21–30 of 114 posts
Just like many punks before him, he did know chords, but he wanted that classic punk naive sound and in interviews he claims he doesn't know anything. It's about moving up and down the neck and finding the sweet, sick and weird sounds. I don't know why the article claims this was a Nirvana discovery. It started in the 70s. Discharge, Wire then Fugazi, Minor Threat. These people are smart, just raw, and they like blun…
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That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords. Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes. I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did…
Yeah, that's definitely 'the' Kurt thing, vocal melody completing power chords. I do hate how he (and the whole generation, and some of the punks before him + no wave crowd as well) pretended that they didn't know any music theory or practice at all. That was quite destructive for so many of us who aspired to play music in our teens, especially if you weren't exposed to music theory and practice in childhood through…
Theory can explain it after the fact, and can extend your options (or at least save you time knowing what you want). I know a lot of "untrained" musicians had a fair bit of theory, but I don't know about Cobain.
> Careful music analysis was left for other bands.
I'm sorry... but lol what.
> And it's fascinating to think that Kurt Cobain was unaware of any musical composition's rule he was following, but just trusting his musical instict (sic).
This doesn't come as much of a surprise. A good deal of my friends who are musicians (particularly those who could sing) found themselves writing music at a pretty young age before they had any real understanding of music theory.
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> Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable. Schoenberg has entered the chat.
Arguably we tend to attempt to hear atonal music in a key (or temporal sequence of keys) despite it's attempt to avoid that. I suspect something similar about bitonality. We hear one of the keys and then try and interpret the other notes in relation to that. (warning. I am neither a music theorist or an expert in the psychology of music perception. But this is HN so yolo...)
Is it the case that much of this is influenced by individuals having grown up listening in an environment with music already structured around a central key and modulation around that? With the same idea also applying to an understanding (or feeling) of rhythm?
The Kindle version is $3 right now.
From the article: > Careful music analysis was left for other bands. I'm sorry... but lol what. > And it's fascinating to think that Kurt Cobain was unaware of any musical composition's rule he was following, but just trusting his musical instict (sic). This doesn't come as much of a surprise. A good deal of my friends who are musicians (particularly those who could sing) found themselves writing music at a pretty yo…
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> Melodies will be in a key, using a set of notes. That’s kinda unavoidable. Schoenberg has entered the chat.
Pretty much every chord he played was a power chord. Thats just a root and a 5th. It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that And nearly every punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are. It just sounds good to them. There aren’t any rules because punk is a DIY genre. If you told him he was doing a thing, he’d do t…
Also, there's nothing particularly unusual about not having any minor chords. In fact, here's a thing that may surprise some people: most African music for example has no minor chords of any kind, and we're not talking about power chords etc just only major and no minor triads. In African music it's really common to have the first inversion of the 4th degree triad function as the relative minor (so in the key of C that would be A-C-F instead of A-C-E).
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When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter. In fact, the ability to tap into mass media only makes the impact of a song greater. Access to electric instruments and effects only gave them more ability to create interesting music. I’m a fan of all kinds of music old and new. But anyone saying German leders or old timey civil war ditties a…
Even the first sentence makes no cogent sense, especially when read alongside your original comment:
> When it comes to cultural significance and catchiness the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn’t matter.
You've apparently changed your argument. "Best in human history" does not mean "most culturally significant and catchiest."
If "the fact that people have been doing it for a long time doesn't matter," then why did you mention all of human history?
If what you mean instead is that you care only about contemporary, present-day cultural impact, then, again, why did you mention all of human history? You've already decided that no time period other than the present matters.