You can't imagine why a forum of predominantly adult men in their late twenties to mid forties would be interested in an article about aging gracefully and maintaining warm healthy relationships with their peers?
it's really not. It's easy for some, sure and you're maybe one of them (or perhaps mistaken!) but many, many MANY people, especially men, even intelligent men struggle with social situations and maintaining healthy social relationships.
Be nice? Don't be a know it all? Even if you don't believe it you've surely heard people say it sometime in the last 40 years. Autism notwithstanding, and that probably accounts for a decent share of the readership
I am, and don't ... but that still doesn't mean it doesn't take effort. There's way more to it than smiling and not being a complete tool.
How long has it been since you called your long lost best friend and caught up? Did you go to his brothers funeral? Check in on him after his divorce? A year after his divorce? 5?
It takes effort and is far from elementary no matter how much rizz you have.
HN in general has a very strict policy against what "people find interesting":
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
News are like addiction, people don't act in their own best interest, they upvote things that they don't really want to see.
Also "just flag it" is not "wasting moderator's time", but the recommended procedure:
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
Well, that means hardly anything. Is up to us, and the moderators, to choose what we want HN it to. I find politics interesting, and often are pretty much on topic, e.g. politics related to protecting personal information. But often are not, and full of ad hominem "arguments"
From my POV, there is no doubt HN is getting more and more involved in politics and more and more polarized, which IMHO is not good. But I'm just one of many users... if it keeps going that way, I may have to leave. Is ok. In the meantime I will keep giving my opinion, as that is the very least what I expect from such a site: to be able to give an opinion (respectfully) without being instantly attacked, verbally or downvoted to oblivion. As can be seen in this case, we are reaching the point where that is not possible anymore... Let's see if the honest people or the trolls win the "battle".
It doesn't mean hardly anything, it means exactly what I said. The guidelines are not strict. They are loose guidelines. That's not an attack on them, it's just an observable fact. The guidelines say one thing, but the users vote for another.
Just meant "flag it if you think is off topic"... but no worries. I'm very used of people in HN not able to read in context... seems to be fried brains from too much AI use. Anyway, IMHO was pretty much off topic. I think we are allowed to have different opinions, you little dictator.
Oh, yeah? So do you! Oh, God, whatta - whatta dumb thing to say, right? I mean, you say it, "You play well," and then right away I have to say "you play well". Oh, oh, God, Annie. Well, oh well, la-de-da, la-de-da, la-la. Yeah.
Luna Schlosser: I absolutely do not want to hear about it, Herald. This world is so full of wonderful things. What makes people suddenly go berserk and hate everything anyway. I mean, why does there have to be an underground? After all, there's the orb, and there's the telescreen, and there's the Orgasmatron. What more do they want?
Herald Cohen: It's hard for us to understand the criminal element. We're artists. We respond only to beauty.
That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords.
Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes.
I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.
Yeah, that's definitely 'the' Kurt thing, vocal melody completing power chords.
I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through other means.
Going back all the way to the '60s, if you listen to interviews with Paul McCartney of The Beatles he states very plainly that he knows no music theory, and can't read music.
I suspect this is true of many great songwriters, maybe even most of them. I would even argue that studying music theory may even make you a worse songwriter, because the most innovative songwriters don't seem to follow some clearly established rulebook, but rather they bend/break the "rules" unknowingly because their focus is on what they are feeling/hearing rather than something more analytical.
Paul McCartney deliberately avoided learning how to read music, but he understands music theory just fine. They are two different skills. It's quite clear from The Beatles' music that they know about keys, chords, etc.
For example, McCartney tells a fun story about The Beatles traveling across Liverpool to learn a single B7 chord in their early days: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_r5B1AhP1Fo
I hear your point. I wouldn't personally consider someone who knows what a key or a chord is to be well-studied in music theory. Surely even Kurt Cobain understood which power chords he was playing, for example.
I was referring more to being well read in music theory in the academic sense. I am doubtful McCartney ever picked up a book on the subject. Traveling to meet someone so they can show you how to position your fingers so you can play a B7 chord is a bit different than that in my opinion.
I hate going into semantics like this, but I guess there's no other way.
Music - rhythm, harmony and melody - has patterns. Those patterns can be described / named. There are systems to also write them down.
When you mention reading / writing music and music theory, western notation and western music theory are what first comes to mind for most of us here. They are obviously not the only ways. Any one of us can trivially make our own systems, or adopt tiny portions of the western system. I have no doubts that people have done that.
From my personal experience, back we were teens, my friend group and I knew a tiny bit of theory (5ths, major, minor, 7th chords + pentatonic / blues scales) so we could use that in communication. The other thing we'd do is refer to motifs by citing them from songs, like "drum beat like When the Levee Breaks" or "strumming pattern like Where is My Mind). Or "for the brigde, turn it around like in Goddamn Lonely Love". Your group knows the same songs, and then you just cite that + show someone something on a guitar.
If you play with a wider group of musicians, a language likely starts to appear, and things get called fixed names more often. No doubt that all the blues people did it, the Beatles and that whole scene did it, ...
Now, if you're into music enough, and want to communicate with other musicians from different backgrounds and genres, it makes sense to just learn the regular western notation (because it's convenient for noticing harmony) and theory (because it has names for all the concepts). It's a bit infuriating that such fancy names ("dominant", "leading tone") are given to such seemingly simple things, but this is true of any jargon.
I've seen the equivalent with self-taught programmers, where they understand some CS concept, but can't name it properly. Maybe in your local demoscene, it got called something else, because nobody has formal CS knowledge. That was quite frequent before the internet, but still is possible when people do something as a hobby.
But for western music theory and notation, you can use it strictly descriptively and not prescriptively. Learn some, then transcribe your favorite songs, write down the progressions in roman-numeral-notation or something, figure out which scales are used, figure out how melodies fit over chord changes, ... Shame music education is closely tied to a classical (and / or jazz) repertoire in most places, it doesn't need to be.
But in any case, both playing well and writing songs obviously takes a lot of practice and effort, and you use whatever you have at your disposal to help. The "we don't practice, we don't care, this just comes out of our soul on its own" is plainly disingenuous, that's the most toxic part of it. But you can't write music without theory, at least your own pidgin theory.
there is a wall, on one side is everything that has been done.....and can be learned/replicated.
If someone is compeled to see the other side
the best way through, ha!, is with very little baggage/knowledge or theory
some few talk about the experience of
crossing that divide, but in no way are they responsible for anyone else considering there museing, instructional
if you want a gentler discorse on the process, then there is no one better than keef, and his various atempts to explain why 5 strings are all he can handle, does alright with them as well
Did he pretend, or did he really not know? The blues was founded by people who rediscovered Western music theory on their own, in part because guitars lend themselves to it. Punks learned that they could play power chords because they work with the messy overdriven sound.
Theory can explain it after the fact, and can extend your options (or at least save you time knowing what you want). I know a lot of "untrained" musicians had a fair bit of theory, but I don't know about Cobain.
The blues isn’t really compatible with conventional tonality: it’s basically major chords with added minor seventh (I won’t call them dominant sevenths because they don’t function as dominant chords), with minor pentatonic (plus added flat fifth) melody. There’s no way that combination can possibly work—but it does!
IMHO that’s a narrow definition of the Blues, and the genre is much wider. From the top of my head, I’m thinking of BB King playing “The Thrill is Gone”. Still blues, but in a minor key. Definitely not major chords with an added minor seventh.
For the minor blues scale working over a major blues progression - I think the dissonance is okay because the flat third and fifth are often passing tones. If you loiter on them, they are more jarring.
I wouldn't say the minor third is a "passing tone" at all, it's the defining note of the minor scale. Listen to e.g. "Mannish Boy"--the minor third is absolutely essential to that riff.
Agree that of course there are blues songs with definitely minor harmony, but I still think the really distinctive and innovative characteristic of blues is "minor melody over major harmony"--the minor pentatonic scale was already ubiquitous in African-American music in e.g. spirituals. That's just incredibly weird and I can't imagine how it must have sounded to white audiences hearing it for the first time.
I think you’re misunderstanding the context I was replying to.
Of course a minor third is important to a minor scale. But if the underlying harmony happens to be a major chord, then the minor third is dissonant relative to the harmony.
I referred to this dissonance as a passing tone because you said “ There’s no way that combination can possibly work—but it does!”.
Yeah, the added flat fifth really isn't a Western European thing, that's what made it different, cool and appealing. Also the shuffle rhythm.
But if you listen to a lot of blues, play a lot of it, play with other blues players, etc. You will notice there's a vocabulary, idioms, etc. You can learn them by ear. You can call them by names of songs or players (Bo Diddley beat), or by the number of bars, ... Well, all of that is kind of - theory. Also, knowing which things you wouldn't play because they don't fit the style, that's also theory.
I like Nirvana as much as the next 90s kid but there is no way these are the best songs in human history, or even in rock history, or even in "modern rock" history.
It's because the fans who like Cobain's songs overpraise him or praise him in the wrong terms: "OMG Kurt Cobain is a genius songwriter."
I think, and as this post suggests, it's much more the case that "Kurt Cobain had very good instincts for someone completely untutored" which is a different thing altogether.
But I think most of us would take a musician with great instincts and not much theoretical understanding over one with extraordinary theory and poor instinct. How many thousands of boring jazz players have been pumped out by university programs over the past 50 years? Meanwhile John Lee Hooker could just vamp over a single chord and I could listen to it for hours.
I'm remembering a scene in Hampton Hawes's autobiography where a well known piano teacher was telling him his students were starting to ask how to play like Hampton. He tells him he wants to give him lessons to help his technique, which he thinks will help his natural talent even more, but Hampton finds it boring and never goes back. The teacher framed Hampton's check he used to pay for the lesson and put it on his wall. All that's to say having great ears can bring you a long way.
FWIW, I'm a huge fan of both John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, who had similar vamp-based playing styles and were untutored, couldn't read music, &c. One of my guitar teachers knew Hooker and he even imparted "the secret of the guitar" to him, which he then passed down to me.
But yeah, feel, instinct, and having good ears can carry you a long way especially for solo artists. I'm still glad I can read music and wouldn't trade that for (almost) anything, though.
Yeah absolutely, I'm not arguing against theory by any means. I'm happy I know it, but often times I wish my early music teachers spent more time with me on following my ears than whatever it was they were trying to do. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found someone that really cared about that.
But also... what's John Lee Hooker's secret of the guitar??? Don't hold out on us!
It's supposed to be transmitted orally, like a story from Homer or something, so I won't copy and paste it here, but you can find it easily enough by searching. Basically, without quoting it word-for-word, it's old bluesman advice from the "diddly-bow" era that when starting out on guitar, string it with one string only and play it until you can provoke emotion from an audience with one string. When you can do that, add another, repeat the cycle, add another string, until all six strings are on the guitar.
Oh I get it, I practice Vajrayana Buddhism and a lot of the tradition is still transmitted orally and in person.
But the gist of that method actually sounds a lot like how my music teacher approaches things, he won't let you move on in your improvisations on a new tune until you can get a feeling from playing just half and whole notes on the changes. His teacher was Lennie Tristano so he's very driven by developing that ear instinct.
I don’t know how you can say with a straight face that smells like teen spirit isn’t one of the greatest modern rock songs. That riff is etched in music history at this point
It's not even in my top 5 Nirvana songs. The riff you're talking about is Boston's "More Than A Feeling" --- so much so that they used to play a fake-out of "More Than A Feeeling" in concert. I like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" more than "More Than A Feeling", but not like, much more.
1. Where Did You Sleep Last Night Unplugged
2. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle (or, interchangeably, "Rape Me", though the "blanket of ash" line gets me every time with Frances Farmer).
3. Lithium
4. Heart Shaped Box
5. Dumb (unplugged).
It's not fair to make the #1 song a cover, but that performance merits it.
It was culturally influential, signaled the end of glam rock, and was even dubbed the anthem of a generation, but it didn't showcase great songwriting. It's not fair because he had time to grow as an artist, but "Everlong" is a better song.
I don't know that I think he was a genius? If I don't think Husker Du, the Pixies, and Sonic Youth were genius-led bands, I'm not sure how a band that basically synthesized those bands and then lensed them through Guns n Roses could be genius. Is David Bowie a genius? Maybe, if we're generous?
When I hear people call Cobain a genius I feel the way I do when I'm hear someone say they've never seen The Wire. Listen to Surfer Rosa and Rid of Me!
None of this is to say Nevermind and In Utero aren't good; they're very, very good, I listen to them all the time 30 years later. But like, I still listen to Soundgarden every once in awhile too. They're not geniuses!
I mostly agree with you, but I suspect there's an element of just being the right age.
I think of Kurt Cobain like an accidental Elvis Presley. Perfect for the moment, and (unlike Elvis) mostly organically grown, but with very clear antecedents.
I cannot point to strong antecedents of Pixies, Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses, PJ Harvey, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Slits, Bongwater, Kate Bush, The Cure, etc. In a couple of these cases, I suspect my own ignorance. In others, I could (and might) argue all night! :)
But I cannot assemble a case for not recognizing David Bowie as a (musical|performance) genius. I don't even enjoy his recordings very much, but he was artistically sui generis and enormously influential.
Influence might not be a requirement of genius (I'm not sure), but surely a novel creativity is at the root of it?
Sonic Youth was the Velvets and The Fall; I found a list of setlists from '70s CBGB and made a playlist, and you can hear Sonic Youth all over it.
Throwing Muses (a favorite of mine) a little harder to pinpoint, feels to me like the product of a scene more than a direct evolution of clear antecedents, rather than an act like Dinosaur Jr. was a perversion of Neil Young. A good contrast to Nirvana.
PJ Harvey is the Pixies antecedents plus Patti Smith. People say Beefheart; I don't know Beefheart well enough to say and have a deep suspicion of people who bring up Beefheart.
Kate Bush is prog rock.
Einsturzende is Can (or like a violent response to Can).
The Cure is radio-friendly post-punk; their early stuff, which is the only stuff that comes close to holding up, is basically Wire.
This is a complete non-sequitur, but I'm putting it here just because the sort of people who made it this deep in the comments might appreciate the story.
For Halloween, I duct-taped a banana to a tee-shirt, intending to go as Comedian[1], which had been in the news recently. My manager, when seeing me dressed this way immediately asked "Oh, are you The Velvet Underground and Nico? I love that album!" I countered with "Did you start a band?" and he said "Yes! How did you know?"
Interesting. I hear the echoes that you mention in Sonic Youth. I would add New York Dolls.
But Sonic Youth also brought something new, more than most bands do. I've listened, as professional obligation, to the entire catalog of Velvet Underground, The Fall, New York Dolls, Iggy Pop. The Fall were the most inventive but Sonic Youth still exceeded them. I recognize that these are the giants upon whose shoulders so many other artists stand, though.
As with The Cure, there are (at least) two Sonic Youths. I see The Top and Daydream Nation as the final recordings of their respective original incarnations.
Interesting that you hear Throwing Muses as a product of a scene. I'd agree for the later records (post-House Tornado), but there was definitely no contemporary scene that the first few records fit into.
I thought about including Lush in my previous list, but did not because, although they had a unique sound, they are a clear extension of the scene they emerged from. Again thinking of the first few releases (EPs) primarily -- after 1993 or so all Brit pop sounds alike for several years.
Re: Kate Bush -- aside from the Fairlight (as successor to Moog) synth, and concept albums, I don't hear much prog rock in there. I think I may prefer to remain ignorant here!
I also left out Siouxsie & The Banshees (again, ~1980-~1990), which was an inexcusable oversight!
Loud-quiet-loud was the signature sounds of Nirvana - borrowed from Frank Black who pioneered it with the Pixies. Kurt was a way better singer and better looking than Frank Black. Along with good songs, that was a recipe for success.
I am a big Nirvana fan. But a bigger Pixies fan. A chunk of Pixies sound/energy was inspired from the guitar middle/outro in B52's "Rock Lobster".
I like both of them, I don't think either is a genius, and I think both Frank Black and Cobain are on basically the same level. I really think it's underappreciated how much the early Seattle sound was just a fusion of 80s punk and hair metal. If you play Smells Like Teen Spirit and the Breeders "Hellbound" back to back, and you like Nirvana much more, what you really like is Guns n Roses.
If you magnify Alice in Chains' beginnings and pretend like Andrew Wood hadn't died and Pearl Jam never existed and Mother Love Bone became popular, the hair metal influence becomes much more obvious.
Surely if genius is to maintain any usefulness as a word at all, it has to mean more than that the person didn't work with a big production crew or have a "primary collaborator", whatever that means. How irrelevant!
I'm not sure if this notion of "genius" helps people appreciate music or if it just worsens the idolising/othering aspect of it. If we are going to use the word, though, can we not attempt to reserve it for the uncontroversial candidates, like Art Tatum, for example.
I mean, you have lost credibility in my eyes by claiming he wrote some of the best songs in human history. Have you any idea the sheer scope of music that has existed?
What a ridiculous statement.
Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable. By his own statement he wasn’t aware of any tonality and didn’t even care to. That folk come along decades afterward and try to fit it into various boxes is good for them, but shows a complete misunderstanding of what he was doing as an artist. I’d imagine he’d shake his head at this entire thread.
When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter.
In fact, the ability to tap into mass media only makes the impact of a song greater. Access to electric instruments and effects only gave them more ability to create interesting music.
I’m a fan of all kinds of music old and new. But anyone saying German leders or old timey civil war ditties are better than Smells Like Teen spirit are high on their own supply.
Most of history humans expressed an extraordinarily limited range of emotion in song, in rigid form. Kurt Cobain wrote more than one song that you could play for a toddler and they’d love it. He wrote more than one song that hundreds of millions of people are listening to 30 years later. I’m sorry but your favorite Gregorian Chant is just not very good in comparison.
This comment is such a weird way to defend the patently absurd claim that he wrote some of the best songs in human history.
Even the first sentence makes no cogent sense, especially when read alongside your original comment:
> When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter.
You've apparently changed your argument. "Best in human history" does not mean "most culturally significant and catchiest."
If "the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn't matter," then why did you mention all of human history?
If what you mean instead is that you care only about contemporary, present-day cultural impact, then, again, why did you mention all of human history? You've already decided that no time period other than the present matters.
I think it's important not to overlook Butch Vig though.
Are there Nevermind demos circulating? (Maybe an official release even, I've never looked)...
They were good songs, maybe even great songs. But I think I could name a dozen bands from the same period who had equally-good songs.
Butch Vig turned those good-great songs into anthemic stadium crashers. I'm not a huge fan of Butch Vig, I think he has a very heavy touch! But he met (or predicted) the moment on that record. The industry/audience moment at least, I don't think the band entirely wanted what they got!
Most people would never have heard those songs without Butch Vig. They would not be on any RS Top X lists.
Kurt might still have been a genius, but he'd have been sharing a tour bus with others. I wonder if he'd still be alive.
Both terms are flexible, sure. And I agree that debating definitions is boring.
> The point is that the guy was a genius.
Is that the point? Are we discussing the man himself, or are we discussing his work? Both, I guess, according to the following:
> He’s written some of the best songs ever by many definitions. That makes him a genius.
It doesn't. Genius is a capacity, not an accomplishment. One can be a genius without accomplishing anything, and one who isn't a genius can do high-level, history-making work.
This whole subthread - arguing about "the best songs in human history" without even the slightest attempt to define one of the most subjective things ever - is patently absurd.
It's an odd thing to even compare. Musical styles and genres come in and out of fashion. Instruments and timbres likewise. People clamour both for novelty and also familiarity. There's no "best" music, just music that has more or fewer fans.
Ideally, the measure of timelessness of a tune is how many people will still go to the effort to play it or reference it once all people who were alive at its release (the people who "liked it before it was cool") are dead. By that measure, the one-hit-wonder of Pachelbel's Canon in D is probably top of the list.
> we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key
Is it the case that much of this is influenced by individuals having grown up listening in an environment with music already structured around a central key and modulation around that? With the same idea also applying to an understanding (or feeling) of rhythm?
Atonal music / serialism is insufferable pretentious bs that no one has ever listened to with pleasure, ever. It's a purely mathematical study, orthogonal to art.
I don't disagree regarding "listened to with pleasure" and I only remember actively listening to atonal music as part of a required syllabus. I do think it's perhaps a useful lens to use to look at 'traditional' tonal music through however, even if just to re-affirm that _some_ kind of order and structure is an important part in making something palatable to the ears (or the brain).
Are you not counting the Surfside (Miami) condo collapse?
Also since it talked about the leaning tower of Pisa: the Civic tower in Pavia (1989) and original Campanile in Venice (1902), probably more examples like that.
Approximately the same size of residential structure, a condo tower in Islamabad Pakistan collapsed in an earthquake in 2005. The earthquake didn't collapse any other condos in the same city, it wasn't an extremely severe one, the fault was with deficiencies in the structural engineering and construction.
I love this. I recently had an idea for an app that would allow people to share their favorite things with other people, and i left that exploration thinking how amazing it'd be to build lots of apps on Google Sheets as the backend - you own the data, it has sharing built in..etc.
so not just google sheets as the backend, google sheets as your personal backend for you instance of the app.
There's a whole class of problems I call "small data" - under about 100 things (note: often your sample set is a year lookback, so for example new customers might be > 100 but only 100 for this year, still small data). Anything that looks like that is often able to be handled manually and probably should be until it's sufficiently useful to automate...things that look like this often are: customers, employees, infrastructure.
In general, put off automation for anything that's not every day or month that you can't just do in a few hours , e.g.:
* Parts of performance assessment & compensation tooling
* Sophisticated recruitment analytics (especially important because with small data it's often not precise or accurate/needs manual attention)
* Provisioning new stuff that doesn't happen often: databases, clusters..etc.
* Maybe the biggest bucket of stuff in general is analytics. Often times people try to get whiz-bang end result numbers with data sets of like 100. It's almost always the wrong move to have crazy analytics abstraction layers and automation when the numbers are small.
A potential simple heuristic might be something like: if it take a day or longer to automate, you need to save at least 5 days of time in the next 6 months for it to be worth it.
