downzy

These awards shows don't matter to anyone other than the artists themselves.

Jay-Z complaining about the Grammys getting it right is hilarious.  When have they ever got it right?  The Beatles won one Album of the Year award in the same decade Frank Sintra won three.  It's always been a joke. 

But sure, the guy who cheated on his wife so much so that she wrote an album about it wants everyone to know that the organization that gave Beyonce 32 awards has been disrespected.

I've seen their summer home in the Hamptons in person.  The last people anyone should feel sorry for is Jay Z and Beyonce.  

17 hours ago, Jakey Styley said:

Miley Cyrus did an iconic performance of Flowers.

I prefer the original, "It's a Beautiful Life" by Ace of Base

5 hours ago, Uncle Bob said:

Ghost has pretty good songs and they experiment a lot in various musical styles. But the songs from them that are always trending are the most dumb ones. No Ghost fan would say Dance Macabre is his favourite song I.E

I honestly know Ghost all that while.  I know a few people who love them and will attest to their live shows.  But any time someone suggests a song to check out I always come back feeling a bit underwhelmed.  I have yet to hear a Ghost song where I needed to hear it immediately again. 

But as I said, I'm not well versed in their music.  Just my impression from what I've heard so far. 

1 hour ago, Stay.Of.Execution said:

yea its pretty pathetic, but aside from 1 or 2 bands i believe coachella always had a pretty ridiculous lineup, no?

They were always known for getting big bands/artists, particularly those who hadn't played together in awhile.  Headlining Coachella was (and I assume still is) a huge pay day for artists.  But a lot of these artists had massive catalogues or were iconic acts that had multi-decade careers.  

6 hours ago, Stay.Of.Execution said:

Festival organizers should be very afraid in 10-20 years when all the big bands have called it quits

I think they're already in trouble.  Did you see the headliners for this year's Cochella?  Yikes.  People will still go because it's Cochella and it's almost a rite of passage for people living in Southern California. 

But yeah, the touring/festival industry will be in real trouble.  Labels now make most of their money from their catalogues.  They're not in the business of minting new superstars. 

Everything is so niche these days.  Music seems almost persona driven these days than music.  Everyone (well, not everyone, maybe just Jay-Z and Beyonce's hardcore fans) is upset that Beyonce hasn't won best album award at the Grammies.  But honestly, are people paying attention to her music because it's great or because it's Beyonce at this point?  I haven't heard a decent track from her in 12-14 years.

5 hours ago, Voodoochild said:

The video is even better. I didn't know the song until my wife told me about it last year, before the movie came out. 

The problem is that my dentist was listening to this song when she was treating me with some torture instrument, and now I remember that every time I hear it. 

That sucks.  You should have said, "hey, don't ruin this song for me!  Do you have any recent Beyonce?"

3 hours ago, Ant000 said:

Nickleback's Photograph is better than Little Sister by QOTSA?

 

Objectively wrong. List is void. Next. 

Didn't you know there's a rehabilitation effort under way for some truly terrible bands (Creed, Limp Bizkit, Nickelback)?

We live in some strange times.  

3 hours ago, D4NNY said:

That is literally such a guilty pleasure of mine, even played it a few days ago in the car. #Noshame. 😂

The song rocks.  Couldn't stop singing the chorus for days after hearing it.  

3 hours ago, Voodoochild said:

And I believe you wanted to say Here Comes Your Man.  

LOL.  Yeah, I'm terrible with song names and lyrics.  Never really listen to lyrics much; never know what Axl is singing about half the time.  

1 hour ago, Voodoochild said:

Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

I could not get through this album.  I appreciate she's trying to do something new, but it just didn't work for me.  It got plenty of great reviews, but I think its audience is pretty niche.

1 hour ago, Voodoochild said:

About the gatekeepers: that was my main problem. You may feel different because I assume you're from US, but growing up in the 80s and 90s here in Brazil there would be your gatekeepers and then our gatekeepers filtering everything. Plus, we of course have our local music too, which is great and it's a lot more popular. There was simply not room enough for everything, so it was really hard to get exposed to great English-based content. I used to discover some stuff on MTV really late at night with shows that introduced me to stuff like Pixies, Live, Beck, Regina Spektor and even Fiona Apple. 

Yeah, I didn't think about that.  We were certainly spoiled in that respect in North America.  Though, I still remember paying someone in Brazil to send me the GNR Tokyo DVDs back in the early 2000s as they weren't released in North America. 

I do agree that some bands didn't get the attention they deserved because of the system that was in place in the 80s and 90s.  There were bands like the Pixies that didn't get a ton of radio play during their prime (though alt stations are all too happy to play "Where Is My Mind" and "There Goes My Man").  But it didn't feel like a full time job like finding new music does not (at least for me).  

4 hours ago, GnR Chris said:

I was with ya till the bit about not listening to new music. I have a voracious appetite for music, and I still enjoy a ton of newly-released music across many genres

Well, I'm jealous.  I wish I could enjoy new music like you do.

I watched the film Saltburn a few weeks ago and my ears perked up at the end when Sophie Ellis-Bextor's "Murder on the Dance Floor" closed out the film.  I was excited to hear a "new" song that had a killer hook in the chorus.  Googled it and discovered the song came out in 2002. LOL. 

I mostly find new music these days through watching television shows and movies.  I discovered Børns's "10,000 Emerald Pools" by watching the The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix.  I just don't have the energy to sort through 100s of songs to find something that grabs my attention and has me humming the tune for the next week.  

1 hour ago, Voodoochild said:

I agree with most of what you said. I would just add a thing to your rant: maybe that's true about rock music, but the alternative/indie scene is still pretty good IMO. I've been listening to a lot of new artists thanks to some great algorithms on Spotify, although I understand people's reservation with the platform. 

Yeah, the few artists that have caught my ear the last 10 or so years have all been in that genre, plus indie-folk.  

Hozier, Vampire Weekend, The Black Keys, Lord Huron, Alt-J, Nathaniel Rateliff, Fitz and the Tantrums, The Lumineers, Børns, Future Islands.  There are certainly artists in this genre that have put out some decent tunes in the last 10-15 years.  But other than a few albums by Vampire Weekend, Nathaniel Rateliff, and the Black Keys, there aren't that many artists where I will listen to their entire albums.  Most put out one or two decent tracks, but too often songs start to blend into one another and I lose interest.  You can't say the same about artists like Guns N' Roses or, say, Radiohead.

4 hours ago, Voodoochild said:

But people need to have a better understanding of that and actively search for new stuff, which isn't harder than back in the 90s.  Also a problem is that there is too much stuff out there, it gets hard to get to know some new song and get used to it if it's not made to be catchy.

Really?  In the 90s you just had to turn on the radio or maybe read some reviews in a music magazine.  Gatekeepers kept a lot of the bad to mediocre artists off the airwaves (though, I'm sure a few great ones got lost in the shuffle).  As a result we were exposed largely to the best out there.  

The barrier to entry to make music is so low these days.  Forget about learning music theory or even an instrument - people can now create music with a computer, a beat generator and some MIDI packs.  And no one needs a record deal anymore to get distributed.  I read that somewhere around 100k new songs are uploaded to Spotify every day.  As you said, there's way too much music to sort through now.

The other problem is on the listener's side.  Music is so accessible these days; there's no real cost other than our time to listen and digest what we're hearing.  Prior to the internet, access to music was a rare but valued thing.  You'd buy an album/cd and listen to it for a week or month straight because you couldn't afford to buy another one right away.  Music was an investment.  Songs that might not have hit right away were given time.  Now it's so easy to skip to the next track.  Music has become more disposable but we also treat it like it's disposable.  

Please do not post YouTube links to videos that are not posted by the copyright holder.

Thanks!

New trailer up...

Looks really good.

11 minutes ago, MJRoses23 said:

Maybe it was just my area that continued the long intro way after the fact. 

Yeah, maybe it was a station to station decision.  Even as a Guns fan, listening to the extended intro was a chore.  Maybe the DJs for your station really enjoyed the extra minute for their washroom break. 

2 hours ago, MJRoses23 said:

You know what I think hurt the first impressions? The extra long intro on CD. If they had kept the same intro as from the locker leaks I think it would have done worlds better. A minute long intro on the radio was rough for people. 

I'm fairly certain that version was only played once by most stations.  My local stations played the longer intro as part of its promotion, but shortly there after played the shorter version.  So not sure if that really made a difference.  

It's not a great lead off track.  The guitar riff sounds like it could replace the intro to the show 90210.  The chorus is just kind of meh to me.  It's not a bad song.  But not the right song to reintroduce a band that has been completely upended.  Guns needed to hit it out of the park.  Better would have been a much better choice.  I don't think it would have changed the overall perception.  But from personal experience, the only reason why most of my friends gave it a chance is because I made them listen to songs like Better and TWAT. 

2 hours ago, AxlRoseCDII said:

I really think if you released the same exact album and just said Slash played on it, it would’ve done 10x better. There would be many casuals and possibly fans who would’ve then felt they had the right to appreciate the music and wouldn’t feel like they automatically hated it. It’s a great album with many highlights that never got the love it deserved.

CD certainly would have done better if Slash was on it, but it would still have needed the right launch. 

Chinese Democracy serving as the first single (with no video) - with or without Slash - was always going to be an underwhelming opening salvo.  This I Love and Better are in the top 25 listened to songs of all time; not bad for two song that got next to no promotion.  They have been listened to more than You're Crazy, Double Talking Jive, Coma, Dead Horse, The Garden, Locomotive, and other songs that are held in high regard by GNR fans.

Axl was already handicapping himself by calling the band Guns N' Roses without Slash.  But I think people were still curious what he had been working on all those years.  Re-introducing the band with the title track killed all the interest in new music.  Personally, I know when I band I generally like releases a new album with a bad first single it kills a lot of enthusiasm I have.  I've got to imagine that most people felt that way the first (and likely only) time they heard Chinese Democracy.  

3 hours ago, Voodoochild said:

I love it. It was one of the songs (alongside with Breakdown) that got me into learning how to play a guitar.

For me, the melody is lacking. I like GNR songs mostly because of Axl’s melodies/hooks. A chorus that is just yelling “Such Fun!” over and over again doesn’t do much for me. 

38 minutes ago, Free Bird said:

In all honesty and in my opinion of course, SIDHY is the worst song, that the classic era has ever released. I don’t count My World which I don’t consider to be a song at all. 
I agree on the combo you posted. Good stuff and it peaks into Raw Power and Ain‘t It Fun.

I loved SIDHY.  Axl's vocals really shine on that one.

For me, Down On The Farm is the best track from Spaghetti.  Never understood the love that Ain't It Fun got.  Good vocal and guitar performances, but the never liked the song itself.  

12 hours ago, luciusfunk said:

The movies will just end up contradicting each other.

In that respect, they'll at least be like every other Star Wars film.

I watched the prequels again over the Christmas holidays as it had been several decades since I had seen them.  Curious if they were as bad as I remembered them.  Tried my best to keep an open mind and there were aspects of them that I did enjoy.

But as a whole, they're really badly made.  In almost every respect.  The directing and editing makes little to no sense.  There's a scene in PM where a yellow fighter jet flies out of a Naboo hanger bay.  It gets shot down by a trade federation ship.  And for whatever reason, the editor decides that we need to stay on this jet for an extra five seconds to watch it fall to the valley below and crash.  It makes zero sense why you'd include a shot like this.  There are many other examples but that's one that stuck out for me.  

I'll give Phantom Menace credit for at least shooting some scenes on location.  Once we get to AotC, it's just one huge green screen cluster fuck.  And had the technology been there, maybe it could have worked.  But it's really hard to get passed the visuals.  I had to laugh at some of the CGI in Phantom Menace, particularly the shots of the robot army assembling outside of the Naboo capitol.  It looked like it was rendered on a 486-based computer.

Other than scoring, the prequels fail in almost every aspect of filmmaking (directing, editing, special effects, narrative, dialogue, acting).

I could write an essay on all the issues I had with these films so I'll try to keep it short:

• The acting was far more of a mixed bag than I remember.  Jake Lloyd wasn't as bad as I thought when he wasn't on his own.  But when he had to carry a scene, it was hard not to cringe with every line he gave.  And I couldn't get past Natalie Portman's long island accent.  She wasn't given much, but even with the few lines thrown her way it was hard to take her seriously.  Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid gave great performances; Liam Neelson passable.  But on the whole, the acting was tough to watch.
• AotC is border-line unwatchable.  Not a single element of film making was done well in this film.  The one thing it had going for it was the explanation for how the clone army came to being.  Hayden Christensen was awful; just awful. There is little reason to believe that Padme would have any interest in a guy who whines throughout the entire film and gives her nothing but creepy looks.  The final battle scene is a mess and makes little to no sense if you sit and think about it for more than a minute.  There's so much of this film that I had forgotten about and for good reason.
• There is definitely a huge improvement in special effects by the time we get to RotS.  It does look remarkably better than AotC and in some respects to PM.
• But there's little else about RotS that's in anyway defensible.  There's so much wrong with how Lucas handles Anakin's transformation.  There was such a better story to be told than the one we got. 

This is the biggest issue I have with the entire prequels.  How badly Lucas botches Anakin's journey to Darth Vader.  And to reinforce this point, here's an alternative:

• Instead of Padme dying because she's sad and Anakin trusting the word of a Sith because of his own insecurities, we get a story where Anakin grows weary of the Jedi order through Episode II because of valid issues and complaints.  Why did they allow his mother to stay in bondage?  Why was he prevented from saving his mother?  They don't really touch on these issues.  It seemed crazy to me that in PM Qui-Gon has no issue ripping a son away from his mother and leaving the mother in bondage. 
• Why does the rigidity of the Jedi order prevent Jedis from enacting real change?  At best these issues are treated tangentially.  But had they been given more focus it would have provided far better context and motivation for why Anakin sours on the Jedis (versus his almost immediate flip from jedi to sith).
• It would have been far more compelling had Padme delivered her children before her death.  Maybe have Luke separated from Padme and Leia once he reaches the age of one or two to help the continuity issue raised in RotJ.  Maybe the trade federation gains the upper hand, forcing Padme and Leia to flee.  Due to her political stature, Padme was given Jedi protection (say, Kenobi) and that protection failed and as a result, Padme dies.  Anakin blames the Jedi and their ineffectiveness for her death (and the belief his children died too) and turns to Palpatine as means for revenge (which supports the film's title) against an organization that ultimately failed him and his family.
• There is no emotional heart/weight to the current story.  There's no rhyme or believable reason for why Anakin would turn to the dark side out of some vague promise by Palpatine to teach him how to bring people back from the dead (which he was never taught but somehow continues to serve Palpatine for reasons).

I think people like RotS the most of the prequels because they finally get to see Anakin become Vader.  And the fact the visuals weren't horrendous like they were in AotC.  Plus we finally get to see Vader.  But it's such an unbalanced film mostly because the entire prequel saga is poorly paced.  Vader's transformation is shoe-horned at the very end of the final film, as if Lucas checked the run time of the film and realized he had to wrap it up sooner than he had planned.  There was an opportunity to tell such a better story that would have made the audience sympathize with Anakin and maybe understand his decisions.  He could have been a noble and interesting character instead of the whiny, insecure version that we got.  It's hard to square the Anakin we see in the prequels with Kenobi's description of him in A New Hope, where he tells Luke that he was one of the best men he ever knew.  We don't really see that Anakin.  We see a guy who constantly undermines Obi-Won and then whines about him to Padme. 

Anyway, just a few thoughts after having watched the prequels recently.  It really reinforces my belief that a complete reboot of the first six films (and eventually the ST) would greatly improve the overall saga.  There's so much potential for a great story that covers the fall and then rise of the Skywalker legacy.  For me, it's hard to hold the SW series to the same level that pop culture has lifted it.  There's more failure than success.

P.S. I had to laugh at the end of PM, where Padme looks over at Anakin and gives him this strange look where she kind of bites her lip.  It gave me this notion that Padme was thinking, "I'm going to fuck that kid some day."  Really weird way to end the film considering the age difference between the two actors.   

8 minutes ago, RnRHOFGNR said:

Metallica has a far bigger presence on YouTube and you did say you only considered spotify streams so yes I am aware.  Im just adding extra to your post.

Metallica's view count for its top five videos:

Nothing Else Matters - 1.3 billion
Enter Sandman - 688 million
One - 309 million
The Unforgiven - 137 million
Whiskey In The Jar - 128 million

GNR's top six videos:

November Rain - 2.1 billion
Sweet Child O' Mine - 1.6 billion
Paradise City - 800 million
Patience - 783 million
Don't Cry - 770 million
Welcome to the Jungle - 583 million

And in case you're wondering, most of the videos were uploaded around the same time (11 to 14 years ago). 

3 minutes ago, MJRoses23 said:

Watched it twice. I still love the song but am not a fan of the video. Its hard to watch. That said, I appreciate that they're still doing stuff. They are at least trying to be creative still. At this stage in their careers thats more than a lot of bands can say. You can all debate the level of "trying" theyre doing, but they are trying. 

After years of silence, I'm happier with them putting out the occasional thing I dont like than nothing at all.

Agreed.

As much as this video doesn't work for me, it's still better that they're trying and putting stuff out there.  It's not as though they never got something wrong during the classic era either.  Artists are allowed to fail to their fanbase from time to time.  Otherwise, there's little chance they'll ever succeed. 

I see GNR's publicist has been working hard:

"The video for “The General” intercuts 20 live vignettes with an A.I.-animated psychedelic visual trip. Between the concert footage, it dives into the subconscious of a young boy who stares down the monsters of dark childhood memories, blurring worlds in the process. The result is unlike anything the band has done before and continues a longstanding historic tradition of bold visuals from Guns N’ Roses. To bring this vision to life, Guns N’ Roses collaborated with Dan Potter—Creative Director of London-based creative studio Creative Works. This was a collaboration between real designers and artificial designers, and the inspiration came from within the band."