Song, by Toad

Brilliant!

There have been some splendid comments on this site recently, from the chatter about what makes a good Christmas, to DC’s frothing rant about airports and the recent sniggering about Bowie and Bing, but this one is quite special and bears repeating for everyone’s enjoyment.

On the post which my brother wrote a while back about the damage that the quest for loudness is doing to the quality of recorded music, which inspired some interesting comments at the time, some genius called snyder has popped up with this little gem which really did make me laugh:

why does it matter how well it’s compressed. i think it still sounds good. maybe ur all just touchy faggets.

This same mentality is the one which led to the American Dream being interpreted as meaning ‘any asshole should be able to become president’ instead of the perhaps less worrying ‘if you are talented enough to be president, then the opportunity will be there for you to realise that potential’. When running against Bush, John Kerry was told to under no circumstances humiliate him for being thick for just this reason.

I love that after hundreds of words worth of intelligent debate this budding savant decided that the entire discussion could be rendered redundant by his own penetrative analysis and misspelled insults. And to a degree he actually does have a point. A recording that is levelled out and then horribly over-amplified does indeed sound perfectly good enough for the radio, for cheap earphones and for most other applications. It is pretty poor, but it is generally good enough.

It exists for the same reason that reality TV exists; for the same reason that The Sun exists; for the same reason that formulaic rom-coms and by-the-numbers action thrillers exist. Because none of us care. Some of us look for genuine skills and genuine achievement and genuine excellence. But sadly most of us, like you snyder, are dull, vapid, shallow, boorish, one-dimensional, mentally limited, turgid, pointless, dull, depressing, mechanical slugs who stumble blindly through our meaningless and trivial lives without once doing anything to make anyone’s lives, let alone the world at large, anything other than a slightly less joyous place for the dubious benefit of our barely noticable presence. You and your banal mediocrity, my friend, are the reason that post exists in the first place. Well done.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – People Just Ain’t No Good
Lloyd Cole – People Just Ain’t No Good