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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4608 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What music do y'all listen to? I've recently gotten back into Florence + the Machine. Gotta say, it's much better going back as an adult. It's hard to find positive, upbeat music with good lyrics.

Not a lot of what I listen to could be called "upbeat", I'm much more a blues and grunge kind of guy. But one artist that the better half and I have been enjoying a lot of late is Lee Brice songs like this may be stupid and hokey but they are fun.

This is the brazilian state of the art https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZxGiEoczryg&t=2932s

Bossa nova?

Voce precisa apprendar ingles portuguese...

I thought I’d been exposed to that via Tim Maia’s Rational Culture, but nope. 1975.

recently I've quite enjoyed a punk rock band called The viagra boys

Shrimp Sessions on YouTube are fantastic

Performers that the algorithm suggested to me and I liked: Alice Merton, Saint Motel, Katzenjammer, The Ting Tings, The Pointer Sisters, Warlock, Thundermother, Gesaffelstein.

Huh. I didn’t think of them as particularly upbeat. Maybe that’s because their only song which I hear on the radio is the mental-illness-romanticizing “picks me up/puts me down” one.

I’ll concur that good lyrics are likely to be sad or at least cynical. Or, perhaps, that cheerful lyrics have a higher risk of feeling trite. Consider folk/country like Robert Earl Keen: his best-known stuff is wistful (Gringo Honeymoon, Front Porch Song). When he gets more upbeat the lyrics tend towards the bitter (Swervin’ in my lane, or God forbid It’s the Little Things). And when he does positive lyrics, i.e. Feelin’ Good Again, it’s over outright mournful instrumentals. Such is the genre.

Oh, it may be the wrong time for Merry Christmas from the Family, but it really is deliciously cynical while remaining positive.

Lately I’ve been listening to Adrian Quesada’s Boleros Psicodelicos. I’m not really a fan of the Black Pumas but his work on this album is just excellent. It’s so richly layered. I doubt that it solves your lyrical conundrum, but I don’t speak Spanish, so who knows?

As a recovering metalhead, I have made an active effort to find upbeat songs to counter a playlist I've literally titled "oppressive despair" (ask me about that one LOL).

Check out:

  • Young the Giant - Proggy Arctic Monkeys but less sexy-all-the-time. Their popular stuff is great.

  • Sammy Rae & Friends - Just plain fun. Their top spotify picks are great.

  • Silk Sonic - Just plain funky fun but Bruno Mars. Start with Leave the door open & Skate.

  • Vulfpeck - funky fun turned up to 100. Lyrics can be a little nonsensical. 1612 & Wait for the moment are good starters.

  • King Gizzard - Psychedelic derpy fun. They're prolific. Start off with 'The River', 'Catching Smoke', 'Fishing for Fishies' and ofc, the infamous: 'Rattlesnake'.

Pirate metal is pretty upbeat. Alestorm - Fucked With an Anchor for example!

There’s an alternative: Embrace hair metal. Fairly upbeat, not very serious and often party atmosphere while still being metal.

The music should serve the theme, and not vice versa. Genre should be seen as tool-kits. You start writing music with the intention of constructing something. A good musician knows to find the right tool-kit to build the structure they have in mind. If the tool guides the dream, then the dream loses all purpose.

Hair metal can be fun in context : stadium & road trip music. But it does not lend itself well to deep listening. Metal is by-definition an intense & tense (alliteration not intended) type of music. That's why it lends itself well to intense emotions which can only develop after years of festering. Grief, anger, wrath, despair & violence are obvious. Meditative states, yearning, (the feeling of) enlightenment are less obvious ones that lend itself well to the genre tools leveraged in metal.

Some metal tools make for great happy music. Djazz is one such example. But mainstream metal genres make for schlocky happy music . Although admittedly, I have occasionally indulged in some of it. Speaking of schlocky metal, here are my 2 "favorites" : Children of Bodom : rebel yell cover and Iron Maiden - Charlotte the Harlot.

I want to ask you about oppressive despair. There’ve been times when Call of the Wretched Sea was just what I needed.

'Viljartha - Den Helige Anden' is the poster boy of the sound I am trying to capture. Atmospheric, Deep sub-bass, and never gives you that bright climax you keep expecting. Usually they induce this thick tension by having very few accent beats (think high E strums, Snare hits, Crash), but the count on the drums to keep tempo is really fast. So it has this incredible speed to it, while being made quite long for the accent hit that resolves the tension.

Death Grips's On GP & No Love are great examples of this sound too.

I like blackgaze too, but that's too melodic. It tries to be beautiful in grief, and that's not the point. On the other hand, extreme metal just comes across as noise without tension. So this playlist tries to avoid those 2 styles of music.

Post-hardcore. Bands like Title Fight, Drug Church, Joyce Manor, Fiddlehead. Here are some cool songs. But it's not for everyone.

Drug Church - Dollar Story

Fiddlehead - Down University

Title Fight - Crescent-Shaped Depression

Joyce Manor - Angel in the Snow

Oh man have you listened to letlive. at all?

I never have. I'll check it out!

I was surprised by how much I liked her new album.

I've been listening to Farya Faraji on Youtube recently -- lots of Byzantine and Balkans music, and some other folk music, for instance from Canada. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to buy or download his music to listen while traveling.

Maybe Im a phillistine but despite listening to a lot of music, I dont know what music Im into. I just shahzam songs I like from public and songs I end up liking from movies and spotify reccomendations does the rest.

Mostly a mix of 90s rock, early 2000s pop and deep house. My favorite song of all time is 'Mr Brightside'. Funny considering I cant stand any of the The Killers other songs.'I aint worried' is my second most played as of late, courtesy of Top Gun Maverick.

Oh and the slowed and reverb genre also has some hidden gems. Pop songs slowed and reverbed become something entirely different, more so than other remix genres. Such as this, or this or this.

I should also out myself as a zoomer and let it be known that TikTok sometimes actually popularizes good lesser known songs, often old ones. Very hit or miss though.

My favorite song of all time is 'Mr Brightside'.

Have you thought about moving to the UK?

Not the first time Im hearing this. Ive been called a coconut too because I like that song too much for someone not white, let alone not from the UK lol.

In recent years, I've become very fond of Enya.

I loved Enya as a child, soured on her in my adolescence and have slowly come back around to appreciating her music. This seems to be a fairly consistent pattern among my peers.

Enya holds a special place in my heart. I have fond high school memories of everyone in the group call meditating to Only Time while waiting for the battle.net servers to come back online.

Glad to hear other players had their own downtime traditions. We would find crappy rips of terrible movies to watch MST3K-style. Fond memories of watching Japanese Star Wars knock-off "Message from Space" one Tuesday night.

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