MUSIC: the official thread.

All Points East festival in Victoria Park. She was last on. I'd already seen LCD Soundsystem, Khruangbin and Beck so wasn't too annoyed.

 

Morelike BDORK, amirite?!?!?!?!

 

For some reason, when I saw there was a new post on this thread, I knew you were going to post this! Weird. Although I thought you were going to write it as 'Djork'.

 

Or BJERK

 

Djork is funnier.

 

Had enough at this point. Id rather be unemployed and fucking starving than run by these middle english waitrose carpark boris brexit faffs another day. Not british not saxon not English, get yourselves to fuck. SNP.

 

Fascinating and kind of scary ... I once drove from Long Island to Waterbury at night in a torrential downpour with this blasting on the stereo... had to turn it off after awhile because it was getting eerie and surreal and making me nervous

What's amazing is none of what you hear is electronic or manipulated in any way ... just extremely disciplined rhythm performance on acoustic instruments to create the pulse and exceptional breath and volume control to produce the rapid wordless choral singing and woodwind passages ... nothing else really sounds like this music

 

Watched the Daddy Yankee, Pitbull & Natti Natasha new reboot of the 90's classic from El General 'Rica y Apretadita' this time with the PC title 'No Lo Trates'. After enduring that new vomit inducing aberration I had to detox watching the truly worthy remake from 2008 by Kumbia All Starz with Melissa Jimenez. I wish there was a better HD quality version of this video. Melissa deserves it.

 

I can actually imagine a complete musical retard like Panchy really liking shit like that.

 

oool

Good story! I can imagine it, too!

 

Fucking terrifying... all that rapid TA TA TA TA TA TA TA TA TA TA TA... "ok, this is gonna make me crash"

 

Raggaeton is the worst music ever

 

Nah, nah, nah.


We got that fuckin beat - Música Sertaneja is horrific.



And fuckin young people love it.

Pricks.

 

That's pretty goddamned brutal

 

Actually, we have the two worst forms of music, that and Funk Carioca/Baile Funk:



Pure dogshit hybrid of Miami bass, Gangster Rap and whatever else - popular in Rio de Janeiro.

 

That horrid shite Panchy posted is indicative of a phenomenon not limited to lowest common denominator pop music ... the phenomenon of people liking a song or performance because the performer is physically sexy

This shit happens in all music ... in the incredibly stuffy world of classical music, where if you shake a tree, 50 charlatans will tumble out; the biggest selling albums all tend to be those featuring performers who are good looking ... there's an English opera singer, some busty blonde (forget her name) who isn't thought of as anything great by experts but who sells shitloads of records because old dudes buy them because there's a hot girl on the cover... she's singing the same old warhorses as a hundred other singers and even does shitty "crossover" nonsense but she outsells vastly more talented and respected singers 5 to 1

Sexy female violinists and piano players, extremely handsome male violinists and piano players ... only a handful with any actual exceptional ability, most of them completely average and some of them well below professional average... all of them playing the same shit Heifetz, Stern, Perlman, Rubinstein, Richter, Argerich, Rostropovich whoever else played far better 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago ... same old repertoire given an inferior performance by a guy that looks like Brad Pitt with an unbuttoned shirt or a girl wearing spiked heels and a painted on minidress ... and all you've got is a picture to look at... the violinist or pianist isn't going to show up and seduce you ... you're literally buying a blatantly inferior performance of music that's been recorded 100 times by other largely better musicians because you wish you could fuck the performer ... it's the strangest thing

Like 15 years ago there was some twat euro guy with long hair and carefully manicured 5 o'clock shadow whose name escapes me ... he went on some daft TV show to set a Guinness record for fastest violin rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's "flight of the bumblebee" which in pop culture is mistakenly believed to be incredibly hard to play (it'd be tricky for a novice violinist of course but it's pretty much a breeze for any professional in any orchestra... there's shitloads of more difficult music for violin than that) ... so this dope, an undistinguished violinist who was really really good looking spent whatever ludicrous amount of time practicing playing that one stupid little ditty (which is really just a minor little bit of clever realist orchestration in a much larger work and was never intended to stand alone) so that he could play it pointlessly and unmusically fast ... and he set the stupid record (since broken by like 9 other idiots with too much time on their hands and too little shame)

My singer's then-girlfriend bought the shitty light-classical, pop songs on violin cash-in CD he put out and went with her friend to go see him perform the same trash in concert and presumably their GINEYS were tingling and wet watching it ... I told her he was a nothing and a fraud taking advantage of ignorance ... that Isaac Stern would've smashed a priceless Stradivarius over the guy's head just on principle... she insisted that he was awesome and his playing "so beautiful"

Panchy has convinced himself what he posted is somehow not worthless audible trash because the girl singing is highly fuckable

I don't understand people like this but they're everywhere

 

Bizarre, right?
People dumbing-down at a furious rate.

Girls tend to gravitate toward liking music because they wet their panties at the singers and always have done - 60s, 70s, 80s - yet we have a trend of males doing the same with females singing rancid shit-for-music.

 

Yeah it's no longer a females-only phenomenon... the first "girl band" marketed towards impressionable 12 year old boys is right around the corner... I can feel it

 

Fixed.

 

Haha I know the Flight of the Bumblebee performance you're on about. To be fair in all the comments he got absolutely slated, he was sloppy as fuck and missed loads of notes anyway.

Do you know Alicia Witt? She kind of fits the mould you were talking about in that she is sexy as fuck (was an actress in the Sopranos), but she is allegedly a child prodigy on piano. I haven't been able to listen to her as I have a major issue with my right ear at the moment so can't listen to anything with headphones etc, but I'd be interested in whether you think she is any good.

 

I bet you she turns out to be one of those people everybody knows or something and this ends up with me looking like I asked "have you heard of this Paul McCartney bloke?"

 

Ok I know her as an actress

I looked her up on YouTube... she is an excellent piano player in a general sense

There was only one video of her playing anything classical... it was an excerpt of something by Liszt

Not terrible or anything but about the standard of an average experienced kid pianist with a few years of classical training under their belt... miles below the standard of a professional, never mind an elite one

The problem with the classical repertoire and training is that a huge amount of the initial training is basically rote instruction and muscle memory ... I've known utterly talentless "musicians" who were taught to play some tired old thing like Für Elise and can sit at the piano and blaze through it but can't play "Hey Jude" which is vastly easier physically because they're not really musicians ... they're just people trained to accomplish a particular task

At the highest levels of classical music, even with the tendency to continuously recycle the same music by the same composers, you are still dealing with genuine musicians... and a great player will perform a piece not only with far fewer mistakes (though "lack of mistakes" is generally overrated as a criteria) but with a far greater understanding of the construction of what they are playing ... my favorite classical piano player of all time was Sviatoslav Richter... Now, his technique was fantastic but there are others maybe even a tiny bit cleaner or more precise (though I'll argue with anyone that there's never been anybody that could play LOUD at high speeds without losing the plot anywhere near as well as he could) and some people had more of a knack for certain composers than he did (he loved Mozart and Chopin but struggled somewhat with his interpretations of their music because the ideal touch was lighter and breezier than what suited Richter) but overall, there was no such thing as uninteresting or bad or routine with him... and with some composers (Prokofiev, Schumann, Liszt, Scriabin, Mussorgsky) his interpretations have no equal, IMO ... why was he special? Because when you hear him play, you feel as if what he is playing is being created right now, like it was never written, as if he himself is its author. That's what makes a great classical piano player. The ability to convince the listener that this interpretation is the correct one in the moment, that this is the right tempo, this bit has the right fortissimo, this other bit the right pianissimo... to make you feel like this is her/his music, not just the composer's.

There's probably 150 different Rachmaninoff No. 2 recordings out there (just to give an example of a famous work given the typical classical record treatment of being done over and over by every fucking piano player and orchestra under the sun) ... of those, maybe 15 verge on being noticeably bad... 130 of them are virtually indistinguishable from one another (I guarantee you could fool anybody, the hoity toitiest experts around and tell them this one is Pianist A with Symphony A conductor A and the other is B when in actuality it's the opposite and they'd not catch on) ... solid, little or no mistakes, appropriate interpretation... only a precious few stand out... they have an unusual feeling to them, sometimes incredibly difficult to describe... Richter's version has an overwhelming power to it that separates it... Van Cliburn's is special, too... an impossible to pinpoint elegance, an easy gravity ... I'd spot either immediately even if you played me 20 different ones... but I'd have a hell of a time distinguishing the other 18 I'd bet ... as long as they were basically "correct"

I'm rambling... my point is that the physical aspect of classical playing on any instrument is the initial hurdle that everyone trained in it has to overcome through practice and instruction... for those of us not trained in that way (myself included obviously as a self-taught guitarist/bassist and dreadfully uncoordinated 10-thumbed amateur piano noodler) even the most ordinary display of rote skill can appear quite formidable ... Alicia Witt playing Liszt is like that. There's literally a million or more people who can do the exact same thing she did in the video I watched. Now, that's still good. After all, what's a few million people on a planet with 7 billion? Pretty exclusive company. But she's also nowhere near good enough to be an unrecorded, one night guess soloist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, never mind a really good one. She might be able to trudge awkwardly through a Mozart concerto with the Waterbury Amateur Symphony. There are loads of brilliant piano players (and players of any instrument) who have no classical training or chops at all who would have no idea how to begin playing such a thing because it's a style of playing they simply haven't learned ... conversely there are numerous classically trained musicians who would be utterly lost attempting even a rudimentary blues number despite its comparative physical and structural simplicity because they've never learned it

Classical playing is one of many ways to make great music ... you need it for playing classical music but it's just one way... there is no be-all, end-all, there's no such thing as the greatest piano player or greatest singer or greatest guitarist ... everyone above a basic threshold of competence in any discipline has strengths and weaknesses

The bumblebee violin prick is a lot closer to Alicia Witt playing Liszt than he is to a real professional classical musician

 

Good breakdown! Appreciate it. Still haven't actually had a chance to listen to her yet so will try and watch the video you're talking about.

Was just curious because I saw the 'child prodigy' label. Probably meant she displayed a level of competence beyond that of her peers growing up, and not necessarily that she is in the upper echelons herself.

 

It gets used constantly in classical circles... remember what I said about charlatans!

 

What about in the reverse situation: rock musicians who play clássical pieces, e.g. Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson...

 

Rick Wakeman had legitimate high-end chops ... I think had he chosen to focus exclusively on playing classical music, he would've been a successful concert piano player... he had atrocious taste as a creator but his playing was outstanding

Emerson much less so. Superior to Lord, for certain but definitely inferior to Wakeman. I don't think there was any professional future for him in classical music. His "Piano Concerto" is not particularly convincing. Better than Lord's garbage with Deep Purple, though.

 

Hummmmm...interesting on Wakeman > Emerson!