The Scourge of Facebook

[Dayna]

ha ha! I think that's what Cheers was about! It was just various people that were freinds sitting around a bar talking about all sorts of things. One was a postman. I don't remember all the details.

[Des]

And your "real job" - sorry, are you a miner having a go at us soft Southerners who don't get our hands dirty? Nah, you're a civil servant with such a cushy job that you can spend all your working day posting on the internet.

You wouldn't last two minutes doing a proper job old son. All that 'I'm a working class socialist' shit you come out with seems somewhat false, considering your ultra-reactionary views. But at least I did hit the spot with my comment. SoTW is better off with ordinary people rather than hacks talking about music and as I said, things are definitely improving on that front. [Happy face here].

[Hugh Weldon]

Perhaps you gentlemen would care to take your argument outside, some of us just came in for a quiet drink. Also this place has a very good jukebox.

[Dayna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqaSWj8y ... re=related

[Jamie Renton]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XL1m89nkk8

[Con Murphy]

Cheers

I for one have always mentally shouted "Norm!" every time I see a Mr Druker post.

[AndyM]

Re jukeboxes..... I was in a pub once with Simon Frith, sociology prof, esteemed pop music academic and (latterly) chair of Mercury Prize judges. He gave me some cash and asked to put 'something good' on the jukebox. That was scary - a bit like F R Leavis asking you to pop to the library and get him a couple of good books.

[NormanD]

.....and?

[AndyM]

.....and?

It was the mid 80s, so choices were constrained.....but as far as I recall I went for Fine Young Cannibals 'She Drives Me Crazy' (the best Prince record not made by Prince), Pointer Sisters 'Automatic' and a failsafe bit of 60s Motown. I think I passed.

[Adam Blake]

Hah! I interviewed Simon Frith once when I was a music journalist. My last question to him (after we'd covered what we needed to cover) was "If rock'n'roll is dead, who should pay for the funeral?" Without missing a beat, he replied "CBS". I liked him a lot.

[NormanD]

And there's always going to be someone who loads money into the SOTW jukebox just to put on "Like A Rolling Stone" five times in succession, and then makes a hasty retreat out the pub (à la "Withnail & I" clip, above).

Mind you, there'd still be a lively discussion on that table over there about the significance of Al Kooper's Hammond, and whether the song would be have been better in the original time signature of 3/4. And, of course, there will be bad blood.

[Dayna]

Simon Frith

This looks like it describes exacly, what's happened to music these days, since the end of the 80s.


From Wikipedia



Bad music"Frith (2004, p. 17-9) argued that "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music; the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include:

"Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce,"
"Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style,"
and "rock critical lists," which include:

"Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty,"
"Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."
He later gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste (see also: kitsch), and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and argument that matters." (p. 28)

[Adam Blake]

Oh God, Dayna, steady on with those Simon Frith soundbites! Very clever fellows with lots of letters after their names who make a living writing about pop music can cause endless problems.

[Des]

Frith was on Front Row last night re. The Brits or the Oscars or whatever they give pop groups nowadays. Every year they wheel him out to pontificate on the latest bright young things. Awful.

[MurkeyChris]

I think it would help the vibrancy of the boards if the twenty plus separate boards could be condensed into a manageable handful, say:

Radio
Websites & YouTube
Sound of the World - chat and music reviews
News - for gig listings, etc.
Forum Decorum & Spam reports
Archive

Since the relaunch I can't tell what icon mean that there is new content, even if I've kept my cookie.