Truth be told: Music on trial.

Originally posted by Davidius
I agree metal music is nothing but nonsense and a bunch of noise. Out of all the musical genres out there, Metal is the hardest to listen to.

It amazes me what people are into these days.

My word you people are closed minded!

There are ignorants and fools who produce all sorts of music and artforms - from pop to classical. There are loads of immoral pop songs, lots of stupid gore metal songs about horrible things, lots of dodgy rap songs about gangstaaa crap, lots of country songs about suicide and murder, lots of war marches about getting in rhythm to kill people efficiently, etc etc!

equally, there is metal that is about overcoming your ignorance..as there is with almost any style, there is at least SOME of it that will be positive to your life.

Zeni Geva are my favourite band of all time, art-metal, producing many albums, artistic, technically great, entertaining, meaningful lyrics..

There are many grind, crust and hardcore acts that are highly politically/ideologically charged.. sure there are ecoterrorist advocates like Earth Crisis, Oi punk bands that are white power, black metal acts that burn down churches and eat each others brains to gain their dark powers, 'hatecore' punk bands that glorify neo-nazism and racism ..

but there are also pop songs that are totally immoral and disgusting, rnb, country, rap, rock, any style can be peverse or sickening.

Sure a lot of metal revels in that, but that is an anti-aesthetic. I used to confront this issue daily when I was in a 2 piece improvised guitar noise band called 'raped by noise'.

What i'm trying to say is that closed-mindedness of any sort is really a way to stifle yourself. I have a lot of really powerful metal (MESHUGGAH !! ! READ SOME MESHUGGAH LYRICS ONLINE AT LEAST!!), with very positive messages..

in the end, with all art, the artist SHOULD BE asking themselves candidly, 'IS THIS GOING TO BE MISINTERPRETED? Is my meaning concise or clear, or is it ambigious, and if so, in a way which I do not want it to be perhaps? Is my meaning correct to what I actually wish to portray?'

even still you can create satires or parodies that may be considered controversial, yet in reality are an attack on that paradigm. However this can be equally damaging to produce if it is misinterpreted much, in comparison to how many people understand its true meaning.

I am reminded of Maynard of Tool saying once, someone came up to him and said how much 'Sober' helped him sober up and change his drinking ways. All the while Maynard was wondering how he could have missed all the obvious messages in the song stating that Maynard was suggesting sobriety is entirely unnecessary in any instance.

Equally, the NEGATIVE musics can inspire people to the positive. For instance, a highly revered local grind band called 'The Kill' wrote a song which really irked me. Up until hearing that song, I had accepted their presence in the music scene, although thinking their masochistic on-stage displays were egotistical and basically showed that the singer NEEDED to injure himself in order to perform well, which in my mind is pretty lame. Anyway, they had a song called something like 'kill gays', it had two lines of vocals and went for 20 seconds maybe, it was another stupid boring grindcore tune, you couldn't even hear the words being screamed by the vocalist.

But when I saw the CD, and read the name, and saw the lyrics, I shook my head and tossed it aside, never listening again.

So equally sometimes such music can make you strengthen your own convictions.

In the end, I guess the way to surmise would be this : in all artforms there is ignorance and stupidity, in some more than others. But do not be genre-ist about it! There is good out of every genre also (again, some more than others!!).

It's also a matter of personal taste.

The Melvins??? Great band.

new post because almost over the limit above hehe!

i make breakcore and jungle choppage which in my opinion is the current 'real' anarchic/punk music of our times. present day 'punk' is so far gone from the initial idea of original 70s punk, it is completely the antithesis in many cases.

Such as is becoming the case with emo-core, since its mainstream redefinition in the early 00's/late 90s.. i mean cmon there was amazing emocore / screamo stuff in the early to late 90s, but then when it became more popular and commercialised, any pop-punk/mainstream indie/faux-goth-faux-punk-power-pop became known as 'emo'. Also all the people that were labelled 'emos' were actually looking more like faux goths, faux punks, indie nerds or rockers. And the people HATING the 'emos' didn't even know what emo was, nor that the people they were hating had no idea what emo was EITHER.

Breakcore has been going downhill since the middle of the 00s, it was a really intense style of music from late 90s to around 2005..but now everything in this area, as well as jungle, drum n bass, breaks and many other styles, is becoming homogonised as dubstep.

I reallllly dislike a lot of dubstep. It's made for people to take ketamine to, feel nauseous from boring, slow sine tone or wobble basses and pass asleep.

I love IDM, breakcore jungle (I call this breakmore because it's less techno/gabber orientated stuff I enjoy, the stuff that's about crazy snares), raggacore/dark ragga jungle, trip hop/glitchy stuffs, independent hip hop (clouddead is a prime example! buck 65 & sixtoo - the canada sessions, these are the kind of things you want to play people that say they hate 'rap' music)..

There is also a problem of too much good new music emerging all the time every second, for free or purchase. There's no way to hear all of it in your lifetime so you gotta be slightly picky.

Also because of this, the mainstream doesnt know what to do, so it clings on to what it understands and can still market to a slightly larger group of people than most free netlabels do. But still, the freedom of choice is winning out.

But another fear is with the ease of access to computers and sequencers, pretty much any one can make music now, and does.
Meaning a saturation of the internet with utterly crap free musics.

But it is the job of the reputable netlabels to weed out the masterpieces from the sea of slurry.. and present to the world.

If you make music, you should first read some of John Cage's works I think

I think sometimes the label pick the crap, because that is what most people understand.

Yes, lowest common denominator.

It is the death of MEANING and information in music.

Mainstream music is about pleasing the most people with the least amount of effort. Fluffy crud.