LCD Soundsystem “Losing My Edge”.

A great song, that summarizes all of this nicely.

should be pretty easy. there can’t be more than a dozen words per song.

A birth defect and old age has weakened my hearing in the upper registers, I am afraid. I did turn the volume up and moved closer to the speakers, but the dogs started yowling (does anyone else have dogs that sing along with ambulance and police sirens?) and I fear the total effect was lost.

Maybe if I go study the lyrics…

My own version of this holds that Sonic Youth is just MBV without melody, but chacun a son gout, I suppose.

i sure hope you found those melodies. Loveless without melody is just a weak Sonic Youth ripoff.

Hey, they’re every bit as goth as Poison were metal. Take it in what sense thou wilt.

Type-O-Negative is Goth. Bauhaus is Goth. Fucking Marilyn Manson is more Goth than Evenesence.

This is true of City of Mirrors, but not so much of All America City or the albums collected on Archive One and Two.

No, I don’t think you misunderstood them at all. There are music snobs of both genders but there’s a certain special breed of male rock snobbery—characterized by a special edge of desperate aggression—that I’ve rarely encountered on the female side of the aisle.

That’s how I always saw it. But bringing up gender questions in rock music is, like, so 1992, and anyway we gave you ladies a fair chance and all you did was start knitting and talking about how feminist knitting is, so fuck that. We can do this stuff ourselves, and reserve the right to complain from time to time about your asking us to turn off the Ex pleeze because it’s hard to knit with that stuff on and have we read this awesome book, The Time-Traveler’s Wife? Uh, no, but we’ve noticed that you haven’t touched this awesome book Ulysses that we recommended to you when you asked us what we like to read…

Is this completely off-base? I swear I’ve met people like this, but perhaps I misunderstood them in some key way…

Less, surely, unless we’re defining “rock” as “anything that uses a drum kit.” Though the “rock” and “jazz” boundary is inherently fuzzy—which is what makes much of Henry Cow admissible as prog “rock”—MTG at least strike me as being much more in “jazz” territory.

I was aware of the term and its origin, but didn’t consider it remotely helpful as a description of the music. “Noise-pop” is more useful. I listened to some “Loveless” again last night, trying to find the beautiful ethereal melodies in front of, or behind the wall of sound.
Put Fripp/Eno on one side of the stage, crank them to 11, put Judee Sill on acoustic guitar on the other side. You might guess that a visual aspect helped, in making the contrast more explicit and comprehensible. But “Loveless” was a studio album.

Not that I didn’t like it. Everybody else in the house demanded I turn it off, including the dogs.

Nope, they’re strictly goth. Evanescence actually describe themselves as “a kind of widescreen goth,” which perhaps is meant to signify their special suitability for superhero movie soundtracks.

I vaguely recall it being called that, Bob, but I believe the proper IMS label for MBV and their early-90s ilk is “shoegazer.” The origin of the term being obvious to anyone who’s ever seen them live.