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D.o.S. wrote:Wait what's wrong with Taylor Swift?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=capQ7vSirVg[/youtube]

Sure, but that's spectacularly unhelpful: Taylor Swift is, basically, Brand New. I don't think about them, they don't really exist in my spheres of interest, etc. Pointing her out as an archetype of some kind of universal 'widely spread but universally terrible' brand of music doesn't facilitate the conversation at all.

Also, the idea that millions of people like it so it must be good and/or 'of merit' would seem to be the exact argument you're making, even as you deny it, so I'm not sure why you would rush to discredit it? I'm sure there are more people, tbh, that have decided to start making music because of someone like Taylor Swift or any other Top 40 mainstay than the people who are making bad Refused records because they listen to Thrice -- if only for the sheer numbers involved.

An overestimation of music based on personal feelings towards it is exactly what DarkAxel was referring to in his earlier post. There's a very real difference between "I like this" and "this is of quality", and you can't erase the latter because of the former.

D.o.S. wrote:An overestimation of music based on personal feelings towards it is exactly what DarkAxel was referring to in his earlier post. There's a very real difference between "I like this" and "this is of quality", and you can't erase the latter because of the former.

Yes, I'm aware of the difference. I'm making the argument that the bands I mentioned ARE GOOD, and I like them, not just that I like them. I am fully aware of this difference. I would remind you that the same works in reverse. A lot of people have invested a lot in early punk and early hip-hop but ultimately I would say there's a big difference between "This record was so influential" and "This record holds up thirty-odd years later." 90% of classic punk is important and influential and respected, but not really anything to write home about.

I'm into hip-hop and also quite active in the Genius community and we have a bit of disdain for people who would top off their Top 10 list with Grandmaster Flash or say that '70s hip-hop or '90s hip-hop was better than modern hip-hop. It's like... well... not so much, no. Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa made really really important music, really fun music, too, but Kendrick Lamar lays waste to both TBH. Same with say The Clash. I'd rather listen to Titus Andronicus' The Monitor than London Calling any day of the week. It's more nuanced, bigger ideas, better lyrics, better musicianship. But I respect The Clash a lot because without them... where would TA be?

And we're back at the same place that all music arguments end up in, you like x, I like y, and there's really no way to say who's right or wrong, because it's entirely subjective. What blows my mind doesn't blow yours and vice versa. And that is cool. We've all said something along those lines in the course of this conversation.

Your argument so far has been 'these bands are good because I (and other people who don't post on this website) think that they are.' Which is fine, whatever, I'm still waiting for you to explain to me why Refused are selling out.

D.o.S. wrote:Your argument so far has been 'these bands are good because I (and other people who don't post on this website) think that they are.' Which is fine, whatever, I'm still waiting for you to explain to me why Refused are selling out.

Because they literally broke up their band because they had become a commodity. They chose to self-destruct instead of be a cash-cow. And that was honorable. They left a legacy that fans of the band agree was just spectacular. And now they're willingly undoing all of that.

http://genius.com/Refused-refused-are-f ... -annotated

We were hoping that we could be the final nail in the coffin of the rotten cadaver that was popular music, but unfortunately the reification was too big for us to succeed with our feeble attempts to detour this boring discourse.When every expression, no matter how radical it is, can be transformed into a commodity and be bought or sold like cheap soda, how is it then possible that you are going to be able to take "art" seriously? ...When we become just another subculture with all the right attributes instead of a real counter-culture, then it is time to die, to revalue the position that we are in

What happened to this, guys?

When I signed up for this forum* I thought it was going to be a serious "Death to false metal" type place but here I am, the pop-punker, and I have to be the one to point out that Taylor Swift unambiguously sucks...? LOL

*which I really love BTW

casecandy wrote:

D.o.S. wrote:Your argument so far has been 'these bands are good because I (and other people who don't post on this website) think that they are.' Which is fine, whatever, I'm still waiting for you to explain to me why Refused are selling out.

Because they literally broke up their band because they had become a commodity. They chose to self-destruct instead of be a cash-cow. And that was honorable. They left a legacy that fans of the band agree was just spectacular. And now they're willingly undoing all of that.

http://genius.com/Refused-refused-are-f ... -annotated

We were hoping that we could be the final nail in the coffin of the rotten cadaver that was popular music, but unfortunately the reification was too big for us to succeed with our feeble attempts to detour this boring discourse.When every expression, no matter how radical it is, can be transformed into a commodity and be bought or sold like cheap soda, how is it then possible that you are going to be able to take "art" seriously? ...When we become just another subculture with all the right attributes instead of a real counter-culture, then it is time to die, to revalue the position that we are in

What happened to this, guys?

Or... they put out a press release with a lot of pretentious nonsense because they were sick of being broke. They copped to as much when they broke up again (although not really) in 2012:

Then there were those years when the ideas you’d clung to through late adolescence were beginning to ring hollow and you got more and more confused and destructive and the band broke up and you had rent to pay. That was among the tougher years. And then slowly, over a span of time, you began to sort yourself out and your friends started making sensible decisions in their lives and it suddenly began to seem like most of you were gonna be ok.

And then there was the year when you stopped being a petulent kid and you got your favorite musicians together in a room again and decided that you were gonna accept the love of thousands of listeners, accept the success that was waiting there to be had and just in general enjoy being appreciated for the exact same qualities that made you a freak to your contemporaries in your teens.

http://dyingscene.com/news/refused-expl ... -up-again/

Seems to me like the band grew up. Apparently their fans did not, because if you don't want your band to be a commodity -- don't sell fucking records. Don't sell merch. Don't charge money for shows. I asked you earlier about Barnes & Nobel and Noam Chomsky: it was ignored, and I think it was ignored because it's accepting a truth that you've decided doesn't apply to the Gospel of Refused: that they were always a product, five-dollar words or not. They're no different from Taylor Swift, except that they're male and Swedish and inspired a lot of terrible chest tattoos.

I'm allowed as a fan to have a different idea about a band I like then the band does themselves.

I've never really been into Noam Chomsky, I always thought he was a wanker, too. He's very anti-Israel. Couldn't ever get into him. As a linguist, I guess. I definitely stopped reading AdBusters when I realized how hypocritical it was of them to be selling magazines for $7 at Indigo. That was conscious move. One of the reasons I stopped being a communist/whatever is because I realized how untenable it is.

You can have a band that isn't totally a product or a commodity. That's why it's so disappointing to see a Minor Threat t-shirt in Urban Outfitters; it's like, I thought you guys were the $5 shows forever band?

I think that's one of the reasons I could never have a band. Aside from lack of talent, LOL. I don't think I'd feel right selling art and there's no way to make art on that scale without selling it. This is a very depressing conversation.

I think I see why bands implode. It's no fun, this thing you thought would be fun. Maybe, like, volunteer worship group bands are the punkest bands of all. I'll look into it.

Anyway, if you're right, and they always were a commodity, then whatever, fuck them. If they weren't selling out then I guess they were always douchebags. They made a good album, though.

And now we've reached the real meat of this discussion: how we feel about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the greater Western interest in the Middle East (with a special focus on the relationship between Syria and Lebanon, postscript on Jordanian oppression).

However, if you want to take a romanticized view of Refused and Punk and whatever else, that's your prerogative. It's important, I think, to relate to these sorts of situations as a fellow musician and artist and realize that those sorts of things are a lot more complicated that "OMG they made a record with their friends what a bunch of sellouts." You can have a band that means something and still make enough to pay rent/not have to live off of dumpster pizza with integrity.

lordgalvar wrote:

D.o.S. wrote:I think the only people who can really determine whether or not they compromised their own principles that are the people in the band. Like, what are we supposed to get self-righteous about: a bunch of old dudes making an album for the hell of it? The fact that they're selling it as a Refused album? It is a refused album, and you had to pay for your copy of TSOPTC, so it can't be the commodification aspect, right?

So Refused have put out an album. Collectively, we don't like it. Whether you think they're pissing all over their legacy by putting out a bad record (seems to be the consensus from fans) or making another not-so-exciting album to go along with the others, that's what they're doing. I doubt this album will sell more than TSOPTC, I doubt this album was ever created with the idea of selling more copies of TSOPTC, and I can't say they're betraying their principles by making a bad record, which seems to be the beef here. It's not like they're going around saying "I wish Ronald Reagan was still alive so he could crucify Noam Chomsky" or anything.

There was a really good interview with Penny Rimbaud about this sort of thing when the Urban Outfitters/Crass Jacket thing hit. Whole thing is good, this is particularly pertinent:

I know that a lot of the DIY punks and the anarcho punks are going, “Oh, bloody rip-off!” Well, they’re not being ripped off. The anarcho punks have been ripping us off since the beginning of time, doing rather pale reproductions of both our music and our art. So as far as I’m concerned they’re just in for what they can get, and that’s laissez-faire [economics] at its most extreme.

I’m quite sure some people who follow us will be pissed off. But they’re not looking at the bigger picture. The sort of people who will be pissed off are the sort of people that are very happy to be working on a very small, almost ghetto existence within a particular genre of thought, a particular genre of action, a particular genre of behavior, and particularly a predictable set of political ideas. Well, the world’s changed a lot in 30 years and I think we’ve got to get hip to that.

http://www.vice.com/read/crasss-penny-r ... bands-name

Alright, all great points D.o.S. Refused do what they want. We can never speculate what they are thinking. Punk ethics are different all over the world (in the UK, most bands have managers and labels...there isn't a lot of this photocpy and a cdr stuff over there).

The only thing I have to comment on is Penny:

Crass is my all time favorite band. I have like 5 copies of every record (crassical collection, vinyl, beat up copies, etc...I ain't that crazy)

I remember when that interview came out, a lot of people I talk to (from around there/that scene) kinda just wagged their fist in that teenager jerk-off motion. Penny set up that scene to be like that where they rip him off. Penny, aka JJ Ratter, is around 15-20 years older than Steve Ignorant. He started out worshiping the peace preached by John Lennon, and then he followed the hippies to Stonehenge. It all failed. He had always romantised the idea of the "guru". When they setup Crass records, it was a brilliant idea that hadn't really been done before: use the profits to make more bands do the same. Unfortunatly, if you didn't have the sound he (or maybe John Loder) was looking for, you got cut out. Flux of Pink Indians wanted to sound more rock and hardcore. The album was remixed with the thin crass style production (very much influenced by Penny's influences). There are two versions of the early Flux stuff in print: flux's mixes and penny's mixes. This is also the reason that the first Conflict album and EP sound so different from the rest of their catatlog (and also why Colin* signed bands like Exitstance and played with AOA because they didn't fit Penny's mold). When Part1 released their first demo, Penny asked them to be on Bullshit Detector 2. Part1 said their sound changed from the demo to the early goth sound (every song is just bathed in flanger). Penny cut them out. Rudimentary Peni gave them the money for their first EP. The Androids of Mu were told by Penny to drop their drummer or he wont release thier stuff.

That bold bit there is definitely untrue man, I've been playing in bands in the UK for a long time (including an Anarcho band that I was in for a few years, we played with Oi Polloi a lot and I had a band with Scott from AOA for a wee while) and I've never known a band to have a manager, certainly not Punk bands, and there's tooooons of photocopied art and CDRs (including my own band's stuff).

Hey, Crass is my all time favourite band too!

casecandy wrote:When I signed up for this forum* I thought it was going to be a serious "Death to false metal" type place but here I am, the pop-punker, and I have to be the one to point out that Taylor Swift unambiguously sucks...? LOL

*which I really love BTW

I don't think there's any sort of genre associated with ILF. I mean, there's the doom room, obviously, but if you look in the "what are you listening to" thread, you'll see a pretty diverse range of tastes. Very little in the way of pop punk, though... Anyways, you may have gotten the wrong impression about this place. Its all about the fuzz, baby. And shit, there's fuzz all over the place. Even T Swift has some fuzz bass in there.

And come on, no matter how true punx you are, it's a little ridiculous to say that its a fact that a band is bad.

You're saying your music is good because it means something to you, and in the same breath saying that someone "unambiguously sucks." How do you know T Swift didn't get someone through some really rough shit? How is it hard to believe someone has the same devotion to her music that you do for Brand New? You keep speaking in absolutes when stating your opinion.

O Drones wrote:That bold bit there is definitely untrue man, I've been playing in bands in the UK for a long time (including an Anarcho band that I was in for a few years, we played with Oi Polloi a lot and I had a band with Scott from AOA for a wee while) and I've never known a band to have a manager, certainly not Punk bands, and there's tooooons of photocopied art and CDRs (including my own band's stuff).

Hey, Crass is my all time favourite band too!

Says the dirty sellout guy signed to a label.

The world needs Rock Stars D.o.S., im just stepping into the void

casecandy wrote:JESUS CHRIST! Now we're cooking with gas.

Forgive my brief response... how could I really respond point-to-point to all that?! LOL

First off, I completely and totally respect your knowledge of punk music. It exceeds my own a thousand times.

However... HOWEVER...

When I said that "punk started in D.C.," I said, FOR ME, it started in D.C. I'm not that dense. I'm well-versed in the Detroit proto-punk scenes that birthed The Stooges and The MC5 as well as the New York scene that birthed The Ramones and their contemporaries and their lesser-known, rougher compatriates, and then everything that went down in the UK. I know that stuff. Not like you know that stuff, no, but I agree with you, punk did not literally start in D.C.

For me though, it did. The punk and post-hardcore I like, and the indie rock that tied in with it, started in D.C. Actually, as much as Black Sabbath started doom metal, Rites of Spring started emo, and Fugazi started post-hardcore. Black Sabbath had its Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple, and then it had its NWOBHM; Rites of Spring had their Minor Threat, The Misfits, and dozens of smaller bands that you no doubt know more about than I do, and then they had their D.C. hardcore, but no one is going to argue with the fact that Sabbath were the first important band with all the checkmarks for doom, and I don't think anyone sensible would argue with Rites of Spring and Fugazi initiating post-hardcore in the same way.

I'm not going to even attempt to argue you on YOUR music, I'd look like an idiot. But you guys forget that you're arguing with me on MY music, which you seem to think is lesser than yours, but believe me, it's living and it's breathing with thousands, millions, of fans, and I'm telling you, when I talk to "my" people (Absolute Punkers as opposed to ILFers) they ARE influenced by Refused, they are influenced by D.C. It's as simple as that. It's literally a fact.

Just because you are affiliated with a a website with punk in the name, doesn't make you punk.

First off, I repeatedly said you can like what you like. I don't like bands like Brand New and Refused. So what? You do? So what? To each his own. Anyway, why in the hell does it matter if Refused is viewed as punk anyway? I never said they wern't or were. But really, what does it matter? They could be called "indy rock", "fart in bag", "punk", or "lowest common denominator" and what difference would it make? I never get into that argument as to what "is punk and isn't"; it is trivial and a stupid sematic line. It's just a label. Fine lots of people like them, but I doubt that "Absolute Punkers" gets millions of visitors a day to justify that statement "it's breathing with thousands, millions, of fans" because wouldn't that have made Brand New and Refused some of the best selling bands in the world right now? All I said is that you can't make blanket statements about the "punk" subculture. It's to diverse, nostalgic, and unique to ever make a blanket statement that they are "the sound of punk".

So yes yes yes I believe you when you say how important Crass is. You're going to have to believe me when I tell you that the music I listen to is equally important to a different but equally large and widespread group of people.

My point with all the crass talk was that you discounted them. And I was also just replying to Penny's quote, not directly you. I wasn't even trying to say that they were more important (even though they truely are) but more that they had an influence even beyond music: one of ethics, DIY business models, independent promotion, and bringing more bands to the forefront. I never said anything about Crass being better than anyone. I attacked them more than anything. I just find them interesting.

I have a very different conception of what punk music was important and what good music sounds like than you guys do, and that is okay. And I am outnumbered her on ILF and that is also okay. But if we were on my Internet turf, so to speak, you guys would be the outnumbered ones.

Am I making the argument that just because a lot of people like something, that it is good?

Fuck no! Otherwise we would be sitting here debating the merits of Taylor Swift and Katy perry.

I'm saying, there is a large and real community of musicians who cut their teeth on Deja Entendu and Full Collapse and The Artist In The Ambulance, and you can't just say "Oh, they have the wrong idea, because Crass."

And I repeatedly said that is fine. Like what you want. This message has brought up this to me, which I mentioned earlier in this post: I just don't understand why it so important for these bands you like to be labeled a certain way? Is it that important for you to have that label so that you can justify some kind of punk rock street cred? Sure Refused influenced people, just not the entire, or even a majority, of the punk world. Refused is refused. Just because they used punk in an album name doesn't make them punk. Defining punk is futile also (unless you want to refer only to those first and second wave bands in a concise/specific definition). Punk is something in constant flux and it is a pretty abstract term. It is more something you know than can always define.

But still what's wrong with Refused just being a band? An independent band? A band you like? Why do they have to have the punk stamp?

Paramore and a lot of those other bands you say were influenced were created by talent scouts and producers to market a sound for profit. Sum 41 changed with the tides to keep singles on MTV. Paramore is the same. Going from Tilt influenced, pop punk to saccrine synth pop and ballad writers at the freaking drop of a hat. Punky Brewster wore punky clothes like that girl in Paramore, it doesn't make them punk. Sure they can be influenced or even ape punk, but it doesn't make them punk when then intent is different.

Earlier I referred to my/our generation. But I forgot that generations are meaningless nowadays. It's not like the '60s where the whole generation (the one that people tried to put down just because they g-g-got around) shared the experience of Hendrix and The Who and The Beatles expanding their minds. There are generations within generations.

My sub-generation, then, is the emo post-hardcore pop-punk generation, and we are legion, and we have a shared, meaningful experience, and a shared, meaningful history, that goes from D.C. to the Bay to the Midwest to Long Island and Florida and Seattle and back again.

We listen to Rites of Spring, Jawbreaker, Fugazi, Dag Nasty, Embrace, The Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World, Mineral, Promise Ring, Braid, Texas Is The Reason, Further Seems Forever, Dashboard Confessional, Refused, Thrice, Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Glassjaw, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, My Chemical Romance, mewithoutYou, Say Anything, The Wonder Years, Underoath, Poison The Well, Dillinger Escape Plan...

Where you say, "Oh, that's when punk died" we say, "See, that's when punk was born" and we don't give a shit if you don't like our music... I don't give a shit, because it's for me, not for you. That's cool. DIff'rent strokes.

I never said that is when punk died; I repeatedly said it was a living breathing thing that you can't define anymore because it is too large and diverse. As a matter of fact, that is what I said I liked about it. All I have said was that if you like that stuff, cool. I don't. Early dillenger was alright though.

Say you hate Brand New and Refused but their sweat on the insides of their tour vans and my blood on the concrete venue floors poured and it proves that it means something. Just as much as all the old stuff that I admit that I don't know.

I can't really go toe-to-toe with you... but you can't just say "That's not real punk, see, THIS is real punk" because THAT is paper-thin ice.

P.S. Both versions of Vein are good

A lot of the bands I mentioned are currently touring bands. I've heard Fitz and the Tantrums are the hardest working band in the world right now. I don't think that makes them punk. Makes them a hard working band. But again, why do we gotta label?

And who the fuck cares that I don't like Brand New and Refused. Had chances to see them, didn't like them. So what?

I never said shit about what is real punk and what isn't. It's just a label.

O Drones wrote:The world needs Rock Stars D.o.S., im just stepping into the void

Gets a deal, changes in his ragged trousers for tailored drainpipes, turns down the blinding yellow on the Bandcamp page into a less-blinding yellow on the Bandcamp page...