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If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
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Vera Nazarian
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Hardcore without punk isn't music, it's a genre of porn. And punk isn't a genre of music, it’s a thought process.
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Dominic Owen Mallary
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RJD was pretty much heavy metal personified, a tiny 5-foot-4-inch sorcerer with a mangy mane, demonic eyes and sly grin, all coupled to a simply huge, operatic voice, a diminutive powerhouse who prowled the stage like a feline elf and who was, it turns out, also finely intelligent and well spoken, an actual gentleman in a genre known all too well for its bombastic, monosyllabic doltbuckets. A rare thing indeed.
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Mark Morford
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I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, "Running Scared," exploded into the room.
Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.
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Bob Dylan (Chronicles, Volume One)
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Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.
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Lester Bangs
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For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn’t matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction. It has drawn me into a story world, held me captive, taken me on a journey with characters like none I’ve ever met, revealed truths I’ve somehow always known and insights that rock my brain. It’s filled me with awe, which is to say it’s made me see the familiar in a wholly new way and made the unfamiliar a foundational part of me. It both entertains and matters. It both captures our age and becomes timelessly great. It does all that with the sturdy tools of story and the flair of narrative art.
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Donald Maass (Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling)
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Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society changed. When the calf was later trumped by a woman offering shots of alcohol from her vagina on Rock of Love, society changed again. My hope for this world is that we can soon run out of shocking body parts and can finally see the humor in our ætheric bodies.
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Christy Leigh Stewart
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Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.
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Lester Bangs
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I made a decision long ago not to make any apologies. Romance rocks, and even though my books don't actually fall into the romance genre, I tout them as very much being about the romance. It's fun. We're all obsessed with it. And it's human nature. Remember, NO APOLOGIES! Write what 's in your heart!
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Darynda Jones
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The path I've been led down is one of senseless catastrophe, a classic Hollywood tale of the man who plummets to rock bottom just moments before he would have crested the peak. [...] I'm living out this queer tragedy as they write it for me - just one more tormented, half-in-the closet gay character whose dark descent can serve as a cautionary tale AND move tickets. But that's certainly not the only queer genre convention out there, no by a long shot. And while tragedies are important stories to tell, our appetite can be satiated with more than just suffering. If the story is good, it will find an audience. Whether it's a tragedy or a triumph doesn't matter.
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Chuck Tingle (Bury Your Gays)
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That was just one curious shift that occurred in the local music scene. The folk-rock movement, as it turns out, didn’t really last very long in its original incarnation. To the contrary, it quickly splintered into three distinct new genres: country-rock, psychedelic rock, and the ‘introspective singer-songwriter’ school of folk-rock most closely associated with former mental patient James Taylor. None of those musical genres, notably, posed much of a threat to the ‘establishment.’ The navel-gazers eschewed social concerns in favor of focusing on tales of personal anguish, the acid rockers largely preached the mantra of ‘turn on, tune in, drop out,’ and the country-rockers largely stuck to traditional—which is to say, quite conservative—country music themes. Following
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David McGowan (Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream)
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Bernard and I always believed that most pop music fits into the board category called rock and roll. Rock and roll was ever changing, and this art form had different genres of classification for the benefit of consumers, like sections in a library or bookstore. Once any genre-folk, soul, rock or even some jazz-reaches a certain position on the pop charts, it does what’s known in the music business as crossing over, and gets played on the Top Forty stations. That’s the reason so many of us own songs by artists from genre’s we normally wouldn't-their hit songs crossed over into the pop Top Forty mainstream.
When a genre repeatedly crosses over and comes to dominate the Top Forty, what had originated as an insurgency becomes the new ruling class. This was the path disco had taken-from the margins where it started, a weird combination of underground gay culture and funk and gospel-singing techniques and, in the case of Chic, Jazz-inflected groovy soul. But it was basically all rock and roll, historically speaking, as far as we were concerned.
But the media and the industry pitted us against the Knack-the disco kings in their buppie uniforms verses the scrappy white boys. But we never saw it that way. We thought we were all on the same team, even if our voices and songs followed different idioms.
Boy, were we naïve.
And boy, did things change.
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Nile Rodgers
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Gordon was an artist who simply transferred her highly refined aesthetic skills to rock music, a genre that, as punk proved, required a sensibility more than chops anyway.
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Michael Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991)
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Punk rock is fundamentally incoherent, an anti-traditional tradition that promises “anarchy,” or a whiff of it, while providing its devotees something tidy and recognizable enough to be considered a musical genre.
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Kelefa Sanneh (Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres)
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Like Grand Funk Railroad, for a time one of the most popular rock bands in America, even if many critics couldn’t figure out why.
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Kelefa Sanneh (Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres)
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Ever since the sixties, rock ’n’ roll had been the most prestigious form of popular music, beloved both by “rock critics” (the term itself suggested this bias) and by everyday fans, many of whom were inclined to accept the idea that mainstream pop music, no matter how much they loved it, was relatively inconsequential. The new pop revolution encouraged listeners of all sorts to question this hierarchy: to consider the possibility that rock ’n’ roll was boring, and that so-called pop music was the future.
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Kelefa Sanneh (Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres)
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Agendalessness is what made the hair-metal scene seem contemporary and fun, setting it apart from more earnest, old-fashioned forms of rock ’n’ roll.
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Kelefa Sanneh (Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres)
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The results are consistent with the worldview divide. The fluid reported that they love rap and hip-hop, along with a remarkable range of other favorites that include both widely popular genres (such as pop, rock, and classic rock) and a lot of niche interests. For example, a smattering of people identified world music, Korean pop, and electronic dance music, all of which have their roots outside the United States, as their favorites.
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Marc Hetherington (Prius Or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide)
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I just find music to be one of the great creations of humankind. It breaks boundaries, it brings people together, and it seems to transcend differences. It bonds us to each other. It does all of that without regard for whether it’s jazz, or rocka- billy, or blues, or rock, or folk, or R&B, or soul, or gospel, or country, or classical, or whatever your genre of choice might be. It does all of that, whether it’s Vivaldi’s violins, or Paul Desmond’s haunting alto sax, or James Burton’s twangy guitar. It’s important stuff to us humans, and it’s important stuff to me.
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Mark Shaiken (Fresh Start (3J Legal Thriller))
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How near to heaven do you imagine Icarus ascended before learning, from waxen-wings, that some things just don’t work out?
No matter how heroic or daring, no matter the purity of purpose or size of the sacrifice, sometimes, things just don’t work out.
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Joe Markko (Genesis of a Genre: The Birth of Christian Rock)
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Kids in America is a high-energy, power-packed, ultra-fun 80s cover band paying tribute to the awesome tunes of the 1980s. Kids in America covers all genres from this timeless decade. From new wave, pop, dance, rock, hair metal, and more! Kids in America specializes in recreating the 80s visually and musically by delivering authentic sound with a vivid show for your favorite 80s hits. We encourage crowd participation so our fans have a fun experience at every event.
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Kids in America
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A precious metal, according to some, is heavy metal.
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Tamerlan Kuzgov
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Screenplay is a company that provides music videos to businesses. Music and video screens are such common attractions in city businesses that court sexual minorities that many of them subscribe to this service. Via disc-based or direct-to-system download, Screenplay subscribers pay for access to a service called “VJ Pro,” where they choose from different genres of music videos that loosely resemble radio formats: HitsVision, a Top 40 mix that promises subscribers “nothing but the hits from every source”; DanceVision, featuring “exclusive remixes, hard to find imports and popular mainstream hits and everything in between designed expressly for the fast paced dance environment”; UrbanVision, a rhythm and blues/hip-hop hybrid that purports “to be all inclusive”; RockVision, rock music featuring songs “from Classic . . . to Disco, New Wave to Old School”; CountryVision, “an upbeat mix of current hits and classic favorites”; and LatinVision, “designed specifically for the sophisticated Latin dance crowd that demands only the hottest and best in tropical, Caribbean, merengue dance and Latin pop.”48 Many gay bars subscribe to ClubVision, which features a mix of “techno, trance and euro-flavored . . . tracks.”49 For dance-themed bars, this subscription features “an extended autoplay feature and individual chapter stops for single track selection.
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F. Hollis Griffin (Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age)
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Billy Gibbons changed the way people view the composition of rock music. ZZ Top is an institution, it's own genre and Billy's playing style is likewise unique.
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Joe Satriani, Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir (Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir)
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I get most of my inspiration from two places: my own life, and reading. I read widely—in my genre (romance), and in all sorts of different genres, from urban fantasy to literature. Then there’s your own life. Romance is a fantasy genre, but if the rock core of your characters doesn’t come from your own life, from emotions you know intimately, the book won’t fly. I don’t mean you have to be married to Casanova—I mean that a heroine will feel genuine to readers if she shares some of your fears or triumphs. Craft the emotional part of the plot from truths you learned from your own life, from watching your friends’ lives, or from reading books.
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Eloisa James
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A whole genre of rock, called math rock, is based on using complex time signatures, such as 7/8, 11/8, 13/8, and so on, in order to break away from the 4/4 time that’s the standard in rock.
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Michael Pilhofer (Music Theory for Dummies)
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In the 1960s both Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants turned to popular genres of music to provide songs for Christian worship. Roman Catholic songs tended to follow the folk idiom, using acoustical instruments such as guitar and flute, whereas evangelical Protestants turned to rock music, using electronic instruments.
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Frank C. Senn (Introduction to Christian Liturgy)
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While this signifier can be difficult to pin down with precision, it can clearly be heard in the records of Duane Eddy and many other guitarists of the period. It usually involves a relatively nondistorted electric guitar timbre articulated with a strong attack and a melody played on the lower strings. Reverberation is ubiquitous, and almost equally common were echo, amplifier tremolo, and use of the guitar’s vibrato bar. This overall guitar sound is often called a Fender sound, but that is a bit misleading, since Gretsch guitars were equally specialized for the purpose, and many other brands were also used. What makes the twang guitar interesting in topical terms is that it not only signified the western topic but also was key to a linked set of genres that intersect one another in complex ways: western, spy, and surf. Because these were all signified by overlapping musical features and in turn resemble one another in some of their broader connotations, we could speak of a twang guitar continuum: a range of topics that coalesced only shortly before psychedelia and were cognate with it in a variety of ways. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida point out that the twang guitar, often in a minor mode with a flat seventh, was a common factor between spaghetti western and Bond/spy scores in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would add surf guitar to the list, with its sonic experimentation and general relationship to fun, escape, and exoticism: “[The twang guitar] probably owes some of its immediate success as a spy sound to its similarity with various pre-rock ‘Viennese intrigue’ sounds like Anton Karas’s Third Man zither licks (1949). But in the 1962–64 period that produced The Virginian (1962), Dr. No (1963) and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), steely Fender guitar was well on its way to becoming an all-purpose excitement/adventure timbre” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 367).
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William Echard (Psychedelic Popular Music: A History through Musical Topic Theory (Musical Meaning and Interpretation))
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The prices paid for records by bands who were previously 'unknown' to PUNK ROCK collectors generally skyrockets after the group has been featured on a compilation series such as Back To Front. Within Europe, it is the Italian PUNK ROCK collectors who push up the prices, but what they are prepared to pay for obscure records pales in comparison to Japanese obsessives.
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Stewart Home (Cranked Up Really High - Genre Theory & Punk Rock)
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There is a long tradition of snobbish individuals attempting to derive social status from the cult of obscurity, and the results are at times hilarious. Series of punk compilation albums such as Killed By Death, or Back To Front appeal to the elitism of those who enjoy listening to records that their neighbours don't own. Of course, a lot of the music is damn fine but the fact that no one has heard of the bands enables those buying the records/CDs (or cassettes in the case of the Hardcore History series issued by Destroy Tapes of Hackney, London) to feel that they aren't part of the herd and are capable of searching out rare gems of culture.
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Stewart Home (Cranked Up Really High - Genre Theory & Punk Rock)
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Little Richard sang with the buoyancy of a young lark. His voice travelled with the speed and power of a gale but calmed the nerves of listening souls. Accompanied by the verve of earliness, he hit the keys of the piano with the potency of a blacksmith, thus forging the aura of iconic music. And through him, Rock ‘n’ roll, that intrepid genre, fused rippling melody with transcendent culture.
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Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
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I’m and aspiring author who writes in Fantasy and YA Genre. Although this year has been filled with many hardships, regrets it’s also taught me a lot. In 2018 I got a great opportunity to travel, met new people, set goals. Unfortunately due to stress, anxiety, lack of communication and fear of losing a great opportunity I lost it all. More importantly I lost a kind person, writer, and friend. I learned that I wasn’t as great of a person I had hoped to be.
When I’m upset I say things I don’t mean. There’s no excuse. I learnt that the hard way. I let my anxiety build up and I don’t make any progress. I wanted nothing more than to join the navy but I was so scared I’d lose my last chance from hurting my back. I was terrified but my anxiety was keeping me from progressing. So when I lost it and a friend I realized that was it. I hade several anxiety attacks for the first time. It was terrifying, I was shaken. But I learned we all have to hit rock bottom and I found mine.
I am determined to change, be a better person, overcome my anxiety and let go of the past. In the last 6 months I’ve started working, made huge progress in my book,won a writing contest and even published a few chapters/drafts of my first book. In 3 days it made it to #1 in Sorcery & Alchemy, # 14 in magic, #23 in fantasy, #26 in dark fantasy and many more categories. I started a writing blog about tips, writers block, overthinking, fear of rejection from publishers, and much more!
So fellow writers, out stories aren’t perfect and neither are the worlds we create. Let’s leaen from our mistakes and discover a world within together.
Cheers to a new year, 2019
Sincerely, gabby
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Note to Self