Haha i listened to the whole thing beginning to end on a commute.

I will relisten to the tracks you listed though.

Cool.

Also, y'know, part of the reason I think that new music in general has been so uninspiring to me lately is that I, for one, tend to listen to most records right around the time they come out, sometimes only for a couple of days, and then my ADD kicks in, or I just plain want to hear one of my go-to artists (mostly Kanye, Sonic Youth and DJ Koze for the last few years) and I sometimes never return to those albums.

Used to be a new album would come out, and if I liked it at all, or was a fan of the artist, I'd listen to it fairly regularly throughout the year. Even if I didn't like some of it. I think it takes time for a record to kind of grow its meaning around you, and that used to be what happened to me. It was really rare that I bought something new just to spin it for a day/week and let it sit on the shelf. I did that with albums that I thought were total wastes of time and money only, but now it's almost become my default.

Anyway, my point is, I think I (maybe you, maybe others, maybe not) need to make an effort to fight the impulse to access this 24/7 virtual library we all have in one form or another, and give albums a chance again. I hope you do so with an album by a band as worthy as the Lips.

Oh, hey, NR...
Re: FLips covers albums

I thought With a Little Help From my Fwends was a massive let-down with only a few redeeming moments. It was a let-down both because it was a waste of time and energy that the band could have applied to something that was actually new, and because it was just a lazy recording, adding nothing new or interesting to the original record (not my favorite Beatles record by any means, but still a remarkable and near-perfect album.)

About a year ago, I read a list Wayne Coyne did for Spin or Rolling Stone or something of his favorite "psychedelic" albums of all time, and he had some interesting choices. The man has great taste in music, really, so that's not surprising. But what was surprising was that for this list, which featured records by Can and Suicide and Television, he did NOT include Sgt. Pepper's, but did include both Revolver and The White Album. Neither of these albums are "psychedelic" in the traditional neon concept album sense of the word, but they're both weird as hell, and aren't quite as confined to one cultural moment as Sgt. Pepper. If he HAD to do ANOTHER complete cover of a treasured classic, I think either of these albums would have been more interesting and less cliché choices. But still... rarely are cover albums worth a shit. I'd rather have a couple new songs on a SIM card made of stem cells or whatever.

Anyway, back to With a Little Help From My Fwends...

I bought it, of course, because I'm a Lips completist but I feel like it was a missed opportunity. Like I said, I really don't tend to care for covers much. They're goddamn boring, especially when they're covers of big, iconic records and songs. But when I read about WALHFMF I thought, "Holy shit, the Flaming Lips are going to cover 'A Day in the Life.'" In my head, if was going to be so fucking epic. But the end result was extremely disappointing. It just made me want to listen to the Beatles. They turned this beautiful album into a novelty project, and I would rank Fwends below their cover versions of Dark Side of the Moon and the Stone Roses' self-titled (The Time Has Come to Shoot You Down... What a Sound is the oh-so-helpful title they went with for that one, by the way. Still, it at least attempted to preserve the spirit of the original album. Fwends was like an assassination attempt on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it mostly just pissed me off.

In my opinion it's the worst thing this band I love has ever been associated with. Though I never did hear that Miley Cyrus album they played on, 'cause... why the fuck would I?

I really liked that Sgt Pepper album.

I also like a lot of Mileys output in the last few years. You never heard Bangers? So good.

Well, I heard at least some of Bangers because it was everywhere. But I was taking about the Dead Petz album, of r whatever it's called. The career-killing one. You know... she dressed up like Marie Antoinette and played some of it on SNL? Yeah. That one.

I'm pretty sure she's done being a big time pop star now. That album dropped like a dead body.

I don't dislike Miley Cyrus. She's not Drake. I'm pretty sure I liked elements of the songs I heard on SNL. But I don't like her. Her voice isn't terrible when paired with Wayne's though. And yet, I would not mourn her absence... from anything... ever.

I liked those SNL songs. I never heard the album tho.

Bonobo's new album Migration is a win in my book. It's a strong and consistent release from an underappreciated artist. Dropped Friday via Ninja Tune but I've been in Lips mode, so I just heard the whole thing today. Good stuff. Nice rainy day, relatively down-tempo electronic music.

I've been waiting for this for a while, though it hasn't been a front and center priority. "Flashlight," from the EP of the same name, was one of my favorite tracks of 2014, and I liked the last album The North Borders (2013) quite a bit. I'd say this new one is an improvement over that one, so far.

Filing under "best new albums" for 2017.

Spoon - Hot Thoughts



Every time I think Spoon is done being interesting, this happens. Their mysterious new album takes form. It gets a kick-ass title, and reveal compelling album art that seems to fit perfectly into some previously unknown empty space in the Spoon universe.

Seriously, this is just great. It feels so Spoon.

This is now my most looked-forward to rock album of the year.

sorry to dredge this up but I mean I just don't get *how* exactly it is that you can listen to these 'credible' acts you've listed when nine inch nails are an assault on them, a complete pastiche of their values and therefore an obliteration of them. it's not about a pop vs. underground oppositional thing, more so that pop has an underlying awareness of its inescapable vacuity and as such is completely free from being quantified in relation to anything outside of its actual properties as organised sound -- it exists as nothing more than brain candy to fill in the gaps in one's membrane and does whatever it can to achieve that.

nine inch nails posit themselves as something more than the midwest strip mall goth-pomp that they unquestionably are, wearing on their sleeves the industrial tag while utterly bastardising everything that made that term have some sort of subversive meaning. I'm not saying that context is of utmost centrality to enjoying music, but when an artist is going to consciously situate themselves in a lineage I think you have to scrutinise that as it's a very unhealthy thing to do, especially one as singular and ideologically rigorous as industrialism. and to shamelessly don this tag while totally flouting all of these underlying principles, creating this facade of existing out of the norm while being the very definition thereof is patently fucking offensive.

I just see them as being perhaps the most heinously disingenuous band I've ever heard, and their music is to my ears pure shit, teen angst left to fester in a jar of piss and then sold back to poor unknowing kids in a coke can with a complementary nose stud.

Wow.

I've never met anyone who hated a musician as much as you apparently hate NIN.

You hate them/him MUCH more than I like them, just so you know. So, you're not going to get an equal response.

Jesus man. I really hate some artists (Drake) but I can't imagine goingas nuts on him as you are on NIN.

Sorry you can't believe it or understand it, but I like NIN as well as Sonic Youth and Throbbing Gristle (Genesis P-Orridge likes NIN too, just saying), and the Melvins and Einstürzende Neubauten, and Velvet Undergeound and Big Black andall the "legit" and "cool" other bands out there. Again, I like music that makes my ears and brain feel good.

There was a time, around age 18 to 21-22, when I decided NIN didn't match up with my increasingly cool and exclusive ( :cool: ) standards for music. They weren't, y'know, actually repulsive to the average listener so they HAD to be just too low brow for me.

Eventually I realized that this was just a symptom of early-adulthood assholism and exclusivity syndrome. I realized that, hey, come to think of it, Pearl Jam isn't the devil either. Not great, but they had some good songs and it's okay for me to think that and still be a John Cage-listening, chin rubbing, musical elite-type guy.

Sorry my friend but you and I think about music far too differently to have a productive discussion here. You come across sounding, like, really snobby even though I don't think that's what you're going for. Also, have you nothing to say about Kim Carnes? Fleetwood Mac? Meh?

Here's some more unworthy, establishment type music whose that I don't hate completely:

The White Stripes (love them actually)
Madonna (she had some bangers... Mostly shit, but that shit was flecked with fuckin' bangers)
Janet Jackson (Control.)
Phish (they have at least 3 great albums. Can't hate them completely, despite the 13 awful ones)
Jane's Addiction (this should piss you off as much as, if not more than, NIN. Jane's was THE catalyst in the rise of mainstream rock bands that stole from the underground and took the basement to the arena. They preceded NIN and were instrumental in helping NIN launch. So, in theory your ire should be seven fold for them)
Faith No More (see above! Mind you, I don't like all FNM, and what I do like is generally pretty accepted by my underground fanatic friends, but holy wow, these guys really walked the tightrope between awesomeness and absurdity.)
Nirvana (What do we have here? A multi-platinum band that started in the underground and rode a trend to the top of the charts while Sonic Yough and Mudhoney toiled away in the clubs. Shouldn't Nirvana essentially be very picture of everything you loathe? Re-write your ablve speech and substitute "Nine Inch Nails" for "Nirvana," and "industrial" for "punk," and it should work just fine.)

But I don't think you hate Nirvana, because I'm pretty sure you, like me, are a white guy between 35 and 40 who grew up with them. Ditto for Jane's and FNM. Why should these bands get any kind of pass? Why should NIN be evaluated only on the most awful elements of their look and "scene?")

There's also this one thing you don't seem to be getting: Trent Reznor is a music NERD. He grew up in Peter Frampton, Kiss, Van Halen. He somehow loves RUSH as much as he loves Savbath, and Depeche Mode as much if not more than Joy Division. He loved the Cure as much as Ministry, that's for sure.

He set out to make fucking dance music. Like, awful dance music. And yet, somehow, he adapted his disco sound to allow for the influence of Throbbing Gristle and New Order and Kraftwerk. Then made a reductive metal album that's heavier than all of Pantera's catalog combined. Then he added Pink Floyd and the Beatles to his list of bands to run through a blender, and he made textures and melodic "concept" records like Downward Spiral and The Fragile. Then he made some poor choices, yeah ("The Hand that Feeds" is oh my god so bad) ... but he managed to turn that to his advantage, and made anotrher reductionist, well-crafted, gem with The Slip before bowing out for a bit.

Then he got into scoring films, and the feedback has been pretty unanimously positive.

Blah. I said you wouldn't get an equal reply, and I guess I lied. But seriously, if NIN is the worst band you've ever heard, or somehow the most "offensive" to your DIY punk n' stuff ideals, then I'd say you need to broaden your horizons as listen to more music. There's a world of polished, mass market shit out there that makes NIN look like fucking Fugazi.

ALSO: if you're telling me that you genuinely dislike the song "Closer," not because of over-saturation, but because it is SO offensive to your musical, ethical and cultural sensibilities that that infectious, decade-defining groove elicits nothing but disgust from you.... then I say you're a goddamn liar.

Sorry. I must insist on being antagonistic as hell here. You've pointed to some vague, abstractions to argue that NIN is, presumably, worse than KoRn and Coldplay and Metallica and U2, but you haven't talked about the actual music. And while sure, some of it is embarrassingly bad, you're gonna have to look me dead in the eye and tell me exactly why "Closer" is NOT one of the best pop singles of the '90s in order for me to even concede one point to you.

I'd love to hear what's wrong with "Into the Void" and "The Perfect Drug" too, but I can't spend all day on this.

What is music, ultimately, other than the feelings it inspires in the listener? Throwing anything else into the mix is and ultimately confusing the issue. "High Fidelity" is fun, but that's not life. In life, if you hear something and it makes you feel a certain way, that's the experience. Muddying the waters with philosophical rhetoric about the nature and taxonomy of the music (i.e. Well, that's [style x] and I've decided to identify as a [style y] type of person, so I have to hate [non x-adjacent] things on principle!") is completely unproductive, and ultimately harmful to cultural discussions of art.

But if you're going to be a hard-liner about this kind of thing, you really need to condemn like 90% of recorded music. Does Al Green line up with your outsider/alienation thing? Does Eric Clapton? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? Michael Jaskson? Prince? BOWIE? None of them should. Assuming they don't, does this mean none of these artists have any good music to their credit? Shouldn't.

I kind of hate Led Zeppelin. They seem to sort of represent a lot of the things about music that I hate most. But I would be insane to suggest that this means they never kicked out the fucking jams.

Anyway, wow. You hate NIN a lot. I thought I hated Drake, but you apparently think NIN is so offensive to "The Pure" that any memory of true "How did we ever get there?" head-scratchers like Limp Bizkit and Nickelback seems to have escaped you. Like, really? NIN's the worst? Worse than its own severed conjoined twin acts like Filter and Marilyn Manson? Ohhhhhhhhhhnononononoooo, I think not.

This appears to be coming out March 17, on Matador by the way.

Spoon hasn't been on Matador since Telephono (also know as "Spoon' Pablo Honey") in 1996. I don't actually think the label matters much. They released They Want my Soul on Loma Vista after a decade plus with Merge, and it still sounded Spoony.

Gotta say, that record (TWMS) was the first Spoon album that didn't really turn my crank on first listen, and didn't eventually grow into a staple. I haven't listened to it since the year of its release. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, and it certainly wasn't bad. It was good, just not immediately memorable (despite great art, title). It was no Ga or Sneaks. So I'm hoping for something that hits the spot right away.

NIN are just fine. it's the Korn, Limp Biscuit, Creed, Nickleback, Emeniem contingents from the late 90's that worried me the most and I was right to worry. a whole generation of dumbasses weened on rap-rock and post grunge = gross individuals, redneck views of the world, and extreme morals on how to live life. thanks to all those fuckers I listed above. those fans are grown up and in society in their 30's making decisions.

and you thought Pearl Jams was wrong. ha.

yes, loser Emeniem was apart of the whole post grunge white trash "hate my parents, girlfriend angst, and I want to put a gun to my head" as any band.

NIN was lumped in a bit with Korn for a while. Specifically, I remember a group of kids in my high school who alternated between Korn, NIN and Tool shirts... maybe a Manson every once in a while, or a Nirvana (because deep, obviously)... sometimes even a Submie tee, which I always found really incongruous on several levels, but whatever.

Anyway, because NIN had dark videos that were played late at night and kinda looked a bit like the "ADIDAS" video mixed with the "Ænema" video (divided by Depeche Mode), NIN was somehow thrown in with that trinity of pre-rap rock, post-grunge whateverthefuck. Really, Trent didn't belong in that company. I don't think those kids ever listened to Pretty Hate Machine all the way through. Surely if they had the music would have seemed totally gay to the lot of them.

I always thought of Nine Inch Nails as a peer of Jane's Addiction, Rollins Band, Faith No More, Ministry, Coil. Dark, weird, ambitious, heavy, a bit artsy... Not the same stuff the Korns of the world were made of.

Nobody's arguing with you. I'm not anyway. Eminem is an awful, awful thing.

 

Anything Could Happen — Bash & Pop (January 20, so at least something cool will happen on Fascist Takeover Day). If you've never heard Friday Night Is Killing Me or don't even know who Bash & Pop were/are, you've lived a seriously miserable life and I can't help you.

You know the Sleater-Kinney live album is also dropping on Jan. 20, right?

I recommend that everyone here who is into weird music, from noise to drone to electronic and ambient to pretty much everything else subscribe to the Boomkat mailing list.

Boomkat has been one of the most reliable places for new music for me in recent years. Great site, great selection, weird music. What's your poison? Archival reggae? Metal so fucked and weird and underground that a reissued LP has no base audience (so why the reissue? Doesn't matter!)? What about, like, Himalayan grime-folk? Or just the usual stuff like Basinki, O'Rourke, Anbarchi, etc.?

They have excellent prices on everything, and if you create an account and sign up for the mailing list and buy an album from them, they send you info every couple days about new music that you might like based on that purchase.

It's rare that I get excited about a company that distributes music, but Boomkat the exception. I'd dig a PR job there. Check it out.

- I mean I'm not 40, I'm 21, so evidently there's not going to be any nostalgic attachment to nine inch nails on any level, and I guess it's that hindsight perspective that makes me view them that way, that I'm not able to appreciate them in the sense of their tapping into some zeitgeist and instead can only see them for what they are now: songs for bro intellectuals at a gym inside the mall of america pumping their arms with what I feel are the most offensively underdone lyrics ever known to man coming out of the manchild mouth of a steroid-addicted megalomaniac who completely lacks any sense of self awareness, ie bemoaning the corporatisation of music while working for fucking beats.

- I'm not inclined to trust the opinion of g p-o given their blatant grabs for attention (TG reunion -- swarm me) and also fucking TTOPY

- again, as I think I established pretty clearly, I'm not in any way opposed to popular/marketable music, especially coming from someone who on this board on innumerable occasions has expressed a love for r&b, dance pop, the literal dregs of mass culture all the way up to stuff that does actually communicate stuff to me personally and others. that's not the point -- it's that trent reznor is not only symptomatic of these cultures which he very clearly derides with a misplaced passion, but he's a benefactor of it (scoring enormous films, working for a company with the most offensive product placement of any organisation currently operating to create a falsified notion of mainstream 'credibility' -- which is in itself a really difficult thing to truly define but I mean in the sense of cultivating a cult-like love for a product in spite of knowing fully well that said product is atrocious yet still selling it to people -- making what essentially amounts to nu-metal for bros with flourishes of very typical abstraction so as to further bilk people who might accidentally perceive some depth in his music) yet still has the temerity to decry the whole culture of consumerism, one which he presides over.

- here's why closer isn't one of the best pop singles of the 90s:
I want to fuck you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
I want to fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god

also to lump coil in with ministry et al, especially at that stage of their career, is not only completely incorrect but totally fucking idiotic.

on a pointlist rave tip..



[gábor lázár - crisis of representation]


this is also out at the end of the month, it's mostly been released elsewhere but sweet to see warp committing to putting all this stuff out for the masses.

[children of alice (james cargill & roj stevens from broadcast with ghost box overlord julian house) - s/t]

YOU'RE 21?!

Jesus man, you don't even know what you like yet. To speak about NIN so dismissively is asinine. You weren't even born when they released their definitive work. Everything you've lived though from NIN is essentially an afterthought. For years we didn't think we'd ever hear from the them again.

Seriously though... remember when I mentioned Led Zeppelin? How I'd be crazy to say they never released anything good even though I kind of hate them? There's a lesson in that.

Also, the lyrics you cited don't make the song not good. In fact their part of what made the song great. Listen to it. It's a disco song released in 1994. A disco song with THAT chorus. Is it Shakespeare? No, but neither is anything Sonic Youth wrote. You're totally missing the point of what I was getting at by essentially arguing ... what? That blunt lyrics and the f-bomb = objectively bad music? It's a 7 and a half minute dark disco song that took over the world. Musically, it's an intricate and melodic (and funky as hell) masterpiece. Have you ever listened to the drum break on "Piggy?" That would qualify as noise today. It would not be accepted by the masses or sell 4 million copies (unless LCD Soundsystem reunited for real, got twenty times more popular than ever before, and threw pop ambitions out the window.

I'm sorry. Your age does not make you unqualified to comment on music, but I think you're taking certain parts of the NIN "thing" way too seriously, and really underestimating other elements of their music. Ever heard their cover of "Get Down Make Love" with Al Jourgensen? That might be cool enough for you.

(21 year-olds need to be cool, feel cool, and be acknowledged as cool by their peers. It's sociology... bro! But really, knowing your age makes this whole exchange make more sense.

Haha. "It's a bad song because [quoted lyrics.]"
Oh, I see. Very compelling anti-logic you're using here. Very compelling indeed.

Not trying to bust your balls, but at this point I feel like I've given you every opportunity to not be a dick about this, and you've said "nah." So... the reality is that you're at an age where everything you say will seem idiotic in a decade's time. Way of the world, that.

I definitely get why I got no response when I namedropped Kim Carnes or Fleetwood Mac or Flowers in the Dirt now. Must have sounded like Greek to you.

Guest - I'm not trying to be an asshole about age, and you make some good points in here, even if most of them are more relevant on social and cultural levels than on musical ones. So let me try to respond a bit less dickishly...


Ok, here's the thing though. First off, despite growing up as a "punk," with plenty of ideas about music similar to those you've laid out, at this point in my life I actually REALLY appreciate the value of a good multimedia and technology product. I happen to love Apple. Not politically of course, but Apple (which owns Beats, and for which Reznor consults... Apple Music soecifically, in addition to their headphone division) makes products that make my life exponentially easier. As a multimedia professional, I really have to say fully and completely that, politics aside, I'm glad Apple exists. Sorry.

But honestly how is so different from Lee Ranaldo or J Mascis making a guitar for Fender? Do you know how Fender operates in terms of trade and distribution? Not awesomely. Certainly, Trent working with Apple is no worse than Kim Gordon working with Calvin Klein. Or hey, remember when "Search and Destroy" was in that jeans commercial? ... ok you probably don't because you were 1.

Also, I don't do steroids, and I don't think I've pumped a fist in years and years. So I think you're making some sweeping generalizations here, and I don't tend to think along those lines, or respect that kind of reasoning.


These reasons you have for disliking Reznor... I'm not saying they're false, but why do they apply so strictly to Reznor? Why aren't you foaming at the mouth about Dr. Dre? U2? The Killers? A million othet suck-ass acts that have mass-marketed a mutilated version of underground culture, or stuffed said culture full of fluff for the purposes of mainstream financial gain? Why Trent Reznor?

Also, these are non-musical reasons for having an opinion about a musician and his music. Have you listened to any of his soundtracks? Spoiler: they're quite good. And the movies are pretty damn good as well, honestly. And it's not just big bloated Hollywood productions. He just scored the climate change doc with the likes of Mogwai.

Trent Reznor, the man, may be symptomatic of a bunch of awful stuff. He's surely not the type of PERSON I'd throw my support behind. But Nine Inch Nails' music is not "Trent Reznor the dude." It's music. And it should be evaluated on one criteria above all others: that being, Does it sound good to you?. To me, a lot of it does. You need to be able to respect that, just as I would respect it if you said, "Severian, NIN just doesn't sound good to me."

But you didn't say that. You got all hyperbolic and know-it-ally about it and suggested that I was "wasting" my life listening to NIN (which, again, I do maybe once a year). Then you went on and on about all these things that have fuckall to do with the actual music and why it is a waste of time.

No offense, but the fact that you're 21 did put this into perspective a bit. When I was 21, I was too cool for most things, NIN included. And man, I was a serious asshole about it sometimes. It wasn't until much later that I got a burning desire to hear "Wish" and "Suck." I thought it was just probably nostalgia, like the very occasional, fleeting desire to hear "Rearviewmirror" or what have you. But then I listened to those songs, and — maybe it was all the Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle I'd filled my head with in the interim — but there were elements of the music that really held up, and I realized NIN was like a less arty, less high-brow, more angsty version of Radiohead (another band that has shamelessly milked counterculture bands — everyone from Sonic Youth to Can to Kraftwerk to R.E.M. — for all they're worth). Only NIN actually pushed the envelope for popular use of electronics in music back when Radiohead was still slumming around Oxford covering Talking Heads! And Trent's production work was envied (and his songs were remixed) by none other than my beloved Aphex Twin. The very act whose sound Radiohead rode all the way to "Best Album of all time dude!" status.

To hate Trent Reznor for his business decisions is one thing. To shit on me (your elder ;) ) for listening to The Fragile — which, by the by, is generally accepted as a strong and daring alt rock record by pretty much everyone at this point — its "alt rock" genus making it a different animal, requiring a different level of criteria for analysis than truly experimental/avant-garde/non-mainstream music, mind you. And as an alt rock record, from an alt rock artist, it's pretty goddamn impressive. "The Great Below/La Mer" may be lugubrious and melodramatic, but it also packages elements of ambient, drone, free jazz, and noise into a pop-ballad a la "Hurt"-shaped box (eh? See what I did there?), which is something you just plain didn't hear on #1 albums in 1999.

I may not love Trent Reznor himself... actually, I just plain don't. He's a meathead. He's, like, REALLY into Rush and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. He's also a libertarian, which I find more loathsome than any brand affiliation.... but I don't need to like him for the music he makes to sound good to me. And if you want to take issue with the fact that said music sounds good to me, you should have some musical reasons for taking such a stance.

Though I don't know why you're surprised or even bothered, since, according to you, I like everything from the "dregs of culture" (by which I assume you mean Kanye, and that's an entirely different discussion about which you are partially right about the person, but OBSCENELY wrong about the music in a way that makes the NIN conversation seem trivial) to, you know, the "good" stuff... the obscure stuff that you believe is the only good music in the world, because that's the mindset you have to occupy right now, based on the rules of age-correlated musical elitism.

This is not an argument. Hell, this isn't even an ad hominem. I mean, it's almost there, but even logical fallacies require some attempt at logic in order for said logic to be deemed "fault." This has none, and I'm pretty sure you know that because you're clearly a bright person.

Do better.


Eh, you seem to be ill-informed on this. Not only is NIN frequently compared to Coil (I'm pretty sure that any site with a "similar artists" or "more like this" feature — Spotify, Apple Music, AllMusic, etc. — will list Coil on the NIN page and vice-versa), but Coil was briefly signed to Reznor's Nothing label. Also Danny Hyde worked on more NIN remixes than I can count, and Drew McDowall helped enginee TDS companion disc Further Down the Spiral.

Additionally, prior to the respective deaths of Balance and Christopherson, the two Coil mainstays were close friends with Reznor. Have you, like, never listened to Uncoiled or Recoiled? Not definitive Coil pieces, I'll grant you — indeed they're not even close — but still... they're alt. takes of NIN remixes. To suggest there's no link between the two bands is patently false.

Admittedly, Coil's "real" albums, and their entire take on "industrial" sounds very different from NIN's. But Reznor is a mega fan, and if you were more familiar with his music, you'd be able to identify where he pulled inspiration from their work.

One last thing is that you need to remember (learn?) that in the early '90s, we didn't have access to music the way you have for as long as you've likely been listening to it. Hell, we didn't even have the internet when this stuff was going on. Those of us who wanted to find underground music often did so first through established big tent artists. Nirvana led me to Sonic Youth, and the breadcrumb trail continued until I was picking up Glenn Branca albums and beyond. Similarly, when I was young, seeing Nine Inch Nails play with David Bowie introduced me not only to the true highlights of Bowie's catalog (Station, Low, Lodger), but also to a whole world of underground artists that were within NIN's orbit. The trail may have started a bit basic, with Ministry and KMFDM and the like, but eventually NIN led me to Throbbing Gristle (for which I will never stop being thankful), and Plaid, and (yes) Coil! Not to mention Aphex Twin and Autechre.

So maybe you leaned about the artists you currently love from a service that picks them for you, or from a free website (Pitchfork, Quietus) or even a message board, but there was a time when this shit didn't exist. I wasn't lucky enough to grow up in a fairly art-centric urban place, where there were GOBS of used record stores to thumb through. But to know what to look for I had to dig a bit. I had to learn Rolling Stone sucked for new music coverage by reading Rolling Stone and getting my new music from the magazine. I had to rely on live shows (which were not always easy to get to before Interwebs, especially for a 14 year-old) or radio stations or my friend's big brother to expose me to new stuff. Even when internet WAS a thing —and I was all over it as soon as I could be — it was a slow and terrible, and it could take hours to load fan pages to learn about new stuff.

So while you may see NIN as everything that's wrong with music (hah! In a world that includes Drake!), for me, they were instrumental in helping me discover the things that were right. Like a lower level Nirvana, in the sense that they exposed me to a new workd of amazing things.

Being a music fan... a true nusic fan, is about so much more than politics, ethics or ideals. It's about the pursuit of joy itself. Music that brings you joy is music worthy hearing. Music that interests you or makes you think is music worth hearing. Music that exposes you to more music is music worth hearing. Not being DIY/obscure/alienated/punk/sophisticated/progressive or whatever else has no bearing on the sound of the notes in your ears. If it did, I'd Fucking hate The Rolling Stones! The epitome of music-as-product, consumer-driven, rich and indulgent horseshit. But only an asshole would hate the Stones.
Those corporate stooges have made my ears and brain feel good as hell over the years.

/old and uncool and unconcerned

Wow. Pitchfork came in handy, alerting me to an album about which I had previously been unaware...
Apparently tomorrow, Friday, Jan. 20, Botany is releasing a new LP! His second in the past three months.

His last album, 2016's Deepak Verbera was a let-down to me at first... not because it was bad music, but because it looked like such a hackneyed cliché for beat and sample-based artists (pivoting to "woo-woo" Indian world music and filing it under instrumental hip hop wen it's really just ambient sound). It grew on me, but not much.

Anyway, most anticipated because it appears to be (and sounds like, so far) an actual Botany album.

Raw Light II (Western Vinyl)

FAKE NEWS, MOTHERFUCKER! The release date is January 27.

http://www.sleater-kinney.com/live-i...pre-order-now/

I agree with a lot of what guest has said about NIN. One of the few 'bands' I really really can't stand. Not so much for the industry politics but for the way they "posit themselves as something more"

DON'T YOU DARE FAKE NEWS ME! YOU'RE THE PUPPET!

You're right though. My bad. Got it wrong no page 1 too.

That moment on the debate... Jesus fucking Christ on a stick. Responding like that was enough to show that dildoturd was simply unacceptable as a presidential candidate. But no. People just don't give a flying fuck anymore. And I've had it with the pseudo-deep sociological explanations; whoever voted for him is RETARDED, RACIST, or BOTH. Enjoy Fascist Takeover Day, y'alls.

(Sorry — that belonged in a different thread, I know...)

I bet Sleater-Kinney secretly voted Republican. A live album? Seriously, what's next? Refrigerator magnets? Another pointless gesture from an increasingly pointless band.

You're supposed to take your meds before you post, you follow...

You and I usually seem to see eye-to-eye on most things, but I'm gonna have to go ahead and be really mean and call you a bunch of names because I don't agree with this thing you just said. That's the internet way.

Nah man, I'm just kidding. I mean, I do call bullshit, because, again, what does this thing you hate have to do with the music that you profess to hate because of it? You're talking about a perceived attitude ABOUT the music from the guy who makes it. Does NIN "posit(ing) themselves as something more" turn up in he aural experience of listening to NIN's music? Can you hear that "positing" in the guitars and synths? Does it sound bad? If not, then... how the hell can that be a reason for really, really hating that music?

I don't necessarily disagree with your assertion that they "posit themselves as something more." I can see how you'd get this impression. Sure. I personally don't think NIN is any more guilty of this than most artists though. Have you ever heard Johnny Rotten talk about himself or his music? And he's really out there because he shits on past music even talking up what he's doing at the time. Covers it all with a nice slathering of sarcastic self-deprecation about how it's all rubbish just to make it not sound like clinical megalomania.

How about Neil Young? Dude is SO INTO his own music, and the worst thing about it is that he's not talking about Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. He's talking about that godawful EARTH live album with all the barnyard animals. He hung up on a music writer because he didn't believe the poor guy had "really" listened to that cow pie of an album... on a Pono player. I read the transcript. This writer was a Young SUPERFAN, and the dick hung up on him for an imagined slight to his (waning ... really terribly waning) artistic magnificence!

Egos are everywhere in popular culture. Kanye's Shakespeare in the flesh. U2 would slap you with a glove if you called them a pop group! How dare you? They are Ghandi! Even Richard D. James, my boyfriend, thinks he's in on some existential joke that the rest of the world doesn't even know exists. How dare you call him IDM? That implies other dance music is dumb (which he very clearly believes to be the case) but still, don't say stuff about which you know nothing!

It's everywhere, in every genre and every circle and every scene. But that doesn't mean the music is bad. Doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the music. So, not a great reason to hate music.

I never professed to hate the music, although I don't like it. Either way I don't think bands are defined solely by the music they create: it can also be a stance or position they take; what they might represent in broader cultural terms. Sometimes it can just be encountering their average fan. Sometimes the music's so good it can make any other factor irrelevant, just as other times I really want to like a band because of what they seem to represent but something about the music itself just won't let me. Conveniently for me in the case of NIN, neither of those are the case.

this is essentially my issue: trent reznor makes it about more than the music, to inject it with this histrionic attitude he has towards everything which comes across as an overcompensation for a lack of actual substance to his music. again, to say it for like the fourth time in this conversation, the substance of his music or indeed any music is not of a particular issue to me -- I have absolutely no problem with pop music, especially clear coming from someone who posts on here pretty frequently about mariah fucking carey -- so long as the artist is cognisant of the nature of their music in relation to a corporate system. THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM. trent reznor, however, is a major player inside this system, yet is presumably as a byproduct of ego completely unwilling to admit his complicity in all of this and puts forward his music as something more than lowest common denominator mall goth. and no I'm not going to say that trent reznor has some greater degree of artistry simply because he puts some fucking ambient interludes on his records, nor am I going to pretend to find something appreciable in his work simply because jhonn and sleazy appreciated him (with their tastes in all respects being somewhat questionable obviously).

my issue is with trent reznor not embracing the vapidity and total redundancy of his music outside of the commodification of a subcultural lifestyle which he sells to the overwrought teens of middle america. he has sapped from a particularly vital form of expression any semblance of meaning, and truthfully the blurring of lines between the TG guys and him is something which really made me lose a lot of respect for them on the basis that conceptually/artistically/however you'd like to frame it, nine inch nails are the complete antithesis of everything they originally represented, joylessness commodified yet articulated in a really cynical, altogether uninteresting way.

as for you implying that I can't have any sense of discernment because I'm 21, I mean I really don't want to bother with something so fucking condescending but what I will say is that I'd feel a sense of self is of greater importance in the modern era when that very concept is obscured, in terms of being made to navigate a culture which is so clogged by unadulterated crap, and accordingly I think I'm pretty well equipped to realise exactly what I want to hear, and when I hear something which to me comes across as cynical either through the music itself or by some other contextual means of course I'm not going to give it any attention because it's a total waste of time.



finally for you to again say that I'm beholden to pitchfork and media outlet when you're 35-40 still reading that shit on a daily basis is a bit fucking rich mate.




[this is probably full of fuck ups but I really cannot be arsed]

Well, first of all, if you didn't want to get into it, you could have refrained from being so flippant when I (gasp!) said I was buying a NIN LP. We have different opinions on music. John Lennon was a wife-beater, but his music is excellent. It really is all about that for me. You could just say, "Oh, ok... I don't like that, but whatever." Instead you implied that listening to NIN was a waste of my life.

I mean, your whole argument just has an air of superiority, and you know that because you intentionally put it there to be combative. It's not really cool to call foul when someone responds in kind.

Secondly... I regularly mention Mariah Carey? This is news to me.

Third, I don't believe I said anything about you reading Pitchfork. Just that there was a time when such services were not available. I wouldn't criticize you for reading pitchfork. I hate them, but I skim their site daily. Rarely do I actually read more than a few words, but yeah, I frequent that site.
Anyway, point was, music wasn't always a click away. That's all. You had to take what you were could get, and if you had the resources, dig like hell from there, especially if you were from a rural community.

Funny thing is, it's entirely likely that you only like Coil because NIN championed them to a national audience back in the mid-'90s.

Finally, I wrote you a message apologizing if my age comments sounded condescending. And as I said in that message, I was playing the field as I saw it. Meaning, I figured you could take some ribbing, considering the fact that you were being snotty as hell. Your comments sound a bit condescending too, so I assumed playing rough was fair game.

Anyway, I'm not anywhere near as into NIN as you are anti-NIN. Really. They made some albums that made an impact on me in my youth, and I enjoy hearing them from time to time, but mostly they turned me on to better things. I'm not some NIN fanboy (though I suppose I'm a big enough fan to invalidate all your generalizations about NIN fans being bros on steroids), so I really don't care about any of this. I just don't particularly appreciate unnecessary unprovoked rudeness, and I felt like you were handing me a big old platter of just that straight off the bat. Now, of course, I too could have said nothing, but I always love challenging people who try to tell me why my tastes are unsophisticated or whatever, when in reality there is no metric for authenticity or sophistication in music, and your opinion is every bit as subjective as mine.

Anyway, we're probably done here, but just to re-iterate — I don't care how it looks or what you take issue with regarding what sounds good to my brain and ears. I'll talk to you about it any time, but it is possible to have a difference of opinion without being a snot about it.

I see you read my message and said you needed to take it as good as you could give it. That was cool.

Why say that privately, then act like I've lectured you like Charlie Brown's parents? (Charlie Brown was a character in this ancient comic strip called Peanuts... bah! Nah, I'm just fucking with you man.)

Seriously though, what's the real deal? Are you offended or not? Because my apology at being condescending stands, if you do indeed feel condescended to. If not, seems like we're all good, so why throw more shade?

Ringo was a wife beater too. but poor ol' Ringo. just saying.

you guys should do the typical thing and get a room and share it over wild turkey shots and a joint. pick an area with a lake with legal fishing. joke how you're going to nickname the first fish caught that's over 8 pounds TZ. the loser get dibs on cleaning it.

I've long since stopped trying to intellectualise why I have pet hate musicians. We all know the reason we have them is because they remind us of the cooler-than-thou guy we used to see at parties in high school. That's why I can't stand Mike Patton for a millisecond