Drummage Pre

Going to take Simon up on his request for good drum performances. I used to play drums quite seriously. Don't know if I was any good but I sure did listen a lot. Most of my choices are fairly canonical. But the canons of popular music were assembled in a much more democratic way by people with greater levels of understanding than those of other arts. For better and worse.

I am going to be limiting myself to a maximum of ten performances per decade and one appearance per drummer (with maybe one or two exceptions). I won't be posting any decades prior to the 1960s and nothing from this century. While the drummers of the 1950s and before suffer my lack of recognition due to my ignorance (outside of a few handfuls of jazz records), contemporary drummers suffer my lack of recognition for the opposite reason. I am more likely to play air drums to a programmed Neptune production than to any indie or mainstream rock record that I am aware of*.

1960s to follow almost immediately

1970s and 1980s will take some time

1990s will be easy, but possibly shorter

* It's not as if everyone forgot to play drums... it's just...
There's a recording engineer who calls himself Mixerman who says that "if the song sucks, the mix is irrelevant". I figure, if the song sucks, the musician's performance is irrelevant. For some, this would seem a little backwards. Surely, if the musician's performance sucks, how can a song be good? But since, outside of wholly-improvised music, the song precedes the performance, if the song is no good, then a musician's skill, which is to bring the composition to its full musical impact, cannot be fully utilized.

Have fun today kids

There's a void where there should be ecstasy...

Possibly back to regular posting again soon... or not...

I really don't know what to say.

I think the move has been positive for me... I have a good job and am starting to pay off debts and get ahead. I might even take, like, a real vacation for the first time in years!

But I feel even further from that whole meaning thing, if that means anything to you.

I mean, it will never be this (see below) good again, will it (?) and I wasn't even there.

From an email to a friend...

Obviously I am out of practice as a writer right now but diction and syntax be dammed!

"I discuss music and society quite a bit with my roommate. We speculate quite often as to the what range of dates should constitute the 'golden era' of music and, more importantly, culture, in Western civilization, and, while we generally agree that things have been going downhill for about 15 years or so, and that the last five or six years have constituted the lowest ebb in what seems like forever, the starting date was, for a while, really hard to fix. Initially, it was placed somewhere in the 1960s, but jazz and all the innovations in classical music since Beethoven make that date problematic. Coming to that realization, however, provided the insight I was looking for. Beethoven is the great Romantic composer, the guy who took pre-existing forms that had been used to mostly write either paens to god or innocuous entertainment and reinvented those forms as vehicles for conveying deep feelings about life and the world around... it's really his era, the Romantic era, that is over. Music now has the function it did hundreds of years ago - entertainment for the wealthy where the inspired re-deployment of traditional forms is appreciated on an intellectual level (ie most of underground/critic music culture), or paens to new gods (consumerism, one-night stands, shapely asses). The desire for intense and direct communication is not really part of the audience's experience."

Reasons for being depressed

It's actually all pretty simple... life, even...

1. Life is actually pretty beautiful, and it really hurts to know that it will not last forever, and that each day, spent appeasing so many others, may be a day wasted. There is a lake, on top of the mountain, which has taken hours to climb, that is refreshing. God becomes necessary to explain the profound privilege of the soothing water.

2. The profound beauty is something that so many are willing to deny to so many others! What bullshit! The differences between political parties can be explained by who wants to deny this privilege to whom, and for what reason. That's it! That's pathetic! To be a Leftist, for all of the critique, for all of the vituperation, for all of the anger, for all of the frustration, is to actually believe, at the end of the day, that everyone should be able to climb the mountain and take their swim in the cool waters. The political mainstream is just a bunch of people arguing about who should be denied this possibility. Can you really pick a side?

It is true, I have had a few beers. But I don't get obnoxious when I am drunk, just inarticulate. There is more!

Love.

I truly am glad you still care

I am still getting page views here even though I haven't posted in a while. The transition has taken a lot of time, and my computer is broken, compelling me to log in sporadically. Thank you for your patience.

Providence is weird. It has been years since I have felt as valued as I do now. Even after only a month of part-time work at my current job, the level of appreciation of my effort is incredibly high. I get paid more now to do things I enjoy doing with people I enjoy working with than I did to do things I didn't like doing with and for people I mostly disliked.

Yet I still feel the pull... It's a small town... I already know half the people in my neighborhood... the dance music scene is small, if it exists at all...

I can't seem to help dreaming big... all the expanse... the space... the intensity... that was promised to me... by techno... by grand-view social theory and critique... by late-night foreign films... I dunno... I will be here another year... and then either I stay or... London... Berlin... Fuck... This sucks or doesn't... The tyranny of wanting everything versus the tyranny of wanting nothing... and the bars close damn early here...