@ this argument. Too bad I have something to say.
DT isn't as influential as the fans would want people to believe. Instead, they extrapolated from their influences, wore them on their musical sleeves, then put out albums. This is self-admitted, btw.
Does that really take away from their ability to write music? Not all bands need to look at their influences and say "Okay, we have to try to do everything this band does" to be a good band. To me, bands that do that are more original than bands that try to clone their influences.
"Hyped" means that DT fans overstate every aspect of DT. In fact, I was one of them. My musical intake has expanded and I see technicality doesn't automatically mean art.
Technicality might not be the only thing that defines art, but that doesn't mean that Technicality isn't at all artistic. It's just another way of making art.
In fact, I've seen those videos of those guys that look like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons jamming on their guitars and doing insanely technical stuff. There's a reason they aren't signed. There's also a reason why bands that can't play a lick, but have such fortified writing ability that they improvise with have legacies that last two decades (my sig images).
The reason for that is because bands that make all 3 minute songs seem to be more appealing than bands that have 12 minute songs with everything having to be "overexaggerated". As for the bands that write short little catchy 3 minute songs, good for them. They have lots and lots of fans. But not everybody wants to hear that, so they listen to another band who could have any sound in the world. And Dream Theater has a sound that seems to be technical, and "overexaggerated". But do you know what? It's not like they care who decides to buy their albums or not. They just want to make music the way they want to make it. And they just so happen to want to make music that's technical, complicated and long. Is that really so bad?
Influential? Hardly. Many others aren't interested in putting out overdone, overtechnical, heartless music. Instead you have bands like Threshold that write solid music and embellish tastefully instead of writing shreds the gluing them together with some concept fans will hail them as geniuses for. That point in their careers is gone.
Well good for Threshold. Just because they have a way of doing things doesn't mean that everybody else has to abide by that same way of writing. People have confronted me about my band, and said to me things like "You're not really metal. Try being more like Trivium or something." The only reason I get offended by something like that is because people are discrediting my band, because I'm not following the hype. Some bands have one way of doing things, and others have their own. Just because the way Dream Theater does a different thing from almost every other metal band in existense doesn't make them any less good of a band.
You also have SX that is in the overtechnical realm, but they fortify it with solid songs and consistent themes and heaviness. I also never heard of SX going and blaming the fans for the misery in their lives, nor have they gone out and banned dozens upon dozens of fans on their message boards that didn't enjoy one of their albums.
Again, you make it seem like Technicality is something that automatically diminishes any credit that a band deserves. It's another form of art, just as any other kind of writing in music might be. I don't in any way like Punk Rock, but I still regard it as a form of art.
As for the band "blaming misery on the fans", that's nothing new. Kurt Cobain blamed his fans for his problems, because he didn't want to be popular, but everybody kept raving about it, and he didn't want to hear it. But writing one song about something that may get on their nerves, especially something like their fans
demanding them to sound a certain way (Never Enough), that doesn't mean that they're placing all the blame on their fans. That's just their way of saying "Stop telling me how to do my job." That song was directed at people like you, who are criticising them for wanting to write music a different way.
I even thought LTE was original until I heard who really did the original concept for the last song on LTE 1 that was supposedly a purely spontaneous jam.
I still don't own the LTE albums, so I don't now.
DT fans also act like they are in the band and take personal offense when someone constructively brings up criticism. This has been addressed on the DT board. The fans aren't in the band, nor do they share royalties. In fact, to the band, what they give you is "Never Enough"!
What's wrong with people being enthusiastic about a band? You don't need to automatically label a person as a horrible human being just because they're enthusiastic about their favorite band. Have you ever been to the Kamelot forum? EVERY SINGLE PERSON is a Kamelot fanboi/fangirl, and whenever somebody comes along, stating an opinion that's not "I masturbate to Kamelot every night", they get mauled by all the forum members, and the Mods even become Ban-Happy. Something like that is nothing new with bands, so there's absolutely no reason for you to discredit only ONE band for something like that. In the long run though, that still doesn't even affect the way a band writes their music.
In the end, it looks to me like you're ripping on Dream Theater, because they're different. And Meedleyx10 is right. You are a biased idiot.
Once again,
@ this argument.
