Is this really rock?
 

Hey guys, only just joined up so look forward to getting to know you all. This is really bugging me are the black keys really defined as rock n roll? Is a guitar solo here and there all you need these days? wheres the heart!

The heart is in the song. If you're measuring the value of rock music based on guitar solos you're a wanker. And this is being said by someone who owns 10 guitars.

Im sorry but did i ever say it was bad in anyway shape or form? I just personally dont feel that at its heart and also how its being advertised as pure rock, so don't call me a wanker for my opinion, because yours really isn't any better. Owning 10 guitars does not make you an expert.

Do you know what the word 'IF' means? The one I used at the start of my 2nd sentence.

It 'bugs' you that the Black Keys are called rock, then you chose to use guitar solos (or lack thereof) as a measuring stick. I added the bit about my guitars so that you and other people would realize I'm not blind bashing the instrument or its solos.

Also, just a friendly heads-up. Links in your signature are generally frowned upon here. Expected to have it removed by a mod sooner than later. Plus your website is gross, too much fancy java script, not enough clarity.

You know what...I just re read what you wrote and i think i took it more personally then it was intended. My apologies, what exactly is the problem to have a link in your sig? Im not making posts telling people to check it out?

Rock has little to nothing to do with guitar solos. But you have a point in saying that they are not pure rock, The Black Keys are rooted deeply in blues music, and though they are rock, they will definitely show that influence.

What's wrong with the black keys? Don't judge them based on their last couple albums, especially the last one. "brothers" isn't a bad album. Listen to their older stuff, it's pretty good. It's some good old blues-rock in the simple two man band form. Junior kimbrough inspired. Dan auerbach isn't very technical but his riffs are pretty good, hes definitely not bad, and his voice is great. His songs overall are pretty good. Listen to the new dr.john album, he does some good guitar playing in that.

Perhaps kiss is more your taste? Maybe motley Crüe? What would you call "real rock"?

I roughly think of rock music as music played by rock bands. That is bands that feature guitar, drums, bass and often some sort of keyboard.

when someone says describe what Rock Music sounds like i just pop this video out :P



Jack White - Fly Farm Blues (It Might Get Loud).avi - YouTube

I think mr Dave misread your post too. I think he thought you were saying "if it has guitars in it I think it has to be rock" whereas what I read it as is "surely just because there are guitars in it doesn't make it rock?" to which the answer is of course no, it doesn't.

Many, even most pop bands use guitar, though more in a kind of backing way than pushing it to the fore as rock does. Even jazz, funk, reggae bands use them, and you wouldn't consider any of them rock, per se.

I think the fundamental problem here is that many people (not saying you're one of them) see "popular music" as being in one of two categories, pop and rock, with all the various subdivisions and genres attendant on those. But at its heart, they think a song/band/artiste is either pop or rock, and sometimes it can be hard to decide which, as the criteria are a little vague.

At its very basic level, pop music is short of course for popular music, so should any music that's liked by a large group of people be called pop? Would Led Zep thank you for calling them pop? Bon Jovi? Springsteen? Dylan? I could go on. Then you could say pop is the "lighter" form of music, where the lyrics are usually fairly bland, the music doesn't get too technical and much of it is geared towards dancing or chart success. Rock music can achieve these effects too, but it isn't generally its raison d'etre, as it seems to be with pop music.

I recently had occasion to move all my music collection from one drive to another, and subdivided it so that it would be easier to find the music I wanted at any given time. So from everything being under "Trollheart's Music Centre" and then listed by band and album, I made subdirectories for rock, pop, classical, instrumental, experimental and so on, with subfolders in each. This left me with something of a dilemma, as it was hard to decide what in my collection that wasn't obviously Rock (Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher etc) could be seen as such, and what should be classified under the pop banner.

There's also an ugly stigma that attaches to pop, sometimes deserved though not always, as if pop music is the poor relation to rock, which sometimes it is. But bands like a-ha and Chris de Burgh, Deacon Blue and Kylie, could not in fairness be called Rock and so went into the Pop folder.

But the point is that not everything that's loud, has guitars or is seen as rock is rock. I personally see rock as harder, more honest music that pretty much always has something to say. To me, it's music that moves you, makes you think, perhaps changes the way about how you think of something, and music that you keep coming back to. It's not, for me, something you play to death. With pop music, I've seen (and heard) people play one or two songs over and over, and ignore the rest of the album(s), whereas with rock I tend to, once I find something I like, look for similar or more of that music.

After all that, I don't know the Black Keys so can't comment on them specifically, but that at any rate is my take on what makes rock music (and what doesn't).

If the guitar solo is there just for the sake of it, even if it doesn't work, then it's rubbish, but if it fits the tune, then it's great. Guitar solos usually fit rock tunes. That's it.

A huge problem for me with organizing music by genre is that I don't think genres are exclusive. There's pop-rock or jazz-rock for example. How do you organize those in a genre folder system where you can only apply one genre to an album at a time? By doing it your way, you basically have to work with all those flaws because you can't get around them. That's one of the main reasons why I don't even try that and just keep it alphabetical :

ex.

I would only organize music by genres in a media player using file tags and then foobar and perhaps some other players actually tolerate multiple values in a genre tag so that a song can be both Jazz and Rock. Doing it on the folder level seems like a really bad idea (imo).

Yeah, it's not meant really to say anything about the music, tore, just to aid me in picking out certain albums. Like when I want to hear a prog rock album yes I can go to "Prog Rock Town" (which is part of Prog City and itself a subdiv of Rock Country) and that does restrict my idea of what the music is, but if I'm for instance looking for an Arena album, say, instead of having to page through all my bands beginning with A I can go to the Prog Rock Town folder and find it easier.

Of course, it's oversimplifying, but I got tired paging down long lists for an album, and besides this I also overhauled the whole music collection, fixing tags, album art and volume manually, so it seemed a good time to reorganise its structure. I was, indeed, dismayed by the bands I had which couldn't really be considered rock as such, not that it matters, but it was interesting.

Anyhoo, it was something I'd meant to do for a long time. Also helps in making compilations and in deciding what sort of album to review.

Thx for the comment though.

Oh yeah, this is nothing to do with how the music is organised on my media player: that goes via the appropriate tags, as you say. This is purely on my hard disk.

TH

PS If you want to see how the structure is set out, let me know and I'll upload pics. I used the idea of beginning with the main directory as being the "World", then broke it into countries, subdivided into cities, towns and in some cases villages. Just looks more cheerful I feel. God I need a girlfriend! And a holiday. And six numbers on the lotto! :)

Sorry if this sounds a bit preachy, but as a passionate digital music library owner, I'd just like to share some practical info.

You should get yourself a player with a proper customizable library function. I can warmly recommend foobar2000 although you might need a little help get started with it as it's generally not something that does all you want it to straight out of the box. We have a help thread here on all things foobar though.

Basically, you shouldn't be fiddling around in your folder except when adding or deleting files. Playing your music by digging around in folders is a thing of the past. You should organize your music collection alphabetically on the folder level and then do other kinds of sorting in the media library through your media player.

Here are some screenshots of library trees I can make on the fly :

http://i.imgur.com/ywwBm.png

Above you can see music organized by "scene" (work in progress) which shows British Folk Revival expanded with bands tagged as British Folk Revival appearing underneath. The band "Heron" is also expanded and those albums listed could also be expanded to reveal track lists. Didn't do that though.

Now, just as easily, I can choose to display my music by countries instead if I like.

http://i.imgur.com/I9L7F.png

So here's by country with Denmark expanded. The good thing here is any music file can belong to as many countries as I like. For example an album could show up under Norway as well as Denmark if f.ex the album was by a duo where one was from Denmark and the other from Norway. Folders are not able to do that for you and once you've organized everything a certain way by folder, that's how it is. To organize it another way takes a lot of work. So, organizing music like that by the folder level just doesn't make sense when it is so easy to customize how the music is presented to you in the media player. Better to just leave organization on folders alphabetically and then sort your music in more creative and powerful ways in your media player.

A slight side note here, but since you mention being able to find prog more easily .. A good media player will also let you create autoplaylists. For example, I have a playlist for all my favourite Canterbury music: that is music tagged as being part of the Canterbury scene which has a rating from 3 up to 5. Whenever a file is tagged as Canterbury and given a high rating, that file is automatically added to that playlist. I can make an endless amount of such dynamic playlists tailored to play whatever I like, whether it's my favourite songs from a specific country, favourite formats, only songs above a certain length, whatever. I just tell it what I want to listen to and songs are added automatically and it stays updated with new music should it fit the playlists criteria.

If you're still digging around in your folders to play music, you're living in the stone age, my friend. :)

Pah! I'm insulted --- wait, was that an elk that just went by? Let me grab my club --- damn where does the wife put my ---- oh yeah, here it is...

Seriously, I'm not as much into playing music on my PC as I am on the move, and for that I almost always use playlists on shuffle. I seldom listen to an album all the way through nowadays, unless it's for review. If I'm using the PC to play that, I prefer to go into the folders and look for the album, as media players essentially perform the same function IF you're looking for a SPECIFIC album. It's still folders for me. If that makes me a caveman, then perhaps when this art sells for millions in the future I can buy a proper...NO, it's a BULL! See? Horns --- A cat? Does a cat have horns??

On a sidenote, tried Foobar, hated it to death. Few media players impress me, though at the moment I'm using Winamp purely for convenience. I use an ipod and a Zen x-fi, both of which do the job well. I've tried a lot of media players, best I came across was Jriver Media Centre, but I wasn't prepared to pay seventy dollars for the privilege of using it, so once the trial ran out that was that. I liked XBMC, but there was something about it that stopped me using it, can't remember what: some sorting function I think, which was a pity as of the ones I looked at it was the most impressive.

I agree with the fact that a guitar solo here and there doesn't make rock music rock music.

But, like everyone else said, and I would merely be reiterating the points already made, guitar solos aren't the only thing in music by The Black Keys, nor is it merely "rock" music.

I suggest listening again, maybe this time looking for the music, the feeling, and the soul rather than a genre to label the song with. Maybe this will help redefine the band and the music for you.

Just to echo previous posts, I disagree entirely that because a song has certain elements to it, it then becomes something else entirely.

How would you categorise Michael Jackson's 'Beat It'? It has a guitar solo, but is it rock? Obviously, it isn't.

Does Morbid Angel's 'Blessed Are The Sick' become folk or classical because it has flute and piano in it?

Why isn't it?
The song seems to be written around a main guitar riff which is how most rock songs are created anyway. It's has the same in structure & style to virtually every rock song I've ever heard.

I would say everything about it makes it a rock song.

Hmmm...interesting point, but I still can't class it as a rock song. It's too...lightweight to be a rock song but I may say that because, subconsciously, I'm a slave to the whole genre thing, maybe not.

I suppose it's down to individual interpretation.

As previously stated, I mentally classify "rock" as having more to do with the band and the instrumentation than I do with their particular sound. If a rock band plays blues, then it's blues rock. If they are inspired by classical music, they may play symphonic rock. If they play jazz, you call it fusion or jazz rock.

But does it not also have to do with the style the band play, or are acknowledged to espouse? Would you consider "Wild boys" a rock song? I personally would not, even though there are guitars and rock elements in it, it's a departure from the music Duran Duran usually played, and they were known as a pop, not a rock, group. Obviously, there's an inherent flaw in trying to label everything/one, but if you use that logic with "Beat it", then no, it's not a rock song, as Jackson was never (imo) a rock artiste. Was he the "king of rock" or the "king of pop"? I honestly don't think one song used with rock influences by a pop artiste can be called a rock song.

If anything, "Dirty Diana" is closer to rock (YAY Steve Stevens!) but even then, I think the general perception Jackson played pop makes it a pop song. If someone like maybe Metallica covered it, maybe then it would be a rock song, but I know a lot of pop bands who have SOME very heavy rock style material, but I would not personally consider those songs rock.

Ah, labels.
But I'm firmly in the camp that says no, "Beat it" is NOT a rock song --- despite the presence of EVH on it.

(Can I have change for my tuppence worth?) :)

I feel like I write this a lot these days, but I still don't think genres are exclusive so although I tend to lean towards one genre-definition of a song or an album, I don't see why a song can't be pop and rock at the same time.

I think Beat It is a pop-rock song. ;)

Wild Boys too!

Ah, but is it a pop-rock song or a rock-pop song? And who gets to sit at the top of the table? And while we're at it, why is it that no matter which queue you join it will always move the slowest? :) :confused:

Tore, I had a quick look at your thread for Foobar. You have to script everything?? Sorry, no way is that for me. I know zero computer language (unless you count HTML) and have no desire to start learning how to programme a media player. Winamp will do me fine, and I'll stick to my folders.

Thanks for the thought: not for me though.

is there a difference between

"Rock" & "Rock n roll" Lol

Not really. I tried out foobar that way, but you'd probably be better off using a premade skin or theme made by someone else first. There are many such skins out there. Here's an example :

DarkOne v3.0.1 by ~tedgo on deviantART

.. But eventually, to get the most out of foobar, you should get into some scripting. That's how you really get the most out of the program. It's very simple and doesn't take long to learn, at least not if you've done a little bit of scripting before, but I can understand that some think it's too much work.

edit :

An example of scripting can be like this .. You have a list of songs with columns for artist and albums and track titles and so on. You want to add another column that shows the disc number. You go into the preferences and add a column (no scripting needed to do that) and then write a little script determining what info the column should show. You write something like :

[Disc %discnumber%]

The brackets means the script will only trigger if the id3 tag %discnumber% exists. If triggered, the script will output the word "Disc" followed by the value of the discnumber tag, f.ex "Disc 3".

Most of the scripting I do by far is for little things like that.