alex maiolo wrote:

kerble wrote:I always thought "sunken" family rooms were the coolest.


so cool, to step down.

An anti-dais of sorts.

Yes, although it need to be shocking white and you need a piano.
Ideally you also need Liberace to make it truly great.

-A

And an indoor grotto with rough-hewn stone ledges and a waterfall.

And those little rain lamp statues they used to sell...

I think Family Rooms and the Quisp vs. Quake argument are the best things to happen to this thread.

Remember when they had the contest to see which cereal would win and continue production? Quisp, the Spaceman cereal won over Quake, the Miner cereal.

Of course, since my brother liked the White Sox and I liked The
Cubs, and he liked Quisp, I, sadly, had to choose the big dumb miner over the smartass Spaceman/alien. And I lost.

So Fuck You, Quake. You were nothing but a bonehead miner, even though your cereal was exactly the same as Quisp, but in a different "UFO" shape.

zom-zom wrote:So Fuck You, Quake. You were nothing but a bonehead miner, even though your cereal was exactly the same as Quisp, but in a different "UFO" shape.

Hear hear!

BadComrade: Fair enough; I'll give you "undertaking," but I stand behind "effort," as it implies the piece itself, & not the physical motions used to create it. (Now, let's not quibble over "piece" or "create," if that's OK; I'll take your disdain as read, but it's just semantics.)

& you'll forgive me if I'm not familiar enough with your messageboard ouevre to properly interpret your gist; however, there's nowhere in anything I posted that implies, hints or intimates that I see the act of writing & performing "The Rambler Song" as intrinsically the same -- in terms of effort, creativity, cleverness, pop-hookiness or whatever -- as my stab at chopping & screwing it.

I don't see why that's such a critical linchpin for you & some others on here; it's why I made the comment about being conversant in the genre before dismissing the MP3 files I offered up. If it's not your thing, fair enough -- but don't pretend you're offering genuinely relevant or astute critique by reading incorrect intentions into my creation & posting of it. If I take a picture of the Mona Lisa, I don't claim to have created something equal in merit or aesthetic function to the original painting; that said, I might like something about the angle or the blurry focus of it & choose to hang it on my wall. That doesn't mean I'm pretending to be Da Vinci. (That would be totally, um, retarded!)

(For additional steps down this well-traveled road, see also: Andy Warhol's whole thing with the soup can or whatever.)

Slowriot: Not up on Christian Marclay, but now I'm curious. I'll check that video out.

Bill Swansea: Oh, it's in the works!

Oh -- & to answer your last question, Comrade, I was the bassist in a punk rock band for 6 or 7 years, so the answer is obviously "no."


Mr. Graham

Mr. Graham wrote:Oh -- & to answer your last question, Comrade, I was the bassist in a punk rock band for 6 or 7 years, so the answer is obviously "no."

I don't know if I can jump in on one side of this argument, but I can jump in and say that this is the most refreshing slice of wit in 14 pages.

Is Johnny Ramone a better musician than a DJ?

Is Phillip Glass better than a DJ?

What about those kids in Panic at the Disco?

What would a member of Faust say about scratching records?

Just stoking the flames here.

BadComrade wrote:but as far as equating playing records (and even beat matching and scratching and hooking your turntables in to a wah pedal) to playing an instrument, there's just no comparison.

I still say scratching by itself is a percussive form if nothing else, and it's at least comparable to, say, playing snare drum by itself. In which case, if you wanna extrapolate and say that playing snare drum isn't comparable to composing music with a guitar, well, i can't necessarily argue that point.

I can appreciate that DJs in rap groups (and rap groups themselves) stem from the fact that "in the ghetto", you can't afford a $8000 Travis Bean bass, so you have to grab a turntable from your friend and one from your mom, and hook them together and play breaks on other people's records to back up your rap.

No. The DJs were around and looping breaks before anyone was rapping over them. Using a DJ isn't 'making do'. Most rap backed by 'real bands' is awful.

But any group old-school enough to have considered a DJ as a cheap substitute for a band is at best going to fall into the category of 'respected as pioneers, but no one actually listens to their music anymore'. Beyond that first generation or so of groups, whether people could afford to buy instruments or not is irrelevant ... there's nowhere that owning a guitar fits into that culture.

BadComrade wrote:Picking up an instrument, learning how to play it, composing music and then performing that music on the instrument is an "effort". Sliding the pitch control on a turntable is not an "effort", unless you're a fucking retard or a quadriplegic.

Retarded. Obviously sliding the pitch control is not an effort, but neither is pushing the kick pedal. You're comparing one isoalted physical action to a mass of cultural, musical, and performative context, which is about as bad an attempt at argumentation by analogy as I've come across.

I can hardly believe y'all've been arguing this long about turntables...really surprising. Of course turntables CAN be creative musical instruments...doesn't mean they always are though. Same thing can be said for guitars....or anything for that matter. What is this thread now...15 or so pages long? Arguing over this? Good God.