support Tutorials CDs PPT mouthpieces

Rock & Pop OK, maybe this should have been in "humour"

Pete Thomas

Well-Known Member
Cafe Moderator
Commercial Supporter
Messages
17,951
Locality
Sunny Southampton
The Four Chord song:

 
Last edited:
Nothing funny there 'Mr Thomas'...it just breaks the hearts/spirits of a lot of the members here who are breaking fingers/lungs/minds practising all sorts of 'wierd' scales/chords/progressions...and hey..!! why make life difficult, think of all the 'three chord trick' stuff..one less chord to worry about..:)
 
Nothing funny there 'Mr Thomas'...it just breaks the hearts/spirits of a lot of the members here who are breaking fingers/lungs/minds practising all sorts of 'wierd' scales/chords/progressions...and hey..!! why make life difficult, think of all the 'three chord trick' stuff..one less chord to worry about..:)

But this clip is like a day's worth of Radio 2 condensed into 5 minutes, which is probably the best thing to do with it. Surely we can aspire to playing some (dare i say it?) better music.
 
I was discussing the merits of 'pop' music with my 11yr old daughter last night. Well she thought it had merit, I somewhat untactfully disagreed, saying it had little or no musical value.... Was pap for the masses. went down a stom, as you can guess..... I think I'm going to sho this to her to support my arguments.
 
There's a lot to be said for music that indulges different emotions. I've had what sound like similar 'discussions' with my father for the last ten years. He's been an army bandmaster near enough all his life, has played trumpet in Brass bands and Orchestras since he was 16, and is generally an all-round know-it-all on that entire sphere of music. The depths of his forays into 'pop music' are essentially Joni Mitchell and The Beatles. That's potentially a little unfair but I'm setting up the anecdote so you get my bias, naturally :p

We can get along just fine. We can sit in my car and he can find hours of music he'll happily listen to and constantly remark how impressed he is to see I've got some particular piece or album on my mp3 player. I think he wet himself when he found Sibelius 5 on there. And yet, the second something else comes on - and I have a huge range of tastes in music, I've got stuff I don't even know the latest genre name its given - he goes completely cold, shocked and appalled I could find such 'trash' worth listening to. What develops are more arguments than discussions, because he doesn't actually listen to my point or my music enough to actually consider them.

Now, admittedly, I find the kind of things you'll find in the Top 40 charts as played by Radio 1 completely unremarkable, but then that's fine, because I don't think Beyoncé is trying to appeal to me. It DOES irk me that my dad cannot understand that I enjoy music he 'doesn't get' - take something like Daft Punk. It's electronic, repetitive, musically very basic, but when I'm in the gym I don't want to hear Paul Desmond's dulcet tones mellifluously floating into my ears, apparently defying time itself as he slots beautiful phrasing in around whatever strange time signatures and rhythms Brubeck is playing - I want to hear something that pumps along with a very hard groove. I don't want to be intellectually engaged by what I'm hearing, I just want to be driven on by it. Different music for different moods.

I can't listen to jazz with 95% of my friends. Of the ..50% of them that would class themselves as 'obsessed with music', nearly all of those are into it for the scene and the skinny jeans and the festival wrist bands they can keep on for weeks after Glasto finished. They don't play an instrument, and I can't imagine what it's like to hear music without actually understanding the chords and harmonies behind it all, but I can totally see why millions of people love the very 'musically meritless' stuff if the lyrics or the beat offer enough for them to get something out of it. Or, in many cases, the 'image'.

Kind of huge topic (and slightly off the original, sorry!) but I had to throw in my two pence for your daughter's plight :p

On-topic, I loved the video, I always enjoy playing with chords with non-musical friends and seeing their faces when they realise just how common some progressions are.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks Adam. Takes me back a while. I remember my father making an effort to meet me musically - his tastes were classical, opera, and more traditional Jazz. Ella Fitzgerald was his favourite singer. While I was into rock, Cream, The Doors, Deep Purple, Led Zep, Uriah Heap, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top (been around a while...), The Who, 10cc and Roxy Music. Even Slade and Status Quo for some lighter fun stuff. Clapton was (and still is) my all time guitar hero, with Alvin Lee, Jeff Beck close. Then I discovered ELP. And Pictures at an Exhibition. But he couldn't handle Mussorgsky's wonderful music being played that way. But I think he realised there was hope. And Queen's A Night at the Opera started opening my ears a little as well. It didn't help that the clique I was in at school dismissed anything soul/tamla... And all Mum wanted to listen to were Tom Jones, Engleburt Humperdink, Frank Sinatra...

I need to open up I suppose, but I've always found mainstream pop so banal that I'd rather turn it off than watch - like most tv... Going to be a hard one!
 
So when my mum objected to me playing The Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette at 3 am when I was 16 I should have told her that it's no different to The New Seekers (or whatever awful garbage she was listening to at the time)...
 
So when my mum objected to me playing The Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette at 3 am when I was 16 I should have told her that it's no different to The New Seekers (or whatever awful garbage she was listening to at the time)...

Even worse, I've had to admit that the music my mum liked (eg Nat King Cole) was way better than the music I liked as a kid (eg the Beatles). I've since come to the conclusion (which I mostly have to keep quiet about) that the advent of rock and roll spelt the end of popular music of any interest whatever.

(Edit: I should of course have said "of any interest to me". Other people's mileage may, and very clearly does, vary. Rock, Ska, etc can be fun, but for me it's all very samey and unsatisfying in the long term.)
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom