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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 4:42 pm
by beats me
Angstrom wrote:
beats me wrote: What are your feelings on Garage Rock (Jack White’s 50 projects, The Kills, etc.)? I dig the rawness of it.
Modern Garage rock area is an interesting area. What it seems to aim for is a visceral authenticity, the raw sound of real poor white dudes in 1968 detroit with nothing to lose but their stake in a speed deal.
But it obviously exists within a modern world of overly-anal engineering, global touring of festivals and Big brand sponsorship.

It's hard to reconcile those two things.

Interesting. I haven’t really explored it that deeply. I think I like it because it’s so far removed from the washes and surgical edits of Electronica. It sounds like a band just jamming out.

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 1:15 am
by Angstrom
Let's ask him what he feels about DJs miming. Should be good.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1 ... grohl_ama/

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 1:22 am
by nathannn
Damn, Reddit is an unorganized shit hole.
How the hell do you find anyone's post in that mess?

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 1:35 am
by Machinesworking
Angstrom wrote:
beats me wrote: What are your feelings on Garage Rock (Jack White’s 50 projects, The Kills, etc.)? I dig the rawness of it.
Modern Garage rock area is an interesting area. What it seems to aim for is a visceral authenticity, the raw sound of real poor white dudes in 1968 detroit with nothing to lose but their stake in a speed deal.
But it obviously exists within a modern world of overly-anal engineering, global touring of festivals and Big brand sponsorship.

It's hard to reconcile those two things.
This.

When corporate rock was washed in reverbs and chorus and heavily produced, garage rock had merit. Now it's hard to take a person seriously who gets around by limousine but tries to be authentic... whatever the fuck that means. There are under the radar garage rock bands that are pretty cool, but honestly skinny white guys doing the blues is more than played out IMO.

For pure musicianship I'm drawn to metal and heavy prog like Animals As Leaders.

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 1:45 am
by stringtapper
Machinesworking wrote:Animals As Leaders.
*thumbs up*

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 1:10 am
by beats me
Machinesworking wrote:
Angstrom wrote:
beats me wrote: What are your feelings on Garage Rock (Jack White’s 50 projects, The Kills, etc.)? I dig the rawness of it.
Modern Garage rock area is an interesting area. What it seems to aim for is a visceral authenticity, the raw sound of real poor white dudes in 1968 detroit with nothing to lose but their stake in a speed deal.
But it obviously exists within a modern world of overly-anal engineering, global touring of festivals and Big brand sponsorship.

It's hard to reconcile those two things.
This.

When corporate rock was washed in reverbs and chorus and heavily produced, garage rock had merit. Now it's hard to take a person seriously who gets around by limousine but tries to be authentic... whatever the fuck that means. There are under the radar garage rock bands that are pretty cool, but honestly skinny white guys doing the blues is more than played out IMO.

For pure musicianship I'm drawn to metal and heavy prog like Animals As Leaders.

Oooor you guys can just ignore that aspect of things. :)

I was listening to a Pandora station based on The Kills and whenever a song came on that I liked and I checked to see who it was, most frequently it was The Black Keys and my knee jerk "keepin' it real" response was "They're kind of trendy right now. I can't allow myself to like them." This is what we do. Well, it stops NOW. I bought 2 of their albums and I'm enjoying them and I don't care what pimpin' lifestyle they are currently enjoying. :x

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 1:41 am
by Angstrom
Don't get me wrong, I quite like the Black Keys. I don't actually own anything by them, but I conceivably could do. I like meaty riffs generally.

I just find the whole idea of Authenticity interesting to ponder.
I don't mind somebody digging some old riffs, or enjoying ideas about old riffs recycled from the 1970's; because Jack White, or the guys from the Strokes are just guys playing music they like. That's authentic enough for me.

Where things get interesting is where the marketing men need to get the product into a niche market. So a term like "Garage Rock" to me means cheap broke dudes in the 1960s making hard edged music that represented their broke-assed existence. That's a thing. Then a little later, let's say 1998 we have some rich New York trust fund types who love themselves some MC5 and some Stooges and they love to play that music (the Strokes). Now is that still "Garage Rock"? I'm not saying it's illegitimate, I'm saying its one thing calling itself another thing.

Does that matter?
Perhaps not, but it interests me.

We live in an age way everyone needs their elevator pitch, their "story", their "hook", their "brand". And often to facilitate mainstream understanding of the "hook" that marketing hook they use is usually something we already met. We use cultural call-backs to save us time. It's the Instagram culture, strongly reference an old cultural meaning to quickly ascribe meaning to the new thing. This picture has acquired meaning because it is a polaroid with lens flare, this band has meaning because they are "like Iggy on the Dick Cavett show".


it's a reductive strategy.
By only being able to assign meaning using the generally accepted shortcuts we already learned we tend to get a simplified version of what each artist could be.
"He's like Frank Sinatra with a Breakbeat"

And it's not just a marketing label, easily escaped, because this is all-permeating way of thinking now. Using cultural shorthand to quickly ascribe meaning is the way that time pressed consumers are able to select almost everything. But at the cost of true originality.

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 2:47 am
by steko
Image

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 3:09 am
by Machinesworking
What Angstrom said.

Plus my own take and I'm sure it's not everyone else's.
We use authenticity as a marketing strategy. A couple years back all the mainstream R&B and Rap acts were calling themselves "real" or things they approved of were real. Every poverty story is used as a marketing ploy, not because we actually care or are interested in the struggles that Eminem for instance had to deal with being really poor, but because it makes him doing black music OK, he's authentic™.
As a kid I cared about that and liked the most raw stuff I could find, but later on it's more like I want my music to tell me a story. I would rather watch some goofball dressed up in face paint sing about the apocalypse on a a stage that looks like a Mad Max movie than watch another guy with carefully ripped blue jeans sing about his relationships. At least the former knows it's an act.

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 3:40 am
by eddiex
i recently saw a craigslist ad. for a garage band, where if you weren't rocking certain brands of guitars and amps...."don't bother."
my buddy started a band the likes of the mummies. he sent me a recording that sounded like it was recorded using a boombox, and they were going to release that as a cd. i said something about the production, and he said, "you don't understand, we did it on purpose."
not that they couldn't afford a semi decent recording, they did it to purposely sound like dookie...i think that misses the whole point of all of those old garage bands.
i also saw a video of this kid making beats on an sp1200....he argued that anyone making beats on a computer or anything equipment that "the rza couldn't afford in those early days" wasn't making true hip hop.
i've always thought that trying to make yourself struggle using crappy archaic equipment (which ironically is super expensive now a days) is so cheesy. it's like saying you are struggling because you can't afford starbucks or something.
those bands like the white stripes, and black keys and the yeah yeah yeahs....i love those bands, but it's like, get a bassist. that's a gimmick too.
not sure what all this means. but....

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 3:53 am
by Angstrom
I'm treading on dangerous ground using such words as "authenticity". A lot of the existentialist stuff leaves me cold with concepts of an isolated creative superman. I can't see it that way at all, because we exist and create in a social context. Lifting old ideas and running with them is fine by me because everyone has influences, and I think most derived meaning and enjoyment of art is usually down to a fine balance of familiarity and surprises.

But those anal kids with their VERY specific selection of amps. Or the guys purposely trying to sound terrible. I consider that to be Authentic!
I consider that to be the modern authenticity.
Rich white NY kids doing poor black guy Mississippi music, and white Swiss guys playing funk on a replica Space Bass. That didn't happen in quite the same way 100 years ago, and it began in earnest 50 years ago.

Our authentic culture right now is one of synthesis. We now have immediate access to a the largest cultural library of interconnected creativity. If some broad sense of historical creative "authenticity" meant being true where you were from, then we are all from a time that is culturally more interconnected than any Delta Blues guitarist in 1930 could ever have imagined.
I think that our problem is in trying to use tags such as genetics, location, upbringing in order to link ourselves to an out-moded idea of authenticity (in the broadest sense). It's an over-simplification that doesn't stand up in the modern media and cultural spotlight.

So while the people who use a very specific vintage guitar and insist on recording on a specific type of tape run on misaligned heads - they are certainly not authentically Duane Allman, but they are authentic to our hyper mediated now. Whether that's pleasant or not, is another matter.

I think that this new kind of authenticity is overlooked. It's almost too new, too close to use to really see it. So we continue to use old measures.

Meanwhile. here's RL Burnside. Being old school Authentic. ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_DOnKJ232M

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 4:04 am
by beats me
Part of the problem for me is we get into presumed "bandwagon hopping" whether it's a hot sound right now or repurposing a sound from the past. Each and every one of us did the same thing when we decided to pursue music. There was a sound we were drawn to and respected and we aimed to emulate it and knew all the formulas, gear, and key players that were involved. So why are we judging the same behavior?

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 4:24 am
by Angstrom
I'm not judging!

But I am thinking "Check out how fucking crazy this shit is getting" . The Beatles were trying to sound like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis, and Buddy Holly - they would do so by emulating vocal phrasings, rhythm, melody. etc. There was no real history to mine. "Rock and Roll" was barely five years old. They only had vague notions of what guitars were used, gleaned from scant few photographs. And anyway, you couldn't get equipment facsimiles, even if they knew what to get.

Skip forward to now and there's a huge cultural repository which we now know makes up the complete matrix of our creative heroes output. Jimi Hendrix played a Strat, which exact one, what pickups?, were they underwound? how were they potted? when he went to tape what was the exact signal path, what mic pre-amps did he use, what desk did he use, what tape machine, etc. etc.

Never before have we had this, and now we have it, and it is a (nearly) brand new way of interacting with culture.

I don't believe that this manner of fetishisation of technique, equipment and style is silly, or invalid. But I do think it's fascinating and new. At least it's new to carry it to these depths. Just think about a record, which samples another record, which samples another record. A 'producer' samples that most recent hit and plays it back through a retro 8 bit sampler audio output, simulated in software with a graphical reconstruction of a now defunct collectible device, which was laughed at while in production.

This is our authentic culture.
But nobody can see it. they are looking through it at the components. "But is he black?"

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 5:19 am
by beats me
Angstrom wrote: But nobody can see it. they are looking through it at the components. "But is he black?"
That reminds me of the part in the podcast where the host (first career comedian. Second career musician) was talking to Dave about the history of music and said "Well it all goes back to some black guy sitting on his porch with a guitar." It was said as a joke but it's also profoundly true.

Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 5:21 am
by Machinesworking
My gut feeling on it is there's a HUGE difference from the sort of cultural and genre data mining Hendrix was doing and say The Stray Cats. There was the beginnings of the sort of time/place/era lifting we see now for a long time, but the band that really just nailed this phenomena for me as a kid was the Stray Cats, an 80's band doing very exclusively 50's rock.
They were good at it and the songs were catchy, but because in the end they added absolutely nothing new to the table, they will be completely forgotten.

With few exceptions the best bands bring together different elements and create something new. The Beatles brought together american blues and rock, English big band melodies, and beer hall pop among other things. Hendrix brought funk, Blues, rock and a bit of crazy experimental acid music among other things.

So, to me anyway, The White Stripes etc. are good craftsmen but bad artists. It's like an exceptionally good painting of a lighthouse and the ocean. Great technique bad art. This doesn't mean they're not fun to listen to but it's kinda like a candy bar compared to a meal.