The TIME Barrier.

I haven't bumped into it yet but I'm sure it's there, somewhere. I usually avoid responsibility for it by dodging around and coming to things through links out of one period to another, tricking myself through various little comprehensions.

My current partner once remarked that she considered Slint an 'alt-country' band and not a 'post-rock' band. It makes a lot of sense (Will Oldham connection, the citations of Hank Williams on "Nosferatu Man") but then I watched a bunch of people suddenly have an "OH I GET IT NOW" moment which I mocked at the time but for me makes perfect sense just in how you maybe bump your head on the easy context but then you shift it around and come to it sideways for a lot of music.

I will admit though I don't care about a lot of bebop specifically. I've tried at times to get into lesser names like Tadd Dameron or whomever; did nothing.

luka said:

so that the pleasure, as i say in the opening post, becomes scholarly (stroke beard, yes interesting historical example, can see how this lay the groundwork for later developments, fascinating) or patronising (aw, sounds sweet, so simple and innocent) or impossible to access (just cant take this seriously)

Click to expand...

I get the scholarly feeling with musique concrete and electroacoustic stuff, but thats kind of the point tho isn't it?

being a bit older, for me it's Fifties rock and roll that is on the other side of the TIME barrier

i can remember first hearing it as golden oldies that would pop up occasionally on the radio in the Seventies

nearly all of it sounded impossibly ancient

whereas Beatles Stones Kinks Motown whatever, from 7 - 9 years earlier, didn't

there were a few exceptions that felt much more part of the modern era than Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis

(both of whom sounded hokey and corny - I mean, "goodness gracious great balls of fire" - cmon! "dont' tread on my blue suede shoes", what's he on about? (another one like that is "Blueberry Hill" Fats Domino - might as well have been from Scott Joplin's time)

the exceptions were

Johnny and the Pirates's "Shakin' All Over"

Eddie Cochran "Summertime Blues"

both had something modern about them - the jittery guitar pulse on "Shakin'", the big sound of "Summertime" (Cochran was really into production and the recording studio - making records rather than capturing a live band sound)

i don't remember having heard it as a small kid, but later on did check out Little Richard and I do think "Tutti Frutti" cuts through somehow, the peal of that shrieked awopbopaloopbop

But the rest of it ("Bebop a Lula", all of Buddy Holly, nearly all of Chuck Berry, etc etc) definitely seems pre-modern, quaint

i can see why it's good, see why it was important, this blast of liberating energy etc etc - I enjoy reading about it (well if it's Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop, - not so much e.g. Peter Guralnick's two volume 1500 page in total biography of the King), i can find pleasure in it in the way i might enjoy some Louis Armstrong

but i can't locate the disruption and transformation in it that clearly was there for whom it burst into the world as this new, unexpected thing

whereas i totally feel that smashing-through energy with "You Really Got Me", "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows", beatles's version of "Twist and Shout", "My Generation", etc etc

lol I was just trying to come up with a reply... and failing

I think you're talking about something quite specific relating to music and my reply was about something far too wide-ranging and vague to be of use here

Of course a lot of 80s rap music sounds incredibly quaint and naive now (pre Run DMC, maybe?). I wonder if that has something to do with how (in a sense) naive it WAS. After all, I was a mere stripling when, say, 'The Chronic' came out, and that doesn't sound naive at all (it sounds at times disgustingly cynical, in fact), not to mention that sonically it still stands toe-to-toe with a lot of contemporary albums.

The very condescension towards the people of the past that the above implies perhaps gets closer to what you're talking about here. A sort of 'how could they possibly have rapped like this:

well i'm rappingass robby and i'm here to say
i'm here to rock you party people to the break of day!

in those days? whereas now they, in so modern a style, rap like this:

percocet
molly percocet
chase a check
never chase a bitch

but its also perhaps a prelapsarian aspect to 80s rap, at least to outsiders - at the height of the crack epidemic, but music by the people for the people, less polluted by commercial influence and a desire to shock and appaul

anyway you've got Simon bloody Reynolds to reply, who needs muggins here :crylarf:

Using an MRI scanner, scientists at Oxford have made an attempt at replicating what it is sadmanbarty hears when he listens to 'Rock the Bells' by LL Cool J.

Here are the astounding results:

inb4 sadmanbarty compares the epic of gilgamesh to bebop and/or modal jazz

it's an interesting tendency we have to patronise the past, as we patronise our younger selves - how silly they were in those days, to believe that, to dress like that

very hard not to believe at some level in historical progression (or else historical decline, if you're peter hitchens)

once me and luka are done with our 4 hour corpsey-tickling session, i've written a lecture on the history of jazz with slides and prepared reading material. if corpse's a good boy we can pop into the pets at home by luka's house when i'm finished.