Or alternately, not as many people like Steve Vai because his music is a bag of arse? The fact that he can masturbate at hyperspeed with his fretting hand doesn't make a lot of difference if it is placed in the context of terrible music. This is an example of what I call 'The Rush Defence'. Technical wizardry does not equal good. In many cases in actually means the reverse. Like Rush, Dream Theatre or y'know, Steve Vai. It's music that could not get any whiter if it tried. I don't even mean that in terms of race, I mean it in terms of the total emptiness and overall vapidity that it shares with the colour white. Their music lacks soul, it lacks emotional bite, it lacks depth. Music at its most detestably phallocentric. I don't really understand why we're comparing Steve Vai to Hendrix or Page but I would say the important difference is that the latter duo knew how to write decent songs with more than a thimble-full of the milk of human compassion. Or steal better songs in the case of Page.
This is brutally frank and highly subjective but I feel like this is an argument that deserves to be made in the face of an implication that Steve Vai is less popular because stupid people just can't grasp the delicate nuanced intricacies of his six string self-fuckery.
See, that's what annoys me, is when people bash bands like Dream Theater and Rush because they themselves view it as "empty." I don't listen to Rush because I personally can't stand Geddy Lee's voice. But Petrucci (DT's guitar player) packs more emotional wallop into one solo than most modern guitarists do in their entire career. If you've ever actually seen any of their shows live, or, hell, if you've ever just sat down and fucking listened, in-depth, instead of taking a cursory auditory glance and casting it aside as bullshit, the fact is they pour every ounce of energy they have into every note they play, and not just for the benefit of technical wizardry. Every phrase and period of music they play has an intent and a message behind it, and it's evident in their performance. Further, they certainly put hooks, motives and familiar and identifiable riffs into every one of their songs, save for a few instrumental tracks. It's not just random "Duuurrr I play fast with no melody."
Johnny--first of all, to begin by nit-picking, your talk earlier in the thread about Hendrix's "Hey Joe" undercuts your own point because it's a cover--and not a good one, at that. The original communicated the idea of the song leagues better. Hendrix put nothing into that particular song that hadn't been put into it more effectively numerous times before. Your talk about his anguish/anger at being a jilted lover is, if present at all, only so because it was put there in the song in the first place by Billy Roberts. Frankly, I love Hendrix's music, but he as a musician, for all his inventiveness and ingenuity, is the exact opposite of what you've been talking about, about being emotionally invested in the music. It happens to most musicians, but as he went further along and became more and more famous, Hendrix became ridiculously self-important and egocentric, to the point where his music ceased to be about fucking anything other than increasingly repetitive chord progressions and riffs and him buying into the hype others built up for him. Not even Jim Morrison was so entirely focused on himself at the end of his life as Jimmy was.
Now, the issue of "shredding" being emotionless. I certainly prefer a lyrical, heartfelt solo over random speed-of-light scales. As such, I'd take Jimmy Page or even a sloppy player like Keith Richards or Robbie Krieger over Satriani or Yngwie Malmsteem any day.
But jesus christ, man. If you're talking about the universal appeal of music and the mass' ability to relate to what's going on in the music, the emotions and ideas it puts forth... I guarantee you, if you put a group of 100 little kids in a big room and put on "Purple Haze," a few of them may get into it, but most of them will just look around and be like "what the fuck?"
If, on the other hand, you play Eric Johnson's Cliffs of Dover or, hell, even the up-tempo middle section of YYZ, you can bet that the vast majority of those kids would be up and dancing around. If you're about to reply asking why a bunch of kids dancing around matters, it's because, contrary to what you claimed earlier in this thread, lyrics are meaningless if there's not a soul behind the music that brings the connotations of those lyrics out. While there's certainly some parts of music that can't be grasped by a young child, the basic element of the music gets across to kids pretty damned clear, often much more so than it does to older people.
In fact, Cliffs of Dover is a perfect rebuttal to your argument. Once the actual melody of the song gets going, it's hard to find a song that exudes such an aura of joy, carefree energy and bliss than that.
Musical virtuosity has nothing to do with "I'm so in tune with my guitar, that's what my music's about." You take the lyrics and vocals out of any pop or mainstream rock song, and it immediately becomes nothing more than rehashed chord changes, and yes, that's true even of Hedrix, of The Beatles, of The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, as much as those are all favorite bands of mine. Virtuosity is about going beyond the arbitrary and pedantic limits that popular music places around the very expression of the emotion that you claim to be so paramount to music.
tl; dr -- See, isn't it fun to be completely non-objective?
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Topic: So I was arguing with Patrick just a few minutes ago (Read 65343 times)