Counter-Currents
1,131 words 
I think the decline of guitar music, an all-conquering cultural force in the latter half of the 20th century, has been a tragedy and not just because what has come to replace it is qualitatively inferior. I think it’s bad because starting a band used to be a pro-social thing that white kids could do together. I think it was Dave Mustaine who once said that playing in a band together was as close as four guys could get without having sex. Even if your band doesn’t “make it” (and in all probability, it won’t), you have an adventure seeing how far you can take it and come away with a few interesting stories. Maybe you’ll open for a band that goes on to become famous.
There are certain organizational and social skills that one has to learn being in a band. Sometimes conflict resolution skills are needed. Once your band is ready to play live, you have to learn how to deal club owners, how to advertise your band, how to build an audience. For my old band’s CD release show, I wanted to get an established band on the show. I had to go through their agent, do these contracts, and get them a place to stay. None of my musical ventures ever went anywhere but I learned a lot throughout the process. There are a lot worse ways for white kids to spend their teens and 20s than playing in a band.
Playing in a band was also a way for someone to raise their social standing. Not a jock or pretty boy? Get a guitar, join a band, and now you’re cool. Had they lived in the 1990s, a lot of today’s incels could have resolved their problems by becoming musicians. My advice to all incels is to buy a guitar and learn to play it or get a couple turntables and learn to DJ. In short, learn to do something cool.
One of the reasons for the decline of guitar bands is that advances in home recording technology has made it easier and perhaps more attractive to be a one-man-band. Working with other musicians can be a hassle. You have to work around everyone’s schedule. Disagreements will flare up in the band over musical direction and who is putting in more work than whom. Internal factions will form. There will be Yoko Ono girlfriends. Additionally, guitar players tend to outnumber drummers by about 20-to-1. Because they are in high demand, quality drummers only wanna play with bands who are already established so finding a good drummer when you are starting out is a pain in the ass. Thanks to advances in music technology, it’s a lot easier for a guitar player to learn how to program a drum machine than it is to find a flesh and blood drummer.
I completely understand the impulse of someone who is musically creative and just wants to get their songs out saying, “Screw getting a band. I’ll program the drums, I’ll buy a bass, and just do everything.” On top of this, I’ve known some autistic prodigies who were otherworldly talented but didn’t work well with others and I’m glad technology exists which allows people like that to share their gifts with the world. But overall, I think this is a bad thing.
First, people who decide to go the one-man-band route are missing out on having a gang of bros around to share the experience with. Second, bands tend to make more interesting music than solo acts for a few reasons. One is that the truly iconic bands were iconic due to the chemistry of two or more distinct musical personalities within the group: Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards, Waters & Gilmore, Morrissey & Marr, etc. In the case of bands like Led Zeppelin or The Eagles, every member had a distinct musical style. Being in a band, musicians have people around them not only to bounce ideas off of but also filter out their bad ideas. This is why when someone in a band goes solo, their songs start sounding like their previous band’s b-sides. There is no longer anyone around them to tell them “no.”
It’s been said that the essence of rock and roll is big city life as viewed from a suburban perspective. The suburbanite looks at the big city as a wonderland of sex, glamor, mystery, and danger, a magical place where the women are easy and there’s always a party going on somewhere. This is what rock and roll is about.
However, people who are actually from the big city tend not to see their home that way. They are more likely to notice the homeless junkies, obscene commercialism, and broken dreams; things that people like Lou Reed (who was actually from New York) sang about.
The decline of guitar bands presents a huge shift of cultural power from the suburbs back to the city.
Rock and roll was the suburbs’ one great contribution to world culture. Have you ever noticed that for all its size, New York City has not produced very many iconic rock bands? This is largely due to the fact that rehearsal space is harder to come by in the big city. Rock and roll is very loud. You can’t have band practice in your apartment because the neighbors would complain so you’d have to rent a rehearsal space. However, in the suburbs, everyone has either a garage, a basement, or a spare bedroom and enough space from the next house over that you can have a live band playing without the cops getting called. On the other end of the spectrum, rural types had practice space but were too far away from any music scene to get heard by anyone.
As such, rock and roll was always dominated by suburbanites. They had rehearsal space but were still close enough to the clubs that they had somewhere to play. Usually, when you hear that a band is from such-and-such city, they are either the suburbs of that city or started out in the suburbs and relocated to the city. New York City is famous for not having suburbs in the traditional sense. Manhattan is an island and there is water where the suburbs should be. This explains New York City’s lacklustre rock and roll legacy. A lot of bands that you hear of being from New York are actually from Long Island which is the closest thing New York has to suburbs but is still culturally distinct.
Feels bad man. As rock and roll goes into decline and the need for rehearsal space decreases, filthy urbanites with their Pro Tools have been ripping the culture away from its rightful owners: white middle class suburbanites who are the only real Americans.
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53 comments
Rick Beato has some similar observations.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h_DjmtR0Xls
There are incredible rock bands coming out of Japan especially, making the best rock thsi 73 yr old rocker has ever heard and I have seen EVERYONE, heck, Zep in ’77 for $5!
Band Maid is probably the creme de la creme, but so many other bands and they are generally superb live, no tricks just solid playing.
BAND-MAID / from now on (Official Music Video)
The Japanese can always be counted on to deliver a crazier more dangerous version of a cultural trend. The USA had the Manson Family, Japan had Les Rallizes Denudes, a member of which hijacked a plane. The west had punk and mental. Japan’s Hanatarash drove a bulldozer/excavator through the club wreaking havoc… worst house party band ever.
Interesting. Ya know, I’ve heard that if you knew how many bands don’t actually play on their albums, it would break your heart.
I once knew a guy who was a professional session guitar player and I asked him about it. He said “You have no idea”. As part of the session musician code, this guy could not tell me whose records he had played on because if it got out that he was telling people, producers would stop giving him work.
Apparently, another dirty industry secret is that there is no such thing as a “live album”. Almost every “live album” contains at least some studio overdubs. This has been revealed when bootleg audience recordings of the same show surface and there are all these differences with the official “live album”.
They will punch in and re-record mistakes. Sometimes the album is live except for the vocals which are re-recorded in the studio. Sometimes they re-recorded the guitar solos. Supposedly every live albums has some kind of studio airbrushing.
There’s a documentary about a group of studio musicians called The Wrecking Crew. It reveals some of the bands that they have done the studio work for. I remember a music critic in the movie being shocked when he found out that his top ten favorite drummers were all the same guy.
Travis,
It’s not just session work but also in live contexts too – the self-same point was made in this YT video:
Ten things non musicians get wrong about music | RANKED
As the algo-blessed Rick Beato was mentioned by Spencer I must highly recommend Andy Edwards’ channel to your attention which reaches several notches higher on the Scoville scale.
A former drummer for Robert Plant who turned educator he has talked at depth about the stagnation and collapse of the whole music industry. In it’s wake he’s now a dedicated YTer who has transcended the genre of 50-something men talking about music in front of their vinyl collection.
He skillfully walks the tightrope between shameless mercenary algorithm-baiting and ruminating on topics of real depth from the perspective of a professional musician. From deliberately contentious Top 10 lists that grapple with the subjective/objective boundary, to ranking the best crisps and biscuits, defining an English musical aesthetic, to Gurdjieff’s influence in modern music, no stone is unturned in his ruthless quest for subs growth.
And, while I am not gonna say he is a Red-Pilled Realist, at the same time he’s occasionally not in the slightest bit shy of discussing race and identity politics.
A couple of videos of note are:
Why I don’t think Jazz is Black Music
For those who HATE Frank ZAPPA | Moon Unit, Misogyny and Modernism
Was this is a guy from L.A.? – the name Jay Graysun comes to my mind. But seriously, it may well be that a lot of studio musicians of the Steely Dan era were used in 90s alternative rock.
I love that guy. He’s a great teacher. Very likeable, enthusiastic and uncynical.
Great article, except for the last paragraph. White middle class suburbanites are definitely not the only real Americans.
I used to be in a few bands, and it’s true that playing music is one of the most fun things you can do. The lack of strong local music scenes is a big hurdle to even becoming a bar band today, but just jamming with a group of friends is still worth it.
“ I think it was Dave Mustaine who once said that playing in a band together was as close as four guys could get without having sex”
Wellll Dave, God bless him, is a notorious tyrant over his bands, in the Scots-Irish Van Morrison mould.
“Drug abuse for me and not for thee” used to be his style.
Good article though Trav. It’s true that rock is dead… but perhaps it always has been. Love you bro
Fionn McCool,
I’ve also heard that about Dave Mustaine, the notorious tyrant. I’d like to think it’s because he got kicked out of Metallica for drinking but no, it’s who he is. Or was. He has mellowed a bit. He was the focus of either the Humane Society or ASPCA where he spoke about how much his little dog means to him. I thought it was pretty nice.
There’s no doubt that the band he created, Megadeth, is one of metal’s top bands. I am not a big fan, there’s a few songs I like. I do like his usual lead guitar player, a Brazilian named Kiko Loureio. Kiko is currently in hiatus from Megadeth due to some family issies. Kiko came through town years ago dor a guitar clinic. He is sponsored by Ibanez (excellent guitars, I have one of their Vai JEM signatures). I asked how he gets such a nice vibrato and he took half and hour to answer.
I bring him up as his YouTube channel is quite entertaining. Being the lead guitar player for Megadeth should turn someone into an egomaniac but Kiko is a nice guy. I am amazed at how much he films and shares about what goes on behind the scenes of a big national tour. He shows almost everything and if you’ve ever wanted to see how a major rock show happens, Kilo shows it. Here’s one example of him arriving in Austin, Texas for the first night of a tour that was three years ago. He goes through his routines, shows the concert venue, the band’s warm up and catering rooms, the guitar tech station back stage, and lots of other minutiae. I found this and his other backstage videos very interesting
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrLFT0qw6k
This is what I should’ve been doing all along. I could at least be playing gigs in the back of a smoky bar. Instead I followed society’s rules and became Dilbert. Damn…
To be fair Rainbow, Dilbert turned out to be very racist, so you’ve got that going for you.
Another contributing factor to the decline of guitar rock is the death of the guitar hero.
It used to be that the lead guitar player was almost as big of a star as the lead singer. Sometimes the guitar player was the star of the band. Eddie Van Halen was a bigger star David Lee Roth and Jimmy Page is infinitely more iconic than Robert Plant.
However, the advent of shred guitar in the 1980s started an arms race of technical virtuosity so that by the end of the decade, it got to where your band had to have a guitar hero that could shred like Steve Vai. I’ve known guys who could play like Steve Vai and it takes an ungodly amount of practice.
On the other hand, a novice can pick up a guitar and be playing Nirvana songs by the end of the day. So naturally, there was a rebellion against guitar heroes with their flashy solos in the 1990s and guitar players gradually became more anonymous. In a way, this made guitar music more populist in that it was easier for just anyone to pick up a guitar and join in the fun but by becoming more singer-centric, it undermined the concept of a band.
I feel bad for all the dudes who spent thousands of hours learning how to play shred guitar only for it to go out of style overnight.
A lot of good points touched on here Trav. I have a lot to say about them all but it’d take too long. I believe a deep dive from our point of view into this issue would be interesting. Such as a longform podcast.
I’ll just say thank you for bringing attention to these lesser discussed, tangential topics. The music issue is ethnic demographic related for sure but it’s much more besides.
Put it this way, I have a feeling that if we somehow win and get our way nationwide, good guitar rock will make a comeback. I feel this quite strongly. Even before I was redpilled I wanted this to happen and had good gut instincts on this topic. I’ve never liked rap, for example. I’ve just always got a bad vibe off the popular music since 2008-ish
Yeah well also, Steve Vai is the type of guitar god who writes music that sucks.
There’s a reason that ‘musician’ and ‘composer’ have historically been 2 different roles.
I’ve one more thing to say.
“New York City’s lacklustre rock and roll legacy”
Seriously man? Never heard of The Ramones?
Seriously? The Ramones?
Great guitar band.
There’s a difference between playing guitar and just making noise with the guitar, and Ramones were the latter.
All I have to say to this snobbery is a great big Gen X “whatever.”
The Ramones wrote great pop songs.
Ramones are from Queens which is the middle class part of New York and has some areas which are suburb-like. It’s where Archie Bunker lived.
In terms of record sales, the two biggest bands to come out of New York were probably Kiss and Blondie. The most iconic New York bands tend to be cult bands like The Ramones, Talking Heads, The Strokes, Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Anthrax.
But for city its size (and certainly compared to Los Angeles or London), you’d expect it to have produced a lot more. Arguable San Francisco, Seattle, and definitely Manchester have stronger rock legacies than New York.
My contention is that rock music is loud and rehearsal space is hard to find in New York. You could practice rap in your apartment bedroom because you can control the volume of the music but a rock band with a live drummer will draw noise complaints.
What a lot of people do now is write with a drum machine because you can control the volume of your drum machine. Then they maybe get a drummer when they are ready to record or tour. This reduces that need for rehearsal space to jam out ideas with a live drummer.
OK but I think you’re moving the goalpoasts to ‘NYC=Manhattan’
And if so I would mention Manhattan-bred groups like Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, DNA, or James Chance and The Contortions.
I have to say this. Greta Van Fleet is an amazing band, and they’ve only been around for about the last decade.
If you’ve ever heard them, you’ll understand why I compare Josh Kiszka’s vocals to not only Robert Plant, but also Geddy Lee…I know, I know, (((Geddy Lee))) but that’s beside the point. Rush was a kickass band and nobody compares to Zeppelin. Fuse the two and you get Greta Van Fleet.
It’s really sad though. You go on their YouTube videos and all the comments are from 50+ year olds. “These guys are great it takes me back to my youth” comments. It’s very sad that such amazing music must be pigeon-holed into a retro genre, when it is so new and original on its own merit. It’s because they are actually playing real instruments and belting out vocals without auto tune. Nobody under the age of 35 has any appreciation for real music.
The flip side is that thanks to advances in home recording technology, there is more good music out there now than there ever has been but you have to put more effort into finding it.
Whoever your favorite band is, there are probably 30 unsigned bands that sound just like them and are nearly as good. You just have to spend some time looking through message boards and Facebook groups dedicated to your niche genre, going through YouTube playlists, and the like to find it. You’re not going to hear good music on the radio but it is still being made.
The bad thing about Greta Van Fleet is how blatantly they rip off Led Zeppelin. They don’t even try to seem a little different. Guys their age don’t even know how to not sound like you’re copying retro shit because they didn’t grow up in an environment where Rock mattered.
Also, the fact that they dress like they went to a vintage clothing store and said make us look like a Rock group from 1974 doesn’t help them either.
Segovia called the electric guitar “an abomination”.
My story is a bit different. Rather than play 6-string electric guitar, I gravitated towards the 4-string electric bass. Somehow, a very cheap hollow-body electric bass got into our church/junior high school group of boys and passed from hand to hand. When my turn at ownership came, I paid $20 for it. This was in the suburbs north of Chicago, mid 1970s.
My best friend and I lived and breathed the band Rush. So it was a fantastic day when Dad agreed to drive me to a music store on the south side of Chicago. They were selling the same bass guitar that Rush’s Geddy Lee played: a Rickenbacker 4001 Stereo Bass. Somehow, I had earned the required $475 for a 1978 model.
Living in the suburbs allowed, as the author says, us the basements wherein to practice. It was interesting to see how the knowledge of who was playing what instrument would disseminate amongst the junior and then high schools. The often-times easygoing camaraderie between young boys meant that once perfect strangers would approach each other to gauge one’s interest in jamming as if it were two close friends talking.
When I said my story was different, the difference was in playing the bass. Nobody played the bass. Every boy wanted the limelight (Rush pun intended) of playing electric guitar. Or the drums. Not keyboards and not bass. The upside was that at one point, I was jamming with three different groups.
One day, a guitarist in my high school class asked if I wanted to play with his group. Stunned, I replied yes. The other three guys in the band were the jocks of the high school, the then-called “sportos.” They were also one grade up which really cemented their cool factor.
But these guys were serious when it came to their band. They had a somewhat working PA sound system, stage lights, and had long established their spot as the high school’s #1 band for graduation parties. If you wanted the best band and therefore the best party, you called these guys.
Basement practice sessions were all business with these guys. There was no internet, no online guitar lessons of tabulature. You learned songs one of four ways: 1. playing the vinyl record over and over, lifting and replacing the needle to the almost exact point you wanted to learn 2. Every band member would buy a record and one of us would record the one song from each record onto cassette tape. Dub that cassette into four more and distribute. 3. Learn from each other. Our singer taught me the opening bass riff from The Doobie Brother’s Long Train Runnin’. 4. Figure stuff out on your own. This was very difficult when it came to learning Rush songs. Their song Limelight has several time signature changes. And a lot of notes played very quickly.
But we learned the songs and I must say, for a bunch of high schoolers, we sounded darn good. We started to rent a proper sound system that included a cassette tape deck. I managed to record two of our sets at two graduation parties. That 45-year-old Maxell 90 minute cassette tape sounds great and was worth every penny.
As author Travis LeBlanc said, the whole band experience was a pro-social experience. It brought me out of a somewhay shy-kid shell. It put me in a spot of four other guys relying on me to fill a very particular role. It put me in many a situation where it was sink or swim with a big spotlight trained on you for a solo. We were a team and executing the songs as good as we could was the goal, not the slightly elevated status of a budding high school rock star.
Each of us would eventually go off to college. After our freshmen year we’d come home over the summer, regroup, play a few graduation shows or a town’s Fourth of July show, and compare college notes. It didn’t last and with no social media, there was only phone calls and written letters to keep in touch. All of the guys have gone on to some very successful careers and though none have been in music, for a few years in the late 1970s, we were pretty good.
I love the shredders, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and John Petrucci. They are all virtuosos who are also good people. Petrucci might just be the world’s best guitar player, in my opinion, although Michael Romeo from Symphony X plays incredibly well. I would say my favorite is Mark Tremonti. He started Creed until they imploded. He then worked very hard on his playing and formed the band Alter Bridge. Just like a good stock portfolio, he has diversified into his third band called Tremonti. Three bands, three times the Tremonti. He is one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet and bucks the saying that you should never meet your heroes.
I’ll close by saying that this article does a great service in the cause of the white race. We are constantly being told by foreign invaders that despite the fact that they left/fled their native countries, they broadcast their “culture” at every turn. Fly the Mexican flag from your beat-up truck, cook your Filipino jib jab casserole, play the boom-boom music from God knows what country. Why? Because they say whites have no culture, no food, no music, nothing. Well, having these bands work together and then entertain our fellows is all part of a massive culture with many different aspects. I loved my basement band experience. So did a lot of other white kids.
Chicago Xer here (class of 1987)-Thanks for the post. I recognize and identify with all of it. Cheers.
Every generation holds special the music they listened to up to age 40, then life’s responsibilities catch up, you can’t be as hip as your youth and new music is more grating. In the 50s, rockabilly was irritating to the swing generation. In the 60s garage rock and the Stones were an annoyance to old people. Led Zep in the 70s was too loud, then came punk, metal, alternative, the noisy underground and so on.
I dissent. Guitar rock is not dead or dying, but it is out of the mainstream. Sort of like white guys in general… out of favor but not going away, in the woodshed honing the message. It’s a good thing to have modern bands playing out of love rather than a ‘job’ where they have to constantly appease the tastes of radio stations, censors, record execs, producers and so on.
We are tuning in to this website and similar underground entities whose perspectives won’t grace The Guardian or NYT. We have to expect to do the same with music. Its easier now than ever to find new stuff with youtube or streaming services. Think of what your parents had to go through combing through record bins or zines looking for something that wasn’t played on the radio.
Myself, I don’t really care for guitar virtuosos, better reserved for classical music and jazz. Rock has its niche for immediacy or sounding dangerous. Maybe there are new fans wanting to hear
Steve Gunn (USA) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqwx0r8n3tU
Shame (UK) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULLsuL0y-Fk
Jesus Lizard (USA) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P2LmeEQ8hs
Fontaines DC (Ireland) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abxGaMCDhmU
Goat Girl (UK) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi2G0t4oqWA
RE: “Rock/guitar rock is not dead…”
fyi
In the early 90s, a concerted effort was made to kill off all strong 1980s White rock culture, & replace it everywhere possible w/ gangster rap. Clubs, radio stations, etc. were pressured to only promote either *depressing* emo White rock, or black gangster rap. It was part of the agenda to demote & de-masculinize White rock musicians who had tons of sex appeal, & at the same time, elevate black masculine rappers, in order to try to convince White teen-aged girls to consider socially mixing with black thugs. (Also, around this same time, after the Rodney King riots in L.A., TV producers coast-to-coast immediately cancelled all the “nice black” crossover TV shows (i.e. Fresh Prince, Cosby Show) & replaced them with thuggy black shows.
The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation https://iforcolor.org/the-secret-meeting-that-changed-rap-music-and-destroyed-a-generation/
Those conspiracy theories have been around for a long time. It’s always some version of White boogeymen forcing Blacks to commit crimes. Also, I didn’t see any mention of the anti-White stuff you mentioned.
“Also, I didn’t see any mention of the anti-White stuff you mentioned.”
I didn’t offer a list of published references for the music industry’s White rock for grunge/emo rock switcheroo, + the heavy Jewish promotion gangster rap. This was described in great detail, by a (now banned) pro-White, Southern bitchuter named Billy Jenkins who ran,”Forbidden Truths” bc channel.
I actually took the time to research exact dates for what he described was happening — ban formations, disolutions, sponsored & promoted concert tours, MTV coverage of emo & thug rap, etc. And everything he described did check out. (I included the gangster rap-to-prison pipeline anon letter in my comment just for context of what else may also have been occurring during that same time period.)
If you happened to be playing rock gigs during this time period, do you recall difficulty in getting bookings, or only being allowed to play warm up for depressing, emo goth headliners or black rappers?
To begin with, Emo and Grunge didn’t happen at the same time. Grunge was early 90s and Emo was mid 00s.
As for Goth, the fashion was slightly popular in the late 90s — early 00s, but the music was never popular. The closest thing to a big Goth-like band was Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson. I was in high school at the time and didn’t know any Goths. It was seen as a loser thing by everyone.
There were plenty of rock bands forming in the 90s — although most weren’t any good — and there were plenty of rock fans among 90s teens. Rock was still everywhere in pop culture. However, the so called Nu-Metal bands ended up blurring the lines between Rap and Rock.
There’s plenty of evidence that the media (esp. commercials and movies/TV) force diversity into who gets hired. But pop/rock music has been less affected. There are plenty of bands with a black bass player or drummer, but if anything they are less likely to be successful. And they don’t seem to be especially popular with black audiences anyhow.
I’m skeptical there was some mass conspiracy to change music to gangster rap. Old people from every generation claim new music is degenerate… even said about swing music from the 30s.
“demasculinize rock musicians with tons of sex appeal”… Are you trying to suggest that all those 90s grunge bands in their blue collar thrift store fashion were less masculine than than all those silly 80s hair metal bands (Poison, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake)? When the NY Dolls crossdressed in a trashy aesthetic it was for kicks. Those sexy 80s bands look like they spent hours in front of a mirror with a makeup consultant with no hint of irony. The 80s wasn’t 24/7 Motorhead and the fickle tastes of the public were going to tire of it, as they did with 2nd rate grunge acts like Bush, Creed, etc. and scads of later lame emo acts. But face it, your band sucked and so did mine. Trump is going to have a tax deduction for not being in a band so there’s that for a silver lining.
“I’m skeptical there was some mass conspiracy to change music to gangster rap.”
There is, or was rather. Morrissey bravely called it out in 1986, an interview with Melody Maker.
Morrissey: “To get on to Top of the Pops these days, one has to be, by law, black. I think something political has occurred…and there has been a hefty pushing of all these black artists and all this disco nonsense into the Top 40.”
Interviewer: “You seem to be saying that you believe there is some sort of black pop conspiracy being organised to keep white indie groups down.”
Morrissey: “Yes. I really do. The Smiths have had at least 10 consecutive chart hits and we can’t get on Radio 1’s A list. Is that not a conspiracy? The last LP ended up at Number 2 and we were still told by radio that nobody wants to listen to The Smiths in the daytime. Is that not a conspiracy? I do get the scent of conspiracy.”
“Morrissey: “To get on to Top of the Pops these days, one has to be, by law, black. I think something political has occurred…and there has been a hefty pushing of all these black artists and all this disco nonsense into the Top 40.”Interviewer: “You seem to be saying that you believe there is some sort of black pop conspiracy being organised to keep white indie groups down.”
Angelo, –This is so true. I always liked his candor & stubbornness, but, unfortunately, his music was too melancholy for my taste. I gave him money anyway. And of note, Morrissey was the ONLY outspoken rocker against the clot shot.
As a teen, when I would watch old video footage of classic rock musicians performing in concert, such as Eric Clapton, I’d notice all these male rock stars had black female back up singers. It made me start to wonder: Do you *have* to be black to be a back-up singer to a White rock superstar? It sure seemed like it! Then, I looked back at some Janis Joplin concert footage. Sure enough, when she belted out, “Piece of my heart”, she had *black* male back up singers. ?! Interestingly, in her Texas senior high school yearbook, her classmates voted her not the best singer, but….the ugliest girl in the class. And, though she was fat & wore glasses, I think they did this, because of her notorious *race-mixing* party girl ways.
In the 80s, we had some solid White rock push back to the gay club, & black glorification/race-mixey disco that was flooding the airwaves.
“There’s no accounting for taste” as they say, and so I’ll respectfully disagree about what rock and pop is moody or happy (even the Beatles and Kinks could be melancholy and Jerry Lee Lewis was a rocking sociopath). Top of the Pops is a TV show, not a direct arm of the record industry, and I agree TV/video/concert is much more about the optics then a recording studio with no cameras. In spite of Morrissey’s complaints, The Smiths continue to top many lists as Best British Band ever (I dissent), with The Queen Is Dead #1 album on the notoriously trendy NME list. I respect Morrissey’s cojones in dissenting from the leftist media. He’s bi, gay, queer or whatever, live and let live as long as the trans stay away from school education and pediatrician conferences. Morrissey and peers in the arts community are welcome to contribute as the left has more than enough artists.
Morrissey is a self-absorbed gay man. He says controversial things for attention.
Morrissey is the supreme nationalist poet of our time and has been for decades.
“demasculinize rock musicians with tons of sex appeal”… Are you trying to suggest that all those 90s grunge bands in their blue collar thrift store fashion were less masculine than than all those silly 80s hair metal bands (Poison, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake)?”
YES, I am. By being so incredibly moody, as opposed to upbeat, the grunge bands managed to pull-off being *even less* masculine than the pancake makeup wearing ’80s rockers you mentioned.
In the 80s, my girlfriends and I (from WDC metro area) would not attend arena rock concerts with musicians who were dolled up like transvestites. We did not want to pay to see that. We supported Metallica & Guns & Roses, and from across the pond, Def Leppard, & Scorpions. And during the Boy George era, I felt a personal responsibility to support my *masculine* neighborhood punk rock musicians. Local Dave Grohl played drums w/ DC’s Scream. Sadly, they’re ALL Anti-White, communist sell-outs now.
I don’t mean to sound like a groupie. We just had lots of spending money & would buy albums every week, and would go to at least 1 rock show a month.
I hear you on the pro-social thing. Especially for the non-jock types. One of my big regrets was not sticking with guitar, or at the very least, go back to learning piano. I feel piano was more my instrument, I like the linearity of the instrument. But, I think I could have gotten good at guitar. Like you said, guitar bands are more pro-social than being a solo classic pianist. I have this sneaking suspicion that in the next few years for my mid-life crisis I will try to learn guitar.
As an erstwhile bass player, I just started learning electric guitar despite being over 50 and can attest that there are few things more gratifying than that crunch you will hear coming from your practice amp. You’ll love it!
Aaron, yes, I totally agree with you on the satisfaction one gets from that crunch. I will always love the bass but once I heard Mark Tremonti play his PRS guitar through a Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier in drop D tuning, wow!
If you do want to lwarn guitar, the cost of entry is so much better and the quality is improved. The cheap instruments I learned on were tough to play due to quality issues. Today’s guitars are a joy to play. Yes, you’ll have to work on building calluses but when the fingers hurt, it’s time to stop. The electronics are also incredible. Rather than having to play through a loud amplifier, you can now buy inexpensive effects processors that have very closely digitally modeled the components of amps, effects, and speakers. You plug guitar into the effects processor, plug headphones into the processor’s headphone jack, and all anyone hears is you strumming the strings.
As Travis LeBlanc said, you can now use your computer to easily program drums and bass and piano and whole orchestras. I program drums that serve to help me practice. I do have ProTools should I want to record stuff and as Travis mentioned, it allows everyone and anyone to out together surprisingly good-sounding music. Youtube has tons of backing tracks. These also help you practice. There’s one of the Rush Epic song 2112. The backing track consists of the drums, vocals, and bass from the original song. I play along on guitar and try not to implode. Everything you hear guitar wise, is all you.
Maybe getting back to piano might be the right path as well. Any instrument that gives your soul peace and inspiration is a great thing. And it keeps our white culture going during these times when we are told we have none.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2008/11/18/media-watch-implicit-whiteness-with-pyrotechnics-or-the-night-white-people-took-over-washington-dc/
The above is about AC/DC concert held in Washhington DC.
The swarms of whites did not go unnoticed by the smaller crowds of blacks orbiting the Verizon Center that night. They seemed slightly alarmed by the rugged whites, many of whom sported Celtic cross tattoos, Germanic cross T-shirts, and other signs of what psychologist Kevin MacDonald calls “implicit whiteness.” Some taunts were thrown in our direction by a group of black girls, and one black man was prompted, for reasons I could not discern, to bellow “suck my d***. Suck my big black d***” for all to hear.
LOL!
Another observation: in the internet era, music has largely lost its sense of place.
There was a time when you could easily tell who was a British band and who was an American band. No one would mistake The Smiths or The Cure for American and no one would think R.E.M. was British. Punk had a huge impact in the UK but not so much in America so in the 1980s, there were huge stylistic difference between American and British.
New music genres used to emerged out of a specific city. Oftentimes, a cluster of bands influencing and in competition with each other would result in that scene developing its own regional sound which might then become a full-blown genre. Grunge came out of Seattle. Hair metal was based out of L.A. The first trash metal bands came out of San Fran. There was a hot Manchester scene in the late 1980s. Shoegaze was invented by a cluster of bands active in the London music scene in the early 1990s.
However, the internet made it possible to bypass your local music scene and get an audience online. You can now get signed to a record deal even if you live in the middle of nowhere which was not the case until recently. The importance of local music scenes has diminished in the internet age and I think that is a bad thing.
I can get behind a garage band on every block… not too ambitious, but listenable and competent in a songbook of guitar rock. A band playing and practicing together is one model that rebels against the “studio musicians” at the other end of the spectrum…. Highly polished, virtuoso hired guns called in to flesh out the material crafted by songwriters.
There’s the new Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (2024) about the fleet of LA based session musicians behind Toto, Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan et al. As explained in one of the interviews, “It rocks… but it doesn’t rock too hard”.
Surprisingly, they acknowledge the music as a niche of white guys who listened to jazz and R&B, who then made an impact on black music ranging from De La Soul to Thundercat. Myself, I can’t take more than a few minutes of this stuff, but the documentary is fun with lots of amusing trivia, such as Toto members having played on almost all of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. A lady New Yorker critic lauds the music adding, “In recent years there has been a shift that I think has opened up some space for dunking on White guys”. You think? It has been taking some people time to notice. Impressively, the subtitles willingly capitalize both White and Black, bucking the trend of ‘white’ and ‘Black”.
Honestly, I have allways thought these post 1920s music genres are all crap and sensless Negro and Jew noise. They are signs of our degeneracy as a race. They have to go away and be forgotten.
It’s hard to disagree with you, though there’s a bit of good music to be found here and there if you look for it. There’s Leroy Anderson, before corny words were added to some of his music.
Have you tried going to a symphony orchestra/chamber orchestra/small classical group concert lately? They are inserting so much crap. And then there are the choral ensembles, who have become unlistenable in recent years.
Millennials killed guitar music. Playing the guitar takes too much discipline and effort plus it demands too much time alone in a room honing a skill with a long term payoff instead of being alone in a room connected to others on the net with immediate feedback. Plus it’s boomer tier, bro.
The decline in guitar music is because there is no money in selling music anymore.. The Beatles, Stones, Metalica, Nirvana were all pushed and given exposure because they sold millions of records.. Thats why they were relevant.. Some sold-out concert tours dont even make money.. The music-store industry has been destroyed and thus there no longer is the “status” being in a band and its relevance therefor isn’t pushed by the machine anymore. Even with something like hiphop, rappers like Kanye West are just as known for selling shoes than they are music. Or any of the whorish women doing RnB etc are better known for selling perfume or being influencers to hock other wares/concepts.. Their lives are more the product, like reality TV.. Rock music was never in a position to be as useful to capitalism post-physical media as hiphop was.. Yes there are other political dimensions, alienating white people etc – but this is largely the result of a technological shift… You are right about the accessibility of technology, but its more that it flooded the market with something that can no longer be sold.
Another thing is that white genres of music have a tendency to split into smaller niche subgenres.
First there was rock. Then punk and metal evolved out of rock. Then in the 80s, metal split into hair metal and thrash metal. New Wave split off from punk and then became Alternative which then spawns several subgenres.
So white music gets progressives more niche and to get on the radio, your music has to have wide appeal.
I dont think its that at all.. The same can be said for Hiphop.. Whats taken place is two main things,
1) A radical decline in the profitability of selling music because of the death of physical music sales
2) Technological change where the market is flooded with too much content that cant be sold because people just download their music for free or music streaming services simply dont pay enough.
2.1) Technology has also opened up people to making music far easier without the need for instruments
Yes, this has been a cultural decline.. But I would argue rock and roll was a mistake to begin with, even if I like plenty of it becuase Iwas born into it.. Guitar orientated, ultimately multicultural and race-mixed music cannot help a civilization truly rise, it only ever led to our downfall. Lets be honest about it. Forget how you felt when you were young, that’s irrelevant.. Be objective.. This all came out of a liberal counter-culture that hybridized with black music.
Your idea that too many niches has killed guitar music isn’t really the truth. The music industry never had any problem selling all these niches in the past when physical media had a monopoly.
Radio? Lol
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