Off-topic discussion thread / moved as clogging other threads

He literally used the word “nothing.” So if that is not “what he was saying,” that doesn’t really help the “not a troll,” argument you are making.

:eek: Fake C peddling fake quotes to the surprise of no one. I think you owe both Karen and Morrissey an apology, don't you Dave?



Troll or idiot?

👆:rolleyes:

I resent that.

Oh yeah? Well I resent the fact that you refused to play chess or scrabble with me after I asked you sweetly. Do you have plans to rectify that any time soon? :unsure:
 
:eek: Fake C peddling fake quotes to the surprise of no one. I think you owe both Karen and Morrissey an apology, don't you Dave?





👆:rolleyes:



Oh yeah? Well I resent the fact that you refused to play chess or scrabble with me after I asked you sweetly. Do you have plans to rectify that any time soon? :unsure:


I'm rubbish at games! It would be like a quiz show when a contestant can't even remember their own name.
 
:eek: Fake C peddling fake quotes to the surprise of no one. I think you owe both Karen and Morrissey an apology, don't you Dave?





👆:rolleyes:



Oh yeah? Well I resent the fact that you refused to play chess or scrabble with me after I asked you sweetly. Do you have plans to rectify that any time soon? :unsure:

There, there. @Malarkey did something you have never done and scored a point based on an actual fact. You generally just throw more and more at the wall, hoping something will stick before declaring yourself the winner. The fact that you have to pretend I manufactured the quote shows that you really are desperate to know what it’s like to score a point. Without the equally desperate assistance of you-know-who supporting you, this is the closest you’re ever been. Enjoy!
 
Your “argument “ about how rock is not based in traditional black music really should be studied as an example of confirmation bias, and how it can cause a somewhat intelligent person to abandon logic in a way that really was out of your control. It’s a case, not of clinging to a bad argument as much as actually believing what you were typing to the degree that it was overriding your cognitive process, . “This can’t be true because I just know it’s not!”
 
There may be more than one reason Morrissey asked Boz to send the emails.Depending on a person’s beliefs or biases some reasons will seem more likely or useful. Personally I would imagine that Morrissey may have felt it fit into Boz’ “duties “ if we can call it that, as he was , or appeared to be the leader of the band at the time.
Yes that makes more sense than my speculation. It just seems he doesn’t get along with the record labels he been on.
Morrissey did turn out to have a legal representative at the time but I don’t think they were on retainer, and I don’t think he had a manager at the time.

He wasn’t again in the greatest of places at that time, I don’t think he was even on a label, pretty sure he wasn’t at that time, do you know?


I would think this type of correspondence, dealing with a former label regarding what you might call a contract issue, would be handled by legal or management. But Boz was familiar with the situation and they would know who he is, so I think that is why he did it.
Who can say if a letter from Morrissey himself would be more persuasive but, I image, same as he doesn’t release his own records he probably doesn’t write his own business letters.

As far as them listening to the record I agree that they probably did not. Remember they were already planning a “We Are. the World “ type record with artists from their current roster, and as a former artist, who likely left a bad taste when he left, it wasn’t a priority anyway.

Bands who perform on big charity records and events donate their money but the exposure puts them back in the charts, and record companies, notorious for being run by cheats, crooks and gangsters probably use some creative accounting to make money on these things.
Yes of course.
I watched something recently about how appearing on Live Aid and doing a great performance pulled Queen out of a slump and may have saved their career.

sure. I could imagine that’s true. Though they always seemed to have hits throughout their career, not that I really followed the arc of it in detail.


Anyway, who knows, but it’s easy to imagine numerous reasons why they weren’t immediately on the phone to Morrissey. The reason I suggested, that the song wasn’t appropriate and it would be too obvious a cash grab, might be totally wrong.
 
Yes that makes more sense than my speculation. It just seems he doesn’t get along with the record labels he been on.


He wasn’t again in the greatest of places at that time, I don’t think he was even on a label, pretty sure he wasn’t at that time, do you know?





Yes of course.


sure. I could imagine that’s true. Though they always seemed to have hits throughout their career, not that I really followed the arc of it in detail.
I feel unqualified to answer questions about whether he had a deal at the time when we have @Famous when dead in the house, but I know his deal with Decca/Universal was over. If might have gone down a lot smoother otherwise.
 
Your “argument “ about how rock is not based in traditional black music really should be studied as an example of confirmation bias, and how it can cause a somewhat intelligent person to abandon logic in a way that really was out of your control. It’s a case, not of clinging to a bad argument as much as actually believing what you were typing to the degree that it was overriding your cognitive process, . “This can’t be true because I just know it’s not!”

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to revisit posts I wrote when I was 29 years old. I'm 33 now and I'm pleased they had such a profound impact on you that you're still thinking about them 1,122 days later. The kids might say "rent free". I just read back over those posts, and even though I was making up a lot of those arguments on the spot, I agree with practically every sentence I wrote. I'll paste them here now and you can tell everyone what you found so disagreeable about them, because as far as I can see my arguments were more nuanced than yours.

This is not true. I know you read it somewhere once and took it as the truth but it's not something you'll be able to back up if I press you on it. Yes, The Stones were influenced by black musicians, that does not mean every white man or woman who played the guitar was too. The Stones are a unique case anyway since their entire act was lifted wholesale from black American blues musicians. There are numerous white rock acts whose lineage you can't trace back to Robert Johnson or whoever. England has a rich folk tradition, so does the Appalachian area of the USA, along with for instance Spain which is the country most closely associated with the six string acoustic guitar. Black American blues musicians are not the be all and end all, and guitar based music did not begin with them, so you know where you can shove your revisionist history lesson don't you. Anyway rock music would have died a sorry death half a century ago if white people didn't revolutionise it. Most of your favourite acts from the 1960s to today wouldn't exist without white innovation. So say "thank you, white people". Go on, say it. "Thank you for your innovative music which gave me something to base my identity around, otherwise I'd have nothing."

You imagine what my motivation could be :rolleyes:. Let me know if you think of anything. I'm sure it will be original. Could it be that I'm a giant racist, perchance? A colossal one? :thumb:

The question was whether it's possible to make rock music without having black influences, my assertion is that it is possible and has been done countless times. Also, just because you've listened to something doesn't mean you're thereafter "influenced" by it. Quentin Tarantino could watch a Michael Crichton adaptation but it doesn't make Inglorious Basterds influenced by Jurassic Park.

Some Beatles music was influenced by black music because they chose to be influenced by it, like they later chose to incorporate Indian sitar-based music into their songs. But then there's 'Blackbird', 'Norwegian Wood', 'Eleanor Rigby'. A lot of the Sgt. Peppers album looks back to Music Hall for inspiration; what black blues act do you think 'A Day In the Life' can be traced back to? Or 'Waterloo Sunset' by The Kinks. 'The Village Green Preservation Society' is distinctively English. I've never listened to The Beach Boys' later chamber pop music and thought "this owes so much to black musicians!", either. Elvis was influenced by Arthur Cruddup but then there are songs like 'Wooden Heart' which display no blues influences.

Morrissey heard plenty of black music but consciously chose not to use its influence in The Smiths, the same goes for his attitude toward non-white sleeve stars and literary references. He was making white music for white people (something Billy Corgan later stated he was also doing), even if Johnny Marr wasn't fully aware of it. It was part of the appeal of The Smiths, you and [name redacted] wouldn't be here otherwise. 'Back to the Old House' has nothing in common with negro spirituals, and 'Suffer Little Children' doesn't use Son House as a reference point.

There's also Tin Pan Alley where many white people and Jews wrote the songs which filled the airwaves for the first half of the 20th century. Like you alluded to, much of heavy metal has few black influences, and the same goes for electronic music which can be traced to white pioneers of the genre in the early 1900s.

But to pick up a guitar and write songs is not to automatically be influenced by Bukka White or Blind Lemon Jefferson. Outside of the USA, many musicians hadn't heard of them. And many of those old blues guys had been nearly forgotten until white people brought them out of obscurity in the 1950s/60s and got them to make new recordings.

I wouldn't consider a lot of Bluegrass or even some Skiffle music to have black roots either. Working class guys constructing their own instruments and battering out songs on them --there was more English folk influence there than Delta Blues. So [name redacted]'s most recent "all music is black music" claim is seeming even less coherent with each passing second.

All it amounts to is 'white people have no music of their own', something [pronoun redacted] would never say about acts from the Arab world or South-East Asia. [Pronoun redacted] is perhaps the most confused person on this forum. On the one hand [pronoun redacted] defends Morrissey through thick and thin, no matter what he says. On the other [pronoun redacted] comes out with these Afrocentric utterances, sounding like Sinead O'Connor after she changed her name and converted to Islam. I don't have time to deal with that!

Anyway my point is that [name redacted]'s claim is too simplistic and holistic to be correct. Unless [pronoun redacted] thinks Richard Wagner was somehow influenced by black musicians too? Or Gracie Fields? :crazy:

James Naismith invented basketball, so no black player in the NBA (over 70% of the players on the team rosters) can play the game without being influenced by the white players who came before!

If a young black basketball player gets inspired by Stephen Curry they are also being inspired by the white players like Nat Holman and Neil Johnston who inspired the black players to play basketball in the first place.

Kobe Bryant owes everything to Larry Bird! :rolleyes:

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again. White people invented the first electric guitar, google it. It's you who needs to learn to read. I could pick up my electric guitar right now and bend the strings, and I'd have done it without being influenced by any black blues musician. It's a natural thing to do when you pick up a guitar. Black people invented the guitar bend now :rolleyes: ? White people invented the electric guitar but they wouldn't have known how to bend the strings if black musicians hadn't shown them? You're a [insult redacted].

Guitar based music would have evolved without black blues influences. Listen to Helter Skelter. When you're exploring your instrument you start experimenting, adding distortion and trying different sounds. You don't need to have heard blues music to do that.

The fact is rock music as we know it wouldn't exist without white people because they invented most of the equipment used to record it and play it.

Did some 'pretty decent' experts tell you that you can't bend a guitar string without being influenced by black musicians?

I'm not 'ignorant' because after all I already know the generally accepted version of the history of rock music that you're trying to push on me, I simply reject aspects of it. I know you like official narratives and don't question very much, your name is 'The Truth' after all which implies black-and-white thinking which can't be shifted. So keep believing that you know 'the Truth' if it makes you happy, but the truth is that "anyone who bends a guitar string is influenced by black music" is stupid even by your standards.

"Morrissey made white music for white people" is simply a fact of his early career, not a fantasy of mine. And his music was all the better for it. Didn't he even say he wanted his fanbase to be skinheads in nail polish?
I already conceded that black blues musicians were an influence on rock music. I said the Rolling Stones had black influences, some of the Beatles music was influenced by it, some of Elvis. That wasn't good enough for you. In your world white people wouldn't know how to play the guitar if black people didn't walk them through it with baby steps. Black musicians have to be the givers of life, the creators, the sun that white rock bands revolve around. You're full of [excretion redacted]. A lot of white guitar music exists independent of black influences, and would have come into existence without old blues guys sitting on a porch singing about God and women and cornbread 100 years ago. Deal with it.

Wrong again but it's nice that you keep trying. They're not facts. A fact would be "black musicians had a lot of influence in the early days of rock and roll", but then we have "you can't bend a guitar string without being influenced by a black musician" which is not a fact. It's an opinion if we can even call it that.

A significant amount of the rock music that we've had over the past 40 years is unrecognisable from the earliest styles of rock. In many cases the blues element has been completely extracted from it. If you reanimated Robert Johnson's corpse and had him listen to The Cure, I think you'd struggle to convince him that they're a black music influenced band. Sure they covered Jimi Hendrix early on who was a 'pretty decent' guitar expert, but aside from him and a few others like Arthur Lee, rock music must have been at least 95% white since the late 1960s.

You absolutely can find innumerable bands who have no blues influences and don't use the blues scale or anything else that can be closely associated with early black rock or blues music. It's a separate entity now, whites commandeered it and shaped it and turned it into something new which became theirs. Whites were there from the beginning too, take some of the white folk songs on 'Anthology of American Folk Music' and add an electric guitar and it's rock music.

You overestimated the black influence while I conceded all along it was a relevant factor in rock's history which you implied was racism because it wasn't obsequious enough.

You're the one who wants to give credit for an entire genre of music, not even a sub-genre but anyone who so much as touches the instrument in question, to one race. It's a shame you wouldn't look at crime statistics by race as closely.

As for electric guitars, every person I see mentioned as having a hand in the creation of electric guitars is white. Early models by Lloyd Loar and George Breed, to the 1930s models closer to what we have today by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker. If white men invented the instrument I fail to see how you can't bend a string without being influenced by a black musician.

If I created a new instrument and handed it to you before I played a note on it, and you composed a song and handed it back to me saying "now you can't play a note without being influenced by The Truth", it wouldn't make it true. An instrument only has so many notes, and whatever sounds you came up with while playing it, I would have found for myself before long.

The person who wrote the first novel in English is disputed, I've heard it credited before to Samuel Richardson. If he did write the first English language novel, that doesn't make Margaret Atwood's latest novel indebted to him and his legacy. She likely would have turned to writing fiction regardless of whether Samuel Richardson had ever existed. And there have been so many novels since then that Richardson's influence has been all but lost in the 21st century. We could say the same for the vast majority of the early 20th century acoustic blues musicians. So she can type up her novel without being influenced by Richardson or Defoe and I can bend my guitar string without having to credit Lightning Hopkins for it.

And like you said "string bending may have happened in classical music before the dawn of the twentieth century." but you close with "facts are facts", after establishing that you're not entirely sure of what the facts actually are.
:rolleyes::guitar:
 
One of the greatest band of our times......

Ladies and gentleman
I present to you all.... WET LEG..
and my shitty crap poems
002BCC0B-3FCA-402E-BE07-30825AB31794.jpeg
 
The fact that you go to this effort says it all. The problem with your argument was that you said rock music from the 50’s and 60’s could be shown to have influence from black artists, but that somehow later rock music did not have this same influence.
While some later rock music from the 70’s and 80’s, prog rock like Yes and similar in the 70’s, and “shred” like Yngwie Malmsteen from the 80’s definitely had more European classical influence, it was still “rock “ and the artists had still been influenced by The Beatles and others that mostly copied blues and early rock musicians when they started.

I think maybe the problem is thinking that these musicians have to be influenced by a narrow range of music, whatever that might be. Paul McCartney never really learned to read music but his ear, like all musicians, was influenced by all he heard, so with the help of George Martin, The Beatles were including European classical influences in their their music. Something like “Eleanor Rigby” is about as far from the blues as you can get, but still written by someone influenced by the blues.

The members of Yes, ELP, and other 70’s progressive rock wanted to use the tools of classical music to varying degrees, but the music was still a rock sub genre. They couldn’t forget their influences even if they focused in other areas. They were not classical musicians, they were rock musicians.

The problem with your reasoning is that you want to say that at a certain point in time influences from the still fairly recent past become lost. They may become less apparent but all of those people heard The Rolling Stones doing their best to represent a style of music that influenced them.

Yngwie, the most European rock musician that comes to mind was inspired by Hendrix. This is never apparent in his playing as far as I know, but “influence”is intangible and manifests in many ways, some more subtle than others.
 
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