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a feeling : no really new music can be recorded any more.
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Sep 02, 2008, 12:29
Re: a feeling : no really new music can be recorded any more.
Sep 01, 2008, 17:19
singingringingtree wrote:
IanB wrote:
I love singles but they are just that. They are a short story, they are a minature, a ten minute film before the main feature if you will. The mark of a true artist is being able extend the idea into a series of statements or a single grand work. .


ian, yr posts are always intelligent + often completely spot on, but ferkristzake take yr head out of yr arse for a minute! does this make U2 or Yes (or pretty much ANY other shite rock band) more like "true artists" than Phil Spector, or Lee Perry, or Howlin Wolf, or Basic Channel?

and to continue yr analogy, you ever read raymond carver, or katherine mansfield, or chekhov???

anyway, in this i-pod shuffle era, albums are officially over ... everyone knows that



Fair enough. Head extracted. Pomposity gene supressed. It was an idiotic generalisation when taken out of context.

That said if you work your way through the (somewhat tedious) thread that spawned the comment what Keith and I were talking about was a) specifically rock music and b) I was aiming my ire at the kinds of limited-musical-ability-one-single-and-they're-gone-acts that Peel would champion not Motown, Stax, Treasure Isle, Studio One or any of the other genius singles-based labels.

The premise that started it all was Keith saying that " Idea's are far more important than musical ability will ever be". My argument is that at some point you need musical ability to bring ideas to fruition. That's all. I don't care if the music is sustained over 20 singles and assorted b sides or four albums. All the people you mention had musical ability coming out of every pore.

In fact I used the examples of both a Yabby U single and a Marvin Gaye / Gladys Knight single (pick yer preferred version of Grapevine) to demonstrate why having some learned musical ability is extremely beneficial when making great original music.

A no-chops-at-all indie band might get lucky once or even twice but at some point they need to learn to play to create sustained works or even a series of shorter ones. Which is why Television's legacy is "Marquee Moon" and not "Where Were You?". I stand by that much and I also stand by the idea that rock (post 66) is basically an album genre. Look at Unsung and our own playlists. It's nearly all long players.

Short stories are all well and good and I will give you Mansfield and Carver for sure but they are exceptions in terms of being short form specialists.

Many great writers wrote short works like Woolf, Fitzgerald, Balzac, Runyon and Joyce (though one could argue that the Dubliners is a novel of shorts) and Damon Runyon's stories tend to interlink in some way but they are in a general sense one-dayers to the test match of the novel. None of these people needed to be able to write less well to do the short stories. Which is kind of my point about technical ability having value.

I hate 90% of U2s music but I totally respect their work ethic and bemoan the lack of it people who could have done more with what they had.

As for Yes they really did matter once apon a time. Even Lester Bangs could see the upside (Beach Boys meet Vanilla Fudge). Jon Anderson is a bit of a prat but musically they crammed more gorgeous melodic ideas into an album than most acts manage in entire careers. And Steve Howe and Chris Squire were on their day a hugely potent and unconventional ten string attack. I can see why people hate them but I am one of those people who didn't throw away all their (i.e. my) old records when I first heard Eater and Johnny Moped.
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