RTP-area local music and culture

[Nathaniel Florin <npflorin AT yahoo.com>]

--- Greg <blumenth AT yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yeah, heaven forbid that a musician be allowed to
> THINK. They might be tempted to do something 
> ORIGINAL.

Wow, you really really missed Richard's point. What I
think you're referring to is this:

"There are way, way too many ideas  on display. Way
too much  (visual/musical/verbal/historical) talk, not
enough ROCK."

Richard didn't say ideas were bad, he said that there
are *too many* ideas. To quote Michelangelo, "Beauty
is the purgation of superfluities." The rock dies when
it becomes a PhD thesis. Also, Richard's coming off of
Woody's line about Tortoise and post becoming
basically an amalgam of any number of 70s bands. From
my view deep on the sidelines this is generally the
problem with music after [insert your date here], that
there's so much rehashing -- "recontextualizing" if
you're feeling charitable, "slavish imitation" if
you're not. And maybe there's some originality there,
but you're really dithering on the margins. Art gets
precious when its main influence is itself.

Richard's other line about "idea-free" music was about
raw experimentation, which of course can't be truly
idea-free in that it is itself one big idea, and which
when applied dogmatically can be as original as
anything (see, say, most every big leap in the history
of jazz up to ~1970). Maybe Lightning Bolt came into
existence without any thoughts beyond Richard's "What
can these drums do? What can this bass do? What can I
do with them?" -- but the times I saw them were as
original as anyone else I'm likely to see, and they
had the sort of Rock Power you can feel in your small
intestine.

Nate