OffsetGuitars.com

the A.V. club has had some cool videos in the past (andrew jackson jihad, they might be giants, screaming females, melvins) but yeah, that was pretty bad. sadly, that kinda middle of the road indiepop is what is popular right now. the kinda people who want ed sheeran only with the superiority of being into something that is less popular than ed sheeran. right now "rock" music is kinda a dying thing. most major lables do not want to touch rock music unless it can be marketed as "the next ____________" which is usually one of the few bands that people with little musical taste resort to. if you're rock, you must be compared to led zepplin. if you're alternative rock, you gotta be compared to nirvana. if your punk, it's gotta be the ramones. if you're metal, you have to be compared to metallica. it's really a cliche of marketing/print media at this point.

while im on the subject of print media. look at NME. it's meant to stand for new music edition or some shit like that but for the last 8 or so years, all they have been doing is been wanking the dick of nostalgia so hard that it cant even get hard. here is a fun game. look up the last few issues of nme (about 30 issues) and see how many cover stories there are about the following bands: nirvana, the smiths, the beetles, oasis. you will notice quite a lot of that. but at the same time, people get very little of their musical taste from magazines nowadays. for years i wanted to be a music journalist. but based on the current state of the print media and the 10000's of blogs out there, i cant really see the point, my college english lecturer was actually into the idea and said "ok, i want you to go write 3 500 word reviews of albums. one you like, one you hate and one you feel meh on. she ended up actually buying the album i recommended. she also liked the negative review i did. the meh one was kinda a slog however. but you can get why.

a few months ago, my friend who is a video editor had the idea of starting a youtube music review channel where i pick an album i thought was never given the attention it deserved, my friend listens to it and we do a discussion on it in under 10 mins......... sorry, i went off topic there.

frankly, do i think "rock" music is dead? no. should it die? maybe.

mbene085 wrote: These losers are so preoccupied with looking like they don't care that it becomes a hideously obvious affectation.

Now that's funny.

'College/Alt- Rock' has always had an uncomfortable relationship with irony. Often, there is so much tongue-in-cheek that it causes one of those 'window piercings' that go right through and expose the unsightly innards that nobody wants to see in the first place.

It stands to reason though. What do most 20-somethings understand regarding rich irony? 5-7 years ago, they were still in their teens. Fée covers have been done for decades but they are just catching on to the wave now as it is new to them.

The gloss had already worn off of the veneer of this shit when I lived in Seattle during the '90s. More folk-tinged covers of Sir-Mix-a-Lot, anyone?

mbene085 wrote: Also, I just realized something. These acts are basically copping the stage presence of bands that used to be strung out on heroin, minus the heroin. They looked the way they looked because they couldn't fucking tell how they looked since they were disconnected from reality. These losers are so preoccupied with looking like they don't care that it becomes a hideously obvious affectation.

To be fair that lot were often as contrived, pretending to be American and indulging in a heaping helping of cultural appropration. You could say it's all part of the performance and the persona but that's a two way street.

To be honest circling right back, I don't really get folk watching videos of bands doing novelty covers while expecting to hate them. I find there's enough records to listen to without watching videos of bands I don't like.

Telliot wrote: I'm sick of hearing 'they just don't make music like they used to...' I find that attitude to be lazy and pointless.

But dudebro remember those 90's!

Generally words spoken by folk without a clue or who once thought they had a clue and are now stuggling to understand how things have moved on. I've never needed anyone to find me music or recommend music to me, I've always found it easy. In fact i'd argue it's the easiest it's ever been, when I was buying records in the late 70's most of the time I could only buy blind on the sleeve, the name or some instict that it was something I wanted to pursue. Finding music was like a breadcrumb trail, you had to pick up the crumbs and follow them. These days it's easy to just skip the whole trail and jump to the end becuse someone has done the work for you (though they often don't do it very well since they skipped themselves). Though this often means folk's knoweldge is spotty, lacking context and often missing those happy accidents that end up being the most important records to you and real epiphanies that lead you down wholly new avenues.

5 kids and still time to look for records, especally as it's the kids hobby too.

D

A lot of these AV Club videos have been bands I never heard of, but there have been some good ones.

Screaming Females cover Shake if Off by Taylor Swift. J Mascis mentioned Screaming Females in an interview, the front woman can really play guitar

https://youtu.be/Zm1-bVYio1k" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Superchunk covers In between Days by The Cure

https://youtu.be/zB_BK5anRp0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The Low covers Shot in the Arm by Wilco

https://youtu.be/VGSHEgCR8nc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Melvins cover Graveyard by Butthole Surfers

https://youtu.be/ppLRUHb_tOc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

And there are a few others out there, but I do agree that most of the bands on there are insufferable hipsters

Just listened to it. It wasn't good, but I didn't think it was that bad.

It's pretty risky to do a song like that and bring the energy down that much.

I think this is worse. The original is an iconic, anthemic, Australian classic. That cover sounds like a deflated balloon.

thegumbootman wrote:I think this is worse. The original is an iconic, anthemic, Australian classic. That cover sounds like a deflated balloon.

Oh man, shocking. Some absolute gold in the comments though


On a slightly less shit note, Paul Dempsey shows great covers can be done, sometimes better than the originals.

He doesn't even transpose into easier to sing keys:

Paul Dempsey covers Miley Cyrus 'Wrecking Ball'

and

Sam Brown's 'Stop'

I'm thinking that this somnambulant cover of Sweet Jane by Cowboy Junkies could be patient zero. Six years later, Sonic Youth's cover of Superstar on the Carpenters tribute album upped the ante not only on stupor and artful artlessness, but also on irony and earnestness.
I'm also thinking we have the high profile performance of Nirvana Unplugged, which broke the Richter scale on introspective earnestness with acoustic covers of their own rockers. That's my amateur musicologist rough timeline.

I don't know if the lazy, laconic singing style is appropriated from heroin chic or from slackers like Mascis, Malkumus, Cobain et al.

The one redeeming feature of this cover is that it is taken from the '70s, which might introduce some Millennials to a time when music was good.

Larry Mal wrote: Overdose of beards, irony and yet too much earnestness.

Ha, as someone who works shoulder-to-shoulder with a lot of the young-uns (sometimes when I’m sitting in a meeting it’s like I've stumbled into a Paul Bunyan jamboree), I’m often bemused by all of my urban lumberjack coworkers. A buddy of mine, a crotchety boomer*, rails on constantly about “those ridiculous hipsters” with their beards and too-tight-fitting suits. All I can think of when he gets revved up is that his elders in the 60s were probably kvetching about "those ridiculous hippies with their bell bottoms, long hair, and loud rock-n-roll music." So it goes.

Anyway, yeah, antipathy towards the irony and too much earnestness of Millennials is really a thing—the defining generation gap, to use a dated phrase, between X-ers (that'd include me) and kids these days. There’s a great David Foster Wallace essay on the corrosive but inescapable trap of irony.

https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

For anyone interested, but not up for an OSG reading assignment, there’s a tidy little YouTube vid that sums it up in ten minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Annnnyway, to bring it ‘round to the thread topic, I didn’t loath this AVClub cover as much as I thought I might.

Also It’d be so much easier to replace my bass player with one of those pipe organ-looking foot pedal things. I don’t think I could get past how dorky it’d look performing with one of those contraptions, though.

* Yeah, I know. All this boomer, X-er, millennial labeling is ultimately an overgeneralizing load of hooey.

sts221 wrote:
* Yeah, I know. All this boomer, X-er, millennial labeling is ultimately an overgeneralizing load of hooey.

I just want to be called Gen Y again. I feel like if a smart phone wasn't a major impact on college life, you aren't a millennial.

brucer wrote:Whoa. That's really awful. Talk about turning a total gem into poo! Hmmm. @#$! What else can be said? Lumbersexuals should stay away from the Sweet.

Nah, that's neatly trimmed office beard. Yacht-rocking beard.

thegumbootman wrote:
I think this is worse. The original is an iconic, anthemic, Australian classic. That cover sounds like a deflated balloon.

I think I prefer it to the original, but her absurdly filled in eyebrows were driving me nuts.

eurotrashed wrote:

sts221 wrote:
* Yeah, I know. All this boomer, X-er, millennial labeling is ultimately an overgeneralizing load of hooey.

I just want to be called Gen Y again. I feel like if a smart phone wasn't a major impact on college life, you aren't a millennial.

I have to agree. I am born in 1980 so am on the cusp between X and Y. I grew up with tech but we didn't even have social media in college. Hell, it wasn't until my last year that we had DSL.

I had that Nokia with Snake on it, the Blackberry was still a couple years away, let alone the iPhone