Rock Isn’t Innovative Anymore

From reading my blog, my tastes in music should be obvious. I like Progressive Rock, Classic Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Blues, Folk, and even some experimental stuff. But my tastes tend to be rather limited. I like guitar in my songs… and not just guitar, but, at least most of the time, guitar solos. But even with those, I’m picky. I don’t like “look at how fast I can play” odes to toxic masculinity (let’s be really… straight speed is basically “look how big my dick is”). I don’t mind speed, but only as one technique in a guitarist’s arsenal of techniques. And considering that David Gilmour is one of my three number one all-time favorite guitarists, speed isn’t even the most important technique, in my opinion (though he did have it to a point, he barely ever used it).

To be fair, no guitar isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer is another of my top 10 bands of all-time, and they only had guitar sometimes, with most of the leads being taken by Keith Emerson on keys, while the guitarist, Greg Lake, favored playing the bass guitar, instead. But even then…

Perhaps it’s because I’m a songwriter, but I don’t really listen to music as an escape. I don’t like going to clubs (too many people, too loud, not enough personal space), and I hate dancing (because I’m really, truly, honestly bad at it… I promise you… you don’t ever want to see me dance… you’ll have nightmares). So I’m not listening to music for the rhythm. I also don’t listen to music as background for something. The best time I have listening to music is, in fact, when I can gather a small group of friends, we can pour some drinks, grab some snacks, turn some music on, and sit and discuss it. I only got to do this rarely (and I haven’t done it in a long time… I miss it), but I have done it with Jimi Hendrix, ELP, Led Zeppelin, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Chantel McGregor, Anna Calvi, Living Colour, and Steven Wilson.

And this means that most of today’s mainstream music, including Pop, Rap, Hip Hop, R&B, Top 40 Rock, New-Age, etc isn’t my jam. I don’t hate them… I realize music is subjective, and I absolutely acknowledge the monster talents that can exist in these and other mainstream genres (Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar are just two of many, many examples [yes, I genuinely believe that Kendrick Lamar deserved that Pulitzer for “Damn”]). But, overall, when I look for music to listen to, I look, basically, for guitar-driven Rock… whatever that may mean. In short: I’m absolutely a music snob of sorts. (I still have trouble with Metal, though… I don’t like 80’s Metal at all, and I have a lot of trouble with the harsh growls and screams of heavier, darker Metal [some Prog Metal, and most Death Metal, Doom Metal, Black Metal, etc], despite the fact that the music in these genres is often incredible.)

So you might be surprised to find that I kind of agree with Steven Wilson, here…

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Streaming Service for Rare, Hard-to-Find, and Out of Print Music

I’ve already posted most of this on Facebook, so it will be familiar to some or all of y’all. But here I’m gonna expand a tad…

First, like I said on Facebook… I’ve been going over the take-down of What.CD, a private torrent site that, yes, shared official material (music, audiobooks, e-books, etc… no video, though).

Now, before I continue, I’m going to quote what I said on Facebook:

No, I don’t want to talk about how or why I know as much as I do about it, and yes, I agree that piracy is wrong, it’s right that piracy is illegal, people should support artists they love with money, and blah blah blah… we’re not having that conversation here.

And I’m gonna stress that here. We’re not here to discuss the relative morality of torrenting sites, question why I know as much as I do about the site, etc. So that’s the commenting policy. And that includes you, too, NSA, CIA, and FBI.

So anyways… I called What.CD the Library of Alexandria of music, and one of the reasons for that is because What.CD amassed an amazing collection of out of print, rare, hard to find, and/or prohibitively expensive music you basically couldn’t find anywhere else. It was incredible what could be found on What.CD, what new music you could find that you never heard before, and so on. And now that’s gone. Sure, torrent sites are like a massively exagerrated Hydra (shut down one site, a thousand more will pop up in its place), but it’s going to take a seriously long time to rebuild the What.CD Library.

But there could be another way, too… a… perhaps… more legal way… to rebuild a part of that library and make it accessible to everyone…

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Quick Life Update

I apologize for the massively decreased posting here. I’m not leaving. A lot of things are in the way right now. So there’s a few reasons for my seeming silence here…

The first is the fact that the publicize feature is broken. In the past, when I published a post, it automatically got sent out to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and even LinkedIn. Now I have to do all that manually. I don’t have a problem with this for APotW and GGS, but for more in-depth posts I want people to dig into, the extra step of manually putting these out on my social networks is kinda annoying.

The second is that things in my life have taken an… interesting… turn. I work at Teavana, and Starbucks has announced that it will be closing all Teavana’s by Spring 2018. Unless I’m working at Starbucks by that time (they will have to hire me as whatever their equivalent of a team lead is, or as an assistant manager, and at a higher hourly wage than what I’m making now, which is $10), I’ll post my thoughts on all of this, on Teavana, and stuff like that. I’d call it a “tell all”, but it’s just going to be my opinion, others will disagree, and, well…

Teavana is, perhaps, not the most popular place in the tea community, and there are good reasons for that. But there’s a lot of good at Teavana, as well, not the least of which is that it has actually served as a reliable stepping stone for people interested in giving up soda and coffee and the like and want to move beyond the bagged stuff… so it won’t all be bad.

As for the third thing…

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Self Care – My Led Zeppelin Holy Grails

I’m moving another post over from my old blog. I’ve thought about putting this here in the past, so here it is. Also, yet again I’ve got another series of days of just Self Care posts. I’ve decided to stop getting myself stressed over the daily disgusting Agent Orange headlines darkening the news and focus on two posts I’ve been promising for a while now… the policing post and the ableism and slurs post. Both of these have taken me so long because they both require a lot of research, formatting, editing, and so on. I can’t just bang these out in a few minutes and throw them on here. Which, of course, means I’m procrastinating. But not any more. I’m getting them done, whether I want to or not!

But anyways… let’s talk about Led Zeppelin…

As a collector of unofficial Led Zeppelin material, there are so many things I wish to have but don’t. A few rare things are simply because I haven’t been able to find them. Some more are because they’re being horded.

But there’s some material that, as far as most collectors know, simply isn’t being circulated. Indeed, for some of this stuff, whether or not recordings exist is a question hotly debated.

But my interests aren’t limited to unofficial stuff. They extend towards potential official material, as well.

I got in to collecting unofficial Led Zeppelin material on an old, sadly no longer existing forum known as Planet Zeppelin. My very first unofficial recording was known as “The Secret History of Led Zeppelin”, which was a 1-cd compilation putting together some of the material from the BBC sessions that wasn’t officially released. I can’t put in to words how I felt when I listened to it for the first time, but it certainly made me addicted, and I haven’t stopped collecting since.

I’d like to go ahead and list, with short explanations, my top 10 “holy grails” of Led Zeppelin material, both official and unofficial.

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Considering how much I love guitar solos, it should be no surprise that I have thoughts, here. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an interesting, and perhaps polarizing, institution in music.

On April 20, 1983, the late Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder and president of Atlantic Records, put together a team that included attorney Suzan Evans, Rolling Stone magazine editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner, attorney Allen Grubman, and record executives Seymour Stein, Bob Krasnow, and Noreen Woods, and founded the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. They started inducting artists in 1986, but they still had no home for the museum. So they put together a search committee, and ultimately chose shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio.

The very first performing artist inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1986 was, of course, Chuck Berry, considered by many who think they know to be the founder of Rock and Roll (I, personally, disagree, but I’ll get to that). Others inducted that same year included Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They all fit the original criteria of the foundation:

Artists—a group encompassing performers, composers and/or musicians—become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record. Besides demonstrating unquestionable musical excellence and talent, inductees will have had a significant impact on the development, evolution and preservation of rock & roll.

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My Recordings! Two Songs I Covered and One I Wrote in 2006

I entirely forgot about these.

This is really fascinating. Turns out I do have three songs recorded. Two are covers, and one is an unfinished original. I’m trying to remember the context. I know I recorded them back in 2006 (holy shit… I wasn’t even 21, yet!), but that’s about it.

The last one, the original, is what fascinates me the most. I managed to find two different versions of lyrics I wrote for it, neither I identify with now (and will not be sharing, because they’re both terrible). But I’ll get more into that with the track.

I’ve been asked in the past when people were gonna hear me sing and play guitar. Well… here you go. They’re from 2006, so it’s been a long time since I put these down, but this is what I actually have recorded…

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Hazel Scott; a Piano Prodigy (4 Videos Embedded in Post)

(It’s almost 8:00am. I finally managed to get tired enough around 4:45am to go to bed, only to wake up a couple hours later coughing due to an itchy throat caused by post-nasal drip. I’ve been like this for at least three weeks now… 🙁 )

There are 4 videos embedded here; 1 from Twitter and 3 from YouTube. Beware in case they autoplay.

So… I realize I missed this past Monday’s Great Guitar Solo, and I haven’t brought the Astronomy Picture of the Week series back. Hopefully I’ll be fixing that this coming Monday and Wednesday, respectively. In the meantime, I have another music post for y’all, this time highlighting the supremely talented Hazel Scott.

How I stumbled on her is actually really funny. I’m a huge fan of this podcast called The Read. So naturally, I follow the hosts, Kid Fury and Crissle, on Twitter. After the debacle that was Mariah Carey’s NYE performance, I was very very curious to see what they had to say. Sadly, they didn’t say anything. However, I did find a pretty funny tweet that Kid Fury had retweeted…

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Merry/Happy Something or Other! Got Any Good Holiday Music?

I was originally going to write this big rant on all this bullshit about “Happy Holidays” and “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Kwanzaa” and “Happy Yule!” and “Season’s Greetings!” and whatnot and about how I will never understand why anyone gives a shit about what greeting is used during this time of the year, because isn’t it the sentiment behind it that matters? But ultimately decided that wasn’t worth my time because… really… I’m over it.

Say “merry Christmas!” to me, and I’ll say it back. Say “happy holidays!” to me, and I’ll say it back. Say any variation of “happy/merry [insert holiday celebrated in December here]” and I’ll say it back because the sentiment matters more to me than the frickin’ words we use.

But anyways…

After various discussions with people, I realized that I am a bit bah humbug about elements of this season…

I mean, I do sort of hate that, in our capitalist society, we have to start “celebrating” Christmas before Halloween ever gets around, but that’s not what this is about.

No.

It’s about the music.

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Anatomy of a Guitar Solo

This is a post from my old blog, posted back on March 28, 2013. Not the best written post ever, but it’s a nice little insight into my mind when it comes to music and what I listen to. I thought there were a few readers here who might enjoy it. I am removing the references to one of my many abandoned blog series, because I just never continued it. Maybe I’ll reignite some of those old series here… or maybe not. We’ll see…

Of course, what makes a guitar solo good is a subjective question. There are even people out there who don’t like guitar solos!

I know… right? Seems like a mythical concept, like gods! But oh… they exist. They’re out there…

Anyways…

This post explains the kind of guitar that I personally like to hear. This is only my subjective tastes, so…

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