Reaper's Top 10, Nay, Top 25 Albums of 2009.

[Reaper16]

For years I've posted my 10 favorite albums of the year on this very subforum. 2009 was such a strong year in music that I thought I'd expand my list by 15 entries. Plus, I'll be adding YouTube embeds to a good song (not necessarily representative) from each album. So bear with me as I add each entry. Character limits and all.

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by patteeu

Since a lot of classical music is lyric-less, how do we know it raises us up to greatness? I always assumed it was about debauchery, medieval-style.

The 1812 overture is the official soundtrack to coitus.

[Jenson71]

Originally Posted by patteeu

Since a lot of classical music is lyric-less, how do we know it raises us up to greatness? I always assumed it was about debauchery, medieval-style.

We don't know that it does. Maybe for some, it is just about pleasure (like movies as pleasure), but I don't know that musicians would agree with that. But what does lyrics have to do with it? Classical music defenders (I'm not a great one) can hopefully explain why classical music can inspire in us a sense of excellence. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn -- they are geniuses, their music the pinnacle of human artistic achievement in terms of sound, harmony, rhythm, and the emotional responses those unleash in humans. Paintings do similar things, and they don't have lyrics.

Bloom: The power of music in the soul - described to Jessica marvelously by Lorenzo in the Merchant of Venice - has been recovered after a long period of desuetude. And it is rock music alone that has effected this restoration.... Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America....But all that has changed. Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breathe, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music. This is a constant surprise to me. And one of the strange aspects of my relations with good students I come to know well is that I frequently introduce them to Mozart.

...

Symptomatic of this change is how seriously students now take the famous passages on musical education in Plato's Republic. In the past, students, good liberals that they always are, were indignant at the censorship of poetry, as a threat to free inquiry. But they were really thinking of science and politics. They hardly paid attention to the discussion of music itself and, to the extent that they even thought about it, were really puzzled by Plato's devoting time to rhythm and melody in a serious treatise on political philosophy. Their experience of music was as an entertainment, a matter of indifference to political and moral life. Students today, on the contrary, know exactly why Plato takes music so seriously. They know it affects life very profoundly and are indignant because Plato seems to want to rob them of their most intimate pleasure. They are drawn into argument with Plato about the experience of music, and the dispute centers on how to evaluate it and deal with it. This encounter not only helps to illuminate the phenomenon of contemporary music, but also provides a model of how contemporary students can profitably engage with a classic text. The very fact of their fury shows how much Plato threatens what is dear and intimate to them. They are little able to defend their experience, which had seemed unquestionable until questioned, and it is most resistant to cool analysis. Yet if a student can -and this is most difficult and unusual-draw back, get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion. Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics. It is Plato's teaching that music, by its nature, encompasses all that is today most resistant to philosophy. So it may well be that through the thicket of our creates corruption runs the path to awareness of the oldest truths.

Plato's teaching about music is, put simply, that rhythm and melody accompanied by dance, are the barbarous expression of the soul. Barbarous, not animal. Music is the medium of the human soul in its most ecstatic condition of wonder and terror. Nietzsche, who in large measure agrees with Plato's analysis, says in The Birth of Tragedy (not to be forgotten is the rest of the title, Out of the Spirit of Music) that a mixture of cruelty and coarse sensuality characterized this state, which of course was religious, in the service of gods. Music is the soul's primitive an primary speech and it is alogon, without articulate speech or reason. 1 is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason. Even when articulate speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music and the passions it expresses.


....

Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel's Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them. In alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites. Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.

Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music, the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. The words implicitly and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves. Voyeurism is for old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All they need is encouragement.

.....


This strong stimulant, which Nietzsche called Nihiline, was for a' ry long time, almost fifteen years, epitomized in a single figure, Mick Jagger. A shrewd, middle-class boy, he played the possessed lower-class demon and teen-aged satyr up until he was forty, with one eye on the mobs of children of both sexes whom he stimulated to a sensual frenzy and the other eye winking at the unerotic, commercially motivated adults who handled the money. In his act he was male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; unencumbered by modesty, he could enter everyone's dreams, promising to do everything with everyone; and, above all, he legitimated drugs, which were the real thrill that parents and policemen inspired to deny his youthful audience. He was beyond the law, moral d political, and thumbed his nose at it. Along with all this, there were nasty little appeals to the suppressed inclinations toward sexism, racism and violence, indulgence in which is not now publicly respectable. Nevertheless, he managed not to appear to contradict the rock ideal of a universal classless society founded on love, with the distinction between brotherly and bodily blurred. He was the hero and the model for countless young persons in universities, as well as elsewhere. 1 discovered that students who boasted of having no heroes secretly had a passion to be like Mick Jagger, to live his life, have his fame. They were ashamed to admit this in a university, although I am not certain that the reason has anything to do with a higher standard of taste. It is probably that they are not supposed to have heroes. Rock music itself and talking about it with infinite seriousness are perfectly respectable. It has proved to be the ultimate leveler of intellectual snobbism. But it is not respectable to think of it as providing weak and ordinary persons with a fashionable behavior, the imitation of which will make others esteem them and boost their own self-esteem. Unaware and unwillingly, however, Mick Jagger played the role in their lives that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so boring and unable to charm youthful passions. Jagger caught on.

In the last couple of years, Jagger has begun to fade. Whether Michael Jackson, Prince or Boy George can take his place is uncertain. They are even weirder than he is, and one wonders what new strata of taste they have discovered. Although each differs from the others, the essential character of musical entertainment is not changing. There is only a constant search for variations on the theme. And this gutter phenomenon is apparently the fulfillment of the promise made by so much psychology and literature that our weak and exhausted Western civilization would find refreshment in the true source, the unconscious, which appeared to the late romantic imagination to be identical to Africa, the dark and unexplored continent. Now all has been explored; light has been cast everywhere; the unconscious has been made conscious, the repressed expressed. And what have we found? Not creative devils, but show business glitz. Mick Jagger tarting it up on the stage is all that we brought back from the voyage to the underworld.

My concern here is not with the moral effects of this music whether it leads to sex, violence or drugs. The issue here is its effect on education, and I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.

.......

Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied. It artificially induces the exaltation attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors - victory a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion and discovery of the truth. Without effort, without talent, without virtue, without exercise of the faculties, anyone and everyone is accorded the equal right to the enjoyment of their fruits. In my experience, students who have had a serious fling with drugs - and gotten over it - find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations. It is as though the color has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white. The pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end, or as the end. They may function perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sapped, and they do not expect their life's activity to produce anything but a living, whereas liberal education is supposed to encourage the belief that the good life is the pleasant life and that the best life is the most pleasant life. I suspect that the rock addiction, particularly in the absence of strong counterattractions, has an effect similar to that of drugs. The students will get over this music, or at least the exclusive passion for it. But they will do so in the same way Freud says that men accept the reality principle as something harsh, grim and essentially unattractive, a mere necessity. These students will assiduously study economics or the professions and the Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit beneath. They will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind. The choice is not between quick fixes and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is meant to show them. But as long as they have the Walkman on ' they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.

http://www.vnnforum.com/archive/index.php/t-24366.html

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by Jenson71

We don't know that it does. Maybe for some, it is just about pleasure (like movies as pleasure), but I don't know that musicians would agree with that. But what does lyrics have to do with it? Classical music defenders (I'm not a great one) can hopefully explain why classical music can inspire in us a sense of excellence. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn -- they are geniuses, their music the pinnacle of human artistic achievement in terms of sound, harmony, rhythm, and the emotional responses those unleash in humans. Paintings do similar things, and they don't have lyrics.

Paintings don't need lyrics because they have pictures so you know what they're about (unless they're some kind of weird abstract BS). Duh.

[Reaper16]

Bloom can go **** himself for two reasons:

1.) What utter bullshit about indignation being the response to something we know to be true. Try this one: "Jesus Christ ****ed children, ate puppies and was generally a tool of the devil to lead people away from the Old Testament & Yahweh." Does anyone find that statement offensive? THEN YOU KNOW IT MUST BE TRUE /Bloom

2.) He talks about the ills of the record industry as if the other mediums of art don't have commercial industries perverting them as well. Selective ****ing outrage is what that is.

[Jenson71]

Originally Posted by Reaper16

Bloom can go **** himself for two reasons:

1.) What utter bullshit about indignation being the response to something we know to be true. Try this one: "Jesus Christ ****ed children, ate puppies and was generally a tool of the devil to lead people away from the Old Testament & Yahweh." Does anyone find that statement offensive? THEN YOU KNOW IT MUST BE TRUE /Bloom

Hmm. I'm not entirely sure that the indignation he talks about in the students towards Plato would be the same as finding that particular statement (or any statement) as offensive. Besides, I think he feels that the initial indignation there is a necessary stage leading to knowing what we deeply value, thus, our whole truth on something. Maybe it's not true that we like our music because of the primal gutter sex drive it gives us, but at least being challenged on it can be helpful for greater awareness. Maybe your initial indignation towards Bloom is the first step towards loving him.

2.) He talks about the ills of the record industry as if the other mediums of art don't have commercial industries perverting them as well. Selective ****ing outrage is what that is.

I don't think he has any particular stake in the other commercial industries. Every single book in the world is incomplete, but that doesn't mean their argument is defeated.

[Reaper16]

Originally Posted by Jenson71

Hmm. I'm not entirely sure that the indignation he talks about in the students towards Plato would be the same as finding that particular statement (or any statement) as offensive. Besides, I think he feels that the initial indignation there is a necessary stage leading to knowing what we deeply value, thus, our whole truth on something. Maybe it's not true that we like our music because of the primal gutter sex drive it gives us, but at least being challenged on it can be helpful for greater awareness. Maybe your initial indignation towards Bloom is the first step towards loving him.



I don't think he has any particular stake in the other commercial industries. Every single book in the world is incomplete, but that doesn't mean their argument is defeated.

1.) Bloom is a ****. I don't want to talk about him anymore because he's an elitist prick with severe prejudices that he hasn't backed up with good arguments.

2.) He's singled out music as being commercialized and packaged to sell without extending the same critique to literature or painting or sculpture or film or any of the other forms of artistic expression that Bloom would ostensibly want us to turn to instead of rock music. Its not that he's given an incomplete argument, rather that he gave an ignorant one.

[Jenson71]

Originally Posted by Reaper16

1.) Bloom is a ****. I don't want to talk about him anymore because he's an elitist prick with severe prejudices that he hasn't backed up with good arguments.

But you're a snob. Is there some sort of inherent rivalry between snobs and elites that is influencing your take?

[Reaper16]

Originally Posted by Jenson71

But you're a snob. Is there some sort of inherent rivalry between snobs and elites that is influencing your take?

I may be an asshole but Bloom is a douchebag.

[Demonpenz]

I like Daisy by Brand New as well. Don't like the turn Vedera went with lately, so much potential to go right where it was expected to go.

[QuikSsurfer]

Originally Posted by CJizzles

August Burns Red - Constellations

Great album!
Meridian and paradox rock my face off

[Simply Red]

That's great Reaper, but, how about the new Robert Palmer tape?

[Reaper16]

Originally Posted by Simply Red

That's great Reaper, but, how about the new Robert Palmer tape?

I'd listen to it if it existed.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by Simply Red

That's great Reaper, but, how about the new Robert Palmer tape?

It's a great listen; if your supposed fiance, Evelyn will quit buzzing in your ear.

[Demonpenz]

so pablo when you dl'ed daisy did you think you got something else on accident or the files were corrupted on purpose? I was all confused for the 2 songs.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by Demonpenz

so pablo when you dl'ed daisy did you think you got something else on accident or the files were corrupted on purpose? I was all confused for the 2 songs.

Yeah, I didn't know WTF was up for a minute or so...but I'd also read reviews saying this album sort of went a 'new' direction so I sort of expected something different.