, and a guy came in and said I just sold 100k of albums. David said, who did he sell? the man replied, I don’t know, who cares?

David in that interview also pointed out that if video was around in the 60s, he would never have become a god in music. That roy orbison, tom petty, Aretha franklin, and a whole host of uglies would not have made it. Paul Williams wrote a lot of wonderful lyrics and tunes, and he could sing, but he was short, and didn’t look good, so he made more giving the music to fronts. Famous people who don’t really write much that buy songs to turn into hits. Been going on since Elvis copied Twitty.

Pink Floyds dark side of the moon holds the record for sitting on billboard charts. Want to know how long? It was STILL on the charts as of may 6 2006.

PINK FLOYD’s landmark DARK SIDE OF THE MOON album scored another major record in America last week (ends05MAY06) by becoming the first recording to spend 1,500 weeks on the Billboard charts.

Dark Side of The Moon has since notched up a further 759 non-consecutive weeks on the chart. The album has now sold an estimated 40 million copies worldwide.

From 1973 to 2006 the album was STILL on the bill board charts.
Do you really think that the music of the most recent groups will be played 100 years from now?

I will give you another perspective.
When I was a kid growing up.. the old tunes were going out, and the new ones came in.
With fonzy and such, the 50s was oldies.

Today the music of the era we are talking about is played on mainstream stations and is NOT considered an oldy!!!! That is, they are not played for the nostaligia that your talking about, they are played like an echo.

The last echo of the quality music that was highly original even if derivative.

Check out Kodais peacock variations THEN listen to Eleanor Rigby and the rest of the music on that album.

Now, kids have access to camera and editing software where if they want to, they can create whatever they want – sure most of it will be derivative as well, but luckily for us, not everyone is Stan Brakhage.

And most produce junk. And the really really great stuff is not being watched or consumed because they are too busy making junk to actually take lessons, learn and so on.

Our Marxist world has moved art and music to discordant harmonies, nihilistic lyrics and themes of death, suicide, sexual depravity and such are the NORM. (meanwhile most whining haven’t had rough lives compared to the NORM in the past).

Your whole rant on socialism makes me think you’ve let your fears sour you ears. I’m pretty sure every Kiss song was for the cause of getting Paul Stanley/Gene Simmons/Ace Freely and maybe Peter Criss laid.

Spoken by a true young and restlessly ignorant. Though I agree with your comment about Kiss!!!

What have YOU actually experienced and know about socialism? that you get assistance for college classes? What I know is I don’t know where my family is buried. They were exterminated. I don’t know where my other side of my family is. they were exterminated.

That is, a huge vibrant family that had lived in their own land for more than 500 years, had to flee and those who remained were tortured to death to make socialism.

Want to know where the perversion in music as performance art came from. study the decadant years of the Weimar republic. Ever see CABARETE?

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!
Fremde, etranger, stranger.
Gluklich zu sehen, je suis enchante,
Happy to see you, bleibe, reste, stay.

They are singing of the decadent times that SOCIALIST Hitler used to rise from.

Want to see socialist realist music?
Socialist realism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism

Todays music is either phantasmagorical or socialist realist as far as the main mass.

is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.

so folk music in the US stopped being about the volk and started being about politics.

everything became political and the more it became that way, the less quality there was.

the reason was that the idea was to change the people through every medium possible. and so uplifting music is a no no… disparaging music, nihilism, rap, etc.

heck. Why don’t you read about amil? H RAP BROWN… its his race poetry that RAP is celebrating… he is in jail now for killing a cop I think… tupak and the others were funded by their PARENTS… founding members of black national socialists and the panthers.

Hows that for changing music?

Novelists were expected to produce uplifting stories in a manner consistent with the Marxist doctrine of dialectical materialism. Composers were to produce rousing, vivid music that reflected the life and struggles of the proletariat.

The fact that the septemberists play the communist international should be a clue of the domination of this form of art.

Its what made the soviet union a gray dreary place… even less artistic than shakers.

Like all youngsters who come up, you think you know a whole lot.
But you don’t know crap,and you wont know till you get older.

Experience is what you THINK you have till you get some

I’ve been more tolerant of music. While classical is still my genre of choice (real classical, i.e., Beethoven, Bach, Handel, not “classic rock” or some such), I’m with Hyperfish on still being able to find good music. Just don’t ask me who the musicians or composers are. But I’ve heard plenty that I’ve liked from up-to-date performers. Maybe I’m not a total old fogy yet;-)

Not yet, nor was I aware of him. But searching for him has caused me to discover the Baen Free Library , which I do intend to explore.

you assume we dont know whats playing today, we are not the old foggies of the past (who werent that old fogie behind closed doors).

let me give you a tiny bit of why we are saying this this time around, and dont agree with you. the reason is actually quite subtle, and obvious but because its obvious, its assumed.

think of music from 1900 on..

we really didnt have recordings of music till what year? before that, how did humans entertain themselves? well, so many people could play instruments, that there was a consumer market for printed music and the ‘hits’ were songs you could play and sing yourself with friends.

at the time the pinnicle of music was recent hits by brahams a few decades back. new sounds abounded, and one could buy some of the new hip music and jazz. with so many people playing music at one time and purchasing sheets, more complicated forms were always being worked on. (same with literature).

at this time we had not been sold on socialism and socialist realism and such. so what we were into is uplifting, upthinking and so on…

so as we move forward the invention of recording media was a hit. edison being a key player here. moving more forward REPRODUCTION was possible.

and the frankfurt school arrived and wrote all kinds of stuff declaring the future in teh same way. after all it was a time of a lot of utopian literature. and so you had wells, and others. and marx wrote his stuff. lenins russia was mostly pr greater than it was or ever is.

what happened is that adorno talked about primitivation of music… and how he could get a bunch of phds to jump around and dance in a circle if you increased the beat… lyrics almost were meaningless, and one would not listen to them. making the music suggestible.

we went from being producers ourselves to mostly consumers.

in a world of jugglers, juggling three balls is nothing. in a world of people who cant tie their shoes and add, well, juggling three balls is a whole lot.

us old fogies mostly learned to play…
the music that was produced was often at a higher skill level, much more original, oh… much more original.

the sounds you are used to hearing, including that amazing music is mostly derivative. read the lyrics to the hook brings you back.

its now a process… and the process doesnt create anything new, it just rehashied the old. it stopped making real progress and entered a realm of constant swirling with no reference…

that is, its disconnected and so once everything is like that we are on a treadmill where we no no past and see no future, and everything is the way it is because thats the way it is and has always been.

isnt that a creepy end to this?

well, we listen to this new music, and we know how simplistic it often is. how derivative it is.

after the realm of music written for enjoyment, you had media used for changing our cultural values a bit at a time. it wasnt natural, you can read about it and how it was done.

the 60s represented the last of the age of the musicians who were playing for musicians…

that was its last breath, before consuming music in mass production completely took over it.

after that. the stuff that came out as new, was not really new, it just paralleled the art concept given to the graphic world.

it became discordant, it became inharmmonic, it became very political, or suicidally nihilist.

i grew up during this transition and i wathced it go from mostly people with good homes, to people who tried to outcompete on how abused their childhood was…

i remember when paul was right, everyone wanted to right a little love song.

but then, socialist realism was added, and songs had to be sung for a cause, well one cause.

all the way up till you have the group that opened for obama playing the soviet unions national anthem.

read the turns of phrase of some of those old tunes.

even the musicians were much more well educated, and if you were educated, you knew it.

hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way, is just a paraphrase from hendry david thoreau.

today, you can endlessly recycle the past that the young are ignorant of.. even in politics. after all, why should only the last century be about mass murder, when there is a whole new fresh crop of those willing to try it again?

there is definitely a downward trend in cultural media since socialism…

us fogies know it was better before in this case.

this time its different because this time, has not been a recycle of times past, this time has been the decline from the industrial rennaisance and the peak of man as individual.

god didnt just die last century

the individual did too…

welcome to the hive…

Hell, both.

One thing that our “Crap” has which much of today’s “(c)Rap” (the “c” is silent) doesnt have;

an actual harmony