HOLYGOD music geek comment
This post will likely only resonate with my fellow late-80s music school geeks.
I've been listening to Yes "90125" this morning. Why? I have no idea. Haven't listened in years and years and years. It's a lot of fun. Some bits have aged very well...some have aged very poorly. But the nostalgia of it all has made up for the poor parts, for the most part.
But here's a bit that I have figured out, 15-20 years too late. Remember the tune "Hold On". (Hooooold On...Hooooold On....etc.) It's a shuffle tune. Back in the day, we LOVVED this tune, because it had such a cool groove. But here's the thing: the groove sucks. Back in the day, we went to lengths to defend it: "Dude, that beat displacement is SO wicked. That's some serious shit." But it's not seriuos shit. It's bad and stupid. People, they are accenting the MIDDLE eighth-note triplet over and over again. That subdivision is owned only by Elvin Jones. No one else is allowed to even think about using it. It's sarcosanct. And YES, of all people, decided to accent the middle eighth note triplet as a band over and over and over again in that song. MAYBE Bonham could use that triplet. No one else. Everyone else fails.
And back in the day we spent hours and hours and hours trying to master the unapproachable middle eighth-note triplet. And there was Yes, encouraging our folly. If they had just kept a straight shuffle, it would have been much better, and we music geeks would have spent hours trying to groove rather than anti-groove. As such we spent years mastering anti-groove, which demanded years of unlearning and relearning and humiliation on gigs and ultimately sacrifice of our egos to give in to our sexual organs, which knew much more accurately what groove was about and what people want to hear. Sexual organs and dancefloors do not want middle-eighth note triplets. They want to shake that ass, which is how it should be, and which is what they fail to teach in music school.
It's still a fun record to listen to, but don't expect people to shake that ass to Yes. And no one really tries that, but it's why people bash this music, which I now understand and is what I didn't understand in 1987 when I attempted to defend the middle-eighth note triplet. That's a losing debate.
Now there's a tune on in, like, 13. Cool. My ass is stationary. I cannot defend.
posted by Teodoro Callate @ 8:49 AM
20 comments
20 Comments:
Are the guys all Brits or a mix of Brits and Americans? I think that Brits get a free pass or something because the shuffle ain't their thang. Of course, that doesn't really explain Bonham, does it?
Hmmm...I dunno. I guess I'll retract my first paragraph and just chalk the whole thing up to the guys in Yes being prog-rock weenies.
Someone referred to Sting as prog-rock recently because he uses odd time signatures and throws around phrases like "obsidian darkness". I guess it's a fair point, although I can't really think of him in the same category with Marillion and ELP. He doesn't have any songs about trolls or magical fairies, does he? Any concept albums about King Arthur?
Wait!?!
isn't "90125" a sort of Soap Opera about kids in Beverly Hills from the late eighties?
I know. It's confusing. I'm pretty sure that was 90210.
One was geeky and was was silly, though I'm not exactly sure which was which.
Re: Sting. I've called him a lot of things, some of them very bad and very publicly. Though I don't think one can really call him a prog-rocker. He never did that shit. You can call him out for some bad jazz moments ("Someone to Watch Over Me" b-side) and you can call him self-indulgent and you can call him very, very sleepy over the past decade. You can call him ridiculous for lip-syncing in the back of a Jaguar (the moment he really lost me). You can call him one of the best musicians of the century, one of the best bass players of all time, and certainly an unbelievable songwriter. But you really can't call him a progger.
Stewart Copeland, on the other hand, was in a band called Curved Air in, like, '74, and they were a TOTAL prog-rock band. I think he was 21 or something and he had a kid with the lead singer and he played double bass drums and they sang about elves. Then he realized that punk music was going to sell, he picked up Sting, and ruled the world. Sting dabbled in bad jazz, but not really prog.
"You can call him ridiculous for lip-syncing in the back of a Jaguar (the moment he really lost me). "
oooh, I LOVVED that one! (girlish squeel!) I completely loved it for its over the top consumerist-glamor factor. every single thing that Sting came in physical contact with in that vid. was surely for sale at the local Mall except the mercedes, of course.
For the record, I have "owner of a lonely heart" tucked away somewhere in my iTunes playlists.
to be honest, I really enjoyed listening to the Yes record. I think it's really unique and stands up to pretty harsh critique with aplomb. It's geeky in places, and the bad shuffle mentioned above is real nit-picky. I was making fun of my own geekiness as much as I was making fun of their lack of groove. They're a band that's not about groove, so it's not really fair to judge them that way.
Anyway, it's still a pretty cool record. Hard to blame them for 80s bombast when everyone suffered from that. They did it alright.
Jon Anderson sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk notwithstanding.
The production on 90125 was beautiful.
The middle triplet thing was in fact pulled off in a shake you ass kind of way ironically by another a brit band. Tears for Fears "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" does this very thing. It grooves in a happy sway kinda way.
The production was beautiful if you could get to it underneath all the reverb. Outrageous. They had the verb DOWN. ("Trevor, what do you say we use the "big hall" again?" "Righto, Chap, it worked on the last tune, too.")
Your right about TFF. (And excellent band, by the way.) They had that triplet thing going. A way better groove than "Hold On". "Hold On" has this jerky, startstop thing going that makes you fall off your chair. The TFF song makes me think of summer in 1985, which was kinda cool 'cause I was a kid and I was driving and I was chasing cute high school girls. I don't do two of those three things anymore.
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That TFF song takes me to the very same place.
uh oh. splam is back in river city!
"Sarcosanct"?
sacrosanct
adj : must be kept sacred [syn: inviolable, inviolate]
Yes, but ...
sarcosanct
adj: must be kept ... in an industrial park, manufacturing antidotes for Asian respiratory diseases
... or something ...
I think Sarcosanct was the villan in Tron.
I meant "villain". Forgot about the extra i in there.
Oops! Didn't mean to make everyone typo paranoid! Evrywun just goe abowt yor busyness as usuel!
I loved the reverb on 90125.
I miss it.
I'm typo paranoid by nature. No worries.
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