bjack on 26/2/2016 at 23:52

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At lunch, Stevie Wonder was playing at El Polo Loco. Now that is class. :cheeky: A musician instead of a technician. Both have their place, lovers, and detractors. However, I bet most here than like/love Kanye would also say SW is a musical genius. Kanye though? I'm not hearing anything not already done somewhere else. He is just getting more coverage. Shit, I did some similar things on a 4 track back in the 80s. No, not comparing myself with Kanye West, just saying the avant-garde mixes he is doing seem predictable to me. I did not hear anything unexpected. Maybe its because I have listed to all sorts of stuff for 5 decades? It just goes round and round. Still, if people like it and buy it, then cool. Like what you like and be happy with it.

Last thing… I hope… Back in the 70s, I loved RUSH. Could not get enough of them. I would almost faint when they played them on the radio, since that was an extremely rare occurrence. Most critics HATED RUSH, saying they sucked and played nothing but teenage trash in pentatonic scales and weird 11/8 time signatures. That is why I loved them. Nearly worshiped them. I was a teenager. Permanent Waves came out in '80 and Moving Pictures in '81. Wow, how they grew and changed. Then Signals in '82 and I was done. I can't even name the next album. Wasn't interested. They had changed too much, yet the critics started to love them. They were super popular and I disliked their new stuff. The point? Just because someone or something is popular in sales and press does not mean I must like it. The only thing that counts if if you like it and enjoy it. Screw everyone else's opinion - unless you are throwing a party and no one wants to listen to your April Wine album.

Chade on 27/2/2016 at 11:57

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Yes, I was asking! It wasn't some elaborate trap. And now I'm listening to Jazz Against the Machine, because how it is physically possible not to at least try out a band with a name like that?

fett on 27/2/2016 at 14:09

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I'm with you bjack (except you really should catch up with Rush at about 1990- Presto. Alex put his foot down about the keyboards and found his distortion pedal while cleaning out the garage. Thier last album, Clockwork Angels is a final triumphant return to thier root. They really did come full circle).

You're also echoing my thoughts about the drum machines. I really do suspect that the majority of Kanye fans are completely unaware of how sophisticated and interesting many of the pre_programmed loops are out of the box. If you've spent half a lifetime listening to those, you're not going to hear anything that hasn't been done by some poor no-name shmuck who got paid bumpkus working for Roland or Pro-tools in the 80's and 90's. I guess if you've never had chocolate syrup on ice cream, the guy selling the syrup must seem like a genius. That's not stupidity on the part of the consumer, it's just a lack of exposure to what's being sold. Speaking of Bound 2, I fished around an old copy of Soundlab yesterday and found the proprietary file it's built on. He tweaked it a bit, changed a few notes in the bass line, but essentially, it's the push of a button. There's also some 50 cent stuff on there and surprisingly, a few things that sound suspisioucly like Common tracks. Hell, when Jason Truby was demoing songs for P.O.D.'s Testify album, we used some of those and Trey ended up just coping them for the final tracks. Soundlab was THE go-to drum loop library in the 90's so it's not a surprise that stuff has ended up everywhere. It's just annoying that Kanye akes such a big deal out of "creating" this stuff when the work is mostly done for him. Still, if you like it, you like it, so in the end it really doesn't matter where it came from. Some folks are happy to listen to that all day but if you've already passed over it to find the custom settings, it's a bit meh. Maybe if I'd never used all that software I'd be more enthused about him, and in that way I could be missing out somehow.

fett on 27/2/2016 at 16:04

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No argument there - I can't speak to much other than the tech-side because hip-hop is admittedly not my first love, or much of a priority. That being said, I can always be faulted for seeing the tech angle of pretty much anything, but that's the way I am, and most of my enjoyment of art in general is in the details of the tech.

FWIW, not sure which of my stuff you're talking about but the older stuff sucks because I didn't know what I was doing, and anything recent is purposefully out-dated and/or an attempt to do something outside of my comfort zone, and more than experimental on my part. I'm not trying to compete with Kanye or CCR for that matter, I'm doing it for myself, and am always happy if someone else likes it - that's about it. It's weird to me that twice now ITT someone has played the "well, you can't do it better" card, which is absolutely irrelevant to the conversation, and art criticism in general. Of course I can't - probably no one here could. I don't get the implication that it means you can't have an opinion about it (especially a dissenting one).

By "modern" I have to assume you're referring strictly to hip-hop because my more recent stuff is pretty much exactly in line (though not exactly on par) with "modern" power-pop, AOR, and 80's revivalist stuff that's being released every day, and selling decently well to its intended audience. Your comparison is dead on if you want to frame it that way but it seems a bit apples and oranges to me. It doesn't necessarily follow that people who don't make "modern" music don't "get" modern music - it's just not what they do. I listen to more 90's and "modern" music than I do anything that resembles my own output. But I have no inclination to do anything like that. I sang for a metal band a few years ago just for shits and giggles because I'd never done it, despite my aversion to that style of music in general. Just saying - it's faulty to assume because someone writes/performs like it's the 1960's they don't have any sensibility for new or popular music. The "you're an old guy" argument doesn't really apply here, especially since it assumes that I've said somewhere that I'm better, or that I can do it better. If I've implied that, I really didn't mean to because there's no way to compare such a thing.

bjack on 27/2/2016 at 17:21

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Random_Taffer, I think he will be as popular as POCO is today. Will there be a critical opinion in 20 years? We may have more important things to deal with than what music sounds the best, etc. Who knows? I can say he is imaginative, that is for sure. Maybe in 20 years I will "get it" and listen to him. It took me 20 years to like REO Speedwagon. Damn, how I hated them back in the day. Now I hear one of their songs and get all nostalgic. Couldn't stand M. Jackson either. Now I catch myself singing his tunes as I work. I've had "Rock With You" stuck in my head for the last 3 days.