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Occurs to me too that certain gear goes with prog because "prog" is as much a particular historical template as an actual style of music. There's no real convention of composition or performance...

Update: my legal counsel has advise me to clarify the foregoing statement. I do not have a Kickstarter; rather, all proceeds from the Nerve Institute and associated entities go to the Dromos...

Unfortunately, I've already received donations from every PE member for my Kickstarter to ensure that the galaxies collide as quickly as possible, so there may be some friction.

What bigjohnwayne said, word for word. And fuck them for getting Chief Keef hung up on that parole violation, particularly when the Chicago police are not-so-subtly trying to kill him.

Just what I was thinking – the most gear-obsessed people I've ever known were producers who made old-school dance, electronica, and ambient music. They would spend six months looking for keyboards...

Glad to see Clipse on here, and you gotta gotta gotta hear Vince Staples, Summertime ’06. Maybe my favorite album of the last couple years.

Although, on further reflection, Robert Fripp dating Debbie Harry was probably a lot like a duller Videodrome, so it makes some sense.

Robert Fripp dating Debbie Harry is one of the weirdest goddamn things I've ever heard, and also the only thing that's ever made me jealous of Robert Fripp.

I addresse this slanderous Calumnie with the only meet Rejoindre, namely, that all such sham Capitaines and Pilots, otherwise Skiffesmen, are possessèd by Spirits whence do they draw their Expertise...

Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a good idea, and I'd much rather hear an unquantized band, but there are quite a few factors in play.

1). The radio/top-40 audience is used to a...

That's part of the problem – I think people overestimate how much this stuff is the band's choice. Almost any mainstream rock band making its first big-money, major-label album is gonna get...

Well, gates and reverb are used all the time to fix the playing of drummers who don't really know how to hit the drums, or who tend to "flutter" the kick drum between strokes (i.e., they don't have...

As Sputnik has pointed out, a lot of people (myself included!) can effectively play certain things on a distorted electric guitar that we could never replicate with a clean tone. I'm a very...

Understand the "YMMV," but why? How is Autotuning a singer any more or less fraudulent than using compression and noise gates and reverb, or quantizing (and I don't know your background, so maybe...

Believe me, they can, and Autotune isn't just used to cover up the inability to sing. That's like saying overdubs are morally wrong.

I say they are, because anything used to make music is an instrument, fer chrissake.

All true & well-put, but as I've tried over the years to figure out why Holdsworth's solo stuff doesn't really grab me, I've come to think that I basically don't care for his arrangements. Great...

You don't have to like it, but the idea that they're not instruments is bullshit. Ask Stockhausen and Pierre Henry if computers are instruments.

Listening to Buffalo right now, and I'm thunderstruck all over again at Zappa's ability not simply to play solos but to direct the whole musical movement of the band with his playing. He reminds me...

There were flashes of it, especially something like "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution." And I remember every time I hear "Get a Little" and "Orange County Lumber Truck" that FZ was also probably...

It was, however, astonishingly cheap to get the Boys' Choir penciled in as a sacrificial hekatomb – apparently they can be replaced for almost nothing – so there will be an appearance, if a brief one.

That's what I miss in pretty much everything by McLaughlin after the late '70s – he was so batshit on-the-edge with Miles and Mahavishnu that his later work seems uniformly pretty safe and sterile to...

That pretty much says it. I've always wondered to what degree FZ knew in advance that a given bar would end up as 11:3 or whatever; I can imitate that sort of thing to a very limited extent, but I...

I'm pretty sure "Rubber Shirt" was a bit of xenochrony assembled from separate sessions – I have the vague impression that they recorded the various bits during a tour in '77/'78.

After a refresher listen to "The Ocean ...," I wouldn't be at all surprised if FZ chopped up the basic guitar/drums track into its most interesting sections, but all the basic components themselves...

addendum: ... which is credible, I think, because O'Hearn wasn't in Zappa's band at the time. He told me that he was already friends with Terry Bozzio and stopped by the studio one night to see him,...

Patrick O'Hearn told me once that the bass parts were single takes (I believe there's an electric and an acoustic), as evinced by the fact that you can hear him grunt damn it! in the middle of his...

A transparent lie. As we all know, PE membership includes a clause specifying that Jon shall have, henceforth and forever, all rights to all female partners on wedding nights.

Well, yeah, I should say that some become unwitting members of a hit squad. Not to derail the thread.

One of the most interesting and difficult parts of Frank's character, I think, and something I've observed in other obsessives (myself not excluded): there's a real pendulum between total compulsive...

I've been wondering about this, too – it does seem out of character, but I can also imagine Frank, having dedicated so much of his time and effort to hateful legal and logistical garbage, just...

Very goddamn true, and I want to respond with more intelligence when I get the chance, but just a note:

Every time I read the phrase "volunteer army" (and I'm not criticizing you for using it,...

One of the saddest cases in American letters. That guy was a great writer for a while, and then came the attention and the high-profile gigs and the chance to make a living as a caricature – very...

I don't think they are, either, and I think Radiohead themselves would be embarrassed by the idea that they revolutionized anything – but, that said, I do think they've got a very unique...

No offense, mate, but if you think the strings and piano are "used in the most rudimentary and flaccid sort of ways," you don't have any experience arranging strings, and you're either not a piano...

Thank you, and I'm glad I didn't get everything wrong; this is all pretty much inference from books and movies and records of the period.

This also points up something about Zappa that I think is...

I'm glad to know there's at least one other person who thinks Hail to the Thief is their best. For me, they were a great band from OK Computer through Hail, a nice but unremarkable band on The Bends...

And, for me, Scott is far and away the best lyricist on Earth right now. Much as I love Tom Waits, David Bowie, John Cale, David Sylvian, certain things by Bob Dylan and Nick Cave, Scott's really...

To give you an idea of what you're in for with The Drift, here's one of my favorite pieces of music by anybody ever, Scott's mini-opera about Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci during the last days...

To judge from books/movies/etc. of the period (I wasn't born, so maybe somebody can corroborate or correct me), there seems to have been a genuine feeling that an unprecedented and unformalized kind...

Tilt is the most accessible of his recent records; I think The Drift and Bish Bosch are utter masterpieces, and I wouldn't quite go that far for Tilt, but it's probably the best point of entry. His...

Maybe my favorite musician, right now and for the last several years. Tilt, The Drift, and Bish Bosch are right up there with my favorite records of the last twenty-odd years, and the latter two...

Well, there's my personal response to this, and there's what I can infer about Zappa's opinions: for me, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe, et al are just boring as all hell. And as far as...

I can't remember where I read this, so somebody might be able to correct me, but I have the feeling that FZ was talking about seeing Jefferson Airplane in '65 or '66.

Addendum: I wasn't there, but to judge from the reactions of sharp-eyed people who were (Hunter Thompson, for example), it seems like a lot of the earlier members of the West Coast counterculture...

Well, consider both the music and the manner of performance –

Musically: the Mothers and Beefheart vs., as FZ said himself, "a bunch of more-rustic-than-thou San Francisco white blues bands that...

I gather the "beautiful"/"ugly" thing was a capsule form of his protest that the San Francisco hippies were essentially a cutesy, superficial, fashion-obedient, commercialized version of a real...

Ah, OK, thanks for the eyewitness correction. I believe I got that from Ben Watson, who – as you know better than anybody – sometimes plays things a bit loose with data.

I can't remember where I found this – I've got the feeling that it was in Ben Watson's Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play – but I know Zappa was quoted as having that said he loved hip-hop,...

Agreed on the Miles comparisons – some of this reminds me of the outtakes from the On the Corner/Get Up with It period. Welcome to official membership of a millennial death-cult disguised as a...

Pretty much with you on all of the above, and as somebody who used to make (very little) money with record reviews, etc., I think this all points up one of the problems with the Criticism Industry,...

... all of which is pretty amplified in the context of "progressive rock," for a number of reasons: I understand what the term meant at a certain point in history, but honestly, "progressive" is a...

... and if you wanted to go all the way with it, I think you could tenably claim that there's really only folk music, and that its stylistic differentiation relies more on canons of cultural...

Don't get me wrong – I'm not talking about you personally, just about the social and historical conditions of something like genre distinction that too many people treat as if it were a divine...

Or, for that matter, William Burroughs, Stockhausen, and drugs?

So, in your estimation, anything that influenced rock music deserves inclusion? Palestrina? Beethoven? Lawrence Welk?

And all this, in a way, reflects the structural racism of American society; people get so understandably defensive when the word is thrown around that very few of us ever recognize the extent to...

Sure, as an influence – and there are any number of rock bands destined for the Hall who have been hugely influenced by hip-hop, too. Most of the post-1995ish rock music I've found interesting is in...

Plus, would anybody here have a problem with Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, or Cluster getting into the Hall? And aren't they a good deal more distant from rock music than NWA is?

OK, but in what way is '70s soul any more or less "rock and roll" than NWA? We're talking about music that comes directly out of rock, funk, and soul in rhythmic and textural terms, and derives its...