Nice list. I love Nick Drake and CCR.

Dont worry I had crap taste when I was 14 too.

Ever listened to a performance of a musical rite by a South American shaman attempting to exorcize a demon? Sounds pretty kooky, silly, and ridiculous, right? I guess that makes those people a bunch of ignorant children.

Utilizing a quantized list of random, obscure bands to define yourself and your lifestyle is a cute way of ensuring your life has meaning without a true cultural context, but it's nothing more than that. Why not drop the defense system you've fashioned for your ego, and listen to some Avril Lavigne or Rihanna? I guarantee you'd be happier.

Dismember, Carnage, Grave and Entombed defines your lifestyle then? What does that say about you? Maybe I have them wrong, I've never heard them, but I know what these bands who try to sound hard or scary are like - all image and no substance, certainly no musical credibility.

Luckily, I'm not very susceptible to modern pitfalls like defining myself by the music that appeals to my instincts and will. The point was that you're more interested in affirming your superiority over others for having 'matured' in life than in how the music personally affects you, and what that entails for the group(s) to which you belong. Anyone can download a few mp3s or buy an album at a record shop. How about actually accomplishing something instead of adhering to some rite of passage whereby an arbitrary grouping of personality descriptors is surmounted? Doing the latter is a declaration of hipsterdom.

For the record, I'm not crazy about Entombed.

You should all pop in some Person Pitch, light up a joint and give peace a chance!


(best album ever, btw)

Ditto. We're obviously from different worlds, backgrounds and eras, it's not even worth a discussion. But don't generalise about "people like me" from my musical tastes - you know nothing about me and what I have achieved in life.

Almost forgot! They're definitely one of my favorites. John Fogarty wrote some killer tunes and played great roots rock in an era when roots rock was way out of style. And Willy and the Poor Boys is a darn fine album...

Some of my other faves:

Lynyrd Skynyrd
The Rolling Stones
The Band
The Meters
Sly & The Family Stone
The Temptations
The Dixie Hummingbirds
Derek and the Dominoes (only one album, alas, but a great one...)

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Take a look at the Bandit's blog, Americana Avenue.

The fact that you apparently see no irony in those two sentences proves my point. In fact, it appears to go right over your head.

People like you are snobbish and stuck up with precious little justification. You're very highly invested in your opinion of yourself as a Velvet Underground sophisticate. In other words a hipster.

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Matthew 10:34

Dead Can Dance is acceptable why I wonder? Oh it has "Dead" in the name.

Sure you are sick of people quoting the Velvets as an influence in their lives, you see them as pretentious "hipsters". But no, for me it's because their music is that good, no other reason. I don't like any band or artist for the ethos or image that goes with them (or their name) - some of them I knew would attract derision and are hardly "cool", I'm only in it for the music and how it makes me feel.

Getting this thread back on track, have any of the metalheads here heard Slint? I'd be interested to know what you think.

The Mothers of Invention
The Residents
Return to Forever
Soft Machine
The Velvet Underground

Some of my favorite bands.

And to bassClef, I'm not a metalhead but I love Slint.

A long time ago, bands like Slint interested me. Honestly, they're directionless, noisy, and completely boring. I prefer music that communicates something profound to standard rock 'n' roll dressed up in 'experimental' decoration.

As for Dead Can Dance, I think Atelier singled them out because they really don't sound anything like the other bands on your list. The rest is fairly basic rock music in spirit, while Dead Can Dance offers something more transcendent. What do you think?

Non-metal, non-classical bands and composers that are worth listening to:

Aphex Twin (ambient material in particular)
Steve Roach
Maeror Tri
Cocteau Twins (Harold Budd collaborations emphasized)
Biosphere
Vidna Obmana

Dead Can Dance are not atypical of my tastes, I have everything by the Cocteau Twins (the older harder stuff being preferred, like Feathers-Oar-Blades, I have the original Lullabies EP), plus many more from the old 4AD stable. And I love a bit of Slint now and then, directionless maybe but hardly boring. I'd be interested to hear what you'd call profound, and why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8FvOuM1FbY

Why? Why not? Where's the, "I miss you, baby" or the frivolous depiction of S&M culture a la Lou Reed? The music has a more focused, cosmic foundation for its structure and ultimate expression. It reminds us of how scarcely significant we are in the grander universe at large while paying reverence to it, rather than dwelling on bluesy, emotionally-limited chord progressions.

Compare to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZH82l_ie9M

There's a huge contrast here, I think.

The Velvet Underground were Kafka; Dead Can Dance were Homer.