Premier Rock Forum

numberthirty wrote: Sat Sep 07, 2024 6:46 pm

OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sat Sep 07, 2024 6:12 pm

numberthirty wrote: Past that, I gotta ask...

If Revelation is a deal breaker, where are you at on Iceburn?

Seemed kinda like that whole scene's version of a band like Brutal Truth or some of the Earache roster: heavy music owing a great deal to Zorn-derived avant-channel surfing. In this case, nth generation hardcore instead of death metal or grindcore at the base. It also seemed to take a page from some of the jazzier SST bands. I think they got much further out after that, but I wasn't exactly paying attention. I don't mean any of that to sound dismissive, as my memory of Iceburn is not particularly vivid.

The only thing I can recall hearing at the time was a split album (w/Engine Kid?) and maybe whatever proper LP was concurrent w/that. Didn't make me want to turn it off, like say Sick of It All or Texas Is the Reason, but failed to really move me, as well.

Pretty sure it was.

That said, in my memory both of the Iceburn tracks were improvs based on themes from "The Rite Of Spring"

I had several Iceburn albums (on Revelation and the one Victory album). I liked the idea of a band from that scene (and Utah!) willing to do 'out music' (separate from the NOU/Refused beatnik jazz posturing), but I can't say much of that music is great or holds up.

As far as the youth crew/Revelation stuff goes, I thought that shit was stupid and musically conservative, but the label signed decent stuff occasionally. I wouldn't expect many Shades Apart fans here (and the name sounds like it would be idiotic hardcore) but I liked them at the time. Excellent Milwaukee post punk band Call Me Lightning had an album on Rev.

Anyway.. RATM. Maybe refreshing to see live in 1992 but god I'd love to never hear it again.

Not crap, no waffles. Their politics were strident but by and large right, which might have seemed uncool in the 90s or whatever when it was better to be wrong and not care as much. Everything's tight, everything's put together. Rap and rock never got on better. Their riffs are better than your riffs!

Met Morello when I was working at a rehearsal studio in the Audioslave days, he was incredibly nice to everyone who worked there.

I remember their first (only?) Rolling Stone cover, and soon thereafter the label "Commies in Calvins" was applied and stuck for awhile.

Honestly I had no idea these guys had become the scourge of anti vax weirdos. Yet again an Instagram account I follow posted Rage and a deluge of “Raging for the Machine you traitors” kicks off immediately.

It makes me like them more.

I think they have a large chud fanbase. They were hugely popular and the sloganeering connects with the anti-jab chud. After deciphering the lyrics, the now-enraged chud takes to Facebook in the interest of medical freedom.

Sometimes they feel like the mirror image of Ayn Rand, in that the politics of their art is maximally appealing to 11-14 year olds, and the art itself is extremely dated.
I'm glad they were popular when I was that age. Before that, my media diet did not include much questioning of the American Teleology, and it was good to have contemporary jams that externalized my feelings of unease about America.
I have tried to listen to the music again as an adult, and it did not go well. I can make it through "Bulls on Parade", "Killing in the Name", "Freedom", "Tire Me", or "Settle for Nothing" by themselves, but by the second song I am cringing, hard.

Ace K wrote: Tue Sep 10, 2024 9:51 pm Not crap, no waffles. Their politics were strident but by and large right, which might have seemed uncool in the 90s or whatever when it was better to be wrong and not care as much. Everything's tight, everything's put together. Rap and rock never got on better. Their riffs are better than your riffs!

Met Morello when I was working at a rehearsal studio in the Audioslave days, he was incredibly nice to everyone who worked there.

I am in total agreement.

If someone in the 90s thought their politics were uncool, I am pretty comfortable guessing that such an attitude had to do with either living in some kind of idiotic, Fukuyama, "End of History" bubble, or just plain ignorance. If anything, I like Rage Against the Machine more now because I understand their politics better.

Accusing Zach de la Rocha of not having any "flow" is a puzzling criticism to me. What does it mean to have, or lack, "flow"? Does poetry have to rhyme, does it have to follow a certain structure? Is it something that can only be leveled at Zach de la Rocha because he "raps"? The lyrics seem to flow alright to me.

They staged an impromptu concert outside of Wall St. during the Occupy movement, which ruled, and everything about the existence of the song "No Shelter" on the Godzilla soundtrack is incredible. Rage Against the Machine is not "nu-metal" and it's not their fault that a bunch of morons tried to imitate what they did--and badly, since none of them had someone like Tom Morello.

I'm disappointed in how close of a vote this is.

Hairy Caul wrote: Accusing Zach de la Rocha of not having any "flow" is a puzzling criticism to me. What does it mean to have, or lack, "flow"? Does poetry have to rhyme, does it have to follow a certain structure? Is it something that can only be leveled at Zach de la Rocha because he "raps"? The lyrics seem to flow alright to me.

Flow is all about your timing, your finesse, how you rock the beat (ie how you change up your delivery to land on it or work against it). Nothing to do w/rhymes or structures themselves. People like Rakim (arguably the master of such things), GZA, Nas, even Eminem and Snoop had this down. Zach de la Rocha? Not so much. He usually just shouts on the beat. And helped introduce that simplistic, really-mad, yelling-at-you style that reminds me of Ad Rock on steroids (w/a dash of the comedian Gilbert Gottfried). Dudes such as the Limp Bizkit guy would just dumb this down even more, to the point where it became angsty jock rap. (Of course, when actual mainstream rap embraced Autotune and that smoothed-out marble-mouthed mumble-MC sound staring in the '00s, the concept of flow went out the window.)

Delarocha isn’t an all-time spitter or anything but that’s why he’s not just on random beats, and also why other people aren’t doing good rap rock. He’s on RATM songs! He’s working in a hybridized style

which also seems to me to be the only way to write if you have a live band as a primary component of your work. The only guy I can think of who is artistically successful as a pure rapper with a live band is Black Thought

Ace K wrote: Delarocha isn’t an all-time spitter or anything but that’s why he’s not just on random beats, and also why other people aren’t doing good rap rock. He’s on RATM songs! He’s working in a hybridized style

which also seems to me to be the only way to write if you have a live band as a primary component of your work. The only guy I can think of who is artistically successful as a pure rapper with a live band is Black Thought

Varying degrees of "pure" perhaps, but the Goats, Death Grips, Body Count (not so much rapping, I concede, but it is Ice-T up front), Digable Planets tended to use a rock band in concert, and hell, I'll even take the second live-band incarnation of the Beasties (early '90s, not the '80s hardcore stuff) over Rage's MC.

If you wanna go waaaaayy back, Stetsasonic. And the damn Sugar Hill Gang almost exclusively used live musicians, as did Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel's "The Message." I believe the backing trio they had in common turned into Tackhead (which you might also add to this list, if you're feeling open-minded).