The video may be crap, but the new Sym-X is astounding!

[PoisonSeed]

You don't really need the helmet. You need a warhammer (you can construct one by yourself) and a strong wish to slay everything along the coasts of Europe.

 

[Ascension]

l'm thinking the only thing Malmsteen & Romeo slay is a hot dog.

 

[PoisonSeed]

Or ten.

 

[SyXified]

Not a valid point you perplexed individual. A mentally inferior being faces a difficulty in comprehending his inferiority. Thus, the being fails to recognise his actual state of existence which is, without doubt, inferior. As is the case with you, poor man.

No no no, a mentally inferior being who is unaware of his inferiority does not have a complex, which implies an attempt to compensate for a perceived shortcoming. For example, the 'simple' kid who cleans up at McDonalds and is perfectly content in doing so does not have an inferiority complex - though his mind may be inferior. Furthermore a perfectly competent person can have an inferiority complex if he perceives himself as inferior and tries to compensate for the believed inferiority - like a guitarist who is always saying he sucks and practices all day and punishes himself for missing a note as a result, even when everyone around him says he is amazing. So inferiority complexes are not solely for the inferior, and in the event they are, they imply comprehension of that inferiority. So no matter how cleverly you think you managed to phrase your glib little response above, you remain as misguided as you are wrong.

 

[SyXified]

Sorry, I'm just used to the mostly acerbic posts you make in that other forum.
Inflection is often lost on e-mails, and forum posts. And yes, I'm aware it works both ways....

If you'll note, I have about 1/10th the posts you do. My style is, generally speaking, to only post something if I have something to say I feel strongly about and am willing to defend. I'm sure that may come off as being constantly argumentative, and would likely appear less so if I padded the rant posts with a greater volume of simple/chatty posts as many people do. I just happen to not be one for casual conversation on music forums, I prefer to discuss the more challenging and philosophical aspects. I tried to post 2 casual posts recently - I made a joke to poison seed and he called me a 'poor individual' and I said I liked the PL bass tone and you called me bi-polar.

I disagree. I'm trying to keep our discussion on art away from "art as a business" I don't relate to the herd mentality where the more people like/buy something, the better it is(and I'm NOT saying that's what you are implying!). And you are correct, if we look at Sony BMG (or whatever company/label Simpson is on) financial reoprts, I'm sure they are doing better than IOMA in a business/profitability sense. It doesn't make anything "better" because more people like it. IMO, of course.

Well you aren't really disagreeing with me here, because I 100% agree with you that how 'good' music is does not necessarily have anything to do with album sales or numbers. I'm more so saying that if you want to argue that the quality of music is up to individual taste and a matter of opinion only, then it begins to resemble a system where any one person's opinion represents 1 'vote' (all people being equal in their individual opinions). Therefore if you have a set of 3 people and two say 'Album X is good' and one says 'Album X is bad' and all their opinions are equally valid, you would say the album has 1 point (2 good - 1 bad). That's how you end up in the numbers game and looking at albums sales when individual taste is the factor used to determine quality - individual matter of opinion quantified into aggregate terms. So it would actually fit better with your above argument, which states that # of individuals who like an album does not necessarily correlate to quality, if you agreed with my argument of objectivity, which does not hold individual opinion as a measure of quality, but that quality is a real - though difficult to comprehend - notion which is not made malleable by personal opinion.

I guess I believe that there are general rules when it comes to morals, but thats a whole seperate argument altogether. We should probably save that one for a rainy day on a different forum.....

Yeah, no, we shouldn't get into that debate given our characters - we'll miss out on real life. My only real purpose for bringing that up is because of the conceptual similarity of a situation where there seem to be very real rules, but no one really quite has a handle on them - just to be illustrative of my argument of how objective rules of musical quality can be understood as an ephemeral concept.

But who is going to get everyone in agreement as to what the rules, no matter how general, are? While even you and I might agree to those general rules, there may be one or a dozen who will disagree with us. That's why I'm saying that we'll NEVER see anything definitive that defines good/bad art or music.

Getting everyone into agreement would be utterly impossible. And yet we as humans still approach art with the notion that some works are 'better' than others - implying we all have some sense that there are standards by which to judge quality. The idea of 'infinity' is intangible - you can never count to infinity, you can never hold infinity in your hand - and yet we still understand the concept exists in a very real way, and operate on the understanding that it exists, even if we can only ever define it abstractly. So too can we understand the conceptual existence of 'good' and 'bad' in music, even if we cannot define them, and operate (as most people do) with that notion in mind. When a composer changes a note he thinks 'this version is better' and not just better to HIM, but better in a very real sense.

If 98% of individuals say the sky is blue and then the color blind 2% say it's gray does not make it so that the skies color is a matter of opinion - it means the sky is blue and 2% of people are wrong. Point being - you don't need everyone to agree to establish reality - you can even at times have the majority be wrong about reality (the world turned out to be round, and the sun was at the center). With something as complex as music, yes, it is highly unlikely we would ever get everyone to agree on what good/bad is. However, as passionate individuals about music I still think it is to our advantage to try to figure out the truth about what is good and what is bad for our own benefit (I would be truly missing out if I had stuck with my philosophy at the age of 13 that Metallica was the be all and end all of good music - and it was ultimately to my benefit when people challenged me on that notion.)

I have a problem with the desecration of religious symbols. NOTHING good ever comes out of that.

Forget the religious significance, the idea was just to use heaven and hell as figurative and easily understood concepts of morality (which you had mentioned) as far as good yields reward and bad yields punishment (which are archetypal ideas and don't need to pertain to religion in any way). I was using heaven and hell to simplify because, as you may have noticed, I can be verbose - trying to save a little time and space. If you prefer you can substitute Elysium and Hades (its hard to find someone who would get upset about takes on those these days). My point was that writing a bad song is not 'morally' wrong, nor is writing a good song 'morally' right - if you write a shit song, you just wrote a shit song.

I think this is where you and I have our disconnect. Without the qualifying factors, sort of like innocent until proven guilty, I can't call someone wrong, for what they like or dislike musically. I might say "That dude's got some weird tastes" or "That guys fucked in the head" (possibly a definition of "idiot" ) Lets not make the example so drastic. I say Rembrandt is a better artist than Monet. You disagree. Who is right? Who is wrong? I hypothetically (not literally!) ask how can one be "better" than the other?
Do we go by auction prices on the paintings? If there are no definitive factors, than we can't definitively call each other right or wrong
I'm really not trying to be a dick, I just am trying to explain my perspective on things, no matter how skewed you might declare them.

Yes, you are right, this is the heart of our debate. And to be honest for a LONG time I had this same attitude. I would have said that when you make an example extreme like 'stepping on cats' versus 'Beethoven's 9th' there is a truth to which is better, but when you get to the Rembrandt vs Monet debate it becomes opinion. And in many ways, this concept when stated this way, remains extremely appealing and natural. I ALSO know that when someone spits out the most extreme example they can think of in a debate it can be utterly infuriating and pretty much illicit a response of 'you're just being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole'. But, there actually is a very real purpose to extreme examples - because if you remember a theory can never be proven true, but it takes only ONE counterexample, no matter how acerbic, to prove it false.

My abandonment of the stated philosophy occurred when I realized there is an inherent conceptual flaw to it. When you take the extreme example, and allow for the idea that screeching cats = bad and say, Beethoven = good because of how much disparity there is between them, but then rebuke quality assignment between say Beethoven and Mozart because of the lack of disparity between them - you are committed to the idea that somewhere along the scale you have created you have to transition from 'I can say for certain thing X is better than thing Y' to 'there is no way to determine which is better between thing X and thing Y'. That means you have to place an arbitrary line somewhere that the example immediately to the left falls into the first category and the example immediately to the right falls into the second category. And if you start running through hypothetical examples of lessening extremity in disparity you'll easily see how this becomes a problem...

screaming cats vs Beethoven
a 2 year old banging on a piano vs Beethoven
An elementary school choir vs Beethoven
A high school choir vs Beethoven
The Beatles vs Beethoven
Symphony X vs Beethoven
Mozart vs Beethoven

How can you decide where to draw the line of transition where determining quality becomes impossible and just a matter of taste? Even if you tried to you would be then have to deal with coming up with examples even closer on either side, until you officially had to say something like 'I can definitely say Beethoven is better than Schubert, but Beethoven vs Mozart is purely a matter of opinion'. This problem is what led me to think that one has to either say EVERYTHING is a matter of opinion, or NOTHING is a matter of opinion - the only two options that save you from this problem of drawing a transition line. And since I've already mentioned my problems with the subjective EVERYTHING argument at length, I won't get into that again.

When I say not to be satisfied 100%, that is based on ones own limits/goals they set for themselves, NOT comparing them to everything else out there.
Because of the lack of quantifying, the person who shits on my song I wouldn't consider them "wrong", in a black/white sense. I think this where we aren't seeing eye to eye. I'm perceiving that your right/wrong good/bad is black & white, and not susceptible to any "wiggle room". Now, in this follow up post, you have clarified that may not be the case, and that is what we are striving towards? Please correct that if I'm wrong. IMO, I don't think you or I will ever be able to definitively agree or prove what is good or bad. and that's pretty much what I've been trying to say since the beginning.

I'm not sure I'm fully grasping your concept of wiggle room on this one. I'll try to clarify my stance - if I say a song is amazing and someone else says it sucks, I think yes in black and white terms, one person is right and one person is wrong - it is just extremely hard to know who is right and who is wrong.

For example, if I hit middle C and C up an octave and ask which is higher in pitch, it would be pretty self explanatory when the person responded whether he is right or wrong. If, on the other hand, I hit a frequency of 440Hz and then a frequency of 442Hz, it would be far more difficult to determine who was right and who was wrong (assuming we are judging aurally of course). In this example we are lucky enough to be able to hold up a meter which will tell us the 'facts' of which pitch is higher. Music is even more difficult because we don't even have a means of measuring the facts - but that doesn't necessarily mean that the facts do not exist. At the moment there is a huge debate in Physics about string theory, and while there is plenty of theorizing and speculation, there are no facts yet and EVERYONE disagrees. But... there ARE facts - even so if we never manage to determine them, but if we were to, we would find out who was right and who was wrong. Not knowing the facts, however, does not prevent one from theorizing and speculating and moving in the right direction. Infinity may be conceptual but we know how to approach it. Writing good music is like trying to get to infinity (perfection in this case) without knowing which direction it lies in. Yet despite our huge lack of understanding, we still should try to figure out which way it is, and try to get there, even if we know actually getting there is impossible.

sorry to those who read through all this and think we're both fucked in the head!

I would hope they've figured out how to recognize our page long, quote filled yammering and just scrolled on by. Yeesh, alright, enough conceptual hoey for one night.

 

[J-Dubya 777]

If you'll note, I have about 1/10th the posts you do. My style is, generally speaking, to only post something if I have something to say I feel strongly about and am willing to defend. I'm sure that may come off as being constantly argumentative, and would likely appear less so if I padded the rant posts with a greater volume of simple/chatty posts as many people do. I just happen to not be one for casual conversation on music forums, I prefer to discuss the more challenging and philosophical aspects. I tried to post 2 casual posts recently - I made a joke to poison seed and he called me a 'poor individual' and I said I liked the PL bass tone and you called me bi-polar.

I really don't even look at post counts for anything. While I'm not as chatty as some of the youguns at that other place, I have been around pretty much since Deron built this place. I also believe substance over quantity. I have made a bunch of friends off of these forums, so my chatty nature is just part of who I am. C'mon, at least I had an emoticon in that statement... I found it interesting/funny that you had ANYTHING positive to say about PL, after giving it a good thrashing here.

Well you aren't really disagreeing with me here, because I 100% agree with you that how 'good' music is does not necessarily have anything to do with album sales or numbers. I'm more so saying that if you want to argue that the quality of music is up to individual taste and a matter of opinion only, then it begins to resemble a system where any one person's opinion represents 1 'vote' (all people being equal in their individual opinions). Therefore if you have a set of 3 people and two say 'Album X is good' and one says 'Album X is bad' and all their opinions are equally valid, you would say the album has 1 point (2 good - 1 bad). That's how you end up in the numbers game and looking at albums sales when individual taste is the factor used to determine quality - individual matter of opinion quantified into aggregate terms. So it would actually fit better with your above argument, which states that # of individuals who like an album does not necessarily correlate to quality, if you agreed with my argument of objectivity, which does not hold individual opinion as a measure of quality, but that quality is a real - though difficult to comprehend - notion which is not made malleable by personal opinion.

Well, we're on the same page MOSTLY here.

Yeah, no, we shouldn't get into that debate given our characters - we'll miss out on real life. My only real purpose for bringing that up is because of the conceptual similarity of a situation where there seem to be very real rules, but no one really quite has a handle on them - just to be illustrative of my argument of how objective rules of musical quality can be understood as an ephemeral concept.

I understand why you brought them up, I just felt that we didn't need to go off on a morals tangent. :Smokedev:

Getting everyone into agreement would be utterly impossible....

...If 98% of individuals say the sky is blue and then the color blind 2% say it's gray does not make it so that the skies color is a matter of opinion - it means the sky is blue and 2% of people are wrong.

Correct, but that is at least a measurable quality....

Point being - you don't need everyone to agree to establish reality - you can even at times have the majority be wrong about reality (the world turned out to be round, and the sun was at the center). With something as complex as music, yes, it is highly unlikely we would ever get everyone to agree on what good/bad is. However, as passionate individuals about music I still think it is to our advantage to try to figure out the truth about what is good and what is bad for our own benefit (I would be truly missing out if I had stuck with my philosophy at the age of 13 that Metallica was the be all and end all of good music - and it was ultimately to my benefit when people challenged me on that notion.)

I will NEVER argue that individuals shouldn't set their own standards, obviously, those standards are going to different by varying degrees.
I have been personally seeking out "new" music since I was very young. I never really had a favorite genre or band I liked, I still don't. Back when the first couple of Van Halen albums came out (I was 14-15), I was already onto stuff like Frank Zappa, Deep Purple, AC/DC, Zepplin, Muddy Waters, BB King, etc etc. and well aware of the vastness of the musical landscape. I guess I've been cultivating my own personal bad/good standards for quite a few years. This by no means, makes my standards any better (or worse) than yours. Maybe I'm just not into needing to have a black/white good/bad definition, I'm pretty happy with my own standards. That's cool, keep on with your search, and let me know what you find along the way, seriously!

Forget the religious significance, the idea was just to use heaven and hell as figurative and easily understood concepts of morality (which you had mentioned) as far as good yields reward and bad yields punishment (which are archetypal ideas and don't need to pertain to religion in any way). I was using heaven and hell to simplify because, as you may have noticed, I can be verbose - trying to save a little time and space. If you prefer you can substitute Elysium and Hades (its hard to find someone who would get upset about takes on those these days). My point was that writing a bad song is not 'morally' wrong, nor is writing a good song 'morally' right - if you write a shit song, you just wrote a shit song.

Agreed, but your "shit" may be my "gold"

Yes, you are right, this is the heart of our debate. And to be honest for a LONG time I had this same attitude. I would have said that when you make an example extreme like 'stepping on cats' versus 'Beethoven's 9th' there is a truth to which is better, but when you get to the Rembrandt vs Monet debate it becomes opinion. And in many ways, this concept when stated this way, remains extremely appealing and natural. I ALSO know that when someone spits out the most extreme example they can think of in a debate it can be utterly infuriating and pretty much illicit a response of 'you're just being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole'. But, there actually is a very real purpose to extreme examples - because if you remember a theory can never be proven true, but it takes only ONE counterexample, no matter how acerbic, to prove it false.

Correct, the advancing towards Rembrandt vs Monet, where it becomes less and less tangible, is what I'm calling wiggle room.

My abandonment of the stated philosophy occurred when I realized there is an inherent conceptual flaw to it. When you take the extreme example, and allow for the idea that screeching cats = bad and say, Beethoven = good because of how much disparity there is between them, but then rebuke quality assignment between say Beethoven and Mozart because of the lack of disparity between them - you are committed to the idea that somewhere along the scale you have created you have to transition from 'I can say for certain thing X is better than thing Y' to 'there is no way to determine which is better between thing X and thing Y'. That means you have to place an arbitrary line somewhere that the example immediately to the left falls into the first category and the example immediately to the right falls into the second category. And if you start running through hypothetical examples of lessening extremity in disparity you'll easily see how this becomes a problem...

screaming cats vs Beethoven
a 2 year old banging on a piano vs Beethoven
An elementary school choir vs Beethoven
A high school choir vs Beethoven
The Beatles vs Beethoven
Symphony X vs Beethoven
Mozart vs Beethoven

How can you decide where to draw the line of transition where determining quality becomes impossible and just a matter of taste? Even if you tried to you would be then have to deal with coming up with examples even closer on either side, until you officially had to say something like 'I can definitely say Beethoven is better than Schubert, but Beethoven vs Mozart is purely a matter of opinion'. This problem is what led me to think that one has to either say EVERYTHING is a matter of opinion, or NOTHING is a matter of opinion - the only two options that save you from this problem of drawing a transition line. And since I've already mentioned my problems with the subjective EVERYTHING argument at length, I won't get into that again.

Exactly, you can't decide where to draw the line, and I don't care for the all/nothing option either.

I would hope they've figured out how to recognize our page long, quote filled yammering and just scrolled on by. Yeesh, alright, enough conceptual hoey for one night.

Yep, one more FZ dvd and I'm off to bed.. :zombie:

 

[LunaTEKKE]

Just got my order last week from Amazon. I haven’t really “connected” with this CD the way I have with the previous releases from SymX – with the exception of the title track. BRILLIANT song -- with a very moving performance from Russell Allen. I haven't repeatedly used my “replay” button this much since I first heard “Sin” from Circus Maximus.

I think that part of the issue is that I’m a huge Michael Pinnella fan and would have loved to hear the keyboards featured more prominently on the rest of the CD. Or maybe this is one of those releases that will take a few more listens before I really “get it.”

PL is definitely one of my favorite releases so far this year, but for me it doesn’t outshine the last few releases from SymX.