Comment Archives: stories: Arts
Re: “Creature of habit”
You are the man Dave! Lots of love.
Max Service.
Re: “Oscars wild”
you're right, Lionel. It's the best supporting actor category where they've all won, I think I conflated the two in my head when I was writing it.
I did guess 4/5 correctly though, you will give me that.
Re: “Oscars wild”
Phoenix is the only one in this category without a win under his belt."
Um what? Hugh Jackman and Bradley Cooper have not even been nominated. Bad editing, Indy.
Re: “Pared down dream”
Great article - with a typo. Fourth paragraph after the photo either needs opening quotes before "first-world problem" or none after - right now there's an unpaired set after the period.
Re: “VTO”
Yea!!!! Tour,Tour,Tour...like maybe to Boise?
Re: “Stripped down”
Who's this "dan" guy? Let's see him take his pants off and get hit with the failure ball.
Re: “Stripped down”
What's not to like about bad naked. Everyone should be more bad.
Re: “Blech magic”
this is a great review. cinema is doomed.
and three cheers to whoever came up with "Blech Magic!"
Re: “Stripped down”
Congrats on 10 years of Total Fest, Josh. All the musical fests/competitions/showcases that have come and gone are a testament to how hard it is to maintain such an endeavor in Missoula (or anywhere, really). And to achieve that with a festival as complex and dynamic as Total Fest is all the more worthy of our respect and admiration.
Having not witnessed Bad Naked's particular brand of live performance, I have no opinion on that. But I will say your definition of punk, Josh, is right on the money.
Re: “Stripped down”
in the pic - who's the girl in blue shirt / black skirt? i simply must know.
Re: “Stripped down”
I hear you, Dan. Ultimately, you're and everyone else is entitled to want to do something with the music or not, and I guess after that, it's all fine tuning. I think Ben Weiss made a good point about BN's hitting and missing, and I think that's the case with folks who are more experimental with tunes. Bad Naked does have some stuff, and I fear the new release isn't gonna do it justice, some super well-written, creative shit and it's absolutely got structure/verse (as tom points out) and music to it. I hope his next release is recorded in a bedroom at minimum, and perhaps studio or friend's four-track, because it deserves to be documented as music outside the live setting with a handheld mini-cassette....
Re: “Stripped down”
You make a good point about personal taste. I think my worst-case scenario writing a review would be to convince someone to stop liking something. That would be awful. Second worst-case, though, might be to say I liked something I didn't just because it was weird.
Re: “Stripped down”
I would never say that Bad Naked is rejecting conventional song writing. This is also coming from someone that has actually covered two of Dane's songs before. If you listen closely, there is a verse in there. There's a chorus. His songs are predominately structured like cheers. He's akin to a punk rock pep band. The "he's rejecting structure and replacing it with nothing" argument kinda falls flat to me. Bad Naked is music made by an odd personality that sounds a lot like an acoustic version of groups like Pink Noise, Toddi Wellman, or a perma-stoned Hasil Adkins.
ALSO: We could all just be using big words to debate personal taste and that is pretty hilarious.
Re: “Stripped down”
I also would much rather see messy risk taking than polished mediocrity—sorry, String Cheese Incident—but my objection to Bad Naked is not that he's messy. It's that he's not taking meaningful risks.
It's true that art is what it is, but I don't think it follows that it can therefore have no standards of success or failure. A work of art sets its own goals and meets them on its own terms. I like Choking Victim and I like the Velvet Underground, but only a jerk would demand that they satisfy the same standards. What CV tried to do and what VU tried to do are very different projects, and each succeeded (and often failed) on the terms of those projects.
What worries me about Bad Naked is that his terms seem to be such that he could not fail to meet them. I disagree with your claim that there is no irony involved in Bad Naked, that it is not supposed to be bad. I think a fundamental part of his project is to discomfit the audience, partly via his performance and partly by making songs that do not have the structure or tonal organization of what we usually think of as songs. The problem is that he is rejecting that structure without putting forward anything in its place.
Noisy punk rock is good, to me at least, because it offers an alternative to restrictive ideas about what music should be. It rejects accepted forms, but more importantly it shows us something better. Anyone can not play "Stairway to Heaven," but it takes a Fucked Up to play "Queen of Hearts" instead. My problem with Bad Naked is that I cannot see what he is doing beyond rejecting conventions of songwriting and performance. He is not trying to do something instead so much as he is trying to do something not.
Aaron, I am dumb, but you don't know me so lucky guess.
Re: “Stripped down”
Dan is dumb. Music can be performance art, he doesn't even acknowledge that potential. People who have a true appreciation for music know that sometimes the best stuff in challenging to listen too. I've never seen Bad Naked, but if he has a following, it's pretty patronizing to assume that it's just a supportive friend group. I've seen a lot of bands with a lot of friends play to a lot of empty bars over the years.
Re: “Stripped down”
Dan, to continue this in err, real time and see if I can bait you into some discussion, here's what I think about your con argument: I disagree that there's any irony involved in a Bad Naked show. Or that it's "supposed to be bad." If it's art, it kind of is what it is, and whether one likes it or not doesn't ultimately matter, because it's done for the correct reasons and it should be provocative and challenging about what exactly music is. I'd rather a twice as bad Bad Naked to a six times as pro String Cheese Incident, for example.
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Re: “Headfirst”
I am looking forward to reading this book soon!