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the velvet underground
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     sonic youth
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the jesus & mary chain
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 my bloody valentine

synths have the same lure electric guitars do: they make sounds that don't really exist! however, they have the unfortunate property of being discrete, and discrete is boring (unless you pile up a huge number of discrete things and set them off at slightly different times).

electric guitars, on the other hand, are continual, and can be double plus continual with the right effects' pedal. or pedals.

when i was a kid, i had piano lessons, like every other middle-class kid my age. my teacher had a yamaha synth next to the piano, which i oggled through most of my practice. i wasn’t allowed to touch it, because it would corrupt my tiny little soul and ruin my piano learnings. well, guess what, i dropped out and have spent my life listening to noise. hope you’re happy.

can you imagine jimi hendrix’s dad going “sorry kid, no electric guitar for you, otherwise you’ll never be able to play it properly”? or slash’s? paul mccartney’s, sure.

(to be continued)

top 5 albums ever (chronologically):

1. the velvet underground & nico, the velvet underground
2. closer, joy division
3. psychocandy, the jesus & mary chain
4. the queen is dead, the smiths
5. neon bible, arcade fire

didn’t make the cut, just:

• evol, sonic youth
• the mind is a terrible thing to taste, ministry

top 5 albums ever, ever:

1. psychocandy, the jesus & mary chain
2. the velvet underground & nico, the velvet underground
3. closer, joy division
4. neon bible, arcade fire
5. the queen is dead, the smiths

Fake Empire yahoo! just released a new version of their web media player. quite nifty.

The first album I ever bought was The Beatles’ The White Album. And by that I mean walking to the record store on my own, and spending all the money I had been hoarding since I was 3 months old or something. I was 10. I bought it because it was 1) by The Beatles, who were famous (tm) and 2) all white!

A couple of minutes after the jet landed Back in the USSR, my head popped. After 10 years of listening to fucking Chopin and the like, an electric guitar will do that to you. And they had two of those.

Needless to say I didn’t get most of it for several years (especially all that noise in Revolution 9), but it gave me goosebumps and made me want to scream and bang my head.

So it’s only fitting that Sonic Youth would record The Whitey Album 20 years after The Beatles recorded The White Album, by then I was older and able to understand all the noise and most of the lyrics. You see, Sonic Youth happen to be the true greatest rock’n’roll band ever, never mind that adding their ages yields 400 years or so (well, one could argue that the same is true for Arcade Fire, but then again they’re ten people).

After several years of listening to Joy Division I was, at the age of 15, ready to retire and die peacefully. In my simplistic view, The Beatles were the beginning and Joy Division were the ending. But then I bought Evol and my head popped again. I finally got all the noise, and their two electric guitars sounded like a dozen. I loved electric guitars, and needed bigger better faster more.

In a nutshell, Sonic Youth are the ones to blame for my posts here.