My problem with Pitchfork boils down to this: Its contributors don't
seem to like music very much. Rather, they revel in the role of
tastemaker, sternly lecturing the audience as to why Band X is
cooler/more worthy of an opening slot on that super-awesome Band of
Horses/Cass McCombs double bill than Band Y, and why anyone who only
recently happened upon "Neon Bible" (raising hand) is a mainstream
poser who totally doesn't get what Arcade Fire is all about, man.
This is why Rockworms
is proudly "The #1 source for Mediocre Music Reviews on the web!" Sure,
we could run a site full if semi-intelligent insights (I must admit,
Kyle's discussion on the overuse of compression in modern music is getting dangerously close to smart), but who wants that? Really???
There are thousands of reasons that people today will tell you for the state of affairs in music. “The musicians just aren’t the same, they have less talent.” “It all sounds the same nowadays”, and “What’s the deal with that rap music?” Though these all have valid points, I’d like to turn the general publics attention to a bigger problem. VGA’s. VGA stands for Variable Gain Amplifiers, or known to some as things like Compressors, Limiters, Extenders and Gates. It is the misuse of these perfectly fine tools that are the reasons for the music industries struggles (or should I say 1 of the reasons). To put it very simply and crudely, these tools “squish” the dynamic range of a sound so that the louds and quiets have less of a variance between them. Overused, as it is today, this can take any soul out of the music. Your quiet violins are coming through just as loud as your drum, and when they verse builds into the rocking chorus, you are stunned to find that the “jammin’” guitars are just as loud as they were before. Its this loss of any range that makes the average consumer not care if they have a CD or an mp3 file. Though the CD offers drastically better use of range, the songs we’re pumping out on top40 don’t even use the range, so no one notices the loss in mp3 format. However, you don’t need to take my word for it. I was inspired to write this article after reading a similar article by Roger Nichols (engineer of such famous artists as Steely Dan), and his EQ opinion column. It was titled “Another New Year’s Resolution, and it talked about this blight, and it was written January of 2002!. So imagine my shock after starting writing to pick up the latest Rolling Stone to have an article on just this issue…Hmm, maybe I am on to something…more soon.
OK, so I TOTALLY stole this piece of news from a bunch of other music news pages (who, most likely, jacked the news off the Rockworms fax machine this morning before we got to the office) but since no one else has been properly reporting/crediting sources, it has become public domain. Boo-yeah. Take that. Learn from your mistakes.
Anyway, Roger Waters (no related to "Muddy") is currently scheduled to perform on the kinda-sorta epic return of Saturday Night Live. Yup. THAT show. The show that has been and presumably still WILL be on full-fledged WGA strike come the February 2nd due date (coincidentally, my mother's due date for ME as well, 24 years ago) of the show.
With this strike, it appears that NBC is pushing for a return of the weekend giant and is encouraging them to go ahead with a writer-less show.
So from this news, a question emerges:
"So what, are they going to have Roger Water play the whole freakin' time?"
It's no secret that there is another publication out their that also publishes stories about rock 'n roll, sticking it to the man, slacking off during work hours, and most of the other principals that rockworms was founded upon. That publication is Rolling Stone.
While on the one hand, we're not too worried about that small startup company cutting into our readership (after all, how many people have heard of Rolling Stone? rockworms.com on the other hand...), I can't help but point out that we tended to throw props in the same direction this year.
'Stone had the completely unoriginal idea of listing the top 50 Albums of 2007 in their year-end issue (which also happened to be the first issue I've ever read--thanks to a x-mas present subscription from my loving wife). You'll notice that many of the albums on their list (which came out late December of 2007) were first pointed out right here--on the #1 source for mediocre music reviews on the web. I'm not going to make any accusations, but I'll let you decide for yourself: Where does Rolling Stone get their stuff? Don't they have ANY original ideas, or are they pretty much just a carbon copy of this site, with less cool graphics?
The Evidence:
RS: M.I.A's album "Kala" ranked #1 record of 2007,
Rockworms: Craig has been meaning to write a review on her since Bucky Done Gun.
