PunkAssBlog.com

The trouble with lacking a college education is you never get the training that involves writing to a maximum word count, which is bad for the blogger who tries to reply to comments.

Because the damn things grow on ya, like leeches or moss, until they’re too huge and unweildy for a comment, and justify turning into a post.

Anyway, first up melissas says:

Um…I like Queen, and I’m 17 years old. I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about when you say “it’s the certainty that eventually Clinton will be elected, that the reagan years will end and that none of the current badness will have happened yet” in relation to liking Queen’s music. I wasn’t alive for any of Reagan’s presidency and during Clinton’s election I was still in preschool. Where’s my nostalgia?

I think every 17 year old likes Queen, gay guys with moustaches singing about stuff, yummy. I think it’s one of those universal constants (The Fuzzy Lipped Q Constant) that neccisitates 17 year olds liking Queen, the sheer normality of liking queen as a 17 year old was practically overcompensation for my also being an anorexic self harming, marx/neitszche reading, nut case with anger management problems who was trying (and failing) to get a chemical addiction to something (the brief experiment that was “chasing the camel”, which involved a pack of smokes and a liquidizer, eventually put a stop to it), but when you reach 18/19 you will grow out of it. If you don’t already, listen to Sleater Kinney and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in preperation for your eventual metamorphosis into an adult with good musical taste. They’re good music, really.

If you still listen to queen regularly after the age of 19 you will be listening to it because you are aware of the history, I personally was born during the whole reagan thing (I’m barely old enough to talk down to you. Yes that is a signal to show I’m kinda joking here so don’t take any of it personally) but as the concept that people are listening to tracks for the reminiscence value rather than musical value holds true for the beatles listeners who were born after Anno Lennoni, it must hold true for queen also (which is possibly a logical fallacy, discuss).

Then stanton says:

I’m sure that you were just trying to stir things up and bait a few old timers for laughs. You appear to have sufficient familiarity with popular music and musicians to have a clue in your head about the difference between musical talent and musical genius.

But just in case you truly are as dense as you are acting, may I ask you to clarify a few things?

Since you say they do not play their instruments well, please list Paul’s shortcomings as a bass player and explain why so many bass players since have described him as the most innovative bassist ever.

Along the same lines, what were George’s shortcomings as guitarist, and please explain how he came to be listed with the great performers of his time.

While we’re at it, what were Ringo’s shortcomings as a drummer?

Please identify the tracks that demonstrate these deficiencies that you have pointed out in the above answers.

Umm, first off, I don’t think I insulted the beatle’s ability to play, the ramones weren’t as good as far as using their insturments go, but then the ramones weren’t about playing their instruments well, any more than picasso was about photorealistic representations of reality.

But even if I had, the trouble is that, yes, ringo and paul and george were good, and they were melded quite well together under The Lennon (& martin)’s musical ministrations, but because they were pioneers they suffered the fate of all pioneers: people came after them, and those people who followed made incremental and quantum leaps in musicology that made the beatles and their contemporary innovations obsolete, as indeed the beatles made their predecessors obsolete. And despite the Ruttlic church’s assertions to the contrary, The Beatles did not emerge ex nihilo from the fermament when the world was created in 1950.

Oasis draws their muscial style from the beatles, but also from all the bands that came after them, and while the beatles were good in the 60’s they would suck if they were a new band that had to compete with other bands from the now, and oasis would in turn be Da Bomb if they’d appeared in the 60’s playing the songs they play now.

It’s like comparing the bayeux tapestry to Dykes To Watch Out For, DTWOF is better, objectively, but you probably won’t have DTWOF strips hanging in a museum several hundreds years from now. Which is the future’s loss if you ask me.

Logically speaking, If the innovativeness of the beatles makes them good, and that is the main defense of the beatles - that they were innovative, then it is obviously not the actual music itself you’re listening to, but rather the zeitgeist that they were part of.

And there’s nothing wrong with that btw, just don’t tell me that the beatles, who suck in the modern context, are better than Oasis, Oasis Blows Goats, yet are still better than the beatles, Lionel Richie in the 80’s was better than the beatles, and Oasis is better than Lionel Richie (and not just because, afaik, Oasis have never stalked a blind woman).

And even if we really want to get into the merits of “innovation”, James muthafucking Brown and the funk/soul pioneers of the 60’s (let alone Hendrix or the Supremes, nevermind Joplin or Johnny Cash) blow them and their amazing whiteness away without any real contest.

And I say that last part as the whitest white woman in the world (color charts tend to list a shade of white as first “arctic snow” and then, several shades whiter even than that, comes “R. Mildred’s skin tone”), but the incredible ethnocentricness of The Beatles’ Canonization does bear mention imho.

Do you have any idea which group has had more covers of their work than any other, by a huge margin?

Frank Sinatra and his many chins beats the beatles by a long shot on that basis, and Frank blows goats, most cover bands tend to cover for the sake of pissing on the originator’s grave anyway, Punk as a genre has a lurve for covers because you can squeeze an incredible amount of irony out of a cover song if you work at it.

Add in producer George Martin, and you have a confluence of skills that melded with a synergy like none other in music history; a phenomenon not likely to be repeated.

You see, the thing is I know the difference between musical genius and zietgeist music, beethoven was actually a musical genius, literally, whereas every single band and musician since Robert Johnson has been labelled a “musical genius”, and generally this happens either because he/she/they have come to represent a distinct era/scene/movement or because he/she/they innovated in some way, now that last one is really irritating when it’s those cookie cutter sound alike/look alike rock groups, you know, grateful dead/def lepard/Metallica/whatever, because they didn’t, but it’s still odd for the ones that did innovate to be held in perpetual high esteem because they invented something new almost half a century ago, like the Me262 is a better jet fighter than an F16 because it came first.

Only the late greats of music from “dead” genres like The Jazz Messengers with Hard Bop Jazz, or actual Country Music (rather than the stuff that is currently marketed as “country”, country died hard, excepting Neko Case of course, who objectively Rawks (or “Cuntrees”, or whatever the term is in Country’s case, I like cities you goddamn toothless bumpkins you! With your flannel shirts and homoerotic pickup trucks! Bah, to hell with all of ya!), like Cash, get to be immortal and eternally marked as “good”, The Beatles did pop, and thus are open to obsolecence because Pop is still an extant genre that gets added to by each generation taht comes after any particular band/singer.

Until you get Oasis, which are better than The Beatles.

The same goes for the Ramones or Bowie or James Brown… or Queen. they’re just roadkill on the highway that represents the life span of pop and rock music. You may admire them as you scrape their once beautiful plumage or fur off your fender, but they’re still just roadkill, and stopping to admire roadkill is only okay if you’re a drunk botanist, and “admiring roadkill” is a euphamism.

The last group/person to excel gets their name eternally engraved on the tombstone at the end of that road, no one else.