Our favorite swede....

[mirth]

Our favorite swede, doesn't play nice....who would have thunk it....

Fast forward to 1:10.00 or so, and if you can take it, watch the rest of the tune (rockin in the free world). Yngwie doesn't know when to stop. just plays endlessly. He doesn't seem to play nice with other guitarists, haha. He's just completely ridiculous (which I already knew, but it's still funny, and not in a good way) and plays over everyone (even worse than normal on these G3 things). Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem like Vai and Satch are enjoying it all that much. I imagine they're ready knock his head off after a couple shows.

If you dare....

[chrissh]

I prefer this swede, but hey, po-tay-to / po-tah-to:

This is one nice way to do 'too many notes':

[Infinite Ego]

Seems to lack the gut punch of NY





Anyway, the whole G3 thing is boring. I mean you have 4000 20-something white male guitar players and maybe 800 bored girlfriends watching a hotdog eating contest. I mean, really, which one of those guys wasn't overplaying?

<rant mode, change channels now to avoid rant, man, I'm in a foul fucking mood>

I used to like Vai and bought some of his albums and years later I look back and I think all that shit is just a cancer, a symptom of a completely perverted and decayed social and cultural system.

And those three assholes playing that song? What a joke.

I was teaching guitar when grunge came along and destroyed my pool of students but I was actually happy about the whole thing and I think a lot of them were relieved too. No more leather and spandex, hair spray, modes, scales, aprs, pointy guitars, etc. Cobain was a total hack on guitar but generations from now Vai et al. will have been totally forgotten or part of a footnote mentioning the blind self-indulgence of an entire era informed by the narrow interests of the 20-something white male middle class ego maniac and his slightly older role models who fetishized technique over substance. Vai only knows two modes: (a) look at me and (b) mystic hippie bullshit where he attempts to plug his ego into the transcendental absolute which is just another version of (a)

Compared to those three wankers NY, like Cobain, couldn't play his way out of a wet paper bag, yet, his approach seems vastly superior and pertinent for our historical moment.

Fuck, dudes, you live in a country that has actual concentration camps, blows a trillion per year on dead end wars, has an election system that is more ludicrous than Cuba's, the corporate media is just full on propaganda and sanitized of anything that isn't celebrity worship or other forms of entertaining bullshit, and we're on the verge of cataclysmic environmental meltdown and I don't see how sweeping arps, and Lydian modes or any of that shit is even remotely relevant any more.

I spent thirty years playing guitar and, honestly, it was all a complete waste of time. I never did a thing worth a shit from the standpoint of the big picture. I always worried about being 'good' but what I should have worried about is being relevant. My guitar should have been a 10,000 pound hammer of bitter irony but that didn't happen because I got caught up in the sort of nonsense that seems to be linked to corporate profits.

</rant>

[Infinite Ego]

Jul 30, 2012 23:24:11 GMT -5 chrissh said:

I prefer this swede, but hey, po-tay-to / po-tah-to:

This is one nice way to do 'too many notes':

Those are great links ;D

[ck1]

I don't think you should have worried about being relevant, either, IE. Much better to just be happy. Music is its own reward.

</mystical hippie bullshit>

[mirth]

I don't disagree at all really IE. I still have a small place for Vai in my heart, but its limited. Satch and yngy do nothing for me. G3 reminds me of the divas live thing with Whitney, Mariah, Celine, Aretha, etc....that was so over the top, this is just as bad, complete wankery. Nobody listening to each other, etc....I just thought yngy was kind of funny, just being more over the top still.

As far as the other stuff, I definitely get that way with music sometimes, where I say it.makes no difference...I'm not sure what makes a difference though, as I see special interests fall on their face all the time. I guess I hope my music or engineering will do something good for someone.

[brucestevens]

I have been disappointed by Vai's records since Flexable. He was great when I saw Zappa Plays Zappa.

Sent from my VM670 using proboards

[bear]

I came up at the cusp of grunge. It was good in freeing expectations but bad for untethering music making from an idea of what was happening to be able to go somewhere with or from it. When I came back years later and taught myself some modes it's amazing how much of the non-technical music of my youth was unlocked.

Relevant is a weird thing. It's the exception that anything I like makes a dent commercially or in any broad cultural way. That's not about me being a pretentious asshat (though it can't help) but about my tastes being a bit odder than most. Some small things have been enormously relevant to me. Some commercial flops have created popular sub-genres.

[aliensporebomb]

That's the other thing: playing guitar - it may have been a waste of time but what else was I going to get into? Water skiing? Stamp collecting? Line dancing? Political activism? Not gonna happen.

So I'll just make my noises and be done with it when I'm done with it. I never did have any kids so it ends with me I guess.

Bitter irony is great but only people like Rage Against the Machine seemed to make any kind of waves with it on a mass success level and they faded out to solo projects and acrimony. Hard to change the world when you're a band full of people who don't like each other.

Now they're considered "oldies" by the local college music station but the vast majority of the youth realize that yeah, we've got an economy on the verge of collapse, an environment nearing that and the collective political intelligence nearly zero due to cronyism, decay, and general corruption. But neither they or I can fix any of that it seems. It's easier to join them rather than beat them. Why is that a good idea? It's not.

Watching this video it was funny to hear Satriani try to sing all gruff and meaningful yet anything he might identify with in the song gets ruined when you get 30 waggling fingers playing a bunch of wanky stuff.

Sorting wheat from chaff gets easier and easier.

but then again there's stuff like this out there:

[ck1]

Hocus Pocus is one of my absolute favorite songs ever. Magical.

[dasein]

Jul 31, 2012 11:27:04 GMT -5 aliensporebomb said:

That's the other thing: playing guitar - it may have been a waste of time but what else was I going to get into? Water skiing? Stamp collecting? Line dancing? Political activism? Not gonna happen.

This is an important point.

Most of us here, who grew up sometime between the 60's and 90's, came of age during the height of America as a political, economic, and imperial power. And while we still have much of that relative to the rest of the world, it seems like it's all downhill from here.

I agree with Zizek when he says that with regards to issues like environmental catastrophe, intellectual property, peak oil, and a growing divide between rich and poor, we are rapidly approaching a "Zero point" that our current political and economic system is ill-equipped to even deal with. Things like peak oil or global climate change are issues that are completely outside the jurisdiction of capitalism as a system and an ideology... it's not just that it doesn't care, but that it's outside of it's own symbolic network, which is why it all seems capable of doing is ignoring it and hope that scientists can work out some science-fiction cure before everything goes to shit.

Virtually any activity we could have chosen - sports, music, or even "useful" work like studying extra hard to become an investment banker - would have been fiddling while Rome starts to burn.

If music doesn't seem like such a monstrous waste of time to me, maybe it's because I'm a bit younger than some of you... the big time waster for my age group is video games. Now there's some fertile territory for ranting...

Does your generation have no future? Are you living in a highly alienating era of late capitalism? Did you get a PhD in physics and now have to bus tables to pay back your loans? No problem... sign onto World of Warcraft, hang out with your guild consisting of a dozen people you've never met and have only interacted with online through avatars, pretend you're a knight instead of a drone working minimum wage with a maxed-out credit card just to make ends meet.

And I hate to say it, but while you may feel that Neil Young is more relevant for our particular era, but is NY really all that more popular than Vai or Satch? What does it matter if someone is more "of an era" if the era doesn't even realize it?

[mirth]

Though I can appreciate the rawness and edge of NY, as much as I try I couldn't stand listening to him for more than a couple minutes. I'd probably dig jamming with him, or hanging , etc...but his voice and songwriting, for the most part doesn't do much for me. More of the same old same old from that generation. Though he plays them with more vigor, and more noise, there's nothing particularly inspiring to me in a song writing sort of way. I don't think it's bad necessarily, just kind of samey to me.

I guess that's my downfall of not really getting popular society. I keep hearing how music isn't as good as it used to be, but from a musical analysis standpoint there's really not much different from pop music today and 40-50 years ago. Same progressions, same melodies, etc...and really it's not that different from the popular music 50 years before that, and 50 years before, etc...etc...etc... Stylistically things may be different, but really not all that much.

There was a time when I kind of followed the stylistic bus, where "x" was amazing, but "y" was garbage. Now I don't really hear the style as much as I hear the music (if that makes sense). It doesn't really matter to me if it's country, rock, rap, avante garde, jazz, etc.... or whatever the instrumentation is, I just kind of here the music of it. So when I hear whatever new pop tune, it just sounds like all the stuff I heard when I grew up. The reason I don't particularly care for it, is I've heard it before, over and over again.

Though I have a knack for getting bored rather quickly, even stuff I love musically, can only be listened to a few times before I'm ready to move on. I just want to hear more, and more and more, I'm obsessed.

So maybe my opinion of NY is no longer valid, as I've heard him plenty over the last 30 years, and I just see no need to ever hear him again. The same goes for just about ever "classic rock" band, regardless of my initial reaction to their music. Same goes with jazz guys, fretless guys, etc... I still gravitate towards certain things, but it's so different to me how I hear it.

As for the video above, I can tolerate Vai, but I can't remember the last time I really listened to him (don't need to hear the note for note solo on "x" tune again, I wish he would improvise more, or write more). Satch, Malmsteen, etc...just completely bore me, as they haven't evolved at all in the last 30 years. Maybe the same could be said about Vai too, but aside from Jeff Beck (who's constantly evolving) Vai controls the whammy bar and guitar better than anyone I can think of and that's interesting to me.

Dasein, I agree with you on video games. I grew up with video games all around, but I never got into them at all really. My brothers both play a lot, but somehow it's never done anything for me. I think it's funny actually that I decided to work on guitar instead of video games, which has lead to me playing over the country, and Europe, been on a few cds, played with great musicians, etc... while they're still playing video games in their living rooms. I think I won out on that one. Maybe I haven't really affected the world, but a few people have some joy from what I've done. I guess I can't ask for much more than that.

[dasein]

mirth said:

Dasein, I agree with you on video games. I grew up with video games all around, but I never got into them at all really. My brothers both play a lot, but somehow it's never done anything for me. I think it's funny actually that I decided to work on guitar instead of video games, which has lead to me playing over the country, and Europe, been on a few cds, played with great musicians, etc... while they're still playing video games in their living rooms. I think I won out on that one. Maybe I haven't really affected the world, but a few people have some joy from what I've done. I guess I can't ask for much more than that.

The Marx quote about how even the worst architects are better than bees seems to hold up here.

Even the most anti-social, irrelevant music is more relevant, more social, less alienating than any video game.

Someone like Arthur Rhames, maybe the ultimate example of a "good at guitar, but who cares?" player... unknown his entire career, lived in abject poverty, died penniless and alone... is ultimately going to be more relevant to our times than a million copies of Call of Duty.

[Infinite Ego]

Neil young is in this conversation because the three wankers are playing a NY song. I don't need to hear NY anymore, either, but what those clowns did to that song is a travesty and they all do that covering just about any song.

[dasein]

Do you think people use music to escape from reality moreso than other things?