Also, Dave's Nirvana article makes me think, since Golden Band has been my bedtime music for a few days in a row: since it seems like there's no particular reason why all the post-grunge bands imitate the style of their predecessors, other than that those things were popular, or were what happened to form the bands' earlier musical experiences, or anything of that sort, and moreover since it seems like much the same could be said of any musical style or movement and its followers, shouldn't you be able to imagine watered-down followers and imitators of any band, or album, or style? Or is this not in fact true? If not, what's special about your counterexamples? Something distinctive about their style? (Or something undistinctive, even: I suppose this question wouldn't be very interesting if the band being copied were just boring or nondescript already.)

(I was thinking, what would it sound like if this album became the imperfect model for a movement? Would the variation involved mean that we would see more singer-songwritery versions of the AAS's sound, more aggressive versions, catchier versions, versions concerned more with emotional commonplaces and platitudes, versions concerned more with love songs, with funny songs, with guitar solos?)

After hearing the Silent Way box the opening to Bitches Brew seems even more continuous with the earlier material.

"Pharoah's Dance" or whatever it's called has a compelling momentum to it, say 10 minutes in (and most other places) - for such a long piece with comparatively few points of large-scale structure (comparatively, with respect to western art music, that is), it seems to have a definite sense of going somewhere in the long sections between the turnarounds and edits and whatnot.

Is there just a lot more typical pop cadencing on The Argument?

kid606's ps i love you is beautiful, I think, and I'm told it counts as glitch, but I wonder if it's just too sparse, if it uses the wrong kind of noises, whatever they're called, to count as 'glitch'. Not that I'm saying Tim had to cover everything that could possibly be relevant to his fine article.

In his new Freaky Trigger article, Jess uses Eno's Another Green World as a point of comparison, a mostly-instrumental record masquerading as a vocal one. But he covers that in one sentence. I've got a woefully unfinished article sitting on my hard drive that talks about the American Analog Set's Golden Band in just those terms. Using the same point of comparison. Just thought you'd like to know. No, I don't know when it will be finished.

I think David's article doesn't go deeply enough into the point it makes about Nirvana and punk. It can't just be that Kurt knew and loved punk as a music and ethos. A number of other popular bands knew about punk, at the very least, and I bet they loved it and its ethos plenty (I'm thinking especially of Soundgaren; likewise Alice in Chains - even though they obviously had roots in glam metal early on, I bet they had some contact with punk somewhere). It's also just not a matter of fierce, primal music, etc. A lot of rock music or other music might fit Dave's description there. If punk is involved in what set Nirvana apart, it needs to be something more specific. I think Dave gets it partly right with the stuff about Kurt's dedication to the music through playing songs, playing with people, bigging up the Raincoats, etc. But it seems like something much more can be said about how punk shows up, even in some tangential or "essential" (and thus maybe obscured by the hooks, or the glistening production on Nevermind, or the Sabbath influences, etc.), in the music. (The fact that I think this makes me think that you could also say something similar about some of the other bands like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, etc., who seem to have more of that thing than say STP, or even worse, Candlebox, who barely masked the fact that they were never a "grunge" band with grunge mannerisms.)

I knew what sounds were around before, but adding my new boom box to my office has helped underscore what the environment was like, sonically, before. Sitting at my desk in the corner, with a shelf full of books, it had begun looking and feeling to me a little like a place. With my music on it sounds like a place.

First things listened to on it: disc two of Miles' Silent Way box, Fugazi's Argument, AAS's Know By Heart, and something new I got from Mike, Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening.

Everything about The Blueprint seems so perfect that I want to hold back anything I have to say about it, as if it's some kind of giant puzzle that has some precise, complex explanation, like a well-oiled machine or a puzzle, that will feel like an achievement to finish putting together. But no one can see the pieces.

Wittgenstein expounding on Mahler, p. 67e of Culture and Value:

If it is true that Mahler's music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is what I think he ought to have done with his talent. For quite obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his symphonies and then burnt them? Or should he have done violence to himself and not written them? Should he have written them and realized that they were worthless? But how could he have realized that? I can see it, because I can compare his music with what the great composers wrote. But he could not, because though perhaps someone to whom such a comparison has occurred may have misgivings about the value of his work through seeing, as it were, that his nature is not that of the other great composers, -- that still does not mean that he will recognize its worthlessness; because he can always tell himself that though he is certainly different from the rest (whom he nevertheless admires), his work has a different kind of value. Perhaps we might say: If nobody you admire is like you, then presumably you believe in your own value only because you are you. -- Even someone who is struggling against vanity will, if his struggle is not entirely successful, still deceive himself about the value of his own work.

But the greatest danger seems to lie in putting one's own work, in one way or another, into the position of being compared, first by oneself then by others, with the great works of former times. One ought to put such a comparison right out of one's mind. For if conditions nowadays are really so different from what they once were that one cannot even compare the genre one's work belongs to with that of earlier works, then one can't compare them in respect to their value either. I myself continually make the mistake I'm referring to.