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Tai as an MGS guard

6 (5.6%)

Mieville's tragic leap

38 (35.2%)

KILL.  YOU.  BOTH.

22 (20.4%)

..-. ..- -. / .-- .. - .... / ... .- -- ..- . .-.. / -- --- .-. ... .

30 (27.8%)

"Stop slapping yourself with your metal hand!" (not an actual quote, but I like to think she said it between comics)

12 (11.1%)

Total Members Voted: 92

[Skewbrow]

@TheEvilDog:

I shall be shuttling between Corcaigh and Baile Atha Cliath in a few weeks time. Which way was it again in the old cartoon? The horse is drinking from a barrel of Guinness while pissing into a barrel of Murphy's? Or the other way around? With a view of trying not to provoke a violent reaction from the locals?

[Jabberwocky]

1984 was the best year for music.  *shakes old geezer fist*

Also, Angus' comment in the last panel makes me a little sad.  R.I.P. George Carlin and Mitch Hedberg.   

[mike837go]

1975!

A Night At The Opera! Has NEVER been topped!

[bunnyThor]

I wonder how old Faye is supposed to be. I think the self-referential joke in 1920 is that Jeph was in his late teens in 1997, but I feel like Faye's supposed to be younger than 30.

Faye was 24, same age as Marten, at the start of the strip. So she's probably about 25 now.

This means that her musical tastes became fixed when she was about 11. 

And unless her town in Georgia had an awesome alt-rock station that really brought in the pre-teens, the music from 1997 that she was actually listening to is more like:

1. Candle in the Wind, Elton John
2. Foolish Games/You Were Meant for Me, Jewel
3. I'll Be Missing You, Puff Daddy and Faith Evans
4. Un-Break My Heart, Toni Braxton
5. Can't Nobody Hold Me Down, Puff Daddy
6. I Believe I Can Fly, R. Kelly
7. Don't Let Go (Love), En Vogue
8. Return of the Mack, Mark Morrison
9. How Do I Live, LeAnn Rimes
10. Wannabe, Spice Girls
11. Quit Playing Games (With My Heart), Backstreet Boys
12. MMMBop, Hanson
13. For You I Will, Monica
14. You Make Me Wanna..., Usher
15. Bitch, Meredith Brooks

Yeah, not a lot of alt-rockin' on the airwaves going on then.

[pwhodges]

If QC started in the present (then), and has moved, say two years on, then it is at least four years behind the present (now); so Faye would have been more like 16 or so in 1997, which seems reasonable.

[The Duke]

This is where I learned its pronunciation.

I literally just made an account for the sole purpose of posting that link. Congratulations, sir, for beating me to the punch.

Welcome here nonetheless.

1975!

A Night At The Opera! Has NEVER been topped!

I might say 1975 as well.  A Night at the Opera, Blood On the Tracks, Physical Graffiti, Tommy (the movie), Fleetwood Mac, Win, Lose, or Draw, Wish You Were Here.  Born to Run, for God's sake.  Either 1975 or maybe '78; Blue Valentine, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Excitable Boy, Dire Straits, Outlandos D'Amour, etc.

And yes, I realize that we only hear the best stuff from the past, but I still like it better than what I consider the best of the present.

[Heliphyneau]

However -  I will believe with every fiber of my being that the discovery of auto tune was a blight upon the musical landscape. A BLIIIIGHT

I'm with you on that, but I concede that I do like this one instance of its use:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk

I don't think I could pick a single "best year for music" -- there's good stuff and a whole mess of crap every single year, some years are better than others . . . eh.  Doesn't mean I'm not a GOW, though.  Plenty of other reasons for people to get off my lawn.

[jacjyd]

If QC started in the present (then), and has moved, say two years on, then it is at least four years behind the present (now); so Faye would have been more like 16 or so in 1997, which seems reasonable.

Ahhhh comic relativity...

[mike837go]

However -  I will believe with every fiber of my being that the discovery of auto tune was a blight upon the musical landscape. A BLIIIIGHT

I'm with you on that, but I concede that...

What's the problem with auto-tune? Just don't friggin' use it! I pretty much gave up on car radio a few years ago.

I vote for my music with my wallet! I BUY a licensed copy of the music and put it on my mp3 player.

Commercial radio has outlived it's usefulness! Don't get me started on the inaccurate and untimely 'traffic reports' or what they claim to be 'news'!

[Carl-E]

...which is why I only listen to non-commercial public radio.  Best news and music by a long shot. 

And for indy music past & present, I recommend WYEP online.  I got it at home and in the orifice office. 

[pwhodges]

What's the problem with auto-tune?

The problem with Auto-Tune? For instance:

Seattle- based indie rockers, Death Cab for Cutie took up a cause at the 51st annual Grammy awards this year, by sporting light blue ribbons on their jackets to protest the use of Auto-Tune. Auto-Tune is a software program that digitally corrects the pitch of a singer's voice, and according to Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard, it's been over used.

"I think over the last 10 years, we've seen a lot of good musicians being affected by this newfound digital manipulation of the human voice, and we feel enough is enough."

[iduguphergrave]

C'mon, people I was hoping this strip would get you to talk about your favorite years (or decades, if that's easier) for music! I want some album recommendations!   

[mike837go]

C'mon, people I was hoping this strip would get you to talk about your favorite years (or decades, if that's easier) for music! I want some album recommendations!    

Here We Go Again
       - Kingston Trio 1959  



EDIT: Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

[celticgeek]

Yes, and the rest of the late 50's - early 60's folk movement.

Folkscare

[mike837go]

You mean like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IlShKGgfjM

[celticgeek]

Absolutely!

[mike837go]

Whoa, wait a second.

Your post had a link to a legitemate [sp?] site about second-tier folk singer compliations.

I countered with a link to a absolute sacastic commentary on the Folk movement.

Was your reply double-ironic or did you miss the sarcasm?

Me cornfused  

[Emperor Norton]

Faye was 24, same age as Marten, at the start of the strip. So she's probably about 25 now.

This means that her musical tastes became fixed when she was about 11. 

And unless her town in Georgia had an awesome alt-rock station that really brought in the pre-teens, the music from 1997 that she was actually listening to is more like:

-snip-

Yeah, not a lot of alt-rockin' on the airwaves going on then.

I grew up in Georgia and am really nostalgiac for 90s music of the alt-rock type. We had some great stations to listen to. Also, though my two favorite albums came out in 98 (Darkest Days by Stabbing Westward) and 99 (Neon Ballroom by Silverchair) which was when I was 15ish, I listened to a lot of alt-rock music that was released much much earlier. Its not like you can ONLY listen to music that was just released that year.

[pwhodges]

The album that started me thinking...

[mike837go]

I'm gonna lead off by playing my GOM card: My kids were 8 and 10 in 2000. So my 1990's music world was Mostly Sesame Street and Raffi.
Thank Goodness Tom Chapin released some new kids material in the late 90's.

My wife and I got quite a surprise, though. Mr. Chapin had a kids-oriented song about sexual reproduction on one of his ealier tapes. He re-recorded it with the help of Dr. Ruth Westheimer! I almost drove off the road with all 4 of us in the car, I was laughing so hard.

-----

My son will turn 21 this year and loves Tull, Zepplin, Pink Floyd, Queen, etc. I call him "Hopelessly Square". That's MY music! For pity's sake!

[sidpatt]

Don't worry Faye.  I would have said 1967.

This is the correct response to today's comic.

Velvet Underground & Nico (plus Nico's Chelsea Girl)
two good Beatles albums
two good Jimi Hendrix albums
probably about four Bob Dylan records
The Doors' first two albums
Pink Floyd debuts
Etta James and Aretha going strong (Aretha releases her version of R.E.S.P.E.C.T.)
The Who Sell Out
Cream releases Disraeli Gears (w/"Sunshine of Your Love")

Other Singles:
"White Rabbit," Jefferson Airplane
"She's a Rainbow," Rolling Stones
"Nights in White Satin," the Moody Blues

Louis Armstrong releases "What a Wonderful World" on 1/1/68

And probably a bunch of other stuff I didn't mention.

[cat_rant]

Says the Dubliner. (You forgot the shillelagh too, typical.)

People's Republic of Cork forever!
[/quote]

  =D Regional \ County alegances aside Irish are type cast and misrepresented in general. I do however make my annual pilgrimage to Cork for to celebrate my increasing age... Usually the best session of the year!

Anyways Back on track....Does anyone else really hate Steve?

 And I am disappointed by Faye and her music snobbery. However it is entirely possible that Faye was heavily influenced by musical tastes of those around her e.g. Family or friends. My closets friends during my teenage years were all older than me... It could have been the same for her.

[SirDudley]

I love Faye's reaction in the 3rd panel.

My music tastes are songs that I like the sound of. Never really could get into bands because I'd hear one song by a band and...not really like the other songs they put out. As a result, I tend to have to a lot of singles on my iPod. I mean, the closest to a full album I have is 10 songs from The Platinum Collection by Queen.

[Carl-E]

I honestly can't pick a decade, let alone a year.  I grew up not only with my parent's record collections (my mom was a Gerry Mulligan & Chet Baker fan, and my dad had Benny Goodman, Alan Sherman, Tom Lehrer, and the soundtrack to every musical they'd ever seen - they lived near Broadway in the late 50's/early 60's, so we're talking Fiorello!, The Pyjama Game, How to Succeed in Business, The Fantasticks, ...) but I also spent my high school years around the corner from a used record store.  My Jethro Tull collection is complete (pre 1984), and Janis Joplin, some '70's British folk rock (Pentangle, Steeleye Span), Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie (Alice's Restaurant, natch).  I got into classical in the 90's, and am still an avid listener, so I missed a decade or two of "new" music. 

Then my girls got me into things like The Weepies, The Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, Regina Spektor, ...

It's a great feeling not to be limited by what you know only from your own past.  There's great stuff out there, just open those ears! 

[Method of Madness]

Faye was 24, same age as Marten, at the start of the strip. So she's probably about 25 now.

Oh, dude.  I'm 23 now, but when I started reading QC I was about 19, just starting college.  Now I just realized that I'll be older than Marten and Faye in a couple years (maybe a little more, depending on time skips).  Not sure why this is notable, but yeah.

[celticgeek]

Whoa, wait a second.

Your post had a link to a legitemate [sp?] site about second-tier folk singer compliations.

I countered with a link to a absolute sacastic commentary on the Folk movement.

Was your reply double-ironic or did you miss the sarcasm?

Me cornfused  

I didn't miss the sarcasm, I was just commenting on the music that I liked, including Tom Lehrer's.  So, pretty much doubly ironic.  I grew up with county/bluegrass/folk music, and really loved it.  I prefer the very early Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to most of their later work.  And I also enjoyed the various Tom Lehrer protest songs ("Wehrner Von Braun", "The Vatican Rag").

I enjoyed the music and the commentary on the idiocy of various things pointed out by that music, and I still enjoy the political commentary of various satirists like Roy Zimmerman and the Capitol Steps.  However, I also enjoy the political commentary of an older generation, Mark Twain, for example.

[SirDudley]

Faye was 24, same age as Marten, at the start of the strip. So she's probably about 25 now.

Oh, dude.  I'm 23 now, but when I started reading QC I was about 19, just starting college.  Now I just realized that I'll be older than Marten and Faye in a couple years (maybe a little more, depending on time skips).  Not sure why this is notable, but yeah.

If it's notable to you, then that's enough.

At least, that's what the mods told me to say.

[Skewbrow]

Call the borgs. We hit a time warp. Not years. Decades or centuries. For me the best year is whichever was the best for Simon & Garfunkel or Manhattan Transfer. Me high school flame used her feminine viles to get me to watch "The Wall"as in Pink Floyd, which was ok, I guess. But the one and only Joplin is Scott, and (Sam the Eagle, help me here) Bach ruuuulllzzz.

[celticgeek]

Sibelius, for the win.

[Skewbrow]

Yess! I <3 u. When's the last time I played Sibelius' Etude? Oh, I don't have a piano around! Guess that explains it. Karelia suite on my iPod.

[Kugai]

I have favorites, everybody does.

But I don't limit my taste.  Hell, if it's good and I like it, I'll listen to it.




I don't like Prunes.    

[The Duke]

However -  I will believe with every fiber of my being that the discovery of auto tune was a blight upon the musical landscape. A BLIIIIGHT

I'm with you on that, but I concede that I do like this one instance of its use:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk

I don't think I could pick a single "best year for music" -- there's good stuff and a whole mess of crap every single year, some years are better than others . . . eh.  Doesn't mean I'm not a GOW, though.  Plenty of other reasons for people to get off my lawn.

I think that autotune should only ever have been used to make that kind of video and never ever in music of any other kind.  In other news: would it be offensive to autotune a video of Stephen Hawking?  Or a step further, to straight up add autotune to his speech machine?  

Discuss.

[TheEvilDog]

I'm not old, I'm still in my mid-twenties, and will attempt to remain so for a couple of years yet. I figure, if you just keep your age as a general decade, it doesn't make you that old. Then again, you're only as old as you make yourself.

Music-wise, I think I've got a good, stable foundation from the 60s with The Who (There maybe only be two band members left, but goddamn, they are amazing live), moving up to 90s Grunge and Rock with Sound Garden, Jane's Addiction, Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters, with Breaking Benjamin for the late 90s/early 00s and some Audioslave thrown in there.

[The Duke]

Call the borgs. We hit a time warp. Not years. Decades or centuries. For me the best year is whichever was the best for Simon & Garfunkel or Manhattan Transfer. Me high school flame used her feminine viles to get me to watch "The Wall"as in Pink Floyd, which was ok, I guess. But the one and only Joplin is Scott, and (Sam the Eagle, help me here) Bach ruuuulllzzz.

I also prefer Scott to Janis in terms of Joplins, but it seems to me that her voice is very much an acquired taste (which I have not acquired) whereas it is basically universally agreed that ridiculous awesome ragtime piano is more or less the best thing.

[celticgeek]

I think that autotune should only ever have been used to make that kind of video and never ever in music of any other kind.  In other news: would it be offensive to autotune a video of Stephen Hawking?  Or a step further, to straight up add autotune to his speech machine? 

Discuss.

I remember reading somewhere that many people have offered to update the software and the voice for Stephen Hawking's text-to-voice system, and that he has resisted this.  I cannot, of course, find the reference now, but I will keep looking.

Edit:  Now, of course, I found that he has chosen a new voice:  Stephen Hawking New Voice

[Method of Madness]

To Carl - It's not quite what you meant, but yo.

[Skewbrow]

@MoM: Sorry 'bout going a bit off-topic here. Just remembered, where I had seen 'Madness' & 'Method' in the same sentence. The title of one of the trickier levels of Lemmings (anyone else here spent days trying to save them little critters?) was 'There's madness in the method'. IIRC I had to ask a friend for a hint with that one.

[numbvox]

I just wanted to jump in and say the following:

Music... in QC?  What is this, retro-QC day?

[pwhodges]

Sibelius, for the win.

Oddities corner: I have a CD of Sibelius's music for organ.  Possibly the most interesting thing on it is a piece that he admitted uses material taken from his eighth symphony, which he destroyed.  Buying the CD meant finding the web site of an obscure Finnish recording company and then navigating the site and shop entirely in Finnish...

[Emperor Norton]

...Just an interesting observation on the whole perception and for instance how bunnyThor mentioned the "Town" that Faye came from. Do people not realise we have cities down here? She is from Savannah, which has a higher population density than the area of Easthampton (the part of Hampshire County with the highest population density). She is still from a city. Hell it nearly has as big of a population as Hampshire County(~140,000 in Savannah, ~150,000 Hampshire County), with only ~14% of the land area.

[St.Clair]

I live in Eugene, Oregon (which will give some context to the earlier comments about Portland), population a little over 150k.  I still call and think of it as a "a college town."

(the "small town" I grew up about a mile from, by contrast, has a population of just under 1k.)

[Emperor Norton]

I live in Eugene, Oregon (which will give some context to the earlier comments about Portland), population a little over 150k.  I still call and think of it as a "a college town."

(the "small town" I grew up about a mile from, by contrast, has a population of just under 1k.)

College town is a term that isn't really the same as saying a town with a college in it. A lot of college towns are actually cities. I live in Athens, GA, which is also a "college town" but if I was asked whether I lived in a town or a city, I would respond with city, because that is what it actually is from a government standpoint. Same with Eugene.

[jwhouk]

Cher is the one to blame for the autotune morass. Ever since that ungodly "Believe", producers have used it to death.

My "year in music" isn't one particular year, though my tastes were hair bands like Def Leppard, Whitesnake and Bon Jovi. (No, I don't listen to that stuff anymore.)

[Odin]

I'm just going to borrow these wise words by Chris Hastings:

[TheEvilDog]

Funnily enough I was listening to some songs on random just as I read that comic and what came on? Johnny Cash's version of Hurt.

[Method of Madness]

I live in Eugene, Oregon (which will give some context to the earlier comments about Portland), population a little over 150k.  I still call and think of it as a "a college town."

(the "small town" I grew up about a mile from, by contrast, has a population of just under 1k.)

College town is a term that isn't really the same as saying a town with a college in it. A lot of college towns are actually cities. I live in Athens, GA, which is also a "college town" but if I was asked whether I lived in a town or a city, I would respond with city, because that is what it actually is from a government standpoint. Same with Eugene.

Exactly.  Hell, Boston is a "college town".

@MoM: Sorry 'bout going a bit off-topic here. Just remembered, where I had seen 'Madness' & 'Method' in the same sentence. The title of one of the trickier levels of Lemmings (anyone else here spent days trying to save them little critters?) was 'There's madness in the method'. IIRC I had to ask a friend for a hint with that one.

Man, I haven't played Lemmings in years.  But nope, not where I got it from.  (Its origin is in my sig, btw)

[The Duke]

Dr. McNinja is tied with QC, Bad Machinery, and Nedroid Picture Diary for my favourite webcomic.  There all so awesome in different ways.

[Tergon]

Lemmings, you say?

No need to thank me.    Alternatively, if it eats up all your free time (and it will) that's not my fault.

[akronnick]

You are a bad man!

[Tergon]

A bad man who is TOTALLY WINNING AT LEMMINGS.  And I'm clearly doing better than you, unless you think you can do better.  Think you can win it?  Huh?  Huh?

Not that I'm tempting you to waste time, I'm just saying, you're totally lame if you don't play Lemmings because I'm so much better at it.