then why don't you call them American Africans? :confused:

frankly, I'm shocked that you don't call them "negroes".

KRISTALBALLZ

i'm not really into internet arguments. it's not that i'm not an asshole...but i'm stupid and hate it when people can tell.

but when sway is involved it's just more rewarding. i mean who really leaves messageboards in anger and admits that's why they're leaving

who does that?

only sway, and it's incredible knowing that yr actions in a thread will undoubtedly have an effect on a persons actual life, i feel like god, and god was there when they invented blues so i feel like i invented blues.

what a high


get stronger sway and be less of a whiner when you're back, please don't lose any sleep over this thread

lol

RECAP:










"
"

That was amazing. It's not just the thoughts but the ability to articulate. Wish I could. Wow.

Honestly, therapy is a reasonable option for anyone who grew up never learning how to listen. Really listen. Sounds so elementary like something that should've been built in, but so obviously is not...

7 pages of wrongs and not one right.

For my part, the music that came from blues is the reason I'm a musician. But the blues themselves can be pretty boring, and every time I see some white guy in a bar worshipping at the altar of SRV and saying how bluesy he feels and everyone cheering him on I want to commit genocide on everyone in the building. That's my opinion. Got it? My OPINION, and everyone's got one. The one thing the internet has yet to learn is not everyone will agree with what's "popular" or "not popular", and both terms are relative depending on the kind of people on the forum. That's the whole purpose of forums; to exchange ideas, not bash and ridicule other's. I'm talking about both sides of the coin here.

And the Billy Corgan pictures with the lolcat text are getting annoying.

Blues is the foundation to everything cool. Even punk.

You're just digging yourself in deeper, pal.

now, swa is going to wake up, shake off the effects of tonite's binge and feel that somehow, he's been vindicated by comments like "YA blues is punkrock, dude" and that bit where Nicky gets "pal"ed.

wash/rinse/repeat

[yay more ragequit (again x3)]

fucking pussy shit. if yr going to be insane, take a cue from Nicky and just drive that shit home without giving up yr guns.

If you copy+paste everything said in this thread in a text editor and search+replace "blues" with "booze" it will make for a much better read.

for swa, they are one and the same.

i'm tired after all this. the lolapalolsa was both exhausting and exhilarating.

there were some stand out moments, kpoppimp was consistently fantastic. space got some great finishers in towards the end. knox delivered the blow that was to mark the point of no return for swa, with her "african americans are you. you invented blues. i don't care." genteel and glice launched some strong early offensives that prepped the tone for the rest of the game.

all in all, i'm going to grade my own performance an A-. i feel in this case, considering i was the one that initiated the ragequit sequence in swa, i deserve a rare A grade.

the battle for lollage was fought valiantly, and fuck, swa was only too willing to supply.

for swa, this would be a sensible time to bow out once and for all, because it's doubtful after his long career he can really top a night like this. he's proved me wrong before tho. and who knows what conclusions will be hastily arrived at in the vomit encrusted haze of tomorrow mornings big wake up naked in the shower?

just some examples from the very first post:

"Lately, it's been booze. An "off and on" interest over the last few years, but it's where I'm at now regardless."
"Booze talks, period."
"Really, case in point, booze is the spine of American music. It's been used as a tool on ones palate for decades now, and it ain't going no where. ANY artist worth a damn over the past 50 years understands."
"Keith Richards got it."

for anyone who has just joined us, a saturday omnibus edition of this thread will be screened tommorrow evening, with directors commentary from b0lly corgans hairstylist, who will narrate a frame by frame replay of the exact moment the jack daniels overpowered swa's already decimated hypothalmic centres in charge of rationality and sent the "SELF DESTRUCT, IF I GO DOWN I'M TAKING U ALL WITH ME" command off to whatever skeleton crew was now in charge of the already massively compromised dignity salvage operations in the frontal lobe.

join me in tommorow's edition for our special report on
"SWA-GATE 7: JOHNNY WINTER'S NO SHOW"

This is very out of hand! I was going to say...
Sway bro, you made some very good points in the initial post. Now, some of the songs you posted were a little obvious to me. But, it's cool. I know you were drunk and just wanting to discuss things when you're drunk (I know I do)
You are certainly correct about blues music being the beginnings of at least two thirds of modern music.
At the same time I laughed at a lot of the posts making fun you... But, at the same time I'm disappointed how hardly anybody would give much of what you said a chance! they more or less just made Billy Corgan photos with your quotes on them.. And I'm sure my post will made fun of too. So it goes. anyways.
i think you're an alright dude sway. Maybe I'm just stoned.

This thread almost makes me proud to be an Arab.

Wow. The thing is with this sort of thing is that... well, it's really difficult to know where to start. The blues had a massive influence on popular music; unlike jazz, country & western (itself an agglomeration of earlier white folk music in the states), the blues retained a sort of popularity after its hayday. 'The blues', as we understand it, didn't appear out of no-where. You ask 20 musicologists what the 'roots' of blues are and you'll get 20 different answers, so I'll not go into that. For a lot of people on this forum, the blues has very little to do with the music they like. I think its influence on reggae (in the tradition stretching from mento to modern day dancehall) is vastly overplayed. Its influence on hip-hop is absolutely minimal, musically speaking, but a lot of hip-hop cats empathise with the black struggle represented in the blues (and I think we mostly mean Delta blues rather than Jelly Roll Morton etc here). Those of us who listen to a lot of dance music of the last 30 years or so aren't hugely interested in the blues, as its influence is greatly diminished by comparison to, say, the Rolling Stones. By the time metal came to mean Maiden, Slayer, Napalm Death and so on, any noticeable blues vestiges were largely elided (which isn't true of Sabbath, Zeppelin, Purple).

This is a very rough sketch of popular guitar music. I've deliberately not mentioned what some call the griot axis, high life, soukous, classical African traditions and dynastic players, mbira etc etc. It is, whatever, a massive sprawling musicological sphere which has minimal influence from black American Delta blues - except in so far as some of those 20 musicologists would say that the blues comes from north African pentatonic systems. Some people (bizarrely) offer that the classical Chinese system - which you'll note is only an iffy 6th away from being authentically blues - is big influence.

Anyway. 2/3rds is an absolutely massive amount of music. I think, even if you limited yourself solely to Anglo-American music, 2/3rds is still way over-estimating the blues' influence. Someone mentioned opera earlier, and I think it's fair to say that the blues, as I understand it, has probably influenced one significant composer of the last 100 years (Philip Glass, who's shite). Shostakovich's jazz period doesn't count, because jazz comes from a very different place at that time (big band and military classical). Nigel Kennedy doesn't count because he's a cunt.

Generally speaking, name a continent and you've got a mass of music; in that music will be authentic folk traditions, with regional variations. There will also be court music, dance music, function music and quite often highly formalised classical forms. From my own perspective as a Brit in the South West, if you look at the highly particular field of Welsh Morris Dancing, there's a massive amount of music which has absolutely fuck all to do with the blues.

This is a bit tl;dr, but I just want to say it to finding nobody because, unlike sway, he's actually mildly receptive to people picking him up on talking shit (sorry, it's a compliment really).

Mess. Will edit that so it's vaguely legible later.

the valorisation of blues seemed to play into some sort of white magic negro fantasy for swa.

"yeah man! all our shit is like ripping off the blues man, those cats knew where it was at." hold on a second. it's really not. not all the time. not inherently. sure, it happens, this does not somehow make blues the source material for all worthwhile special music the world has ever produced like he claimed. you can trace things back to whatever you want. you cannot make up some sort of historicity that isn't there. you can't just say "because X ripped of X who ripped of X who was black everything is really stolen from black people". you can do those X's for people of any race.

if you have any respect for these musicians, or any musicians at all you call them on their crap, you demand greater standards, you approach their work critically not patronisingly. i don't think its necessarily a sign of progress that black american musicians seemed to pretty much abandon the electric guitar at a certain point and move into the drum/bass sound of hip hop. it's just what they did. i don't think it necessarily came from them being "ahead" or a realisation that the white cannon of late 20th century american popular music isn't all that shit hot after all. it isn't, i mean, obvi-fuckin-ously it isnt. obviously, they were coming from a different vantage point in regards to seeing this fact, but that just does not make them somehow "better". the idea that we who are white should pretend that they are "better" or specifically focus on this idea of them as special and magical just does not do them any favours. you can say it makes the blacks music different, but i'd much prefer if you just dropped the black/white frame altogether. so it could eventually become unnoticeable. isn't that what's best for everybody?

you make arguments like swa did, you are just keeping race as something somehow relevant or visible to music. like its something worth noticing and treating specially. i mean, its a factor in the musicians lives and situations, and its relevancy is massively varied at best. that's really about it.

unlike what swa seems to want to believe, having lower standards of wealth compared to whites in the US does not somehow bestow greater artistic... well i guess magic is the word he was inferring. did he really think some of this magic was going to rub off on him when he started knowingly falsely accusing knox and others of racism? lol, kind of projecting there a bit aren't we?

what i'm saying isn't intended as a denigration of a particular races music, i don't think i even need to say that. more an attempt to make the point that you decide to go the opposite route you are still keeping alive the previous racial framework, it may be positive instead of negative but it's still there. there would be no racial problems if we didn't have that framework in the first place.

i don't care about most of what little blues i've heard, it's about as dead as punk rock is at this point. in fact punk rock is pretty much its twin in limitation, lack of ambition and obsolescence.

and man, i've just wasted all this post thinking vaguely about black/white politics in regards to music, which is just boring and pointless.

shows what fucking happens when b0lly isn't around