MathOfInsects

Same here. I'll wait until doomsday is closer and try again.

Corey Henry could make a chicken sandwich sound good. (It sounds like internal sim to me.)

I bailed on Joel pretty hard after his first couple of albums. Occasionally something would slip through to make me think he still "had it," more often stuff would slip through to make me want to hurt bunnies. No, Billy, you didn't start the fire, but you sure made me want to with that atrocious song. His weirdly clueless piano solo in River of Dreams was another of those moments. It's like someone handed him the song, said, "We hear a piano solo here," and he poked around to find something to play because he didn't naturally hear anything, and then they kept the poking around. FWIW, I also think Elton John's best work was early on. All the 80's stuff felt off-keel and bloated--largely when he switched to writing his own lyrics for awhile. But in terms of groove/rhythm/musicality, I'm #teamelton all the way. I think Billy Joel has incredible chops, but I always feel like I'm being played AT somehow.

I hate to be a bottom-feeder, but my local Sam Ash has some cool keyboards. I guess it's time to visit...

Each previous potentially artist-ending advance--phonograph, videos, synths, drum machines, MIDI--has only led to greater and greater creativity in the end. Artists use whatever the available technology is, and make it into something new. I'm excited to see how people incorporate AI into their art. It's already made stemming and noise reduction way easier, and even the best mastering engineers I know now use AI for certain elements of their work, even when the rest of it is done by hand/ear/slider. As you hint at, if it's really that easy for the public to imagine that a "good enough" AI track is made by "real" musicians, then the answer will have to be for musicians to raise their game. I am here for that.

I'm not really asking about the legality of it, though. To me that's a whole different issue. I'm probing to find out where people's discomfort starts--where the line is that something needs to cross to make them fear or dismiss it.

For sure—that line was Warhol’s provocation. But I’m thinking more of these types of works:

The artists who make pictures and portraits out of tiny headshots of people...is that art? Is it ethical?

Hunter S. Thompson used to write paragraphs, then cut the sentences out, mix them around, and reassemble them into new paragraphs. What do we think about the ethics of this?

Nice playing from the pianist! (And props on the piano-mic'ing too, beautifully handled.)

That was so great to see. First of all, props to Paladino for copping Joey's style and almost directly predicting certain moments of Joey's playing. A great couple of choruses from him. And interesting to see that Schaffer had essentially prewritten his solo. It's a blues in F and he's certainly got the chops for it. I wonder what prompted him to go that route. Maybe just intimidation from the three guys he invited onto stage? Maybe he should have gone first, in the end...?

That guy was such a heel.

Early 1960s.

A classic clip. Having come up through one of the country's most avant-garde programs, and being a huge Zappa fan, I've always been bummed at how much the fool they were playing "Mr. Zahpa" for here. I mean, I know it's not like it's so mainstream to use a bicycle as a sound source. And he's spoofing them almost as much as they're spoofing him. But I've always sort of wished they just wouldn't have put him on, rather than make him a punchline.

Where in the video is that?

That was bloated and unnecessary and hella fun. I wish PS had STFU for 12 seconds so we could hear everyone play. Yeah, Paul, they know they're getting another chorus, and yeah, we remember the name you just told us. They're famous, we know who they are. I enjoyed hearing how everyone approached their playing after hearing what the previous guy did. Joey D in particular made a point to slow the pace down and let something build before doing those crazy 16th-note triplet arpeggio runs. I couldn't tell from his expression if he was enjoying PS's playing or bemused by it.

First, I 100% agree with you and don't favor the "music olympics" approach to our field. But I do think some of the "X or Y" conversations are about something different than competition; they're really a conversation about people's aesthetics or preferences, and in that sense they can be interesting and helpful.

Seems right.

Libra. Sorry, I thought it said post your signs.

I always feel like I shouldn't admit this, but: I'm a good LH bass player as long as you don't also want a great keyboardist. If I'm really paying attention to being an effective bass player, I'm way less of a keyboard player. Sometimes that's a good thing! I've gotten better over the years, but when it comes time to really separate the two hemispheres--say, during a solo--I have to concentrate very hard to keep the bass doing what it's supposed to be doing while my right hand is doing what it wants to be doing. However, I will say that the times I've had to be LH bass for groups that normally have a bass player, my relationship with those songs is way deeper when I'm back to being keys-only on them.

I call them the Buttmy Tonebro’s. “But my tone, bro…!”

Steve Cropper’s parts are probably easier to play than Steve Vai’s, too, but I’d still give the crown to Cropper every time.

Hmmm. Ok, definitely a Honky Cat vibe on those chops in Redneck Friend. Obviously channeling Nicky Hopkins there, too. BUT I don't hear a note of piano in Delilah. And I barely hear one on the Hollies tune--maybe twice really on some distant chords in big moments, unless that's also piano in the right speaker. (But it sounds more like guitar.) So maybe the takeaway is that he was the guy playing parts that people ended up not using...? 😀 The BJ tunes...yeah, could be anyone. No wonder he's not sure.

Hang. Heng. Hong. Hung.

Whoa, cool. I didn't know that (either of them), or forgot it if I did. I'm going to listen to all these tunes with that in mind a bit later. As for BJ remembering which notes he played on a session when he was 14...? I mean...maybe? But does he really? There's been a lot of shall we say "impeding" done to his memory in the years since then. But still, cool bio item. I wonder if anyone's alive who could say definitively it was or wasn't him. https://www.songfacts.com/facts/the-shangri-las/leader-of-the-pack