The bass playing on that track is superhuman Steve999. Great find! That's the good stuff. I love Parliament/Funkadelic/Sly Stone. I think Bootsy was as innovative as Zappa.
Castle, "art rock" was all that pretentious stuff from the 70s... Genesis, Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, etc. Frank Zappa summed it up by saying, "Art rock is neither."
I hope this gets you started! I'll keep to looking from a bass lens since that's where we started. There's a lot more out there! This is all just off the top of my head stuff.
I personally went from a journey where I listened to these types of things and I said I wanted more horns, I want more from the music harmonically, I want to hear people challenge the chord progressions in their solos, I want more sensitive drumming, I want some more interesting structure, etc., and that took in me the directions of jazz and classical.
Bootsy on the bass, driving the whole groove, and a whole lot of other um, unique, stuff going on:
Kool & the Gang hitting their stride before they hit the lottery:
Earth, Wind & Fire stretching out before or just about at the time they became a smooth as silk hit-making machine:
The Commodores stretching out in the soul and funk and disco genres before Lionel Richie left and played nice for the masses:
How can I leave out the Isley Brothers! Check out the guitar!
Jaco Pastorius, with the sensitivity to his band of a jazz musician and the band's solos on the edge of the changes in a way that challenges your ears. I think he committed suicide. One thing that is totally astonishing to me is he used a fret-less electric bass. You need some kind of ear to play a fretless electric bass--the strings are short enough that you need to hit the note just exactly with very little room for error as far as pitch goes. He would quote Bootsy licks in the middle of an intense solo at times!
Stanley Clarke, who can play jazz double bass great but electric bass was his introduction to fame. This is from his first album, very dense music, again building on Larry Graham and Bootsy Collins and in my mind a musical peer of Jaco Pastorius.
Ohio Players rhythm section (maybe I should have posted a song with their great horn section) stretching out the disco / soul genre with Far East Mississippi:
Something more modern with Marcus Miller. He is unique in that a lot of times he makes his bass the lead instrument. He's got Larry Graham's slap bass as a primary style but with a lot built around it in terms of jazz sensitivities. You can decide if he lives up to his influences. Papa was a rolling stone!
And Prince was moving into some new musical and social ground ahead of his time in the funk/disco genre before (in my view) he kind of softened up so he'd have more of a mainstream audience. Now Prince was moving in a direction with no drums, and I was uneasy with that, but I think this is a prescient and powerful cut. I've learned to try to listen past the fact that songs have no drums or have mechanical beats now, it's just part of modern music. The problem with the official video here is that it is not the whole LP song, which includes what a lot of people refer to as the serenity prayer and and odd set of lyrics after that. So here's a link to the full lyrics: http://www.metrolyrics.com/controversy-lyrics-prince.html
Watch Out! Unfunky UFO! Bootsy driving the whole groove again, and layers and layers of other creative or at the very least, let's say, unusual(?), stuff, this time with jazz-influenced horns:
Ten likes on that post Steve999. Lots to dig through and explore there. I think Ohio Players' Fire is a very revolutionary album. There are parts in that album that I can't figure out how they did it.
Sonitus, there's more musicianship in that Cider Drinker clip than there is in the synth noodling and programmed drums below it!
why would you keep insulting people and what they like? I get that you have your own standards for music(like anybody else), but right now what you're doing is art bigotry.
so, like we tell kids about food: "say you don't like it, not that it's disgusting".
Peanut butter, hot dog and ketchup sandwich.
There is such a thing as terrible ideas in creative works. All art is not equal.
Understanding music requires a certain amount of discernment about what works and what doesn't and being able to express the reasons for that in words. Someone else can disagree, and their analysis can be judged by how well they make their own case.
I value musical structure and musicianship. It isn't enough for me for music to just have musicality.
Feel free to apply criteria and judge music yourself. The best way to learn about music is to think about it. And the best way to think about it is to talk with other people about what is and isn't good. You can feel free to criticize music I think is good. Explain to me why you don't think it's good. I'll learn.
Music can be discussed analytically just like science can. You don't get mad if the experiment doesn't go the way you want it to. You gather evidence and come up with a hypothesis to explain it.
Its sound science not a music appreciation thread. Evaluate the music double blind, then show us a graph proving its good, then we talk. Course brian eno is crap, thats been thoroughly discussed already.
Feel free to apply criteria and judge music yourself. The best way to learn about music is to think about it. And the best way to think about it is to talk with other people about what is and isn't good. You can feel free to criticize music I think is good. Explain to me why you don't think it's good. I'll learn.
Music can be discussed analytically just like science can. You don't get mad if the experiment doesn't go the way you want it to. You gather evidence and come up with a hypothesis to explain it.
There are constant debates in Sound Science about the audible effects of cable and you think we can come up with a common law of good music? I wish you luck with that one
I’m not a big fan of criticizing/analyzing anyone’s taste in music - way too subjective, even if structure is part of the discussion. I do agree that more analytical detail on why we do and don’t like what’s posted would be more productive than Band A stinks. Or Genre B is just a bunch of meaningless doodling.
If you take this argument to its logical edges it will make your head spin. It's not just restricted to music, but to painting, sculpture, dance, you name it. Honestly I hit a point where I say come on, that's a line on a canvas or a rather pointless blob or I really don't see any skill in what you're doing, that's in my mind, but I'm kind of live and let live, unless someone engages me. So like with the synth stuff up there, someone posted some synth stuff, so I posted some synth stuff that I thought was kind of near the artistic apex for that stuff. Now if a person wants they can listen on their own and see what they think and expand and take it in and check more of it out or just think to themselves that's not my thing or tell me why they don't like it and introduce me to something they think hits an artistic apex. I listened to both of the other synth tracks posted twice in full. I think I see what they are going for. On the other hand, you know, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney and Prince played all or nearly all of the music on some of their albums and it required a lot of practice and hard work and perfectionism and musical ability and knowledge about effective musical structures and melodic creativity and harmonic knowledge and courage as far as the social messages go. So if someone has something counter to that point of view feel free, but good luck on that one. And if someone wants to say there's just as much to the two synth tracks posted up there let's hear it. Now if someone just says, hey I like that, it makes me feel good, well that's cool with me. But you know at some point let's not pretend that the same level of craftsmanship is being applied. But if it makes you feel good, honestly, I'm into that, enjoy it.
So I want to introduce you to what I feel is objectively the greatest music of all time:
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