Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[CortJstr]

Whoa, for sure. Like, with five hundred guys playing theramin behind him.

I wouldn't recognize Axl Rose on the street if he came up to me and asked for directions to the subway, but I'm really enjoying this thread.

Every time I see a recent picture of him I think he's Danny Bonnaduce

[theinevitable]

What I am mostly bothered by is the assertion that this critic is somehow a bad person/an overthinker/unable to have fun because he does not like Chinese Democracy.

And the assertion that Overproduced Wall of Sound is one of the best ways to make rock music, and that you have no heart if you do not think this... this is just ridiculous. This is just completely ridiculous.

I'm not going to say "you shouldn't like it, you are wrong if you think it is good", but I am going to say what I think about it, and you can like what you like. A lot of my very good friends like things which I really dislike, and I still respect them because they are good people, and because they respect me. (except this one time when I first met my roommate, and I said that Nirvana was possibly my favorite band, and he said "wait... you've heard the pixies, though, right?" I love him anyway.)

Dan, the same can be said for the kind of garage rock you prefer or any kind of style for that matter.  Some have done it amazingly well, most of it sucks.

I realize this.

I don't know if I'm explaining what I mean very well. This is a problem I have. I will keep trying.

The issue, to me, is that most shitty garage rock stays in the garage, whereas millions of dollars are spent creating and distributing shitty overproduced music.

Making uninteresting garage rock is a thing which requires very little resources. Maybe some crappy garage bands make it, and millions of dollars are spent producing and promoting their records. They probably end up being bad.
For the same reason, I dislike overproduced too-many-overdubs type albums. Art/music/any creative endeavor is very, very rarely good when created without limitations. Boundaries. "Go in there and do whatever you want, here are the things you need to put in any instrument or sound you could ever imagine" is not a good way to get a good record.
The problem I have with this kind of music, and maybe one day I will get over it or whatever, is that it just sounds too damn indulgent to me. 20-minute violin-bowed guitar solos, full orchestras backing them up, 200-member choirs singing along... this is just too much for me. I don't like Opera, either.

I don't know if I am quite saying what I am trying to say. I think I am most bothered because I feel like this kind of music has created a lot of people who think that you need to be a mega-talented millionaire to make a good rock record. Not people posting on internet message boards about alive stuffed animals. People out in the real world.

"I don't like it, and also it is bad for society."

[KeithHernandez]

Wow, inev is absolutely right.

[jaydub]

And don't even get me started about Britney.

[pmcd9]

Wow, inev is absolutely right.

Inev is absolutely wrong.  As I understand it, he's saying that if an artist has every resource available to them they inevitably are going to make an overproduced indulgent piece of shit record.

First off, any artist that rises to success has every resource available to them.  When Neil Young for instance plays a song that consist of just his voice and an acoustic guitar it's not because a 20 piece band and 60 piece orchestra weren't available to him.  But when he does put on the orchestra and big band it's because it's what his artistic vision has dictated and not because he's a kid in the candy store that doesn't know when to stop.

Personally, some of my favorite music is what you would call "overproduced," but when the tools of the trade are used effectively it can really move you like nothing else.

Evidence for the defense of overproduced music.

[theinevitable]

I mean, people like Neil Young are the exceptions which prove the rule. How many other artists can you name who are hugely financially successful who have put out as many fantastic albums as him?

He is one of few performers who started out small with just his talent, and got up to the point where he CAN afford to do anything he wants, but has the wisdom to know that that does not mean that he SHOULD throw in everything but the kitchen sink. There are countless bands who lose their way in the magic of the studio once they've "made it" with their first album. Sometimes it pops up right away (the flaming lips' second album apparently had this problem because they found someone willing to let them do all kinds of auditory hijinx for cheap... it wasn't until later that they had the musical maturity to use these resources effectively) and sometimes it sneaks up on you (later Led Zeppelin, to me at least, goes way too far afield.)

The Beatles are not overproduced, they are geniuses.
And I would argue that they did not have everything available to them the way modern bands do, in that the beatles largely figured out how to get all those awesome noises on their own, or with the help of friends/coworkers/etc.

[pmcd9]

Well you are speaking to my original point now.

Dan, the same can be said for the kind of garage rock you prefer or any kind of style for that matter.  Some have done it amazingly well, most of it sucks.

And yes of course The Beatles and Neil Young are geniuses and that's right at the heart of the matter.  Make no mistake, the Beatles were completely unfettered and in his biography Paul McCartney speaks about how the A Day in the Life sessions came about.  It's been awhile since I've read it, but basically they were trying to come up with the most over the top ideas they could conceive.  They were trying to out do another "overproduced" genius Brian Wilson. 

So even the Beatles most highly produced stuff sounds great because it was created by geniuses.  With Guns and Roses on the other hand... well it's garbage in, garbage out isn't it.

I think the review you linked to hits the nail on the head.  The reason GnR sucks now not because it's overproduced, but because all of the geniuses have exited the band*.

*obviously I'm using genius loosely referring to guns and roses in the same context as the beatles.

[littlefallsmets]

See, I think Brian Wilson was ONLY interesting at his craziest.

All the early Beach Boys stuff was just well-sung catchy schlock.

Only when he got to the point that was parodied in "Walk Hard" was his sound actually engaging to me.

A good song well-made is not nearly so interesting to me as a shambling half-genius half-trainwreck disaster of melted waxen wings.

This is just me though. I'd rather hear someone stretch and fail with little flecks of genius in the shit than hear someone shine up and perfect the standard old thing.

I'd rather watch "The Brothers Grimm" a thousand times than "Titanic" once more, to analogize to film.

[pmcd9]

What Brian Wilson was doing was hardly "standard" at the time.  They don't call his work groundbreaking for nothing.

[theinevitable]

I mean.
The issue is, "overproduced" is different from "highly produced."
The difference between Brian Wilson or The Beatles, who were geniuses at using the studio to get what they wanted and were big fans of people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and stuff, and schlocky bands that producers try to fix in the studio by hiring drum doctors.
The thing I am against is the idea that "overwrought overproduced melodramatic walls-of-sound are one of the most valid approaches to rock and roll."
The general belief that adding more shit to a song makes it better. That overdubbing the drums 10 times will sound better than just... recording the drums once, with the band.

It's one thing to be the Beatles and decide that the studio is your instrument, to some degree.
It's another thing for rock music as a whole to go in the direction of attempting to do that, as it did for 20 years or so. I often think that I would be a much angrier person if I were alive during that era, not that it's completely over-- we do live in the era of the vocoder.

The idea that something is good BECAUSE it is completely overdone and horrible and excessive, this is an idea that I strongly disagree with. Just as much as I can't stand the idea of playing guitar like this. Or that era of British art, I forget what it's called, but it is a weird early 1800s artistic movement that actually looked like... the covers of fantasy novels, or illustrations of led zeppelin songs.

And here I was working towards a big finishing metaphor that was really clever, but my roommate came in and said "what the fuck are you doing still arguing with internet people, don't you have 2 exams tomorrow?" and I forgot what I was going to say. more to come i guess.

[pmcd9]

I think we are starting to see eye to eye.  But even if we aren't so what, it's 3 am on Monday morning and I too have 3 finals due this week.

I was using overproduced in quotes because I was thinking it was an in the eye of the beholder situation.  But you are now referring to overproduced as using studio trickery to compensate for inferior performance by the artist.  That's certainly not what the Beatles or Brian Wilson were doing and I really don't think it's what Axl Rose is doing either.

As for Yngwie Malmsteen, I admire his ability to play so many notes, but that kind of playing is more like sports than music.  They should have an annual competition to see who shreds the fastest.  But there again, he's just taken something beautiful to it's musically crippled extreme.  The original source of inspiration for that type of playing still blows me away.

[Victoria Waterfield]

Or that era of British art, I forget what it's called, but it is a weird early 1800s artistic movement that actually looked like... the covers of fantasy novels, or illustrations of led zeppelin songs.

Is this an attempt to diss the Pre-Raphaelites? Not cool, man.

[wombat]

Is this an attempt to diss the Pre-Raphaelites? Not cool, man.

What's more I think it might be more accurate to say that the covers of fantasy novels etc look like the Pre-Raphaelites than vice versa. I mean, they were kind of a weird bunch of dudes but I am pretty sure they did not have secret time machines that they used to get Led Zep albums to copy from.

Did you know that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a pet wombat? He even wrote poems about it.

[theinevitable]

yes, I was talking about the pre-raphaelites. horrible.

man, fuck axle rose! he totally blows!

[jaydub]

Is that another term for Rococo?  Because that shit is hideous.