The Explain Why You Like This Album ('cause i don't understand) Thread

[Terrible Lizard]

Originally Posted by The Unfan

I like it because it reminds me of me.

Are you some undead, multidimensional fish that relates drunken observations on the most strange and ridiculous aspects of the human condition?

[boo boo]

Originally Posted by Terrible Lizard

This from a Residents fan? *tsk* *tsk*

I also like The Residents and while I don't HATE Beefheart I don't quite get all the admiration.

[SATCHMO]

Originally Posted by Terrible Lizard

Fair enough, then I can only give my reason for liking it. Since the album is basically a dadaist work the form of an album.

I like it because it manages to combine old style rhythm n' blues, out-of-consciousness lyrics, and bouts with random yelps and farting noises. Which can lead to hilarious results for some, but I personally think it jams.

It's a disjointed, sloppy collage of avant-garde concepts old and half-assed. The fact it seems so crazy is one of its attractions.
It also has the effect to make itself completely unlikeable in the first listen, I thought it to be more of a novelty when I first heard it, but I gave it more listens over time, and within a few weeks I thought it was ****ing brilliant.

The album has an overwhelming feeling of being very pretentiously contrived.

It is the air of pretention that rubs me the wrong way. It pervades the music and is much louder than anything auditory on the album.There's nothing evocative about the album, except that which evokes disdain for the listening experience itself. Anything of artistic merit is buried under a contrived heap of absurdity for the sake of drawing attention to itself.

[Terrible Lizard]

Originally Posted by boo boo

I also like The Residents and while I don't HATE Beefheart I don't quite get all the admiration.

It's just really ****ing weird and lulzy.

@Satchy

"Pretentious" is the excuse and you know it. Beefheart most likely made it see the "pretentious" artsy ***s spend empty nights trying to find some meaning in it.

[boo boo]

Well the thing is, The Residents did that avant garde stuff but in a much more accessible and entertaining way, in addition to that they were more diverse and knew what an actual melody sounded like.

Also nobody tries to make them out to be these untouchable poetic geniuses, I'm not saying they were either but goddamn they certainly qualify more than Beefheart does.

I just don't see the genius in a guy chanting out (all the while trying to make his voice sound as obnoxious as possible) words with no real meaning over what sounds like a bunch of instruments being stomped on and beaten with mallets.

[The Unfan]

Not just any mallets. Mallets of buesy rocky greatness. Also, I think his voice sounds like a divine mixture of Ghandi and Homer Simpson.

[SATCHMO]

Originally Posted by Terrible Lizard

@Satchy

"Pretentious" is the excuse and you know it. Beefheart most likely made it see the "pretentious" artsy ***s spend empty nights trying to find some meaning in it.

There is absurdism, or dadaism, which can very often be both musical, artistic, and more impotantly authentic (aka The Residents, eh sometimes.), and then there's just pretense. This album isn't absurdism or dadaism, it "sounds like" absurdism & dadaism, like someone trying, very hard, to sound absurd. It's that "trying" that is the pretense that comes across to me so heavily on this record. It's very fake.

...nobody tries to make [The Residents] out to be these untouchable poetic geniuses.

I do.

[Terrible Lizard]

Originally Posted by boo boo

Well the thing is, The Residents did that avant garde stuff but in a much more accessible and entertaining way, in addition to that they were more diverse and knew what an actual melody sounded like.

Also nobody tries to make them out to be these untouchable poetic geniuses, I'm not saying they were either but goddamn they certainly qualify more than Beefheart does.

I just don't see the genius in a guy chanting out (all the while trying to make his voice sound as obnoxious as possible) words with no real meaning over what sounds like a bunch of instruments being stomped on and beaten with mallets.

Obnoxious? It's a Howlin' Wolf impersonation. Vliet could crack glass with his voice, and The Residents learned melody over time, they started out knowing basically jack ****. Not a bad start, but you have to understand the difference.

Beefheart was declared a prodigy at an early age, an heiress offered to pay his way into one of he biggest art schools in the country. But this when he still just sculpted for hours on end.

The music isn't just noise, he applies free-jazz elements and delta blues on a avant-garde format not very different from Stravinsky and Reich. His "obnoxious" ramblings also seem to reference everything from the Holocaust to the state of gospel music in the south.

It's not mindless, Beefheart wrote every note, and rehearsed with the band over and over again. And he didn't steal ideas from commercials, which seems to be your standard.

[boo boo]

Originally Posted by SATCHMO

There is absurdism, or dadaism, which can very often be both musical, artistic, and more impotantly authentic (aka The Residents, eh sometimes.), and then there's just pretense. This album isn't absurdism or dadaism, it "sounds like" absurdism & dadaism, like someone trying, very hard, to sound absurd. It's that "trying" that is the pretense that comes across to me so heavily on this record. It's very fake.

It seems like any random guy can make a bunch of random noise and get called a Dadaist genius.

I think Zappa and Residents are good examples of people who did that kinda thing the right way, for one thing you understood what it was they were trying to say or do.

I'm not really a Dada fan but I don't think just making a bunch of random noise coupled with stupid jibberish lyrics and calling it Dada is what Duchamp had in mind.

[lucifer_sam]

i'm getting kinda sick of "pretentious" being this catch-all term that ensnares every fucking musician that doesn't play some sort of watered down commercial pap.