I think it’s great this campaign has got RATM to no.1 - not because I have any particular love for RATM but because it’s a nice combo breaker after four years of X-Craptor no.1s. I’m sick of manufactured bands and jumped up karaoke singers hogging the charts (especially as my gym plays nothing but chart music, bleh…)
Hopefully this will encourage more real bands to go for it next year.
[quote]roybot wrote:
[quote]worzel wrote:
C’mon fellas, dissecting a bands political motives/ideologies is fuckin pointless and is usually relegated to ‘older people’ who kids don’t give a shit about and don’t even listen to, or knobs that sat in the corner of a party blowin the head off everyone else who were trying to have a good time!
[/quote]
True. Besides, song lyrics in general are basically nonsense…some of the greatest lyrics ever hardly make any sense. [/quote]
Those are some huge generalizations, man. I dunno…
[quote]Rational Gaze wrote:
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Ironic that the people in the UK have seen fit to get Rage to number 1… all while living under Draconian gun laws with Big Brother watching from cameras on every street corner.
Someone should take their own advice…[/quote]
I take it you read the Daily Mail?[/quote]
Lmao
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
Those are some huge generalizations, man. I dunno… [/quote]
I’ll admit that there are exceptions (which was why I said “in general”), and there is undeniably some sort of meaning behind even the most wacky lyrics, but going back to Worzel’s point, what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t have pick apart a piece of music to decide whether or not it is worth listening to. Surely good music is good music.
There’s nothing wrong with exploring music on different levels, but in the end, if you like it, you like it. A first reaction to music should be emotional, not intellectual. At least, that’s my personal opinion.
[quote]roybot wrote:
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
Those are some huge generalizations, man. I dunno… [/quote]
I’ll admit that there are exceptions (which was why I said “in general”), and there is undeniably some sort of meaning behind even the most wacky lyrics, but going back to Worzel’s point, what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t have pick apart a piece of music to decide whether or not it is worth listening to. Surely good music is good music.
There’s nothing wrong with exploring music on different levels, but in the end, if you like it, you like it. A first reaction to music should be emotional, not intellectual. At least, that’s my personal opinion.
[/quote]
Don’t get me wrong, I pretty much agree with everything you said. That last part about the first reaction being emotional and not intellectual is something everyone should know.
It’s just that a lot of songs use lyrics for that very emotional reaction. The best songs lyrically can do both [usually emotionally first,then with repeated listens intellectual too]. And a lot of artists don’t really write special or exiting songs without their lyrics, that’s all.
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
Don’t get me wrong, I pretty much agree with everything you said. That last part about the first reaction being emotional and not intellectual is something everyone should know.
It’s just that a lot of songs use lyrics for that very emotional reaction. The best songs lyrically can do both [usually emotionally first,then with repeated listens intellectual too]. And a lot of artists don’t really write special or exiting songs without their lyrics, that’s all. [/quote]
All excellent comments, but when people tear apart music because they dislike the political affiliations of the lead singer, etc. as they’ve done here, then they aren’t really judging the music on its own merits (and in doing that they overlook the power of the lyrics to provoke an emotional response and serve as an extension of the song)…I can appreciate that not everybody likes RATM, but I just feel that a lot of people dislike the band because of their personal views and that really doesn’t support the idea that they are crap.
That kinda stuff should rank a distant second to the actual music. I mean, Spector is a cold-blooded killer; Gary Glitter is a pedophile. Both are objectionable human beings, but that doesn’t erase the fact that they were the same people that produced music which moved a lot of people.
After they were convicted, people stopped buying their music, for obvious reasons. But that doesn’t make their music any worse than it was before. Sure, that’s an extreme example, but you get what I’m saying here.
[quote]roybot wrote:
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
Don’t get me wrong, I pretty much agree with everything you said. That last part about the first reaction being emotional and not intellectual is something everyone should know.
It’s just that a lot of songs use lyrics for that very emotional reaction. The best songs lyrically can do both [usually emotionally first,then with repeated listens intellectual too]. And a lot of artists don’t really write special or exiting songs without their lyrics, that’s all. [/quote]
All excellent comments, but when people tear apart music because they dislike the political affiliations of the lead singer, etc. as they’ve done here, then they aren’t really judging the music on its own merits (and in doing that they overlook the power of the lyrics to provoke an emotional response and serve as an extension of the song)…I can appreciate that not everybody likes RATM, but I just feel that a lot of people dislike the band because of their personal views and that really doesn’t support the idea that they are crap.
That kinda stuff should rank a distant second to the actual music. I mean, Epstein is a cold-blooded killer; Gary Glitter is a pedophile. Both are objectionable human beings, but that doesn’t erase the fact that they were the same people that produced music which moved a lot of people.
After they were convicted, people stopped buying their music, for obvious reasons. But that doesn’t make their music any worse than it was before. Sure, that’s an extreme example, but you get what I’m saying here. [/quote]
Dude, I’m pretty sure we’re on almost the exact same page here. I did say, that they [and System of a Down] were great despite their political leanings, and that I don’t hold the actual politics of an act as long as they can convey it properly [the examples of Sex Pistols, Clash vs. RATM and SOAD].
I just didn’t think neglecting lyrics on the whole was right, which I’m sure we agree on.
[quote]roybot wrote:
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
Those are some huge generalizations, man. I dunno… [/quote]
I’ll admit that there are exceptions (which was why I said “in general”), and there is undeniably some sort of meaning behind even the most wacky lyrics, but going back to Worzel’s point, what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t have pick apart a piece of music to decide whether or not it is worth listening to. Surely good music is good music.
There’s nothing wrong with exploring music on different levels, but in the end, if you like it, you like it. A first reaction to music should be emotional, not intellectual. At least, that’s my personal opinion.
[/quote]
I agree with you totally on that one Rybot.
When you first listen to a track and in most cases today ‘see’ a track played on TV you are drawn in by the rhythm and the beat of the music or the flow of the lyrics.
The ironic thing here is that most people can’t even sing an entire song without getting the words wrong or mixed up’ so in fact most people haven’t got a clue what the artist is saying anyway!
That is unless you make the effort to dissect the lyrics to understand something other than the initial vibe you got on hearing the track for the first time.
Sorry guys, when I said Epstein I meant Phil Spector…I’m sending the wrong guy to the gallows here - lol! Don’t know why I confused the two when I was typing. Although I don’t think Epstein will care 
Morellos riffs are minted. Like Jimmy Page if he was locked in a padded cell with Phelps “Catfish” Collins sort of shit.
Had to laugh at that wee poofy prick Louis Walsh claming that Killing in the name of is a ‘novelty’ record.
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
Dude, I’m pretty sure we’re on almost the exact same page here. I did say, that they [and System of a Down] were great despite their political leanings, and that I don’t hold the actual politics of an act as long as they can convey it properly [the examples of Sex Pistols, Clash vs. RATM and SOAD]. [/quote]
Yeah, I think we are. I when I talked about people letting factors like politics dictate
whether they think a song is good or not, I wasn’t including you - I’ve read enough of your posts on music to know that you’re extremely passionate about the subject.
[quote]
I just didn’t think neglecting lyrics on the whole was right, which I’m sure we agree on. [/quote]
Oh, I never said that you should dismiss lyrics out of hand; I meant that the listener shouldn’t judge the quality of music on the lyrical content alone (as some seem to be doing here). Besides, as Worzel said in his last post, very rarely can you listen to a piece of music and get the songwords 100% correct the first time around…most people don’t ever bother to learn the correct words; or they try to and still get 'em wrong. In the end, they don’t care, but they aren’t trying to over-analyze the music, either. Not knowing the precise meaning doesn’t seem to impair their enjoyment. We see people fucking up songwords every day…and we see them smiling to the end.
Conversely, sitting down and reading them off an inlay card afterwards and forming your judgements around that isn’t an emotional response to the music, it’s a rational one.
But we definitely seem to be on the same wavelength here. We’ve just taken slightly different paths to the same destination.
[quote]Jack Urboady wrote:
Had to laugh at that wee poofy prick Louis Walsh claming that Killing in the name of is a ‘novelty’ record.
[/quote]
I had a damn good chuckle when Cowell said that Journey songs were good choices because nobody had ever heard of them. He has the balls to say that when his biggest hit is the Tellytubbies theme tune (no, I didn’t make that up - it really is his most profitable single to date). So much crap spews forth from the mouth of a guy who’s a self-professed “music fan” - LMFAO.
That’s because the Sex Pistols and The Clash were punk rockers in a era of rebellion. They were part of a transformational movements in rock and music at large whereby bands expressed themselves, their feelings and their thoughts through music in a way never heard of before.
The cool thing is that bands like RATM make people think about things like politics and the social environments we live in. They do it through music which is one of the best channels to do it through because it covers such a wide audience. Sure you could say that they don’t really know much about the actual issues they tirade against or passively support but then again neither do you and the other listeners. Because its music, what we are hearing are intellectual arguments emotionally supported, fueled and driven. These guys don’t want to change the world (if though if they could they would), they want to make people garner a new perspective perhaps or a different ‘spin’ on a social element, because they know sometimes people are only fed one type of treat by the ‘man.’ This no1 UK chart thing is successful in the sense that there’s evidence that people were able to change away from a product that they were constantly being given.
[quote]roybot wrote:
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
Dude, I’m pretty sure we’re on almost the exact same page here. I did say, that they [and System of a Down] were great despite their political leanings, and that I don’t hold the actual politics of an act as long as they can convey it properly [the examples of Sex Pistols, Clash vs. RATM and SOAD]. [/quote]
Yeah, I think we are. I when I talked about people making letting factors like politics dictate
whether they think a song is good or not, I wasn’t including you - I’ve read enough of your posts on music to know that you’re extremely passionate about the subject.
[quote]
I just didn’t think neglecting lyrics on the whole was right, which I’m sure we agree on. [/quote]
Oh, I never said that you should dismiss lyrics out of hand; I meant that the listener shouldn’t judge the quality of music on the lyrical content alone (as some seem to be doing here). Besides, as Worzel said in his last post, very rarely can you listen to a piece of music and get the songwords 100% correct the first time around…most people don’t ever bother to learn the correct words; or they try to and still get 'em wrong. In the end, they don’t care, but they aren’t trying to over-analyze the music, either. Not knowing the precise meaning doesn’t seem to impair their enjoyment. We see people fucking up songwords every day…and we see them smiling to the end.
Conversely, sitting down and reading them off an inlay card afterwards and forming your judgements around that isn’t an emotional response to the music, it’s a rational one.
But we definitely seem to be on the same wavelength here. We’ve just taken slightly different paths to the same destination. [/quote]
Yup, glad we agree :).
We’re not. The quality sucks independent of the lyrics. Nothing about it is musically complicated or interesting. Listen to the song that goes “Killing in the name of…” that we here on the radio 15 years after it was produced: how many different chords are there in that song, 5?
But that’s what pop music is: crap for the masses to listen to and throw their money away on based on their marketability.
[quote]Anyways, he found a pretty sour audience when me and my cousin saw it. Whose father was killed by the crack smoking (no joke) illiterate militia. They also nearly kidnapped my Grandma when she was on a pilgrimage to pray for the weak and poor. Yes, Zack, the Sendero are fucking heroes. They are TRUE Communists too, that’s why their leader is some white guy who comes from a millionaire family and was obese even when he was living underground. At least Che was an honest acetic and not just eating empanadas all day while children were starving and fighting.
God, his stance on Sendero, is about as absurd as some rich half Asian Swiss kid, making music lauding some illiterate meth-smoking deliverance-type redneck militia killing blacks, jews and urban ‘carpet baggers’ in some part of Alabama.
Just too absurd to tolerate. [/quote]
In terms of wealth, he’s just like the leader of the Senderos. Really, he’s never known poverty having been raised in a suburban affluent area on his mother’s dime.
Which brings us to the real source of his ‘rage:’ having a lunatic unemployed deadbeat for a father and a mother who paid all the bills with her professorship. He got to channel all that ‘rage’ he really felt towards having such a piss-poor father at ‘the system’ and ‘capitalism’ and ‘the machine,’ etc. Many people with daddy issues do this.
His mother sounds quite a bit like Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetero, also. The parallels are all there.
[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
System of a Downs first album [especially the first half] was great. I think better than any RATM album.
And as for political bands, this is why I never give musicians credit JUST for talking about social issues. Most musicians don’t know much about politics. You give their politics a pass if it fits into an overall aesthetic, or if it doesn’t get preachy and spends more time illustrating something and letting listeners decide, rather than attempting, and ultimately failing to explain.
Hence why Biggie was a far better political/social [and overall] rapper than Pac’s lame ass could ever be. And hence why bands the Sex Pistols, and The Clash do the political thing better than bands like RATM or SOAD even though their political leanings are similar. [/quote]
RATM and SOAD are two of the most, if not THE most politically active bands around. They both have held numerous rallies, concerts, sit-ins and other forms of protest for a whole litany of causes. The Sex Pistols never stood for shit and neither did Biggie. And I’m sure Tom Morello knows a thing or two about politics since he has a degree in political science from Harvard. The Clash stood for something, but whatever that was never made it beyond their music.
People can say what they want about RATM’s political leanings, but the bottom line is that they are activists, not preachers, and they use the high visibility that their band brings to raise awareness concerning all sorts of topics and issues. Their music has made two generations of kids start thinking about something other than bling-bling.
[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
We’re not. The quality sucks independent of the lyrics. [/quote]
If you personally believe that, then it’s cool: I’m not here to convince anybody to like RATM - I just don’t agree with you that all the people ripping into the politics of the band are putting they’re personal feelings aside and judging the quality of the music as actual music. Seems to me that there is a lot of criticism on this thread about what RATM get up to outside of the recording studio, but very little criticism of the music itself. There are times where you can speak for yourself, but not for others; this is one of them.
I can appreciate that, but to be fair, early forms of country, blues and rock ‘n’ roll are guilty of the same things, so I don’t think simplicity is necessarily an indication of weak musicianship or lazy songwriting. There are scores of far inferior songs that could be regarded as structurally more ‘intricate’.
Is Leadbelly any less influential because he relied on simple chord progressions and didn’t have a four-part harmony in the chorus? I guess Nirvana did a cover of this because it was easy to play.
Should Clapton have stopped listening to Robert Johnson because he could play flashier solos?
Besides, RATM was part of a movement which favored simplicity over the garish excess of the hair metal of the 80’s. Grunge was applauded for going back to the roots of rock; RATM were doing the same thing, but they somehow deserve criticism for it (the only explanation I can think of for this double standard is that people judge the band solely on their political standpoint). People forget that RATM were influenced by rap / hip-hop outfits with a political message (particularly Public Enemy), just as much as they were influenced by the likes of Sabbath.
All RATM did was to draw from several very different wells of influence. You could say that they managed to unite several demographic groups by combining rap, rock and a political message…they certainly weren’t playing it safe. At the very least, they made people think.
[quote]worzel wrote:
I was 15-16 years old when I first got into RATM and I didn’t give a shit about what was going on in the world around me and I can safely assume that most kids of the same age think along the same lines. All that mattered was if the music kicked ass and RATM did just that! All this political spiel blah blah about RATM means fuck all to kids who are getting pissed, stoned and hopefully screwed.
C’mon fellas, dissecting a bands political motives/ideologies is fuckin pointless and is usually relegated to ‘older people’ who kids don’t give a shit about and don’t even listen to, or knobs that sat in the corner of a party blowin the head off everyone else who were trying to have a good time!
It’s first and foremost all about the energy in the music and if you missed that point well then…[/quote]
Or maybe older people don’t want to give a dime to enrich someone who works against my beliefs? Young people are often buying this crap with mom and dad’s dimes btw.
And believe it or not, u s46 year old guys have seen a lot of music in our day. and very little years ago was politically motivated in such a stupid way.
An old buddy, RIP, who was lead singer in a cover band said it best, " We don’t play Rage. Why? Whah, wha, wha, I have a million dollars." He thought they were full of crap then, and many of us have and still do.
[quote]tom63 wrote:
[quote]worzel wrote:
I was 15-16 years old when I first got into RATM and I didn’t give a shit about what was going on in the world around me and I can safely assume that most kids of the same age think along the same lines. All that mattered was if the music kicked ass and RATM did just that! All this political spiel blah blah about RATM means fuck all to kids who are getting pissed, stoned and hopefully screwed.
C’mon fellas, dissecting a bands political motives/ideologies is fuckin pointless and is usually relegated to ‘older people’ who kids don’t give a shit about and don’t even listen to, or knobs that sat in the corner of a party blowin the head off everyone else who were trying to have a good time!
It’s first and foremost all about the energy in the music and if you missed that point well then…[/quote]
Or maybe older people don’t want to give a dime to enrich someone who works against my beliefs? Young people are often buying this crap with mom and dad’s dimes btw.
And believe it or not, u s46 year old guys have seen a lot of music in our day. and very little years ago was politically motivated in such a stupid way.
An old buddy, RIP, who was lead singer in a cover band said it best, " We don’t play Rage. Why? Whah, wha, wha, I have a million dollars." He thought they were full of crap then, and many of us have and still do.[/quote]
Don’t blame being conservative on being older, I’m 47 and love to lift to RATM. It’s just music, I don’t have to ascribe to their politics.
It would be my guess that most artists political views don’t align with yours, they’re just not as vocal about it.