As someone constantly seeking out new music (recently for example, I've been working backwards through the 1001 albums you must listen to book), I inherited some of my family's old vinyl collections including stuff that was like 60 years old.
So so much of it is awful. It's interesting granted, but people ignore that the charts were filled with bland covers of other popular songs even in the 60's.
Hip Hop is a great showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE"
In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare.
The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another.
People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao
Banksy's art is definitely closer to teenager #deepthoughts Instagram pages than contemporary art imo.
He reminds me of YouTubers that got famous making like reaction clips, pranks and the odd sketch that then think they can write (or even act in) a feature film
My experience with Ulysses was just reading Dubliners followed by A Portrait of a Man then Ulysses.
I've always enjoyed reading classics and "arty" books, like buying works by Salinger, Plato, Pynchon, whatever. I'm by no means an impressive reader but I like just letting them wash over me. Like sticking a great movie on - maybe I don't know all the nuances of Stanley Kubrick but it's just a movie at the end of the day. You watch it. Reading, watching, listening to "challenging" or highly rated/influential art....worst comes to it, you don't really like it.
Anyway, Joyce literally wasn't aiming to write a difficult book. He famously said "this is for them" while gesturing towards the general public in Dublin. It's an ambitious novel and a misunderstood one, but it's a funny, goofy work with something for everyone. There's dogs, pubs and trad music in it
Finnegan's wake is genuinely an essentially cryptographic novel. But I'd honestly recommend anyone who reads a lot to read Ulysses
I can live with that. I'm not on a campaign against the book, except maybe to say, "Hey, if you don't care for it, there's nothing wrong with you."
I don't know the exact quote, but I think Joyce also said that it was just a funny book. I didn't find it all that funny, and especially, didn't find any of the three main characters at all interesting. But YMMV. Check it out.
When MfA was released, a few airports tried that, and got an extremely negative response from passengers.
I wonder if, decades later, not to mention a generation or two with exposure to "chillout", "ambient" and maybe just a dab of psychedelics, the response would be any different today.
Boooooring. I think Eno is better at self-promotion with intellectual pretense than music itself.
The less pretentious material (eg U2) is - for me - way better. Bowie? The ‘experimental’ tracks are a weak rehash of the krautrock of the time. Tangerine Dream run rings around them.
I own all the TD albums up to White Eagle, along with several bootlegs. I saw them at York Minster in the 1970s. I also am the BDFL of the ardour.org project, where releases are named after chronologically ordered Eno albums.
I see no reason to make comparisons between their work, which are quite different in affect, goal, and production methodology.
Love love love that album! Eno is just cool because he was constantly thinking about the context for his art as well as making beautiful music.
Him and David Byrne did an album called "My life in the bush of ghosts" - I was reading Byrne's book about it and he was saying it was constantly asking 'how would someone who has never seen or heard a guitar or piano be played... approach it? Is strumming arbitrary, could it be percussive?'
I read the book for a book club, and decided to listen to the album as well, even though Eno said he took the title of the album from the book without ever having read the book.
The album was a lot more accessible than the book.
So so much of it is awful. It's interesting granted, but people ignore that the charts were filled with bland covers of other popular songs even in the 60's.
Hip Hop is a great showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE"
In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare.
The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another.
People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao