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The Death of Guitar Music (durp durp)


Moose

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http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4144362-hard-times-for-guitar-music-by-steven-from-blood-red-shoes

I feel like sharing (probably in a rambley messy sort of way).

This is a completely inoffensive article that I have no big problem with, but tell me something I don’t know! My main objection to this kind of opinion is so: why does anyone want good, original bands and musicians to “make it” to the mainstream anymore? There is so much music out there now that is so easy to come across that we don’t need BBC radio shoving it down our puss, do we? (and on that note PABH and Twin Atlantic are really bad at music, in my humble opinion). As a rule of thumb, even bands that have gone from bottom to top -or whatever the article says – get worse as they get higher up.

Music is an art (OBV), I don’t see the need to make money - or a living - from touring and spend thousands of pounds making an album. These days you can tour whilst breaking even with a bit of knowhow and some good old elbow grease; you can make a decent album for £300... Heck, you can make an album for free if you are comfortable sacrificing expensive production and mastering. It might be hard, and I personally have little experience, but if you love the music you’re making you’ll do it.

“If it wasn’t for the MAINSTREAM I wouldn’t have discovered Nirvana. I would have durpy durp durped my durp.” For every band that you wouldn’t have discovered if they hadn’t made enough money to tour somewhere, get noticed by the right person, get more money put behind them, etc etc and eventually reach your ears, I’m confident there is a band just as good around the corner that can impact your life just as much.

THE INTERNET. There are so many good bands out there, and generally they are not the bands that are too bothered about mainstream success. I’ve spent some time in a band that was concerned about the mainstream and meeting the right people and its not a lot of fun. It sucks the fun out of it all and I feel that the music is less... pure... or something. I’m not preaching from experience here. I’m not all like: “mainstream music is shitty man cos I’m in a punx band.” I love Pearl Jam, Death Cab, Belle and Seb etc and probably wouldn’t if they weren’t famous. I’d like to think that I would still be interested and passionate about music though.

Do people think “guitar music” would end if it was in no way mainstream anymore? Does it really matter that good bands can’t make a living out of playing music?

That’ll do for now, I should probably do some work.

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I agree with you in principle, but guitar bands (what a weird term) breed guitar bands and the only real way they can do that is mainstream exposure. Even if it's bad bands. A kid might watch fucking Razorlight on TV but they might pick up an instrument, get good, get into decent music through that and realise they were being silly and make awesome sounds.

I'm quite tired so this might not make much sense, but I feel like I'm somewhere in the region of a point. There need to be big "guitar bands", however good or bad, to inspire kids to make more bands. Or something.

I'll return to this when I can think.

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I agree with you in principle, but guitar bands (what a weird term) breed guitar bands and the only real way they can do that is mainstream exposure. Even if it's bad bands. A kid might watch fucking Razorlight on TV but they might pick up an instrument, get good, get into decent music through that and realise they were being silly and make awesome sounds.

I'm quite tired so this might not make much sense, but I feel like I'm somewhere in the region of a point. There need to be big "guitar bands", however good or bad, to inspire kids to make more bands. Or something.

I'll return to this when I can think.

You're probably right. I think alot of us will have gotten into "GUITAR MUSIC" by a band we are probably embarassed to mention now, or a band we still have a soft spot for, regardless of how embarassing they are. Mine is Less Than Jake, thanks to Street Skater on the PS1. No shame. Though they weren't big, but they were placed onto a product that was quite big. Video games, man.

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You're probably right. I think alot of us will have gotten into "GUITAR MUSIC" by a band we are probably embarassed to mention now, or a band we still have a soft spot for, regardless of how embarassing they are. Mine is Less Than Jake, thanks to Street Skater on the PS1. No shame.

Watching Manic Street Preachers on TOTP made me want to play guitar. I have never bought a Manic Street Preachers album. It was bizarre, but that was it. They're good though, right?

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Watching Manic Street Preachers on TOTP made me want to play guitar. I have never bought a Manic Street Preachers album. It was bizarre, but that was it. They're good though, right?

Yes! They are the greatest rock and roll band of all time. This is not opinion it is fact and anyone who disagrees will be embarrassing themselves by being completely wrong.

It's probably not this edition of TOTP you're talking about but this is joyous. The same year M People won the Mercury Music prize.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2sA3qZ8u6c

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I reckon Moose is spot on. If you want money and your friends to not think you're a total loser, get a fucking job. If you love making music, be in a band and everyone else can suck it.

As for bands needing to sell out to inspire naive kids: that time has passed. If my hypothetical lovechild wasn't clever enough to find half good music on the internet in this day and age, I'd crash a car into its whore mother.

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Guest Giles Walker

M People were a slightly dodgy 90s twist on northern soul (i think most of their hits are pretty heavily based on actual old northern songs) so even though i think that this sound has dated terribly, i would argue that it was more inventive than the Manics. So it was probably correct for them to win the Mercury music prize over the Manic Street Preachers that year in my opinion.

Differences of opinion eh?

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M People were a slightly dodgy 90s twist on northern soul (i think most of their hits are pretty heavily based on actual old northern songs) so even though i think that this sound has dated terribly, i would argue that it was more inventive than the Manics. So it was probably correct for them to win the Mercury music prize over the Manic Street Preachers that year in my opinion.

Differences of opinion eh?

The Manics weren't nominated for the Mercury that year, I was more just mentioning M People as context for the British musical landscape at the time. I can see where your coming from but I can probably name about ten bands/artists who were making music that sounded like M People that year fusing cod-soul with disco but I can't think of anyone else doing Wire/Skids-esque post-punk with Industrial and Krautrock sounds like that Manics were on The Holy Bible.

Listen to anything by Pulp, Blur or Oasis from that era, then listen to Die in the Summertime or The Intense Humming of Evil and you can see how out on a limb they were amongst other Brit guitar bands. I don't think there's a single M People song that wouldn't fit seamlessly onto a Lisa Stansfield or Eternal album.

Still, horses for courses and all that!

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Guest Giles Walker

I am not trying to flame you here, but Eternal were a pop r&b group and Lisa Stansfield was originally a singer on a cheesy house record, who then made straight up pop vocal tracks. I am quite a big fan of soul music and i am struggling to think of much stuff that sounds like M People from around that time.

There were a multitude of Acid Jazz bands, but they had more of a jazz funk lilt to them, the New York deep house sound of the time was almost similar, but again too much of a departure from that cheesy belted out style that Heather Small had.

But yeah, i get it, you prefer the Manics to M People. I think it is safe to say that is the standard opinion of most folks who listen to music outside of their car on the way to asda to do the shopping.

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I love a lot of Motown and Stax stuff but I can't profess to know much about Soul post-1970 so maybe there's a huge difference between M People and Lisa Stansfield/Eternal that my ears aren't picking up on and what I know about Acid Jazz and Deep House you could write on the back of a fag packet so I'm willing to concede that M People may have been more original than I'm giving them credit for (I still think they sound fucking horrible though!)

The Manics suffer a similar fate really, they've made some of the most subversive records of the last 20 years, worked with people as diverse as Steve Albini, John Cale, Kevin Shields, Erol Alkan, Errors, Fuck Buttons, Optimo, Andrew Weatherall and Mogwai but a huge amount of people will still think of them as being the same as The Stereophonics.

As an interesting aside, M Peoples percussionist Shovell actually features on the Manics second album.

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Nirvana got me into guitar music. I fell in love with them at 14, bought a cheap sunburst Strat knock-off which I thought looked like Kurt's, found a guitar teacher, went round with a copy of Nevermind and said "teach me this". Lesson 1 - Smells Like Teen Spirit. Lesson 2 - In Bloom. Lesson 3 - Come As You Are. Lesson 4 - Breed. Etc. Though midway through Nevermind we decided to take a break from Nirvana and he taught me "Everything About You" by Ugly Kid Joe and "Inside" by Stiltskin.

Cool story me.

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I am sure that very similar articles were written when home taping was prevalent. This is just record company scare-mongering. "Guitar bands" will not disappear, and if they do, that's just the way it goes. Popular music is a constantly evolving thing. People will always get into music they like somehow, it just wont be with the aid of record companies in the future. I think that this a good thing.

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It was posted on Facebook by a band from Glasgow I kind of know. They’re in the habit of sucking all kinds of cock and I think they genuinely will “make it.” They’re oh so cool too... oh so cool. The singer says really profound yet controversial shit between songs: “who finks David Cameron is silly? Haha durp durp lol.” “I was reading some Karl Marx the other day...”

To be honest, no-one will ever know what my point in this thread is, because I don’t know. They just posted this and were like: “this guy knows what its all about!” which made me think “shut up you bunch of cunts”/”who fucking cares? Who?”

Chip on my shoulder? Probably.

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'Guitar' music has been eating itself for a while, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's done. It might mean that the bubble of public school boys with v-neck t-shirts and shaggy haircuts has burst, but thank fuck for that, frankly. Were The Libertines and The Strokes really huge enough to clone to the degree they were in the middle of the last decade until recently? Both of those bands were part of a new wave/post punk revival that also included the likes of Franz Ferndinand, The Futureheads, Bloc Party and, um, The Bravery (The Stokes get tagged as part of a garage revival, but I really can't hear it like I can in say, The Hives or The White Stripes) which got pretty exhausting pretty fast. Not that some of those bands didn't do some good stuff, just that there was a lot of it and it pretty conservative and precious. I don't blame a lot of (perhaps unadventerous) rock fans getting fed up.

I'm just throwing things out here, but it's interesting that this period seemed to be twinned by electronic dance music taking on more rock textures. Justice have described 'Cross' as a heavy metal record and they've essentially just released a prog record, Soulwax/2manydjs would think nothing of having Mr Oizo and AC/DC in a DJ set, and Daft Punk would happily homage ELO. That's admittedly reductive, but around 2006/7 a lot of electronic music seemed to rock more than rock did. It also kind of meant that rock became something you did in quotes, sadly. Like Fern Cotton or a Top Shop model doing the horns. Fucking diamante Motorhead t-shirts and pre-ripped jeans. Because we've just been through an 80's revival that's lasted twice as long as the fucking eighties, we're well overdue for an early nineties one, I think. Of course, by that logic we'll end up like the late nineties eventually when the alternative rock bubble burst and we ended up with Stabbing Westward and Bush.

Articles about the 'death' of rock music often focus on indie however and ignore how vital metal is. I think a lot of journalists are kind of snobby about metal. Viva Brother may be a critical and commercial dead end, but metal can still be pretty exciting and has a really enthusiastic fan base. Kids in black with stupid hair are clearly going nuts over bands with florid typefaces and months in their name, it seems. Bands like The Foo Fighters, Nickleback, Snow Patrol and Muse can draw massive crowds. I'm not a fan of any of them, but it seems that rather than guitar music being dead, it's just that the kind that London critics like to hype up is in rude health. Good. Maybe people will stop making jangly music about cheekie chappies.

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