Enough already! Or the most self-indulgent song ever.

Cafe Society
61

[QUOTE=woodstockbirdybird]
What they don’t like is masturbatory 20-minute drum/guitar solos and songs that meander interminably without any kind of payoff. Or bombastic pseudo-classical pomposity masquerading as rock.
[/QUOTE]

Well, hell, neither do I and I despise rock critics and have since my first Rolling Stone subscription c. 1970.

That’s why I said “If the band can play with enough musical ingenuity to fill up the time, then let them go wild.”

But if they can’t, that still doesn’t mean they’re being self-indulgent. They may just be bad. (Or their audiences might be bad and actually like junk. Most audiences fit that description.)

We don’t even have a glimpse of a definition of “self-indulgent” that any two of us can agree on.

Long isn’t necessarily self-indulgent, whether it’s progressive noodling or druggy guitar solos. You can sincerely try to make good art and fail without being self-indulgent.

Pretty much anything short of “I’m so rich and famous that I can put out the musical equivalent of my grocery lists and shove it down your throats despite what the record company thinks about it” isn’t self-indulgent.

And nobody cares what rock critics think.

62

[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
Three words:

Metal
Machine
Music

A double album; one hour, four minutes, and four seconds of feedback. Side four has no out groove and will continue to play forever.
[/QUOTE]

Bolding mine- can someone explain how this works? I’ve never had an album without an outgroove.

63

I’m not sure I understand the confusion. I assume the record was just mastered and pressed so that the innermost part of the groove just circled once around the record and merged back into itself.

64

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
Bolding mine- can someone explain how this works? I’ve never had an album without an outgroove.
[/QUOTE]

The track on an LP is a spiral groove with corrugations that make the sound as the needle rubs along it. The needle follows the spiral inwards. At the inner end of the spiral, when the LP has finished playing, on most ordinary LP’s there is a much coarser spiral that quickly brings the needle in towards the centre of the LP. This is what I think is called the “outgroove”. On an automatic turntable, once the outgroove brought the arm in past a certain point an automatic mechanism would pick the arm up and bring it back to the rest, and turn off the turntable.

However, if the record had no outgroove but just ended at a circular groove too far from the centre of the record to trigger the automatic arm pickup mechanism, and if a soundclip were pressed into the groove, then the needle would just go around and around playing the soundclip indefinitely.

65

[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
I’m not sure I understand the confusion. I assume the record was just mastered and pressed so that the innermost part of the groove just circled once around the record and merged back into itself.
[/QUOTE]

Wait, so the arm goes back out again playing music on an outward bound spiral? Or does it keep playing the same last 3 seconds (or whatever the innermost rotation is) over and over again?

66

Tool - Ions

4 minutes of noise.

67

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Wait, so the arm goes back out again playing music on an outward bound spiral? Or does it keep playing the same last 3 seconds (or whatever the innermost rotation is) over and over again?
[/QUOTE]
It just plays the last couple seconds over and over. Did you ever have a record with skip that would knock the needle one groove out, and keep repeating until you fixed it? It’s like that, but deliberate. There’s no pop as the needle skips, and the sound is so atonal and arhythmic that there’s no abrupt change as it repeats.

A friend of mine heard about this album in college, and wanted to hear it. Someone else we knew had it, and agreed to make a tape copy. He put sides 1, 2 and 3 on one side of a tape, and side 4 on the other. He left the infinite repeat going long enough to fill the tape.

And there’s a happy ending. My friend found a copy at a used record store (it was quite the collectors item at the time, maybe still is) and bought it. It was in excellent shape. probably only played once.

68

[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
It just plays the last couple seconds over and over. Did you ever have a record with skip that would knock the needle one groove out, and keep repeating until you fixed it? It’s like that, but deliberate. There’s no pop as the needle skips, and the sound is so atonal and arhythmic that there’s no abrupt change as it repeats.

A friend of mine heard about this album in college, and wanted to hear it. Someone else we knew had it, and agreed to make a tape copy. He put sides 1, 2 and 3 on one side of a tape, and side 4 on the other. He left the infinite repeat going long enough to fill the tape.

And there’s a happy ending. My friend found a copy at a used record store (it was quite the collectors item at the time, maybe still is) and bought it. It was in excellent shape. probably only played once.
[/QUOTE]

To your knowledge, has it ever been re-mastered to CD? If it has, do they fill out the remainder of the CD playing time with the repeated passage to mimick the original effect of the LP?

69

[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
It just plays the last couple seconds over and over. Did you ever have a record with skip that would knock the needle one groove out, and keep repeating until you fixed it? It’s like that, but deliberate. There’s no pop as the needle skips, and the sound is so atonal and arhythmic that there’s no abrupt change as it repeats.
[/QUOTE]

Ah, got it. That sounds kinda cool.

It also sounds like something that would drive a parent crazy, if they weren’t into the music blaring from their teenagers’ room.

70

[QUOTE=Princhester]
You seem to waver between whether or not it’s about length or about quality. On the one hand you say “I don’t think it’s about the length” but then you suggest that what is justifiably criticisable as “masturbatory” is a “20 minute drum/guitar solo”.

To me, whether a drum or guitar solo is good or bad depends on whether I like it or not. Not how long it is. There are (in particular) long guitar solos that I’m sad when they end. There are others that I wish they never start, even though I know they’ll only last 8 bars.

As to “masturbatory”, most musos enjoy playing. Whether it’s sex or masturbation depends on whether someone else enjoys it. Which again does not to me depend on length, per se. [Insert penis joke here].
[/QUOTE]

Fair enough. Where I and the critics tend to agree is we’re essentially listening to rock music for the songs, not to hear someone show off. Surely there are good long guitar solos that work for the song (I’m a big fan of “Reoccurring Dreams” myself); but there are many, many more that sound to me like nothing more than egotistical displays of mastery. Don’t even want to get into drum solos (and I’m a drummer!) - they almost never exist for anything other than grandstanding (and they’re that much worse when the drummers suck, such as the guy from Iron Butterfly or Peter Criss).

Exapno, I think we’re pretty much in agreement, with regards to your last post. Though I’ve heard plenty of stuff that sounded to me like “I’m so rich and famous that I can put out the musical equivalent of my grocery lists and shove it down your throats despite what the record company thinks about it”. Hell, I think Led Zeppelin’s film The Song Remains The Same is a prime example.

I don’t think rock critics are worthless, though - I’ve discovered a lot of great music I otherwise never would have heard had I not read pop/rock criticism. I just never take their word as gospel, though I often appreciate their insights.

[QUOTE=dwc1970]
To your knowledge, has it ever been re-mastered to CD? If it has, do they fill out the remainder of the CD playing time with the repeated passage to mimick the original effect of the LP?
[/QUOTE]

It has been remastered for CD, and is even available on iTunes, I believe. I bought it years ago when it was only available as some kind of import/special edition CD, and they didn’t do anything to mimic the original effect, AFAIK (though, with that particular piece of music, it would be difficult to tell if it was repeating).

71

[QUOTE=woodstockbirdybird]
I don’t think rock critics are worthless, though - I’ve discovered a lot of great music I otherwise never would have heard had I not read pop/rock criticism. I just never take their word as gospel, though I often appreciate their insights.
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As a reviewer and critic (not of rock, thankfully), I try to draw a line between the two. It may be a fine line and may be crossed, but criticism is a different species than reviewing, so rock criticism is a different species than rock reviewing. The latter can be valuable, although I’ve often been burned. The former is almost never worth the time, although there is always the occasional exception.