Posts by Schrottrocker

  • What's Your Weather Like?

    Local news said 250 people were injured in my city on this Wednesday morning and they had to open a mobile treatment center since hospitals were beyond their limits. Craziest thing I have ever seen. The official warnings were not exaggerated at all but who are employers to tell their workers to stay home?

  • What's Your Weather Like?

    After having snow and ice in this region which usually has zero snow we now got ice rain. First time in my life I ever saw this: rain that instantly freezes everything into a layer of ice. Getting to work was an adventure, to put it nicely.

  • TotW 12/05/2022 - 12/11/2022: GENESIS - Dancing With The Moonlit Knight

    I've been reading or hearing this quite a number of times in various interviews, I can't recall every single one. I have a clear memory though of an old interview with Metallica in the 90's in which one of them said something liek "it's harder to write a 3-minute pop song than a lengthy epic". It's something that comes up often times, apparently addressing a (perceived?) perception of non-musicians who think it must be harder to write long songs.

  • TotW 12/05/2022 - 12/11/2022: GENESIS - Dancing With The Moonlit Knight

    Quote from Backdrifter

    I like Rutherford's comment in relation to how they supposedly "sold out" or lost their integrity etc, when he said it's much more exacting writing a catchy 4-minute pop song compared to a multi-sectioned 10-minute prog epic.

    Lots of artists have left similar statements addressing the common "you sold out" comments. Let me add my take on this: it's easier to write a noodly pretentious overly-extended nowhere-going prog longtrack than a good pop song such as That's All, and it's easier to write a bland samey formulaic throwaway charts hit pop song than a prog masterpiece such as Moonlit Knight.

  • Sales database

    Quote from KeithC

    Ed Sheeran @ 3 and The Beatles @ 43 tells me all I need to know. Drake and Bad Bunny are 1&2 (never heard of them). Taylor Swift and Bieber also in top 10!

    Which button did you click? I peeked into the various "Top" lists and they give me Elton John, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, ABBA etc. throughout.

  • Are political threads allowed?

    I honestly can't see how us normal people can stop climate change if China and the USA won't do anything serious in this matter. Our governments keep preaching it's "our" fault, meaning us voters, excluding politics and leading economy.

  • TotW 10/24/2022 - 10/30/2022: GENESIS - Land Of Confusion

    The mid-section apparently stretches the song too long for today's radio. I heard this song in a friend's car on the radio and I noticed they entirely cut out the middle part. The song as it was playing was intro - verse 1 - chorus - verse 2 - chorus - repeat chorus - outro.


    Slightly going off-topic but: remember how in the 80s the vast majority of radio songs ended in a fade-out which would usually follow dozens of repeated choruses or instrumental choruses, basically lots of outros were like a song would get stuck in a loop where it wasn't going anywhere and finally faded out. This was perfect for radio guys to talk into songs or fade them earlier or just leave them playing. Nowadays nothing can be short enough. I've been reading in a blog, if you wanna make a streaming hit these days, make sure it doesn't exceed the 2-minute mark.

    Land of Confusion is one of those 80s songs that doesn't end too soon nor does it end in a fade, a rarity at those times. If you count how many songs on a Genesis album end in a fadeout you will find Abacab introduced a rule a cold end has to be the exception, this goes straight way all through to Calling All Stations. Before Abacab, fadeouts appeared here and there when they served a purpose, kind of to keep you in the mood of the song. After Duke they turned into a rule without purpose.

  • Why I Don’t Think I’ll Contribute to Wikipedia Anymore

    I really love reading through wikipedia articles and it has become a hobby of mine to dig systematically through all wikipedia articles to a certain topic. Nonetheless, I am aware you can never rely 100% if wikipedia articles tell the truth or just madeup facts, or even if they don't simply omit important paragraphs. A friend of mine composes classical music and tried repeatedly to correct the list of his own works, which his wikipedia article, written by some obscure person, provides with multiple errors. Each time his corrections were "re-corrected" to the previous erroneous state.


    I once saw a web comic (have to find it again) that I guess tells some truth about wikipedia even if it was just meant to poke fun:

    Panel 1: Wiki user writes an article. Since he hasn't done his research properly he just makes up a whole paragraph.

    Panel 2: Scientist writes a paper, looks up stuff on wikipedia and includes the madeup stuff from above-mentioned article. Paper gets published.

    Panel 3: Another wiki user notices said article lacks reliable sources. He searches and finds the published scientific paper which confirms the madeup stuff.

    Panel 4: Wiki user #1 has done research in the meantime and tries to correct his own article - only to find his madeup paragraph is now locked for editing since a reliable source confirms it. Thus, some madeup rubbish has evolved into true facts.