'vaca' is espanol for cow, dude!!! / some greatest hits from my week off from work
i- slept a good 11 hours every night
- survived the bachelor party in nyc
- realized, once and for all, that instrumental prowess, even when it is applied with the greatest care, with balanced attention given to expression and restraint, will invariably invite a label of 'excessive' in pitchfork album reviews*. case in point: the last sentence in the 2nd paragraph of the site's review of the new chili peppers album. i picked this example because, well, the author implies that the band jams these busy instrumental flights into songs where they don't fit, and that's just objectively false; there's some fatty tunes to be trimmed here and there for sure (it's a double album!), and maybe some of the brittle funk numbers necessarily seem forced from guys in/pushing into their forties (sorry, they still do these better than anyone else anyways), but whether you actually care for the technique-heavy stuff, you won't hear one song where it doesn't at least make sense within context.
honestly. i wonder why a reviewer would venture an assertion so clearly far off the mark, and the only motive i can come up with is pure chops-envy. geez, rob mitchum, sorry that the same group that once wore socks over their members at shows and played numbers where they turned on a dime at 200+ beat tempos can still write a more memorable chorus than the shitty garage band you play bass in.
for anyone that's not afraid of accomplished musicianship, i recommend giving the album a spin: from a guitar standpoint, john frusciante's fills and solos are nothing short of masterful. absolutely beautiful and sublime.
- defeated surly mailperson who scrawled an angry 'no name, no mail' on our mailbox, from which our names had previously been removed by persons/forces other than ourselves, by taking a piece of mail that had been delivered to us in error, writing 'delivered to wrong address' on it in angry red scrawl and placing it in plain view above our mailbox
- watched the movie 'in the heat of the night' with scott on saturday night. i remember that the tv series used to be the bane of days spent home sick/snowed in/on vacation from school as a lad, when tbs used to air episodes ad nauseam in the afternoons. while i could never sit through the show, i enjoyed the movie thoroughly. it's got a great soundtrack, too.
- bought an xbox 360 and 'oblivion' to go along with it. joy. haven't been big on fantasy/rpg's for years, but the whole experience is so unbelievably deep and immersive. i find myself getting giddy over the prospect of roaming the vast countryside of oblivion's compelling simulacrum and stumbling on a new ruin or cave to plunder, and thinking that there's something almost romantic about this, and realizing that, as big of a nerd as this makes me feel, this speaks to the escapist appeal at the heart of gaming, and represents the natural course of things as hardware technology evolves.
* now that i think of it, there's a sore irony lurking in the fact that a collective of writers who themselves clearly revel in panning shit in the most esoteric and specialized pop vernacular possible -- something they quite well most of the time, i might add -- seem to regard the specialized accomplishments of virtuoso instrumental technique in the same way that dracula would daylight**.
** thanks to ted koppel's remarks on howard stern for inspiring that analogy.
posted by jomilkman @ 9:51 AM
4 Comments:
hey milkman, sorry i missed you in new york, but i hope to get to boston one of these days to rectify that situation.
as far as the specialized instrumental technique thing goes, in the days when i actually possessed some technique in playing an instrument, someone (i have no idea who) compared the issue of technique to developing an elaborate fighting style. if you develop an elaborate technical style that is effective, you could totally kick anyone's ass six ways from sunday. however, if you develop a baroque fighting style that is not grounded in some simple fundamentals (ie, good taste) and is elaborate purely for the sake of being elaborate, then you will get your ass handed to you while you are flailing away doing what basically becomes an elaborate dance routine.
of course the best i can do now is bar chords and basic pentatonic noodling, so i am far from an authority on this matter.
i think that analogy works.
virtuosity for virtuosity's sake is creatively bankrupt, but i think the big problem is that many critics today -- legitimate and otherwise -- are so hyper-sensitive to this notion (still hungover from 80's excess?) that they summarily dismiss anything that's technique-heavy, all while forgetting or choosing to ignore the fact that pursuing minimalism for minimalism's sake is just as bad.
sometimes, you can say a lot with a few notes, or colors, or words. other times, though, you need a lot in order to say a lot.
again, i think it's funny that a website that can be prone to verbosity in writing from time to time would be so utterly consumed with assailing bombast in music.
feel free to borrow it anytime. i think you'd enjoy many of the songs
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