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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Vlürch wrote: 13 Jan 2020 03:59 Oh yeah, I like it too, but prefer the uvular ones at least adjacent to non-high back vowels (both the voiceless and voiced ones). I'm not too big a fan of the uvular trill, though, because so many of the languages that have it have it as the only rhotic... that's one of the reasons I like Amdo Tibetan, although I guess technically speaking it has /ʁ/ [ʀ] and it's not considered a rhotic, but meh.
IIRC, Verdurian has /ʁ/! I think Verdurian would be a pretty awesome language if there weren't so many words that sounded just like their Germanic or Romance equivalents that it was impossible to suspend my disbelief that this was a language spoken on another planet.
Khemehekis wrote: 12 Jan 2020 01:06First of all, I should mention that the comment was identical to one a poster on Student Zone (a now-defunct forum for teens and twentysomethings), where I shared my rock musical, posted. That poster had a "tag team" partner who was really into a few certain sports teams. A few weeks after one of the two posters made his "looking like a queer" comment on Student Zone, he and his friend were both banned (maybe they were sockpuppets of each other?), so knowing that that kind of "looking like a queer" idiocy led someone to get banned was good release.
Ah, I see. And yeah, that sounds like they may have been sockpuppets...
As I recall, they went by AtlantaSportsEan and GotDatSwagger.
Ouch, biting wrists sounds painful and dangerous, but I feel like I can kind of relate because I used to cut my arms (nowadays I only hit myself in the head and am trying to stop doing that too).
I hit myself in the word whenever I hear or read someone use the word "whxxps". (I had to censor the vowels out with X's, so I don't cause myself to slam my forehead by writing it.) I was never a cutter, but I've bitten myself since I was about 10.
Anyway, props to you for calling him out! [:)] I don't think I've ever had the balls to do that... I mean, nowadays I don't care if someone calls me homophobic slurs or whatever since I've fully accepted that I'm bi and that the only ones who can give me shit for it are LGBT people, but like, I still marvel at people being brave enough to actually confront bullies and assholes, especially without resorting to being assholes themselves. So often it's like, one person acts like an asshole and then the person they were assholy towards reacts by acting like an asshole too... it has to take real strength to not stoop to their level.
Thanks. I think it's really bad when someone uses a homophobic insult to attack a straight person. It implies that there's something wrong with homo- or bisexuality. Imagine if someone on the Internet wrote, "You worthless nxgger!" every time a (Caucasian!) person did or said something he thought was stupid or lame. He would get banned from the forum pretty quickly. Too bad it doesn't happen as quickly with homophobia.

And then, when someone directs that homophobic insult at someone who actually is LGBT, well, that's outright hate speech. I wouldn't resort to responding to "looking like a queer" with "You fucking breeder!", because bigotry in the opposite direction is also wrong (like if an African-American flamed a White guy by writing "You worthless hxnkey!")
Khemehekis wrote: 12 Jan 2020 01:06I probably get a different audience from you. Rather than the "metalhead/nerd/edgy" demographic, my audience is the "typical Millennial/pop-rock fan/Youth Culturalist/rebel against social norms/anarchist" demographic.
Mmh, yeah, that of course has something to do with it. A lot of metalheads tend to be pretty assholy, especially ones who just listen to metal but don't make music themselves...
Yeah. There's a reason I called it the "metalhead/nerd/edgy" demographic. A lot of metalheads seem to be edgelords, obsessed with being as edgy as possible. Like they'll put stuff with an attitude up on their MySpace pages, occasionally interspersing it with something about cute little kittens, just to be ironic (and therefore add to the edginess).

There was this guy on Teleboards (a now-defunct Canadian-owned forum) who went by Dragon of Blood. Dragon was obsessed with a metal band called Iced Earth. Dragon of Blood was an appropriate name, as he would breathe flames draconinely at as many other posters as he could, and was friends with a few other ierks who liked to flame newbies. He would repeatedly address me as "You worthless faggot" (I'm not even sure if he knew I was bisexual). His posts were filled with references to pedophilia, beating people up, and raping corpses. Dragon liked to accuse other posters of being pedophiles, which due to Teleboards' censorware, appeared as "feltching feltching feltching feltching phile".
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 12 Jan 2020 01:06I do get positive comments (one that has now disappeared was from a girl named Robin who said, "Love the look too, man") as well as negative, so those keep my spirits boosted.
Of course, yeah, positive comments are always nice and can counter the negative ones. It's funny how nowadays the vast majority of comments even on Deformed Elephant Surgery stuff are positive, when in the past the negativity sometimes escalated pretty far. I'm not sure why, but I'd like to think that maybe in part it could mean that metalheads in general are starting to not be as turned off by random happy electronic shit and autotuned vocals and whatnot... but more likely it's just that the ones that hate that type of stuff don't go out of their way to find any just to call it shit anymore due to reduced attention spans or something like that.
I had to google Deformed Elephant Surgery. I had never heard of them, and it seems they're so obscure that Amazon doesn't even carry their music. Weird stuff; I can't tell whether their noise is supposed to be upbeat, sad, or angry.

I remember reading a comment on Quora in a post on different high school subcultures, stating that metalheads feel as if they were born into the wrong century. Obviously they're not listening to Imagine Dragons or Bastille, let alone Justin Bieber . . .
Khemehekis wrote: 12 Jan 2020 01:06Other comments like the "hurensohn" comment are just generic abuse that doesn't actually comment on any aspect of my song nor my singing, nor even my dress nor the way I carry myself, so they don't really bother me.
Hmm, makes sense but does that mean it wouldn't bother you just as much if someone vehemently accuses you of being something you're not? [:O]
Well, sometimes a comment of the sort you asked about does pertain to my creative material. When I posted the synopsis and song lyrics to The Bittersweet Generation (a musical set at a fictional high school called Dulcevida) on fora, two separate girls accused me of rupping off Disney's High School Musical! I had never seen HSM at the time, so I most decidedly was not ripping it off. The first girl thought it was a rip-off merely because (a) it was a musical (b) set at a high school. She told me, "It's been done" and "come up with a more original idea for a musical".

After I mentioned that (a) I had never seen HSM, (b) I had been working on my musical long before HSM was a glimmer in Kenny Ortega's eye, (c) The Bittersweet Generation focuses on different kinds of kids (skaters, hipsters, preppies, trendies, aspiring rock stars) at a different kind of high school (instead of the Boomer-teen-era social hierarchy of High School Musical), (d) The Bittersweet Generation was aimed at an older audience than HSM, (e) my musical dealt with different issues (like youth rights, social conventions, civil disobedience, homosexuality, and generational differences) than HSM, (f) the conflicts that drive my musical are between students and faculty instead of between thespian students and non-thespian students, and (g) if someone decided, after the first musical to be set in New York City, that New York "had already been done", we would have missed out on West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, A Chorus Line, and RENT . . . that girl replied by writing, "Don't get your panties in a bunch". Hello? Boys don't wear panties!

Another accusation (from the second girl, who also wrote, "Are you trying to rewrite HSM or something?") was that "all the characters are stock", but I think that perception came from the original way I introduced the characters' personality with a few words when they first appeared in my play, rather than a true assessment at the degree of originality of my characters. I have since taken the direct-characterization descriptions out of my libretto, and I haven't heard that criticism since.

And another possibility I'd like to add to Salmoneus' list of reasons criticisms and flames on the Net might bother someone: He feels existential frustration at the thought of being misunderstood or misinterpreted. I can't tell you how many times I rushed to correct a completely barking-up-the-wrong tree misinterpretation of something I wrote. Luckily, on this forum, we have a House Rule that says, "Don't put words in other people's mouths", but even here, it still happens occasionally.
Last edited by Khemehekis on 11 Apr 2020 07:44, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Vlürch »

Reyzadren wrote: 13 Jan 2020 06:04I have never received a dislike or negative comment on any of my videos on my youtube channel before
How is that even possible?! [:O] I'm glad to hear, though, of course.
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00I hit myself in the word whenever I hear or read someone use the word "whxxps". (I had to censor the vowels out with X's, so I don't cause myself to slam my forehead by writing it.)
That's... that sounds like it must be hard. [O.O]
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00Yeah. There's a reason I called it the "metalhead/nerd/edgy" demographic. A lot of metalheads seem to be edgelords, obsessed with being as edgy as possible.
True, but it's not all there is to it. Some metalheads are the farthest thing from edgelords, too, and many metal musicians are only edgelords when it comes to their public persona.
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00occasionally interspersing it with something about cute little kittens, just to be ironic (and therefore add to the edginess).
Eh, who doesn't like cute little kittens? Just because someone is an asshole doesn't mean they can't like nice things, too. Someone merely obsessed with being edgy would probably talk about wanting to disembowel said kittens or something like that, so I'd think it's more likely that they just like kittens and are self-aware enough to realise that being edgy 24/7 just isn't fun, and maybe cute little kittens are the perfect outlet in the public eye since, again, who doesn't like cute little kittens?
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00There was this guy on Teleboards (a now-defunct Canadian-owned forum) who went by Dragon of Blood. Dragon was obsessed with a metal band called Iced Earth. Dragon of Blood was an appropriate name, as he would breathe flames draconinely at as many other posters as he could, and was friends with a few other ierks who liked to flame newbies. He would repeatedly address me as "You worthless faggot" (I'm not even sure if he knew I was bisexual). His posts were filled with references to pedophilia, beating people up, and raping corpses. Dragon liked to accuse other posters of being pedophiles, which due to Teleboards' censorware, appeared as "feltching feltching feltching feltching phile".
I seriously hope he was like 13 or something, because if he was older than that... well, you know. His username makes him sound like a 13-year-old, too. Obviously being a kid shouldn't be an excuse to be an asshole, either, but it seems like kids are always going to be assholes until they have some kind of experience that dramatically alters their way of thinking... which doesn't happen for everyone, so some people remain unwashable assholes for the entirety of their lives.
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00I had to google Deformed Elephant Surgery. I had never heard of them, and it seems they're so obscure that Amazon doesn't even carry their music. Weird stuff; I can't tell whether their noise is supposed to be upbeat, sad, or angry.
...it's my band, which I thought was obvious from the context but I guess not. It was a solo project until last year, and when people gave negative reviews and even sent me death threats and shit, I took it pretty hard. Obviously the negativity had a lot to do with the fact that I started out doing the kind of cybergrind/goregrind that everyone and their grandma was doing on Myspace at the time (sometimes called myspacegrind in hindsight) but began to include deathcore influences early on (just after somewhat integrating into the "community"), then stuff like dubstep parts and autotuned clean vocals and shit, which seemed like natural progression to me but nobody else saw it that way.

In the process, practically all the old fans turned into haters and there was no influx of new fans; whenever my shit was mentioned anywhere, it mostly drew in more haters. In late 2012 and 2013 that began to change (at least in direct interactions), with a shift in the typical reaction from "this is shit, fuck you" to "this is weird, stop it", and by 2015 "this is weird, I like it". The new EP, which was a collab with two guitarists, has gotten only positive and neutral feedback so far, which... well, I could've never expected, but it's also necessary to note that it has gotten much less attention than any previous release...

As for what it's supposed to be, well, it's mostly just supposed to be weird. If you don't mind me asking, which song(s?) did you listen to?
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00I remember reading a comment on Quora in a post on different high school subcultures, stating that metalheads feel as if they were born into the wrong century. Obviously they're not listening to Imagine Dragons or Bastille, let alone Justin Bieber . . .
I don't think that really makes sense tbh, considering metal didn't even exist until relatively recently, and while the type of people who listen to only metal are actually rare (and there are even metalheads who like Justin Bieber out there), most metalheads prefer metal over other genres (and often a specific subgenre of metal over other subgenres; the animosity between subgenres can get pretty bad, although that seems to be less of an issue now than it was even just a couple of years ago) so they wouldn't even want to live without metal. Like, of course there are those who larp as medieval warriors and whatnot, but even most of those types are self-aware enough to know that they wouldn't actually want to live in the middle ages or whatever.

Since there are metalheads who like other genres too, metal has never been entirely separate from other genres. It's becoming more evident even in the subgenres that are traditionally considered to be at least in part defined by what they lack rather than what they include, as in they're merging into one another (often with influences from non-metal genres as well), with the effect that nowadays it's often impossible to neatly categorise many bands into one subgenre.

Obviously the increase in influence from non-metal genres and the blurring of the lines between different metal subgenres has led to more openness to experimentation and whatnot, but it seems like non-metal artists embracing metal influences is still viewed negatively in a lot of cases. For the normalisation of electronic elements and "cringy" lyrical themes and whatnot, the impact of Babymetal can't be ignored (I'm still surprised by the fact that they made it into the hearts of so many metalheads, considering at first the majority of metalheads hated them with a passion), but I feel like a lot of the metalheads who accept them accept them because they subconsciate the fact that they were teenage girl poppers who weren't into metal before and the band was literally started as a gimmick, since so many non-metal artists/bands still get shit from so many metalheads for incorporating metal elements in their music; if they truly accepted non-metalheads picking up metal influences, then logically that wouldn't happen every single time...

Maybe eventually the lines between what's metal and what's not metal will blur similarly to the blurring of the lines between metal subgenres, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I mean, some bands that weren't considered metal earlier are increasingly being reconsidered as being metal bands, even their early material, but the opposite is happening just as much so the categorisation of bands into ones with "metal roots" and ones with "non-metal roots" is probably only going to get more and more confusing with time. That might be a good thing, though, especially if it leads to more bands not caring about whether they're considered metal or not and just doing whatever they want.

...and I'm rambling again. [>_<]
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00Well, sometimes a comment of the sort you asked about does pertain to my creative material. When I posted the synopsis and song lyrics to The Bittersweet Generation (a musical set at a fictional high school called Dulcevida) on fora, two separate girls accused me of rupping off Disney's High School Musical! I had never seen HSM at the time, so I most decidedly was not ripping it off. The first girl thought it was a rip-off merely because (a) it was a musical (b) set at a high school. She told me, "It's been done" and "come up with a more original idea for a musical".
Accusations of ripping off something are a universal part of doing anything creative, I think. Just because something has been done before doesn't mean it's not worth doing again, and there's always bound to be something new even in the most "rehashed" art. Like, even if two people tried to make the exact same thing, it'd end up being somewhat different because the people that made it were different individuals. I'd like to think culture doesn't affect that too much, but obviously it does to some degree, too... but even literal identical twins who were never two minutes apart making the "same" piece of art would end up making two different pieces of art.

Furthermore, very few things are ever truly original. If you could come up with something truly original, something that has nothing in common with anything that's been done before, you'd be an absolute genius. Usually even the most "original" art is "indebted" to earlier art, and it's becoming harder and harder to make anything that'd be considered original or unique with the passage of time and the increase in the human population, and the increase in artists and especially the increase in artists with the ability to get their art out there.

Of course striving for originality is good, but I feel like having it as the primary goal is more than likely going to lead to disappointment. Most of what you can think of has already been thought of before, and even if you're among the first to do it, there's more than likely going to be somebody who did it a little bit earlier or at around the same time. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, even if you know that somebody did it a little bit earlier.
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00Hello? Boys don't wear panties!
Well, some might.
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00I can't tell you how many times I rushed to correct a completely barking-up-the-wrong tree misinterpretation of something I wrote.
Oh, yeah, same. Nowadays I've mostly (but not entirely) learned to not do that, haha.

PS: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH sorry for how insanely long this post got... [:x]

EDIT: Sorry for editing out more than half of the post, I just realised it might count as political even though I personally don't think so. I don't want to risk getting banned from this forum since conlanging is one of the only things I'm into and this forum is one of the only social interaction I have...
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00
I hit myself in the word whenever I hear or read someone use the word "whxxps". (I had to censor the vowels out with X's, so I don't cause myself to slam my forehead by writing it.) I was never a cutter, but I've bitten myself since I was about 10.
: /

We may have a few things in common. I got over it, and I wish you will too.


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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Vlürch wrote: 19 Jan 2020 10:56
Reyzadren wrote: 13 Jan 2020 06:04I have never received a dislike or negative comment on any of my videos on my youtube channel before
How is that even possible?! [:O] I'm glad to hear, though, of course.
Shh, I shall let you know. *whispers*

People hardly visit my channel, it has few views [xD]
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00
Khemehekis wrote: 12 Jan 2020 01:06I probably get a different audience from you. Rather than the "metalhead/nerd/edgy" demographic, my audience is the "typical Millennial/pop-rock fan/Youth Culturalist/rebel against social norms/anarchist" demographic.
Mmh, yeah, that of course has something to do with it. A lot of metalheads tend to be pretty assholy, especially ones who just listen to metal but don't make music themselves...
Yeah. There's a reason I called it the "metalhead/nerd/edgy" demographic. A lot of metalheads seem to be edgelords, obsessed with being as edgy as possible.
Hmm. Depends on what you mean by "edgy", I suppose... but IME, most metalheads are among the least likely people to be dicks to others for no reason. I mean, sure, there are a few to whom that doesn't apply - and those few tend to be the loudest and most obnoxious of the bunch - but that's the case with any sufficiently large group of people. Especially on the internet, where those who've got nothing better to do with their lives than to be loud and obnoxious on the internet will naturally have both more time and more willingness to post stuff than basically anyone else.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by sangi39 »

I think Metal, especially the more extreme genres, is where you'll find the loudest "our music in the best" but they're not the majority by far, just the most noticeable, which, as Aszev has said, is true of a number of large followings.

See also the Metal Thread for basically this exact discussion.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Vlürch wrote: 19 Jan 2020 10:56
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00I hit myself in the word whenever I hear or read someone use the word "whxxps". (I had to censor the vowels out with X's, so I don't cause myself to slam my forehead by writing it.)
That's... that sounds like it must be hard. [O.O]
Very. But I haven't injured my brain doing it (yet). Typically I do it until I feel the force, right in the center of my forehead.
Vlürch wrote: 19 Jan 2020 10:56
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00occasionally interspersing it with something about cute little kittens, just to be ironic (and therefore add to the edginess).
Eh, who doesn't like cute little kittens? Just because someone is an asshole doesn't mean they can't like nice things, too. Someone merely obsessed with being edgy would probably talk about wanting to disembowel said kittens or something like that, so I'd think it's more likely that they just like kittens and are self-aware enough to realise that being edgy 24/7 just isn't fun, and maybe cute little kittens are the perfect outlet in the public eye since, again, who doesn't like cute little kittens?
This is a good point; I didn't think of it this way.
Vlürch wrote: 19 Jan 2020 10:56 I seriously hope he was like 13 or something, because if he was older than that... well, you know. His username makes him sound like a 13-year-old, too. Obviously being a kid shouldn't be an excuse to be an asshole, either, but it seems like kids are always going to be assholes until they have some kind of experience that dramatically alters their way of thinking... which doesn't happen for everyone, so some people remain unwashable assholes for the entirety of their lives.
Dragon of Blood gave me the mpression of being older, at least 16.

I stopped being an asshole in my teens after being the victim of too much repression from socially conformist adults who put social rules like "Boys can't well their hair long", "Take your hat off inside a classroom", or "Don't be gay" on a pedestal, which caused me to think about what the difference between those and real moral rules was, which in turn caused me to aim to live a morally just life.
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00I had to google Deformed Elephant Surgery. I had never heard of them, and it seems they're so obscure that Amazon doesn't even carry their music. Weird stuff; I can't tell whether their noise is supposed to be upbeat, sad, or angry.
...it's my band, which I thought was obvious from the context but I guess not.
Oh. I had no idea; I didn't pick up on that. I can watch more of your videos on YouTube and add insightful comments there, if you'd like me to.
then stuff like dubstep parts and autotuned clean vocals and shit, which seemed like natural progression to me but nobody else saw it that way.
It seems to me that a lot of "harder" or more connoisseurial music fans don't like AutoTune at all, so maybe the AutoTuning was turning them off?
As for what it's supposed to be, well, it's mostly just supposed to be weird. If you don't mind me asking, which song(s?) did you listen to?
Oh, so I was right on target, then.

I listened to "Human Being".

It's also harder to discern the mood of a musical piece, it seems, when there's not a human voice singing it. Consider, for instance, how Adele's or Pink's voices put emotion into their songs.
I don't think that really makes sense tbh, considering metal didn't even exist until relatively recently,
Would you say metal started in the early seventies with Black Sabbath? (Fun fact: I once had a dream wherein I was flipping stations on a television, and one of the stations was a heavy metal station that was debuting a new Ozzy Osbourne video for a song called "Nasty Surname". That was the only time Ozzy Osbourne has appeared in one of my dreams.) And if metalheads had been born centuries ago, they probably would be listening to German or Norse drinking songs, I bet.
For the normalisation of electronic elements and "cringy" lyrical themes and whatnot, the impact of Babymetal can't be ignored (I'm still surprised by the fact that they made it into the hearts of so many metalheads, considering at first the majority of metalheads hated them with a passion), but I feel like a lot of the metalheads who accept them accept them because they subconsciate the fact that they were teenage girl poppers who weren't into metal before and the band was literally started as a gimmick, since so many non-metal artists/bands still get shit from so many metalheads for incorporating metal elements in their music; if they truly accepted non-metalheads picking up metal influences, then logically that wouldn't happen every single time...
I've never heard of Babymetal. But their story sounds funny!
Accusations of ripping off something are a universal part of doing anything creative, I think. Just because something has been done before doesn't mean it's not worth doing again, and there's always bound to be something new even in the most "rehashed" art. Like, even if two people tried to make the exact same thing, it'd end up being somewhat different because the people that made it were different individuals. I'd like to think culture doesn't affect that too much, but obviously it does to some degree, too... but even literal identical twins who were never two minutes apart making the "same" piece of art would end up making two different pieces of art.

Furthermore, very few things are ever truly original. If you could come up with something truly original, something that has nothing in common with anything that's been done before, you'd be an absolute genius. Usually even the most "original" art is "indebted" to earlier art, and it's becoming harder and harder to make anything that'd be considered original or unique with the passage of time and the increase in the human population, and the increase in artists and especially the increase in artists with the ability to get their art out there.

Of course striving for originality is good, but I feel like having it as the primary goal is more than likely going to lead to disappointment. Most of what you can think of has already been thought of before, and even if you're among the first to do it, there's more than likely going to be somebody who did it a little bit earlier or at around the same time. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, even if you know that somebody did it a little bit earlier.
Your comments remind me of an answer one Ted Boucher wrote to my question about The Bittersweet Generation and High School Musical on Quora:
Ted Boucher, If you create music, you’re a composer. I do, so I am. wrote: Cliches aren’t bad, otherwise “High School Musical” wouldn’t have worked.

Were there any characters or story bits that we hadn’t seen a million times, in TV shows about high school running back to “Mr. Novak”, “Room 222”, “ Welcome Back Kotter”, and movies like “To Sir With Love” and “The Blackboard Jungle”? As for the music and dance, didn’t it get covered, or perhaps beaten to death in “Fame”?

And anyway, didn’t that “Let’s get the gang together and put on a show” thing get a start (sort of) with films like “Summer Stock”, or “Holiday Inn”, and get knocked off in a whole bunch of Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney” films?”

And really, wasn’t “Bye Bye, Birdie” a satirical rock and roll up date that was, in turn, knocked off with “Grease”?

So when the Disney folks handed Kenny Ortega HSM, they weren’t expecting a lot, just another kids movie that travelled over a well-trodden path. This was Kenny Ortega, tho, and he took all those hackneyed, worn out cliches and made them shine. It was such a big hit that it stood on its own, and “people” forgot how many times it had all been recycled.

And then came “Glee” whose creators claimed, with straight faces, to be unaware of HSM. And no one at Fox, none of the crew, none of the actors, writers, choreographers, musicians, nor any of the hangers-on, mentioned it? Really?

Bottom line, Even if yr musical is a “cliche”, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, it probably helps the audience connect to it. There are, maybe, 37 story lines that recur in dramas and films. May not even that many. It isn’t the story that is important. It’s how you tell it.

Every writer has a different voice, and no one tells the same story the same way. If you don’t believe me, ask a cop whose trying to interview witnesses at the scene of an accident.
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00Hello? Boys don't wear panties!
Well, some might.
Oh, you're right. I forgot about transvestites and people with kinks. Even I wear sunglasses that come from the ladies' section.
EDIT: Sorry for editing out more than half of the post, I just realised it might count as political even though I personally don't think so. I don't want to risk getting banned from this forum since conlanging is one of the only things I'm into and this forum is one of the only social interaction I have...
I didn't see the part before you edited it out. I'm guessing it had something to do with the part of my post about calling people fxggots and telling (Caucasian) people "you worthless nxgger" because you think something they said was stupid?
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Xonen wrote: 20 Jan 2020 21:53
Khemehekis wrote: 19 Jan 2020 04:00
Khemehekis wrote: 12 Jan 2020 01:06I probably get a different audience from you. Rather than the "metalhead/nerd/edgy" demographic, my audience is the "typical Millennial/pop-rock fan/Youth Culturalist/rebel against social norms/anarchist" demographic.
Mmh, yeah, that of course has something to do with it. A lot of metalheads tend to be pretty assholy, especially ones who just listen to metal but don't make music themselves...
Yeah. There's a reason I called it the "metalhead/nerd/edgy" demographic. A lot of metalheads seem to be edgelords, obsessed with being as edgy as possible.
Hmm. Depends on what you mean by "edgy", I suppose... but IME, most metalheads are among the least likely people to be dicks to others for no reason. I mean, sure, there are a few to whom that doesn't apply - and those few tend to be the loudest and most obnoxious of the bunch - but that's the case with any sufficiently large group of people. Especially on the internet, where those who've got nothing better to do with their lives than to be loud and obnoxious on the internet will naturally have both more time and more willingness to post stuff than basically anyone else.
By the word "edgy", I'm thinking of the tough, "Pain? Bring it on!", liking-skulls-and-spiders-and-flies-and-blood, playing-the-guitar-loud-and-making-your-fingers-bleed persona. Being a jerk can be edgy too, but that's not the only way to be edgy.

One of my best friends from high school, Andreas, was a metalhead and he was always nice. Since (a) there weren't many metalheads at Campolindo High and they weren't jerks and (b) I was friends with one of them, I never really encountered any assholic metalheads as a high school student.

It wasn't until I started getting onto Teleboards and 4thkingdom.com (then 4degreez.com, a website famous for its psych tests), that I encountered assholic metalheads like Dragon of Blood and 4thkingdom's infamous Shadow (a tragophile who had a pet goat named Summer whom he bragged about making love too and would "butt" into every conversation to bring up a hircine angle). I don't normally come across many metalheads except on 4thkingdom and the conlanging community's Internet presence, both of which have a lot of them (in this survey alone we have eight metalheads out of fewer than thirty respondents). 4thkingdom used to have a lot of jerk metalheads in addition to the nice ones, but then Shadow got banned and the other jerks got bored when the character of the board changed, and CBB is mostly nice people except for some of the users who have already been banned (DrGeoffStandish comes to mind, and I don't recall him liking metal).
Last edited by Khemehekis on 04 Feb 2020 07:30, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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sangi39 wrote: 20 Jan 2020 22:20 I think Metal, especially the more extreme genres, is where you'll find the loudest "our music in the best" but they're not the majority by far, just the most noticeable, which, as Aszev has said, is true of a number of large followings.
Heh, I think the loudest "our music is the best" people are the fans of tween pop, like *NSYNC and Justin Bieber. There are tens of thousands of 12-year-old girls who are completely convinced that Danny Wood/Taylor Hanson/Nick Carter/Nick Jonas/Justin Bieber/Harry Styles is the best musician in the universe.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08Oh. I had no idea; I didn't pick up on that. I can watch more of your videos on YouTube and add insightful comments there, if you'd like me to.
If you feel like it, but if it's not the kind of music you're at all into... well, why would you subject yourself to that? [:P]
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08It seems to me that a lot of "harder" or more connoisseurial music fans don't like AutoTune at all, so maybe the AutoTuning was turning them off?
Yeah, of course that's at least a part of it.
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08I listened to "Human Being".
Oh God no, hahaha, that's an ancient shitty song from 2010 and the only reason it's even on Youtube is that I already uploaded it back then, but for some reason Youtube had some weird glitch and it and another song from the same album somehow got "uploaded" in 2017 or whatever even though they'd been there since 2010, and I figured it was fine since nobody would ever listen to those two... but well.

Honestly, I'd say that for anyone who isn't really into that kind of stuff there's no point in listening to anything except the collab EP from last year, if that, but it's the most "polished" and "sensical" so yeah. Still, expecting something meaningful is the wrong starting point because it just isn't "meaningful" musically or lyrically, and that's kind of the point. I mean, like, I did write some lyrics with very un-deep "societal commentary" (child molestation is bad, virtual reality shouldn't replace reality, etc.) so maybe it's like 1% "meaningful" but mostly it's just shitty 13-year-old level shit that's supposed to be funny but nobody finds it funny except me.
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08It's also harder to discern the mood of a musical piece, it seems, when there's not a human voice singing it.
Eh, instrumental music can be just as emotional as music with vocals, especially if it includes stuff like beautiful guitar solos. Personally I don't think emotion or meaning is necessary anyway, but I'm not really into instrumental music either, although for different reasons. Anyway, if you were referring to that particular song, there are vocals in it (just growls and they're pitchshifted down, though) but I don't even remember what the lyrics were about, something about how horrible humanity is I guess...
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08Consider, for instance, how Adele's or Pink's voices put emotion into their songs.
True, but emotion can't really be reliably heard in like 90% of cases. Like, sure, you can hear if something sounds emotional, but ultimately you wouldn't be able to tell if it was real emotion or not, the same way actors in films can make you feel emotions just by acting. Maybe it's an assholy perspective, but I think music is entertainment. Although I'll agree that music that sounds truly emotional can make you feel all kinds of emotions, you still wouldn't necessarily know whether it's really coming from the hearts of the people making it... and why should it matter? I don't think it does, ultimately, because the emotion is in the listener's ears (or heart (or I guess technically brain). I mean, even if you hear a truly emotional vocal performance or guitar solo or whatever, you're not going to be feeling the exact same emotions that the singer or guitarist or whatever was feeling at the time of recording it. You may feel similar emotions because you project your own personal experiences on it or whatever, but music isn't magic that allows people to step into each other's shoes perfectly and understand all their struggles and whatever.
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08Would you say metal started in the early seventies with Black Sabbath?
They were a huge part of it, of course, but even the Beatles played a part in it (their song Helter Skelter could well be argued to be some kind of metal), and Jimi Hendrix, etc. I don't think it's possible to single out any band or artist or anything as the inventor of metal, just like it's not possible to single out any bands or artists as the originators of any subgenres; there are always innovators and often one or two that came first, but pioneers in any given style will inevitably end up influencing each other regardless of whether or not they even realise it, evolving the sound that comes to be a new genre.

Obviously the innovators are always the ones that should get the credit for inventing a new genre, but the "non-innovative pinoeers" shouldn't be forgotten either. In my (unpopular?) opinion that includes even bands and artists who came quite a long time later than the innovators if they did something that was rooted in the work of the innovators but added something new to it while clearly keeping it in the same general style. Arguing about who invented what and when is kind of pointless, when it could just be concluded that nothing comes into being from a void. Doesn't mean the innovators are going to get any less respect or credit for being innovators, just that there were also pioneers besides them. I think that same applies to everything, not just music but also other kinds of art and even scientific research.
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08I've never heard of Babymetal.
How?! They're great! If you haven't listened to them by now, you definitely should. Their first album is their "weirdest" and pretty "cringy", but in a charming way, so I'd suggest that just because it's so much fun and they were clearly not very serious yet. At the very least you should listen to this song imho, in my opinion it's one of their best. Their actual diehard fans may disagree (or not?), I don't know, don't care. It's just pure fun.
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08I didn't see the part before you edited it out. I'm guessing it had something to do with the part of my post about calling people fxggots and telling (Caucasian) people "you worthless nxgger" because you think something they said was stupid?
It was about a lot more than that, mostly metal-related actually, but also mental health and whatnot. I don't have a problem with opening up about mental health problems publicly at all in general (myself or when others do it), but when politics start to bleed into it... well, I'd rather not go there on a forum where I've already stirred shit with political posts way too many times for me to still not be banned, since that's the one subject where it can easily get the most controversial. I mean, for me depression stems like 50% or more from politics, so... again, I felt like it's better if I avoid replying to those parts of your post, because otherwise I'd end up saying something political that would probably be offensive and I don't want to risk that.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08I listened to "Human Being".
Oh God no, hahaha, that's an ancient shitty song from 2010 and the only reason it's even on Youtube is that I already uploaded it back then, but for some reason Youtube had some weird glitch and it and another song from the same album somehow got "uploaded" in 2017 or whatever even though they'd been there since 2010, and I figured it was fine since nobody would ever listen to those two... but well.
Ouch! >_< Looks as if I picked the wrong song. I was never able to get into grindcore, and have hardly ever heard any anyway.
Vlürch wrote:Honestly, I'd say that for anyone who isn't really into that kind of stuff there's no point in listening to anything except the collab EP from last year, if that, but it's the most "polished" and "sensical" so yeah. Still, expecting something meaningful is the wrong starting point because it just isn't "meaningful" musically or lyrically, and that's kind of the point. I mean, like, I did write some lyrics with very un-deep "societal commentary" (child molestation is bad, virtual reality shouldn't replace reality, etc.) so maybe it's like 1% "meaningful" but mostly it's just shitty 13-year-old level shit that's supposed to be funny but nobody finds it funny except me.
I couldn't make out any of the lyrics. Given titles like "Pink Unicorn Chaos Rainbow" and "Lepidopterous Inundation", I'm guessing the aesthetic you're going for is supposed to be rainbows-and-unicorns, much like the Babymetal sound?

Three of the responses on one of your videos were "Blarg". What does the word "blarg" mean? Is it something metalheads say?
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08It's also harder to discern the mood of a musical piece, it seems, when there's not a human voice singing it.
Eh, instrumental music can be just as emotional as music with vocals, especially if it includes stuff like beautiful guitar solos. Personally I don't think emotion or meaning is necessary anyway, but I'm not really into instrumental music either, although for different reasons. Anyway, if you were referring to that particular song, there are vocals in it (just growls and they're pitchshifted down, though) but I don't even remember what the lyrics were about, something about how horrible humanity is I guess...
Do you have the lyrics to "Human Being" written down, or are they lost forever?
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08Consider, for instance, how Adele's or Pink's voices put emotion into their songs.
True, but emotion can't really be reliably heard in like 90% of cases. Like, sure, you can hear if something sounds emotional, but ultimately you wouldn't be able to tell if it was real emotion or not, the same way actors in films can make you feel emotions just by acting. Maybe it's an assholy perspective, but I think music is entertainment. Although I'll agree that music that sounds truly emotional can make you feel all kinds of emotions, you still wouldn't necessarily know whether it's really coming from the hearts of the people making it... and why should it matter? I don't think it does, ultimately, because the emotion is in the listener's ears (or heart (or I guess technically brain)). I mean, even if you hear a truly emotional vocal performance or guitar solo or whatever, you're not going to be feeling the exact same emotions that the singer or guitarist or whatever was feeling at the time of recording it. You may feel similar emotions because you project your own personal experiences on it or whatever, but music isn't magic that allows people to step into each other's shoes perfectly and understand all their struggles and whatever.
Well, this is a good point. But at least I have some idea of what the songwriter was feeling at the time she or he wrote it. (Except for manufactured songs like ". . . Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears, which Britney did not write and which was carefully calculated to make money from the purses of 12-year-old girls.)

My friend Laura says she hears emotion in the songs I send her. Songs like "Sept. 12" and "Green and White". (I've posted the lyrics to "Sept. 12" on this board before in a conversation with Elemtilas.)
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08Would you say metal started in the early seventies with Black Sabbath?
They were a huge part of it, of course, but even the Beatles played a part in it (their song Helter Skelter could well be argued to be some kind of metal), and Jimi Hendrix, etc.
The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix -- I never would've imagined!
Vlürch wrote:Doesn't mean the innovators are going to get any less respect or credit for being innovators, just that there were also pioneers besides them. I think that same applies to everything, not just music but also other kinds of art and even scientific research.
[+1]
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08I've never heard of Babymetal.
How?!
Probably because I'm not exposed to much metal. I don't know many metalheads in person (although one of my friends, Andreas whom I mentioned before, is into metal). I don't hear it very often, except for Evanescence or when The Bone (a hard-rock radio station in the Bay Area) is playing (and I'm not counting the nu-metal bands that were ubiquitous around 2000, like KoRn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park). When someone like Sangi39 talks about metal bands and name-drops a bunch of them, I keep thinking "Who are they? I've never heard of that band!)
Vlürch wrote:They're great! If you haven't listened to them by now, you definitely should. Their first album is their "weirdest" and pretty "cringy", but in a charming way, so I'd suggest that just because it's so much fun and they were clearly not very serious yet. At the very least you should listen to this song imho, in my opinion it's one of their best. Their actual diehard fans may disagree (or not?), I don't know, don't care. It's just pure fun.
That was a good song. I thumbs-upped it (and also "Megitsune", which I recognized as the Japanese word for vixen). One of the comments on YouTube was spot-on: America made metal sound satanic, Japan made metal . . . cute.
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08I didn't see the part before you edited it out. I'm guessing it had something to do with the part of my post about calling people fxggots and telling (Caucasian) people "you worthless nxgger" because you think something they said was stupid?
It was about a lot more than that, mostly metal-related actually, but also mental health and whatnot. I don't have a problem with opening up about mental health problems publicly at all in general (myself or when others do it), but when politics start to bleed into it... well, I'd rather not go there on a forum where I've already stirred shit with political posts way too many times for me to still not be banned, since that's the one subject where it can easily get the most controversial. I mean, for me depression stems like 50% or more from politics, so... again, I felt like it's better if I avoid replying to those parts of your post, because otherwise I'd end up saying something political that would probably be offensive and I don't want to risk that.
Oh, I see. I remember your posts about racism and nationalism in Northern Europe before, but I didn't make the connection.

And . . . I googled "Dragon of Blood" to see if that guy was still perambulating the Internet, and discovered "I am the dragon of blood" was a lyric in an Iced Earth song! Now I know where the screenname came from!
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10I couldn't make out any of the lyrics. Given titles like "Pink Unicorn Chaos Rainbow" and "Lepidopterous Inundation", I'm guessing the aesthetic you're going for is supposed to be rainbows-and-unicorns, much like the Babymetal sound?
Oh, right, I forgot I didn't include lyrics in the description... well, they're on Bandcamp if you care enough to read them. I wish I could say "don't blame me if you cringe", but like, I'm the only person you could blame. [xD] But yeah, that's pretty much the intended aesthetic, even if it's more rooted in the cringy late 2000's and early 2010's synthcore and "scene" metalcore aesthetic (albeit half-ironically), with some obvious "remnants" from goregrind/porngrind. But yeah, obviously Babymetal has been a huge influence.
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10Three of the responses on one of your videos were "Blarg". What does the word "blarg" mean? Is it something metalheads say?
The first "blarg" comment is from one of the guitarists, so I guess maybe the other two commenters just saw his comment and thought it was funny? No idea tbh, I'd ask him but I doubt he'd know either.
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10Do you have the lyrics to "Human Being" written down, or are they lost forever?
They're lost forever, the only place I had them written down was an old hard drive that physically broke. It's physically impossible for even me to make out a single word because A) they're pitchshifted toilet growls lol, B) my pronunciation of English was pretty bad back then and C) if I ran out of lyrics while recording back then, I was too lazy to write more and just repeated random words from the lyrics I'd already written and/or something random and as a result it was pronounced even worse. [xP] I didn't think ahead at all, like, I just made a song and then wrote lyrics without any consideration for recording, so I often ran out of lyrics... which, if I noticed while recording before getting to the last line, led to practical gibberish between lines.
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10Well, this is a good point. But at least I have some idea of what the songwriter was feeling at the time she or he wrote it. (Except for manufactured songs like ". . . Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears, which Britney did not write and which was carefully calculated to make money from the purses of 12-year-old girls.)
Emotional music can be "manufactured", too, though, and AFAIK it's still the norm for pop singers to not write their own lyrics. Obviously they can still feel the lyrics and project them, but that's one of the reasons why the idea of "authenticity" is so overrated imho. Everyone has emotions, so everyone can project their own emotions onto every song they hear (or sing) even if they've never experienced those emotions. If the lyrics are very clearly about Subject Matter A, then most likely people who have experience with Subject Matter A will feel more of an impact because of those lyrics, but even Subject Matter Z could be projected onto those lyrics by people who have never experienced Subject Matters A to Y.

Artificial intelligence is going to start pumping out "emotional" music sooner or later, most likely sooner, and obviously that won't mean that artificial intelligence has become truly sentient and able to feel emotions, but rather that people project their own emotions onto the music because it simply sounds emotional to them. There are techniques or "tricks" that can be used to make music evoke certain emotions, and while those are not universal, it's rarely (if ever) the intention of the composers to make music that evokes universally uniform emotions... because that'd be impossible, not only across cultures but across individuals within the same culture. Still, there are general associations of what sounds sad or happy or triumphant, etc. even across cultures at least in Eurasia, but IIRC those don't hold much water in Africa, South America and maybe Oceania or something? I don't remember, I just remember reading something about that once.

Besides, people can (or at least should be able to) relate to emotions brought on by situations they haven't personally been in. It does kind of seem like people are increasingly unable to do so, which is worrying on all levels, but I mean, there are only so many emotions that can be felt even if there are countless sources for them. It's hard to make this point without getting at least tangentially political, but like, for example, anyone who can't relate to someone's pain just because their skin colour or sexuality or class or whatever is different from theirs is an asshole. A song about heartbreak or whatever could still resonate for people who have never felt heartbreak, especially if the melody is one that's stereotypically sad, but they'd likely be projecting the closest equivalent emotion onto that song. That's what I do, anyway, even if subconsciously.

...but obviously there are exceptions, like how songs that are clearly meant to be sad end up sounding hopeful to some people, or vice versa, or any other kind of "emotional mismatch". I think that's because the emotions projected are still related ones, kind of like different "phases" of the same "spectrum". Maybe that doesn't make any sense, at least the way I say it, but well.
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix -- I never would've imagined!
Well, the Beatles recorded Helter Skelter in 1968 and Jimi Hendrix played loud with distortion. Arguments could be made that they didn't really give birth to metal, and I wouldn't want to get into that argument because it's pointless, but at the end of the day they did things that ended up being metal things... not exclusively metal things, but still.
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10Probably because I'm not exposed to much metal. I don't know many metalheads in person (although one of my friends, Andreas whom I mentioned before, is into metal). I don't hear it very often, except for Evanescence or when The Bone (a hard-rock radio station in the Bay Area) is playing (and I'm not counting the nu-metal bands that were ubiquitous around 2000, like KoRn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park). When someone like Sangi39 talks about metal bands and name-drops a bunch of them, I keep thinking "Who are they? I've never heard of that band!)
Makes sense, I just assumed there couldn't be anyone who's on the internet who hasn't heard of them since they were mentioned literally everywhere when they released their first album. I'll have to admit I'm not a metal pro or anything myself, either, since I barely ever listen to new stuff anymore except what sometimes pops up in Youtube recommendations... but that applies to all music, not just metal...
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10And . . . I googled "Dragon of Blood" to see if that guy was still perambulating the Internet, and discovered "I am the dragon of blood" was a lyric in an Iced Earth song! Now I know where the screenname came from!
Ah, good old usernames derived from songs... those always make me cringe a little tbh, makes sense why I assumed he'd have been like 13 since I always assume people whose usernames are derived from songs are in their teens or at least made their accounts when they were. Obviously it's not always true, and I know that's probably going to offend someone to no end, but... that was common practice on a certain music forum that no longer exists but that I began posting on when I was 12, and I already then cringed at it. No idea why tbh, though... [:x]

EDIT: Link was broken.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Vlürch wrote: 13 Feb 2020 15:42 Everyone has emotions, so everyone can project their own emotions onto every song they hear (or sing) even if they've never experienced those emotions.
This is wrong. And our world is the way it is because most normal people don't want to accept that NOT EVERYONE has emotions.
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Tanni wrote: 13 Feb 2020 17:53This is wrong.
Obviously I excluded psychopaths from "everyone" in that context because they're not even relevant. Like, how many psychopaths are going to want to sing emotionally or play emotional guitar solos or whatever? (Or even listen to emotional music?) And even if all psychopaths wanted to sing emotionally or play emotional guitar solos or whatever, and even if they all succeeded in making it sound emotional to other people, the emotions would only exist in the listener's projection... so, I guess, even if psychopaths were included, the "argument" that the emotions heard in music are the listener's projections would still be accurate. I wouldn't bet either way regarding the ability or inability of psychopaths to make music that "normal people" would hear as emotional, but I don't see why they couldn't if they learned what the things that commonly make "emotional" music "emotional" are and then used those techniques in their music.

Now, obviously, that's not to say all or even most songs that sound emotional are actually just technically "engineered" to sound emotional rather than being genuinely emotional, but I think it'd be pretty naive to think that some aren't since it's generally possible to determine which aspects of "emotional" music make it sound emotional. Again, they're not universally applicable, which imho only strengthens my point: if it was always possible to hear the true emotions behind songs, then everyone would associate the exact same emotions with the exact same songs. That doesn't happen even within the same culture, let alone across vastly different cultures with different musical conventions, so... you know, there's always going to be at least some projection on the listener's part.
Tanni wrote: 13 Feb 2020 17:53And our world is the way it is because normal people don't want to accept that NOT EVERYONE has emotions.
Just to be clear, you're not implying that everyone who isn't "normal" is a psychopath... right?
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To puncture a common urban myth: psychopaths are not emotionless. Quite the contrary! Psychopaths (if they exist at all as a distinct group, which is controversial) are characterised by emotionally impulsive behaviour, aggression and hostility, and an obsessive need for control. They do show relatively less of certain emotions - guilt, empathy, risk-aversion and social anxiety. But overall, they tend to be highly emotional people. The popular image may be of hyper-rational, ice-cold Hannibal Lectors; but that's pretty much a fantasy. Instead, real psychopaths tend to be the sort of people who fly into an uncontrollable rage at the slightest provocation. [they also tend to be manipulative, so some of them are able to conceal their rage in the short-term, in order to achieved a desired outcome, but that's not the same as not having the emotion in the first place]. It's part of why they tend to be self-sabotaging.


Nobody lacks emotions. As Hume observed, reason is nothing but the slave of the passions: if you have no emotions, you have no reason to do anything (nothing is frightening or desirable, nothing is unpleasant, guilt-inducing or disgusting, nothing is a source of pride or vanity, there is no desire to help others stemming from empathy, etc). [some people wit diminished displays of emotion and serious disorders show periods of catatonia, but I don't think it's generally thought that that's driven by a lack of emotion]

Some people, however, do have relatively 'calm' emotions, and many people experience periods of diminished emotional intensity. This is known as apathy, and is indeed defined as a lack of emotion - but this 'lack' is only relative. Strong apathy is generally limited to people with advanced neurodegenerative disorders, although apparently it can also occur with schizophrenia. However, even what's termed apathy often isn't really apathetical in a broader sense of the term - it may be accompanied by anxiety, for example.

There are also some people who don't recognise that they have emotions, or can't discuss their emotions - something called alexithymia. This doesn't mean they actually show less emotion than anyone else, however.
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Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 04 Feb 2020 07:08I've never heard of Babymetal.
How?!
Probably because I'm not exposed to much metal. I don't know many metalheads in person (although one of my friends, Andreas whom I mentioned before, is into metal). I don't hear it very often, except for Evanescence or when The Bone (a hard-rock radio station in the Bay Area) is playing (and I'm not counting the nu-metal bands that were ubiquitous around 2000, like KoRn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park). When someone like Sangi39 talks about metal bands and name-drops a bunch of them, I keep thinking "Who are they? I've never heard of that band!)
Vlürch wrote:They're great! If you haven't listened to them by now, you definitely should. Their first album is their "weirdest" and pretty "cringy", but in a charming way, so I'd suggest that just because it's so much fun and they were clearly not very serious yet. At the very least you should listen to this song imho, in my opinion it's one of their best. Their actual diehard fans may disagree (or not?), I don't know, don't care. It's just pure fun.
That was a good song. I thumbs-upped it (and also "Megitsune", which I recognized as the Japanese word for vixen). One of the comments on YouTube was spot-on: America made metal sound satanic, Japan made metal . . . cute.
BabyMetal is pretty good as an "all-round" metal band, I think. They're first album does seem to be very "metal but cute", with a handful of non-metal influences thrown in (Ii ne has a pretty heavy dance element to it with a rap section in the middle, followed by a metal section, then back on to dance, Onedari Daisakusen, I think, has a hip-hop run the entire way through, 4 no Uta has a sprinkling of reggae(?), and Uki Uki Midnight has a splash of dubstep(?)).

Second album comes around, and I think they stayed more within the realms of the metal with a J-Pop bent that made them well known, but they seem to have tried to vary their songs within that range, with a lot of power metal elements, and more focus on "ballads" or "epics", although I think there's an overall more "electronic" feel throughout a few of the later songs in the album. The album, overall, I think, seems to try and blend things a little bit more than their first album, so it feels more like one album, rather than a collection of songs.

Their third and most recent album, I think, goes back to the direction of their first, with a much more noticeable run of experiments in blending genres. Shanti Shanti Shanti, Oh! Majinai, and Pa Pa Ya!! are the ones that stood out to me most (with heavy influences from traditional Indian music, pirate metal, and electronic/rap/nu-metal respectively), Da Da Dance is a really "dance" song, Brand New Day is really "poppy", while the last three or four songs go down the "ballad" route again, but coming at it from different directions, genre-wise.

They're generally an easy band to find songs you can enjoy when you sit down and give them a listen. Some of their songs might not be to your particular taste (I think I saw someone who once laughed at Doki Doki Morning, who a few weeks later said "Headbanger!" was one of the best songs they'd heard in a while).

I actually thinks that's true of metal in general, at least that's becoming more and more the case*. with different genres getting mixed in to varying extents by different bands. For example, if you find Arkona too "screamy" when looking into folk metal, there's always Butterfly Temple as a cleaner approach, but then Arkona also has songs like Славься, Русь! which are arguably a lot easier on the ears than most songs by Butterfly Temple, and could be called metal-influenced folk rather than folk-influenced metal.



*It could be that metal has been like this for a lot longer, but that it's only the "louder" and "just metal" ones that made it to my ears. Sepultura's Roots, which had a ton of Brazilian and folk element to it, came out in 1996, for example.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Vlürch wrote: 13 Feb 2020 15:42
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10I couldn't make out any of the lyrics. Given titles like "Pink Unicorn Chaos Rainbow" and "Lepidopterous Inundation", I'm guessing the aesthetic you're going for is supposed to be rainbows-and-unicorns, much like the Babymetal sound?
Oh, right, I forgot I didn't include lyrics in the description... well, they're on Bandcamp if you care enough to read them.
I seeeeee. The lyrics to "No Loli-gagging" pretty much sum up the feel of the album. Tries to be cute and rainbows-and-unicorns, albeit in a silly, even satirical, way. Mixing violent things with sweet things. Like cute girls cutting up zombies.
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10Three of the responses on one of your videos were "Blarg". What does the word "blarg" mean? Is it something metalheads say?
The first "blarg" comment is from one of the guitarists, so I guess maybe the other two commenters just saw his comment and thought it was funny? No idea tbh, I'd ask him but I doubt he'd know either.
I see. Are you Vermin?
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10Do you have the lyrics to "Human Being" written down, or are they lost forever?
They're lost forever, the only place I had them written down was an old hard drive that physically broke. It's physically impossible for even me to make out a single word because A) they're pitchshifted toilet growls lol, B) my pronunciation of English was pretty bad back then and C) if I ran out of lyrics while recording back then, I was too lazy to write more and just repeated random words from the lyrics I'd already written and/or something random and as a result it was pronounced even worse. [xP] I didn't think ahead at all, like, I just made a song and then wrote lyrics without any consideration for recording, so I often ran out of lyrics... which, if I noticed while recording before getting to the last line, led to practical gibberish between lines.
Not really a sad loss, I guess. And what are toilet growls? Do you actually submerge your head into a toilet bowl to produce them?
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10Well, this is a good point. But at least I have some idea of what the songwriter was feeling at the time she or he wrote it. (Except for manufactured songs like ". . . Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears, which Britney did not write and which was carefully calculated to make money from the purses of 12-year-old girls.)
Emotional music can be "manufactured", too, though, and AFAIK it's still the norm for pop singers to not write their own lyrics.
There are some pop singers like Taylor Swift who write their own songs and come up with really good stuff. This seldom happens with the tween-oriented pop groups and singers, of course.
Vlürch wrote:Obviously they can still feel the lyrics and project them, but that's one of the reasons why the idea of "authenticity" is so overrated imho. Everyone has emotions, so everyone can project their own emotions onto every song they hear (or sing) even if they've never experienced those emotions. If the lyrics are very clearly about Subject Matter A, then most likely people who have experience with Subject Matter A will feel more of an impact because of those lyrics, but even Subject Matter Z could be projected onto those lyrics by people who have never experienced Subject Matters A to Y. . . . A song about heartbreak or whatever could still resonate for people who have never felt heartbreak, especially if the melody is one that's stereotypically sad, but they'd likely be projecting the closest equivalent emotion onto that song. That's what I do, anyway, even if subconsciously. ...but obviously there are exceptions, like how songs that are clearly meant to be sad end up sounding hopeful to some people, or vice versa, or any other kind of "emotional mismatch". I think that's because the emotions projected are still related ones, kind of like different "phases" of the same "spectrum". Maybe that doesn't make any sense, at least the way I say it, but well.
Yeah, not everyone has the same reaction to the same song. I tear up every time I hear "The Living Years" by Mike + the Mechanics, for instance, even though I'm not sure the songwriter intended the song to make people cry.
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix -- I never would've imagined!
Well, the Beatles recorded Helter Skelter in 1968 and Jimi Hendrix played loud with distortion. Arguments could be made that they didn't really give birth to metal, and I wouldn't want to get into that argument because it's pointless, but at the end of the day they did things that ended up being metal things... not exclusively metal things, but still.]
"Helter Skelter" doesn't sound metally to me. It reminds me more of "Palisades Park" by Freddy Cannon and "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys. Jimi Hendrix? Possibly, but in my brain he'll always be catalogued alongside the Grateful Dead and Phish.
Vlürch wrote: Makes sense, I just assumed there couldn't be anyone who's on the internet who hasn't heard of them since they were mentioned literally everywhere when they released their first album. I'll have to admit I'm not a metal pro or anything myself, either, since I barely ever listen to new stuff anymore except what sometimes pops up in Youtube recommendations... but that applies to all music, not just metal...
I don't recall any Babymetal advertising from 2010 or thereabouts. When I think back to my YouTube use at that time, I think of Greyson Michael Chance.

Some artists pretty much have all their following on YouTube, or at least all their American following. I keep seeing "Hunnybee" by Unknown Mortal Orchestra (a New Zealand band) advertised on YouTube, for example, but I don't hear nor read much about them at all outside of YouTube. However, you said you saw BabyMetal mentioned everywhere online, so I'm not sure how I missed them.
Vlürch wrote:
Khemehekis wrote: 13 Feb 2020 06:10And . . . I googled "Dragon of Blood" to see if that guy was still perambulating the Internet, and discovered "I am the dragon of blood" was a lyric in an Iced Earth song! Now I know where the screenname came from!
Ah, good old usernames derived from songs... those always make me cringe a little tbh, makes sense why I assumed he'd have been like 13 since I always assume people whose usernames are derived from songs are in their teens or at least made their accounts when they were. Obviously it's not always true, and I know that's probably going to offend someone to no end, but... that was common practice on a certain music forum that no longer exists but that I began posting on when I was 12, and I already then cringed at it. No idea why tbh, though... [:x]
Yeah, there's a poster on 4thkingdom.com who says she got her screenname from a Tori Amos song. She joined 4degreez.com (the precursor to 4thkingdom) when she was about 16. And then there was the teen-age girl who used the screenname LikeDiscoSuperfly (a line from the song "Sex and Candy" by Marcy Playground).
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Vlürch »

Salmoneus wrote: 13 Feb 2020 22:27...
Hmm, interesting... for some reason I always thought there was a difference between "psychopaths" and psychopaths, as in there are those who are like what you described and they're called psychopaths but that the literal definition still referred to the type that have no real emotions whatsoever and are just "inexplicably evil" or whatever, like that kid who wanted to kill her family for no reason who was interviewed in some documentary... but I guess that's not psychopathy, then?
sangi39 wrote: 13 Feb 2020 22:33I actually thinks that's true of metal in general, at least that's becoming more and more the case*. with different genres getting mixed in to varying extents by different bands.
Yeah, I think it's especially obvious from how metalcore and djent have seemingly merged into "standard average metal". It's pretty cool, I think, that the boundaries between different subgenres are disappearing while the distinct subgenres still remain, and that non-metal genres are constantly influencing metal more and more, and that metal is starting to influence non-metal genres more and more, and I think sooner or later new subgenres will branch off from the "standard average metal", which is pretty exciting since it's reaching a point where that's kind of difficult to imagine imho. In just 2030, what kind of metal will exist? And 2040? 2050?
Khemehekis wrote: 17 Feb 2020 08:44I see. Are you Vermin?
That's my old pseudonym, yeah.
Khemehekis wrote: 17 Feb 2020 08:44And what are toilet growls? Do you actually submerge your head into a toilet bowl to produce them?
Hahahahaha, no, they're just a specific type of particularly low metal growls that sound kind of "wet", made more distinctive by pitchshifting them down.
Khemehekis wrote: 17 Feb 2020 08:44"Helter Skelter" doesn't sound metally to me. It reminds me more of "Palisades Park" by Freddy Cannon and "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys. Jimi Hendrix? Possibly, but in my brain he'll always be catalogued alongside the Grateful Dead and Phish.
Well, the specific term I've heard used is "proto-metal". It doesn't refer to a defined sound as much as things done by the precursors of metal that led to the development of metal if that makes sense.
Khemehekis wrote: 17 Feb 2020 08:44I don't recall any Babymetal advertising from 2010 or thereabouts.
I don't know about advertising, but I mean a lot of metalheads were talking about them in late 2012 and early 2013 (and ever since), both positively and negatively (but increasingly positively AFAIK), and I also saw posts about them on Tumblr. Most of the users on a certain metal site I spent a lot of time on back then pretty much hated them, but I'm not entirely sure if that was the general sentiment among metalheads in general or if they already got mostly positive attention back then... well, all I know is that the way I discovered them was through Youtube recommendations when the music video for the song いいね! had just been uploaded some days earlier, but the algorithm was arguably better back then. Still, they definitely blew up quickly.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Vlürch wrote: 17 Feb 2020 21:53
Salmoneus wrote: 13 Feb 2020 22:27...
Hmm, interesting... for some reason I always thought there was a difference between "psychopaths" and psychopaths, as in there are those who are like what you described and they're called psychopaths but that the literal definition still referred to the type that have no real emotions whatsoever and are just "inexplicably evil" or whatever, like that kid who wanted to kill her family for no reason who was interviewed in some documentary... but I guess that's not psychopathy, then?
Nothing every happens for no reason. And nobody ever 'wants' something 'for no reason' - wanting something and having a reason for something (even if it's not a reason that would make sense to others) are practically synonymous. People don't have no emotions - although some are more or less emotionally stable, and some are better at describing (or more willing to truthfully describe) their emotions. Ice-cold robot killer people don't really exist - although some people pretend to be them because it looks better, or feels better, than admitting their feelings.

If a child wants to kill their family, it's generally because:
- they have negative feelings toward their family (anger, hate, jealousy, resentment, etc)
- they have more positive feelings toward things they believe they could get if their family were dead (money, fame, respect, a romantic partner, etc)
Some may also do it not because they want to kill their family, but because they want to do certain things that just happen (without, as it were, them really understanding or caring) to be fatal for their family - making a 'cool' video to share online, for instance.

Even among serial killers, the type who act cool and controlled (even though internally they're not) are the minority - most are impulsive and compulsive. And indeed, even the 'controlled' ones are generally just acting on impulse, but able to delay gratification of that impulse to take into account immediate consequences. The cost-benefit analysis of a seriously antisocial career is so unfavourable that very few people not overwhelmed by a compulsive drive would ever make that choice.
In just 2030, what kind of metal will exist? And 2040? 2050?
Most fashions in pop culture don't really last all that long. Fashion takes its form in reaction - it takes the symbols of its era, and repurposes them to convey some meaning. But when the era is passed, the symbols lose their meaning, and hence their power, and hence the repurposing of those symbols likewise loses its power.

You can only really be in the fashion movement in a true sense when you experienced the moment in which the movement was vital and meaningful. You had, as the saying goes, to be there man. Cultural cachet that attaches to those movement-members in turn spurs a further wave of imitators - among, as it were, those who were there to witness those who were there. But as the generations go by, the imitations become more and more watery, and gradually blur into other movements until they disappear - because to those who follow after, it is increasingly unclear why the old fashion should be followed (because it means nothing to them in and of itself). As we get further away from the core experience of teenage rebellion in the 1980s, it will be increasingly hard for metal to sustain itself as a genre. Not, of course, that it'll just vanish. But it's already lose most of its popularity, and it will tend to lose its distinctiveness and gradually blend into everything else, with only a small hardcore who reject change.

So what will metal look like in 30 years? Depends what you mean. Some of it will look exactly the same as now - it just won't be very popular. And most of it will not look like metal at all, and probably won't call itself metal. Ironically, the bigger the revival, the less will be preserved, because revival requires relevance, which requires change.

I suppose people have always been asking themselves that question. What will folk look like in 30 years, people asked. What will doowop look like? What will music hall look like?

Even common practice music only survived as a major current for some 350 years or so - and it changed almost out of recognition in that time period. Classical music in the narrow sense of the word only lasted... what, 50? 70? years.

[Classical music in the wider sense is now only slightly more popular than metal, measured by favourite genre, although considerably more so measured by enjoyed genre.]
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Vlürch wrote: 13 Feb 2020 15:42 Makes sense, I just assumed there couldn't be anyone who's on the internet who hasn't heard of them since they were mentioned literally everywhere when they released their first album.
Just to broaden your horizons a little bit: I've heard the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, and I've heard OF Taylor Swift, though I'm not aware of having actually heard any of her music. But I haven't heard of anybody else talked about on this thread.
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