Led Zeppelin is Rediculous.

Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's been an aesthetic shift. Really, when I say I 'don't hear the difference' what I tend not to hear (more than just the notes themselves) is the aesthetic. And to me a lot of it is still loud guitar music with the same attitude as before. I'm not saying that's inherently a bad thing in itself, but I just want to see somebody doing something different.

It depends, MFB (just putting aside objections by enforcers of righteous right braininess against the infiltration of sinister left-brain activity for a moment :)

I think we could try an analogy with jazz. Jazz started out as rude and wild and was putting two fingers up to the establishment at the time. Remember, at one time even Strauss's waltzes were considered impolite by the guardians of righteousness.

Much has happened since then and most (not all) jazz is now "respectable". Where does that leave guitar rock? We had the blow-waved rockers (often studio types) singing with the kind of shallow sentimentality we had in a lot of 50s music. We had rock playing become clean and neat and tidy, all these extra chords, technique etc. Junior goes to college.

Punk arrives with its safety pins and anti-technique thing. Next minute we have tutorials and CDs on how to do punk drumming. I expect there are now people out there giving lessons in performing death growls in the correct way.

Who has revolutionised electric guitar playing? After Jimi, Adrian Belew, Ian Williams and Robert Fripp come to mind. Slash and Van Halen were highly influential.

It seems to be that rock has become less sexy and more violent, which fits the current ethos where two people making love on screen is considered obscene but someone getting shot or beaten up is family entertainment. Sexiness has shifted to pop and funk.

In terms of techiques and ideas I see the mainstream music scene tending to chase itself in ever decreasing circles - feeding off what's come before and not innovating, except on the fringes. We can thank powerful record companies and the increasing commercialisation of music for that. In the 60s bands could form and be sloppily creative and still get signed.

The scene is now so competitive that if musos hope to not work 9 to 5 they have to play to the market. Listeners don't have time in this busy world to just sit there with their heads wedged between the speakers, getting off on musical experiments or expressionist soling a la Zep etc.

Music for music's sake has decreased. Music now needs a utility value to be do well - to also have use in parties, dancing/moshing, chilling, background/musak, advertising, movie sound tracks ...

Web 2.0 is the main thing keeping rock from stultifying completely.

Edit: MFB, we posted at the same time and said more or less the same thing :)
 
I think you're underrating the influence of people like East Bay Ray on styles of playing. Most of what I hear as 'new' movements are essentially rebellions against the 'order of things' but I haven't sensed that for at least a decade. Why? Well, you've covered that pretty well. What we do have is a small number of artists who work for themselves, but invariably they've been left well alone by the record labels.
 
I think you're underrating the influence of people like East Bay Ray on styles of playing. Most of what I hear as 'new' movements are essentially rebellions against the 'order of things' but I haven't sensed that for at least a decade. Why? Well, you've covered that pretty well. What we do have is a small number of artists who work for themselves, but invariably they've been left well alone by the record labels.

Heh, I've not heard of East Bay Ray. I looked at YouTube and figure that I missed it because my old fartiness doesn't relate to it, even a bit. So it wouldn't surprise me if I understated it. Thanks for filling the hole :)

To look for where rebellion comes from I think you have to weigh up:

- What's big now
- The youthful creative urge.

If popular music is getting out reach for young people, then they say "stuff you" and do their own thing. Once the technical and logistical challenges of music become too great then you get a reductionist movement in the poor areas, which seems to be where most musical revolutions grow. That's why big kits and complex triggering solutions will be the targets for the next rebellious movements; they put music-making out of reach of the poor.

It could even be a quiet revolution as more people create music on their desktops instead of forming bands (cost of studios, noise laws, more condensed living etc). Then there's the rise of video and gaming and Rock Band etc.

Bands are being increasingly squeezed out of clubs and pubs by machines - be it DJs or gaming machines. I think the whole concept of band play is under threat. It's enough to make anyone nostalgic.
 
What you have to ask yourself though is that is that all necessarily a bad thing?

East Bay Ray was the guitarist for the Dead Kennedys. You have no excuse!
 
What you have to ask yourself though is that is that all necessarily a bad thing?

East Bay Ray was the guitarist for the Dead Kennedys. You have no excuse!

I don't need an excuse. I'm an old biddy and proud of it! (or at least resigned to it). When I start getting cats I know it will be all over. For now I just borrow the moggy next door for my feline cuddle needs :)

No more band play a bad thing? Hell yeah. I love playing in bands. When I am in a practice studio with a bunch of musos I'm at home. I admit to a teensy bit of subjectivity here. The experience of band play is precious to me and if I holed up at home with Reason and churned out stuff I'd end up as a hermit. I also enjoy the physical aspect and challenges of playing music, even though I'm far better with the conceptual side.

I think many others will share that joy of physical music-making so I won't be alone there. I have a feeling that Robert Fripp's prediction of music moving towards "small intelligent units" is prophetic.
 
I'm just throwing it out there. Bands disappearing is a form of development, of a sort. That's all I'm suggesting. I'm not saying it's for better or worse.
 
I'm actually getting really quite sick of the backward-looking 'Rock' lobby at the moment.

It drives me insane. Well not quite. But I think it is holding music back. Led Zepp this, Led Zepp that. Holy cow! John died decades ago. There has been loads of great music since then. Why listen to the same old music over and over again? How many times can a novel be read?

Don't get me started on Wolfmother. It is the year of our Lord 2009!
 
It drives me insane. Well not quite. But I think it is holding music back. Led Zepp this, Led Zepp that. Holy cow! John died decades ago. There has been loads of great music since then. Why listen to the same old music over and over again? How many times can a novel be read?

Don't get me started on Wolfmother. It is the year of our Lord 2009!

Take away 'Lord' and I agree entirely. That's not say I don't listen to older music, but there has been something since then!
 
Take away 'Lord' and I agree entirely.


I was being formal. I've been reading too much Erasmus. I was thinking 16th century. I thought it funny because we are discussing 2009 and looking backwards to the 70's. I have a weird sense of humor. :)
 
MFB, as you'd know, The Lord was a cat that belonged to the guy who accidentally ruled the universe.

I'm in a band that plays music from the 40s onwards so I'm not in any position to judge people who are stuck in the 70s.
 
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I thought the Universe was run by hyper-intelligent mice? Oh wait, that was just the Earth.
 
MFB, we are of course being rather retro here :)

I like old music (and other stuff) the way Dad likes Benny Goodman; that's the music of our youth.

Dufference is that I enjoy some new stuff too as long as the volume control isn't set to 11 and/or techno that even out-ostinatos me!
 
I'm actually getting really quite sick of the backward-looking 'Rock' lobby at the moment.

Now that I've alienated everybody in this thread, I will explain.

I like Led Zeppelin. I used to like them a lot more, but I'm actually with DMC on this one on so many levels. This focus on bands that have been gone thirty or forty years to the forsaking of all others (to use matrimonial terminology) really irritates me. That and bands (like Wolfmother) who just re-hash this kind of music. It happened, it's over, please move on with your lives.

The truth is, it stagnates everything. Whenever I listen to Classical Music (and I listen to a lot more than the majority of the people on here as part of my degree) I can usually place it within a certain compositional timeframe and see a progression directly from Bach, through to Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schoenberg et al. I don't know if it's just me, but the speed of musical change in the previous century should have made it easier to pinpoint to even more specific dates. I can do it with jazz - I can listen to a lot of the music and pinpoint a rough era as to when the music was written - pre-'Brew' Davis is definitely pre -'Brew' Davis and Brian Blade is definitely much more modern, because I can see a linear progression. However, when I listen to a lot of guitar-based music, I just don't hear that. I can certainly hear it for the first decade or two of rock, for argument's sake '55-'75 but really beyond that, I struggle to hear what has musically changed in a lot of mainstream material.

This focus on a very specific time frame (roughly '68-'78) means that younger generations are growing up with an attitude of just wanting to play that music. I'm sick of pentatonic scales, I'm sick of two-minute guitar solos, I'm sick of drummers hitting their crash every 'one' and I'm sick of vocalists who think that they can use the word 'wooohhhmmaaannn' in a song without a hint of irony.

There are plenty of bands out there that don't do this. I could name dozens, but it seems to so many young people today that this period is all that counts. I know, I've been there and out the other side and I was even critical of drum machines for a long time - until I started looking elsewhere. I've discovered so much musical diversity in the last two decades it is ridiculous, but so little of it uses the 'standard band' format. Bowie is a prime example - there's a guy who realised what he was doing was going to be passe in the next two years and changed it all just because he could. What did we get? Two (arguably three) fantastic albums - that mercifully haven't been copied - and mind-blowing collaborations with a small group of musicians that have seriously radicalised and influenced a wide range of musicians in the years since. Why then, do I keep hearing the same three chords on the radio? Why do I listen to a mainstream pop track and think it's from the 90s but it turns out to be the 'newest' chart release?

Because people don't listen to enough music. Vygotsky (a psychologist) postulated a theory known as 'Zones of Proximal Development' whereby in order to develop, one has to stretch slightly beyond their 'comfort zone' and seek new empirical experiences. I don't think enough people do that. Without that I would have never have started the degree I am doing, I would never have discovered some really fantastic music (let's just start with Schoenberg and Penderecki) and I would have never have discovered quite what a computer could do, and that actually deeply disturbs me, yet every time I log in, I keep seeing the same names mentioned, the same concepts mentioned and there is very little new in any of it.

Why not take the primitive rhythms of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' and try something new, rather than lauding over Bonham, Paice et al (who I do think are great drummers) and really pushing some boundaries?

Well put. There are billions of great songs that no one has ever heard, because no one has yet written them and no musicians have yet rendered them. If I can bring help bring a few of those songs into existence during my life, that will be one measure of a life well-lived.
 
It's my hope that the next musical revolution will involve people being very silly.
 
I'm 16. My dad brought me up listening to all the classic guys...The Who, Floyd, Allmans, Free, Bad Company...You get it. And I've always been into Zep. but the other day my dad gave me a whole stack of Zep CD's. L.Z. 1, 2, 3, and Houses of the Holy. Wow. I had really only listened to their hits before this, but when I ran through the whole CD on my dads Altec Lancing Model 19's, I realized something. EVERY SONG on their albums are absolutly amazing. These days, it's all about the HIt. Bands put out CD's with 1 Hit, and then 11 filler songs that suck. But Zep is something else. So innovative-so original. True Art. So far, I have ran through Led Zeppelin 1, 2, and Houses of the Holy, the latter being my favorite. These guys really blow my mind everytime I listen to them. I just thought I'd tell someone about my new found appreciation for the most influential band of all time.



-MA


Try the BBC sessions. Really amazing. The best thing I have heard by them I think.
 
Even on XM it's STILL the same 3 or 4 songs! Ahhhhhh!! I turned on the XM on my way into work today and guess what! THE SAME SONG I HEARD LAST NIGHT WHEN I PULLED IN MY DRIVEWAY.

I'm not knocking Led Zepplin, just the programming guys.
 
Even on XM it's STILL the same 3 or 4 songs! Ahhhhhh!! I turned on the XM on my way into work today and guess what! THE SAME SONG I HEARD LAST NIGHT WHEN I PULLED IN MY DRIVEWAY.

I'm not knocking Led Zepplin, just the programming guys.

The only XM station that doesn't play the same songs over and over seems to be the Vault. That station playlists closer to the early or mid seventies "album rock" stations.
 
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