Amazing musical ability has become mediocre — because we have access to so many great musicians. At the same time popular music has become less amazing, crude and ugly as artists seek novelty, and probe the dark depths of human nature. Bill Whittle and Alfonzo Rachel explore how music turned to poison.
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Video below hosted at Rumble.
47 replies on “Musical Poison: Devolution of Society Tracks Descent of Pop Music into Crude Ugliness”
The movie Amadeus, 1984, takes the modern music meme to the max with characters hating Mozart’s work.
May I recommend Ola Gjeilo’s ” Ubi caritas et amor.” Sung a capella by the NUS choir. And composer Eric Whitacre’s “Glow.” Sung by the Drakensberg Boys Chorus. Both are on You Tube and both are extremely beautiful. Also, the score to GOT, The Night King composed by Ramin Djawadi, especially Season 8 Ep 3.
And from LOTR, the Rohan soundtrack— Ride for the World’s Ending.” And also From LOTR , Enya singing “May It Be.” Hans Zimmer composed the Gladiator movie score and leaves us with the stirring final piece at the close of the movie.
For fun and creativity there’s Cosmo Shelldrake and his inventive music sometimes with lyrics which are very whimsical and novel. All these are recommended if you want to be taken away by beauty without leaving your home!
Bill, I will counter your Jurassic Park with “Somewhere in Time.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esrTfwBiOM0
On the topic of RAP and Hip Hop – I will say that several of my playlists include Run-DMC LL Cool J and Kurtis Blow. Among others. Probably an earmark of the where and when I grew up.
Today’s music can be described thusly: “THUMPA WACKA THUMPA WACKA THUMPA WACKA…….”
True story: I was stopped at a red light on a warm day, with my window open and next to me was a Mustang convertible with its top down, and the youthful, preppy looking driver was listening to a song whose lyrics were “Yo my b*tch and I’m yo p*mp…”, over and over and over again, accompanied by the theme expressed in the first paragraph. Ugh!
This is great. I’ve had this precise conversation more than once recently. We lived in Tennessee for a few years, and really enjoyed the “young country” genre. Trace Adkins, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, and a few others made really enjoyable music. We moved away, and drifted off of that for a while. Recently, I thought to try listening to the local “young country” station here in Michigan.
It’s…. awful. Unlistenable. Softly boring slow speech over click tracks, snap tracks, is all most of it is. It sounds like it was made by someone putting a chord progression into an iPhone’s “Garage Band” app, and just babbled some broken-heart words over it. “Inartful” might be a good term.
It seems music, particularly melody and harmony, have died.
I have to agree. Liked a lot of those same artists and also Zac Brown (I think they have a very Eagles, Doobie Brothers type sound) and Darius Rucker. I find myself listening to the older stuff and change the station with the new stuff. It’s sounds like they are trying very hard to make a country-ish, pop sounds that will be liked by everyone. So they make songs liked by no one.
Member Rodney Roe had a blog post last week on with a link to Tom McDonald who is rising up itunes. Go check that out.
https://billwhittlecom.wpenginepowered.com/will-bill-whittle-see-this/
Don’t know if he is “Christian” RAP or “Conservative” RAP, but that was a cool track.
Number 1: Zo – very cool. Much respect to anyone who can just sit down at their kit with no notice and pop out 45 seconds of excellence.
Number 2: There is still quite a bit of good out there, but one has to search through much detritus. Many talented people making music, but many, many more just out to make a buck. So they see what is selling and make tracks just like that. To the point that while I have a pretty good musical ear (I sing with the local symphony’s chorus) much of what Ronette listened to in Jr HS and early HS I could not tell the singers apart.
Then something interesting happened, she discovered “our” music. Then thanks to YT and streaming she found that she liked music from all decades. She may never be the Rat Pack fan that her old man is, but neither she nor her roommates listen to “the crap” songs. She appreciates the lyrics and melodies. I think this pendulum will swing back.
Thank you so much for the drum outro!!
I truly enjoy this entire dynamic between Bill and Zo!
Was it not Tipper and Al Gore who worked so hard to come up with ways to “shield” youthful ears from “inappropriate ” lyrics? That top down control coming from the two most un-hip adults of the era is what made me dislike Al Gore so much.
And yeah, Zo just killed it!
It was indeed, Tipper and Al.
Zo, you’re awesome dude!
Precisely the same trends have trashed “classical” music. Most new compositions are little more than academic masturbation, deliberately inaccessible disharmonious, UGLY tone progressions that truly appeal to nobody. The same can be said of much contemporary academic research, often created by some tenured no-talents churning out junk in search of acclaim – and publication – from another bunch of tenured jerks.
Back in the early 90’s, I worked for a quick oil change place for some extra money. I was the old fogy working with a bunch of 18 year-olds. One morning I walked in on an animated discussion and said “What’s up guys?” One kid asked me “Have you ever heard of a band called Pink Floyd?” I about spit out my coffee and rattled off 4 albums names and said “Yeah, I’ve heard of them.” Every jaw in the place hit the floor! It seems a lot of the music of the 70’s still intrigued the younger generation.
But I digress. One thing I still cannot tolerate is techno and autotune.
That brought a smile to my face!
Zoe is a great drummer. I appreciate that because my son-in-law and his father were both drummers and played at gigs.
Great video, but I have to take issue with your synopsis of music in the 70’s. Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, All Green Steely Dan, Chicago, Pink Floyd, Elton John, Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Carly Simon just to name a few in the early part of the decade then going into disco, which is in my opinion great music for what is was with the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, Chic et all. Getting into the first Rap with the Sugar Hill gang and the start of Punk with Blonde, and The Clash. Past this there was great Country Music, Country based Rock (the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Little River Band, Credence Clearwater) and the beginnings of the hair metal era to come with Van Halen. I would be hard pressed to find another decade with greater musical diversity. There is something great for everyone in the decade.
I would add one dimension to music: harmony. Music is Melody, Rhythm, AND Harmony. A wizened old music professor (commenting on The Who, in the negative, I believe) told me that art required all three, and it requires all three in multiples.
In other words, art requires of music multiple melodies and expressions of melodies, multiple harmonies and expressions of harmonies, and multiple time signatures and multiple tempos and multiple… it’s complex without appearing so. (To me, dynamics are a form of harmony, as are counterpoint melodies.)
He further opined that melody is the mind of the music, rhythm is the body of the music, and harmony is the spirit of the music. Without all three, there is no art and the music is incomplete. And I’ve come to understand this as our culture has devolved.
Rap is nothing but beat. Even the lyrics carry the beat and nothing more than prurient shock value. Rap is nothing but body; no mind, no soul.
Rock and Roll often just carries rhythm and melody, if we may insult melody so. Some of it is catchy. But little of it lifts us. We remain in our own bodies and think rebellious thoughts.
Even jazz can sometimes be little more than melody and echos we’ll generously call harmony. Without a beat, it only appeals to the cranial narcissist who forgot how to experience reality with skin-to-world.
So what is music? Can we find it in today’s culture? Music is found, like Bill says, in some film. It can be found in some jazz and even some rock. I notice it more and more in the two Nashville forms, Country & Western. Big Band, like Nelson Riddle or Benny Goodman or Lionel Hampton often have real gems in their catalogue (although most of their work is dance music).
On rare occasions I’ll notice it in folk. (There’s more music in eastern European folk than American.)
Look for a piece that has more than one melody. Look for complex harmonies. Look for time signatures and tempos that change, along with a range of dynamics, harmonies, and counterpoint. I know; that eliminates 95 percent of recorded material, now or anywhere in the past. And we’re left with stuffy old records that dad used to play: you know, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and even Traffic.
And if you ever want to learn where they got their ideas, listen to Debussy, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Holst, Vivaldi, Wagner, Mahler, and even some Bernstein.
The rest is noise to dull the senses, if the audience still has any sense about them.
Anyone who completely disses The Who might go listen to “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
Also Tommy.
Or “My Wife” or “Baba O’Reilly” or … etc.
My experience with ‘experts’ telling me what is good and what is not, what is proper and what’s not, what I like and should appreciate or not, is all too voluminous and very bleak. Those people are usually posers trying to tell me why they’re better than me because their ‘tastes’ are superior.
My suspicion is that the “wizened old music professor” that Jeff refers to in his post above was just looking for reasons why the music he liked is good and anything else is bad. The things he said are missing from much of Rock music are there, they’re just not where he expected to find them in a form he particularly cared for.
Were that not so then that music would not have survived the test of time and to be fair, a lot of it has not. Thank God. If I never, ever hear “Billy, Don’t be a Hero” or “The Night Chicago Died” again it will be too soon.
Yet everything that “wizened old music professor” said were missing can be found in the first 30 seconds of “Long Cool Woman” by the Hollies. Had he bothered to look for them objectively.
If that guy were my music professor I’d want several second opinions and probably would not have put a lot of store in his expertise outside the venues and genres he advocated.
Did your prof measure music’s value using The Pritchard Scale?
This made me spit water all over the screen!
When I was young, my Dad hated the music I listened to … Because it wasn’t the music he listened to and I hated his music back. Much of this musical antipathy was due to the fact that neither of us had actually bothered to listen to the other’s music. When I later did bother to listen to what Dad liked, I liked some of it too.
Fast forward a few decades and my Dad and I are making a coast-to-coast transit in separate vehicles. Everything on the AM/FM is crap or boring so he calls me up on the radio and says “What tapes (yes, this was back in the era of cassette tapes) have you got that you think I can listen to?”
I nearly crapped myself right there in the front seat of my Town Car. So I thought about it a bit, dug through my rather cumbersome tape collection and came up with a few I thought wouldn’t cause him an aneurysm.
Surprisingly enough, he loved the tapes I picked out. I don’t remember which ones I chose except for two. One was Counting Crows which he listened to crossing the Midwest and the other was Enya’s Watermark, which I gave him to listen to crossing the great western deserts. He listened to Enya over and over again as the bleak landscapes of the Sonoran and Mojave scrolled past his windows en-route to Los Angeles.
As time went by he and I shared quite a lot of music over the years. He introduced me to classical and old-school Country Music (Charlie Pride, Charlie Rich, Loretta Lynn, etc.) and he really liked a lot of the stuff Iistened to if you exclude the head-banging stuff. There were even a few Led Zeppelin songs he liked.
Along with most of his generation Dad is gone now but their music still lives on. My point here is that his music and my music are both real music. They can be appreciated if you can get past the generational wall and actually listen to them.
The poison the guys above are talking about will never, ever make that grade because it’s not real music.
There’s a backlash against that poison occurring too. A lot of younger people are discovering the music I liked when I was their age. My college age nephew asks me about getting more of my collection every time he comes home from school He’s also adopted my “thing” for real watches and fountain pens. Which is also counter to his generation’s mania for the Apple watches that have to be charged up every day and the ‘use it and toss it’ mentality of cheap ballpoints.
There’s some hope for future generations. It’s just not obvious.
So I was going to post something along similar lines. What Zo said about Rhythm and Melody is true, and the poetry of the Lyrics is key as well. Those three pillars are why someone like Scott Bradlee of PMJ can take good songs and re-imagine them from a different era with a different rhytmic style. Because they are foremost good songs.
My grandfather listened to Classical music and opera. His kids listened to Frank and Dean and Sammy, but still enjoyed classical and opera. My siblings and I listened to The Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jackson Brown, EW&F, Stevie Wonder etc. and then the likes of Whitney, but also appreciated the Rat Pack and Pavarotti. ( I got in trouble with my dad once because I didn’t enunciate well singing “Play that funky music” 😉 )
Really good music, that with a soul, transcends the generations. Trite silliness done to sell a tune and make a buck does not. Aretha is great no matter when you were born. Same for Nat King Cole, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Scott Joplin and the list goes on.
Yeah, I used to think that the reason I can’t stand what passes for music now days was just due to me getting older. Up until the poison of ‘Gangsta Rap’ et. al. came along there was always a tendency to prefer the music one grew up with to the latest generation’s ‘noise’ and I just chalked my distaste up to that.
Then I tried really listening to that crap and realized that the generation raised on that hideous, hateful, senselessly violent, disrespectful, lurid, venal, god-awful cacophony was missing out on real music. Unlike my dad’s music to me and mine to him, there was no redeeming quality of actual music behind that drek.
That crap is to music what a diet of nothing but cotton candy and sno-cones is to a kid. They might like it but they don’t really get anything good from it.
Even various ‘covers’ often don’t hold up well to the original version. Guns & Roses cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heavens Door” springs to mind. I like Dylan’s original version much better. The Outlaws did a fair job on “Ghost Riders in the Sky” though, so it’s not all bad.
One night sitting around a campfire at my family’s fishing cabin in northern Minnesota my kids, their spouses and I were discussing this sort of thing. Somewhere in the conversation the song “Fancy” came up and I mentioned that the original version was my favorite. My daughter-in-law, whom I love dearly and bless her heart, said “Oh, you mean the one by Reba McEntire? She’d never heard of Bobbie Gentry, didn’t know that Bobbie with an “ie” was a girl and was certain Reba’s version was the original until I corrected her.
It’s good to remind the kids that the old man knows his stuff. Every now and then. 🙂
Along the lines of covers vs originals – was in the car with Ronette and her playlist was streaming (because 20 somethings can’t do anything without incorporating their phone) and Landslide came on. And she says I love this song. I listened and it was clearly not Stevie Nicks. It was the Dixie Chicks who apparently covered it in 2002 when they were still Dixie, guess I missed it.
It was pretty good they have decent harmonies. But of course I said at the end that the while this was good, the original was better. Original?? She asks.
Now, I enjoyed Fleetwood Mac, they had some truly great songs, and younger me thought much of Stevie Nicks. But they didn’t make my playlist much while Ronette was growing up. So she found them streaming and we listened together she for the first time, me getting reacquainted. She was blown away by the original version of Landslide. I think I like them more now than I did in the 70s and 80s.
Right when things opened up here, Mrs Ron and I went to see a cover band that tours nationally, Tusk, at a local outdoor venue. They were really good and I realized that while I had them one notch down, that was some good time for music in the 60s/70s.
Oh, and Bobbie Gentry – yes please. Might have to find some of her streaming or on YT today. Amazing to think she just stopped being a public person and in the early 80s you could do that. Harder to do that now.
I think it’s great that something like you describe can happen. Your daughter discovered an oldie that got a cover by a newer group and loved it. Then when you turn her on to the original she loves it even more. It’s a double bonus for her and a great way for you to experience real music with your kid.
Not to be morbid about this but someday you’ll be gone and every time she hears that song she’ll think of you. I know this is so because that’s what happens when I hear something Dad and I listened to together. Real music has generational continuity and implications.
We’re sort of pioneers in music in a way because up until the invention and marketing of affordable high fidelity music reproduction and playback to hear the actual, full value of music you had to be at a live performance. I’m sure Hank Williams Sr. and Tommy Dorsey sounded a lot better when you could hear the whole range in person than they do on the old 78 RPM vinyl records I have for my Graphanola.
In fact, I would argue that more modern studio recordings with their multi-channel dubbing and mixing and super high fidelity multi-track capture are even better than live music as far as being faithful to the music goes.
A live performance has its perks too, don’t get me wrong. I saw Pink Floyd’s The Wall in Berlin (1990) and The Eagles Hotel California at Red Rocks Amphitheater (sometime in the ’80’s I think, I can’t remember exactly) and the experience of a live show is phenomenal. But you go for the show not the musical quality because the musical quality is much, much better on a recording.
Back in those days I could only dream of a decent stereo system because the good stuff was both well out of my affordability range and not amenable to my more mobile situation at that stage of my life.
Today I have a decent system. Not audiophile quality but pretty good. I still can’t afford the really good stuff but I come fairly close with what I can get within the limitations of my budget. I have a fairly good Yamaha AVR, good but not the best speakers and a lesson I’ve learned is not to skimp on the sub-woofer. Of all the sound replication equipment I own my Klipsch 12″ Studio Reference sub is arguably the closest I come to real audiophile gear.
All this stuff does really well in a 12′ x 18′ room with acoustically friendly walls. One of my buddies loves to come over for movie night in my home theater. He says it’s better than an actual movie theater so I’ll let him be the witness of my successful system setup.
I say that not to brag about my audio gear, I’m sure there are people on this forum that have better. I personally know people that have much better gear. But like my cigars and my whiskey it’s well into the “good enough” range. I can’t afford $300 bottles of whiskey or $50 cigars either so what I aim for on a quality scale of 1 – 100 is to hit around 90% with what I can afford. That last 10% will always be beyond my financial reach.
That last 10% would also be a waste of money for me because my hearing has been dulled from thousands and thousands of rounds of weapons fire and a whole lot of explosions all without any sort of hearing protection. It’s bad enough that today if I don’t wear hearing protection and am around anything bigger than a .22 rifle I can’t hear squat for a couple days.
Still, I can feel Bill banging his hand on his desk during these podcasts … That’s close enough.
So today my appreciation for good music is even greater than it used to be. I find myself distracted by more than appreciative to ‘background noise’ and I appreciate quiet a lot more than I used to. Now when I listen to music, that’s about all I’m doing. I might be cleaning up and de-cluttering my man cave while I listen to music (I have a play list for that) just to make the time productive but never much more that needs concentration than that. I save my “music time” for listening to music and precious little else.
One of the bugaboos of modern gear and capture is the MP3 format. It’s OK but MP3 uses compression and in order to make the audio file as small as possible it filters out audio ranges that the human ear can’t hear. With a decent audio setup you feel those ranges more than hear them so I try to stick to the FLAC codec files as much as possible.
If you find Bobbie Gentry on YouTube the audio will be compressed MP3. It will still sound good but some of the music will be missing. You will only notice this on a decent audio system, the music will lack some of its punch and depth.
Most of the smaller, portable audio devices, like phones, won’t do anything but MP3 and are not FLAC capable. As a result I usually listen to audiobooks rather than music in my vehicle, when mowing lawn on my tractor, etc. I put together a fairly good set of cans for the tractor and when I’m working for my buddy on heavy equipment. Those headphones are “ear covering” behind-the-neck types so I can wear a hat and allow me to use both my phone and a two-way radio with pause, play, volume, skip, FF, RW, answer phone and the transmit mic button on the headset. They also do a fair job of limiting the roar of a diesel engine. Right now I just started the first book of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. That trilogy will probably last me most of the summer.
I am not remotely an audiophile, mostly because I cannot afford to be one. We all pick and choose which luxuries we decide are necessities for us. For us on the right, this is called being an adult. We purchase what we can afford and do without the things we cannot. And once we make that decision, generally don’t look back.
For those on the left this is call “Unfair” and they demand that we provide them with anything someone else has and get offended that someone has something they don’t. This is also known as being a child.
Having lost all family that was my parent’s generation, I know well that these moments will be fleeting, and I assure you I take time to enjoy them. I hope that I am sufficiently passing on the joys of life and the important aspects to Ronette. The amount of unmitigated garbage out there that they are exposed to in the name of equity is staggering. But she makes enough comments about what is BS that I am lifted in my soul.
Well said and all true. I honestly didn’t even think of this music topic in those terms and you’re right.
Leftism can be summed up in the person of a spoiled, ungrateful, mean-spirited adolescent who goes through life miserable in a misery all of his own making. Further, because he’s miserable and a poor excuse for a human being he wants the rest of us to be just as miserable as he is.
Which explains his fervor for the deconstructionist destruction of what is arguably the greatest society ever realized by human kind. Everything in the Leftist repertoire leads to foreseeable disaster and it is foisted upon the rest of us in the name of improvement.
It really is as simple as that, on the bottom line.
My two boys are all grown up and moved away so those moments of enjoyment in their company and discoveries are become rare. Later, in my experience, comes a deep satisfaction in knowing they’re on the right path.
I still have a lot of memories of those times though, and when the occasion occurs to spend time with any of my grandchildren I can quietly appreciate seeing my relationship to their fathers reflected in them.
I say “quietly appreciate” because anything else implies that it’s my doing and not that of my kids. I gave them the information and the training but it was themselves who chose what to do with what I could offer. They deserve the credit, they earned it.
I wish you and Ronette the very best of futures and don’t think for a moment that I don’t notice and appreciate the efforts that you and people like you make to assure the young people you raise will work towards that bright goal.
Interesting that you mention the $300 bottle of scotch. I refuse to spend that much, mostly because I don’t think those are that much better. I have had JW Blue, and there are much lower priced Scotch that I prefer. I took a virtual trip to Islay and don’t think I spent $300 total (the 16 I had).
I was going to get a bottle of the Courage and Conviction American single malt to try, but the VA ABC has it over priced, I feel, at $75 for a fifth. Fortunately whoever sets their prices is not good at math. They had the 50ml splits for $2.99. So I tried one of each of the three types they had. The base, the Sherry Cask and the Cuvee cask. They were very good. But not better than any below or the Laphroig 10, which are less expensive.
I didn’t say “scotch”, I said “whiskey” which admittedly includes Scotch Whiskey and in fairness I did say “whiskey’ not “whisky”. The former being the Scottish spelling and the latter the American.
I confess that I do not buy the Virginia Distillery C&C, it’s usually provided by a friend as a gift or from a guy who works at the distillery at a reduced price. So I didn’t realize it was that expensive. Apologies.
I’m not certain it’s fair to compare an American Single Malt with a Scotch Single Malt. I’m thinking they’re not apples and oranges but maybe apples and plums (same genus different species).
I’m also more a fan of Highland Cremes than Islays, Speysides or Lowlands. Personally the smokiness that most people love about those is a deal breaker for me. Though I have a good friend who’s a fanatic for those whiskeys and I’ll drink them and be glad of the favor, it’s not something I ever buy for myself.
I have a bottle of Glen Deveron 20 that is for special occasions but my usual single malt is The Macallan 12. Which I get at a good price at the local PX. I don’t get up there much but I have a buddy that goes by the Navy PX coming home from work every day so …
I’m aware of the hierarchical attitudes when it comes to Scotches but … Each to his own preference and personal tastes.
All of that said, I’m considerably more of a Scotch drinker than I am an American Whisky drinker but keep both on hand in my bar and I do love a good bourbon.
I have a bar with quite a selection, mostly for company (and mostly that someone or other left here and will pick up where he left off the next time he’s here) because there’s only a few things there I drink with any regularity.
There’s a sign over that bar with an EGA on each end, anchors inboard of course, that says “Marines Drink Free”. A friend who’s a retired Master Guns made it for me to my specifications.
I like any decent Highland Single Malt but get ready to gasp … My go-to, everyday Scotch is Famous Grouse … Which is made from three single malts blended. I can get that at the PX for real close to $40 a handle.
That’s right, you read it correctly, a blended Scotch Whiskey …
I’m a philistine, I’m afraid.
🙂
No, there are some blends I like. And I prefer Highlands to Speyside. But I do enjoy the smoke. Monkey Shoulder is quite good and less than $30 at the local ABC.
I wasn’t trying to compare the C&C to Scotch, more to American whisky. If it was more reasonably priced, I would likely get it as a nice change of pace.
Back to an earlier thought, I occasionally get Cardhu, even though it is a Speyside, as it was the first single malt I shared with my folks when I was of legal age. It’s more of a memory than a taste.
Similarly, when I am thinking about my mom alot I drink Stoli, cause that what she almost always drank.
Tonight I actually had my own created version of an Old Fashioned with Agave, bitters, lime and Larceny. Made for a nice cocktail on the deck.
That does sound tasty. I think I have a bottle of Larceny on the bar so I’ll try it sometime.
Just to mix things up now and then I have a bottle of Aztec Chocolate Bitters on hand. Use that instead of Angostura for a change of pace in an Old Fashioned and such applications. For some reason it really perks up the Americans too.
For many cocktails I like a dash of bitters and a squirt (or squeeze) of lime even when the recipe doesn’t call for it. I like a dash of bitters in bourbon and branch and both lime and bitters in a scotch and soda.
For me what takes me back is a bourbon or whisky sour, which to me is just a jigger of liquor, ice and a can of Squirt (TM) soda pop. Which I have a hard time finding here for some reason.
That’s what my Dad used to order after a round of golf. I would be his “caddy” when I was a kid and he’d let me have a sip when we got back to the clubhouse. Just a sip mind you, but I thought a sip with Dad after 18 holes was heaven.
Now I drink that with bitters and lime too. Bitters and lime is just a great all round cocktail condiment.
Hard to beat a gin and tonic on a hot day sitting by the pool too but … Again a drink substantially improved with bitters and lime.
Gin may be the one spirit for which I just never acquired a taste.
For the fall, I make my own syrup letting it sugar and water steep with several sticks of cinnamon. Then use the chocolate bitters and a slice of orange when building the drink and mixing. Goes best with a spicy Rye.
But for summer, the lime seems to bring out a nice scent and flavor and the Larceny is pretty sweet so the lime and bitters really balances. things.
My version of a whiskey sour uses more lemon juice than soda, but that is a nice summer treat as well.
I get the feeling I drink too much, I might give Steve G a run for his money.
I’ve said it since I first heard rap. Rap is not music, its words spoken to a beat. Takes talent, yes. I’ve heard Christian rap I like, but I like melodies and harmonies more. Most rap I find disgusting, or very base in nature. Not interested. Once I get more time, I am going to post on the blog some videos of a musical group I like: The Piano Guys. Take classical and modernize it. Or leave it alone. Take modern and “classical” it. Or leave it alone. Or blend it. Or all of the above. Or write their own, that can feels modern or classical. Will title the blog “Some of my favorite videos.”
Thank you, Zo. What a wrap-up!
Heh, you just reminded me of this:
The Beach Boys 50th Reunion Tour – That’s Why God Made The Radio – YouTube
I’m old enough to remember when James Watt thought they were controversial
Music is great when it gets to something meaningful. Sometimes it’s depressing. Sometimes it’s even ugly.
More and more ugly music may be a reflection of the ugliness that has grown in society as we jettison the hard-won values that made it more beautiful. And there *may* be some sort of feedback mechanism at work here, too, I can’t be sure.
One of the things I really can’t stand about what passes for modern pop music is the ubiquitous banality of it.
It’s not like banality hasn’t existed in popular music before (que “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” for just one example) but it seems to me to … at least in top 40 land … that what we’re getting to now is almost all modern versions of “yummy, yummy, yummy” with more and more of THAT celebrating immorality.
Which, to me, is ugly.
A subject near and dear to my heart. It’s not new. But it IS getting worse.
There have been better closings to your clips, but never one cooler than this. Thanks for the drumming, Zo!
30 years ago I was wondering how music would change so that the kids would shock us old people. Between the violence of Slayer lyrics (as in “Angel of Death”) and the sexually explicit rapping of The Geto Boys (listen to “Gangsta of Love”), I didn’t see how the bar could be raised.
It seems the reaction has been to go bland & lifeless. Or drag queen sing a longs on Blues Clues. As Bill pointed out, Nirvana may have been sad, but whether depressing, violent, or crude, at least our music was alive
I’ve been listening to a band called Greta Van Fleet for a while. They’ve been around for a few years and they’re in their mid-twenties. They sound a lot like Led Zeppelin, but do have their own sound that I just enjoy. It’s great having a band that is doing some classic rock and being around my age, because I grew up listening to classic rock from my dad. While I love listening to those classic rock bands, it’s nice having a band that’s young and making this kind of music.
Good one – I had forgotten about GVF! They are one of the all too rare bright spots in today’s music scene
Making Art is difficult; regurgitating slop is easy; especially if one is praised and rewarded for slop.