I Have A Confession To Make

[HTT]

nvm

[Tiles]

Welcome to reality.

Your reality. Not mine. When really nothing matters, why do you still make music then

It's a matter of perspective. You're important to your family. You're important to your band. You're important to the music you make. You're important to your fans. And so on. Every single person has some influence on the world around them. How much depends on you.

But i fear my english is not good enough to continue this philosophical discussion here.

Of course you can. Rigging isn't really that hard, it just takes some time to get good at it.

No it is not a matter of time. It does not magically become better just it is now half past nine and you repeated the same mistakes over and over again. You first need to learn some basics. For rigging you need to have a clue about topology. Bad mesh, bad deformings. That's the way it is. I know what i am talking about. I have done all these mistakes in my life before. Also i had to learn it first.

That's probably why I've never heard of it.

Archviz is how architectural vizualization is called internally by the artists that does this job. But my point was that 90% of the 3D artists are not in a big team. And then you need to be a generalist. Not a specialist.

[enroe]

Haha, now things are getting really interesting.

Humans have always tried to see themselves as special, their lives as important and meaningful, but that's nothing more than an effective evolutionary tactic. The people who think their lives matter will outcompete those who do not. The reality, though, is completely different.

And it gets even better:

We are all just spare parts stacked on shelves in some vast warehouse, eminently disposable and mostly of little or no use. We are left there to gather dust until we pass our use-by date and are tossed into a bin.

Here, Bones, you are of course absolutely right! Because your
assessment is completely subjective: you can consider yourself
and every single person to be absolutely unimportant and
irrelevant.

From the perspective of the "big picture", from the perspective
of the universe, this is objectively true. But from the perspective
of our society, this view is subjective. In other words, you could
just as well say the opposite: every single person is absolutely
uniquely valuable and contributes something valuable and
irreplaceable to society just by "existing". It doesn't even matter
"what" they do exactly. Just by being a thinking individual, every
single person is incredibly valuable. And they must be treated
as such.

That is, by the way, the difference between dictatorships or
failed states and Western democracies: In Western
democracies, every individual is infinitely important and unique.
That is why there are human rights and the right to asylum. In
dictatorships and also in Trump's world, the individual counts
for nothing; at best, he is "shifting mass" or even "deal mass".

But ultimately, it's like this: Everyone has to give themselves
importance and relevance. Because there can't be a social
worker or a coach behind everyone who constantly suggests:
"Ohh, you are so important and so great!" That's only true as
long as you're a child and your parents suggest this.

As an adult, you are "aware of yourself". And you either give
yourself this importance or you don't. Everyone creates their
own "self-image" in their head - and is completely free to do
so.

You, Bones, feel completely unimportant, like a stereotypical
pecking chicken among tens of thousands of chickens in tens
of thousands of cages. That is your right - and in that respect,
it is completely OK. From this perspective, the use of AI is not
an issue at all.

I - and everyone in the band and around me - see myself as
absolutely unique and infinitely valuable. And every other
person too. This perspective changes the way we deal with
ourselves - and with others. And it also changes the
assessment when using AI.

[Jac459]

Yet in my mind, there is no doubt that Prodigy and Chemical Brothers have revolutionised electronic music (and music in general).

I'm not hearing it. Chemical Brothers have one song that sounds vaguely like a Frontlione Assembly rip-off but, beyond that, I've not hear anything from them that seems remotely different from anyone else.

The song you are saying is not very new, by the way, is from mid-90s.... Have you realised that ?

Yes. The same year that Smack My Bitch Up was released, PWEI broke up, after five albums.

Find me one equivalent example in this era. Maybe you can name Front242 from Belgium but they are far from this level of quality.

Pop Will Eat Itself constantly reinvented their sound on every album, with the aid of top-shelf producers like Flood. This is what they sounded like on their first album in 1987 -



Then on their second album in 1989, the same year NIN released Pretty Hate Machine, they had refined things, probably thanks to Flood -



Then they took a left turn in 1991 -



By 1994 they were back with their heaviest sound yet -



But this is possibly my favourite, from between their 2nd and 3rd albums -



But the point is, you are not going to fully understand how much Prodigy sounds like a pale imitation of PWEI without listening to all their stuff, because they were so inventive that it's impossible to pick a "typical" PWEI song. From this sampling, though, you can definitely feel their overall vibe.

The mix of rock and electronic, today ubiquitous, was at this time unheard of and defined modern music.

Come on, rock and electronic music had existed right through the 1980s. Have you never heard of DEVO or Simple Minds? Even before that there was Prog Rock. For that matter, I was doing rock with electronic instruments in the mid-80's (badly). This from 1987 -

Thanks for all these references. I will listen to them carefully.

[Largos]

Funny that people will write essays on forums about using A.I. as a shortcut but can't be bothered to learn how to write lyrics themselves or connect with people who can.

This post was created using ChatGPT

[vurt]

children are so much easier to control.

that could only come from someone who never had kids

[BONES]

From the perspective of the "big picture", from the perspective
of the universe, this is objectively true. But from the perspective
of our society, this view is subjective.

No, it is not. It's exactly the same as "American exceptionalism", it's just a concept, it's not real. It is how society controls you, not through some deep, evil conspiracy but just as a product of society itself. Like a good marketing campaign, it taps into that evolutionary anomaly in our make-up to keep us in line.

just as well say the opposite: every single person is absolutely
uniquely valuable and contributes something valuable and
irreplaceable to society just by "existing".

You can say anything at all, it doesn't make it right, true or accurate. What you have postulated here is the most absurd thing I've read in ages. Imagine trying to convince the soldiers at the Somme during WWI of that; it would be great motivation for them to climb out of the trenches and be slaughtered in their thousands but that doesn't make it real or true. Quite the opposite, examples from history like that show how utterly disposable even the best of us are.

"what" they do exactly. Just by being a thinking individual, every
single person is incredibly valuable.

I'm not and I'm not so pathetic that I need to believe otherwise. And if I'm not, then neither is anyone else because I'm still much better than the rest of you. Because the thing is, actually being better doesn't matter, what matters is that you conform and obey.
Gotta go to work now, because I am just a cog within a pointless machine who needs to eat, we'll continue this later.

[Jac459]

Yet in my mind, there is no doubt that Prodigy and Chemical Brothers have revolutionised electronic music (and music in general).

I'm not hearing it. Chemical Brothers have one song that sounds vaguely like a Frontlione Assembly rip-off but, beyond that, I've not hear anything from them that seems remotely different from anyone else.

The song you are saying is not very new, by the way, is from mid-90s.... Have you realised that ?

Yes. The same year that Smack My Bitch Up was released, PWEI broke up, after five albums.

Find me one equivalent example in this era. Maybe you can name Front242 from Belgium but they are far from this level of quality.

Pop Will Eat Itself constantly reinvented their sound on every album, with the aid of top-shelf producers like Flood. This is what they sounded like on their first album in 1987 -



Then on their second album in 1989, the same year NIN released Pretty Hate Machine, they had refined things, probably thanks to Flood -



Then they took a left turn in 1991 -



By 1994 they were back with their heaviest sound yet -



But this is possibly my favourite, from between their 2nd and 3rd albums -



But the point is, you are not going to fully understand how much Prodigy sounds like a pale imitation of PWEI without listening to all their stuff, because they were so inventive that it's impossible to pick a "typical" PWEI song. From this sampling, though, you can definitely feel their overall vibe.

The mix of rock and electronic, today ubiquitous, was at this time unheard of and defined modern music.

Come on, rock and electronic music had existed right through the 1980s. Have you never heard of DEVO or Simple Minds? Even before that there was Prog Rock. For that matter, I was doing rock with electronic instruments in the mid-80's (badly). This from 1987 -

Ok, I listened to your references and thanks for sharing.

It is quite far from the music style I am describing here though.

This is a genre named as "Big Beat" that was basically invented by Prodigy and Chemical Brothers.

As per my point on rock mixed with electro, you are absolutely right, there are many examples before but the way it was mixed in big beat is for me a turning point... It is really a new genre based on rock and dance/electro.
PWIE is more hiphop-ish and close to public enemy in my view.

But anyway, this is absolutely fair to say that electro and rock were mixed far before.

Nevertheless, my points remains on Liam Hewlett creating a super popular and unfluancal music style with a very artistic way of doing sampling...

[Bunny_boy]

This is a genre named as "Big Beat" that was basically invented by Prodigy and Chemical Brothers.

It was invented by Geordies in the 70s

(That's from Get Carter, and has always tickled me)
------------------
And Prodigy Experience sounds f**k-all like EBM, although I'm sure the poppies would've been an influence on the prodigy after a fashion as they're both influenced by electro and stuff by Hank Shocklee

[Jac459]

This is a genre named as "Big Beat" that was basically invented by Prodigy and Chemical Brothers.

It was invented by Geordies in the 70s

(That's from Get Carter, and has always tickled me)
------------------
And Prodigy Experience sounds f**k-all like EBM, although I'm sure the poppies would've been an influence on the prodigy after a fashion as they're both influenced by electro and stuff by Hank Shocklee

Mmm

Wikipedia seems to be on my side though :

"Cultural origins Early 1990s, London, England"
"Big beat is an electronic music genre that usually uses heavy breakbeats and synthesizer-generated loops and patterns – common to acid house/techno. The term has been used by the British music industry to describe music by artists such as The Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, the Crystal Method, Propellerheads, Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada."

Of course, Wikipedia can be wrong, but in this case, I don't think so....

[Bunny_boy]

Ah, it's a joke lost in translation. You (and Wikipedia) are correct, but that's a still from the 1971 film Get Carter, filmed in Newcastle and Gateshead. As you can see, the poster on the right is advertising a Big Beat night!

[BONES]

It is quite far from the music style I am describing here though.

Maybe to you but not really to me. As you described it, a mix of rock and electronic music (by which I assumed you meant dance music). In the context of what PWEI were doing in the late 80s, through the early 90s, Prodigy and Chemical Brothers didn't sound like anything truly new or innovative. If Clint and Graham sang pretty much any Prodigy song, it would just sound like another PWEI song, only less interesting. It's like a stripped back, more repetitive (and boring) version of Poppies.

Chemical Brothers were a bit different, a lot more dance music, almost no rock influence, which makes them a lot more boring. Hey Boy Hey Girl, for example, is one of the most boring songs you'll ever hear on the radio. There's only one musical idea that repeats for three-and-a-half minutes, with the same three lines of vocal repeated endlessly. Still, it's more interesting that Block Rockin' Beats, which is even more bereft of ideas, it's just a bunch of samples strung together. The only thing that makes Setting Sun in any way interesting is the vocals. There's nothing to the rest of it and even the lyrics are repeated, such that you can't wait for the song to finish.

This is a genre named as "Big Beat" that was basically invented by Prodigy and Chemical Brothers.

No, it wasn't. According to the internet, it came out of a club scene in which Chemical Brothers were involved, but they didn't necessarily start it. Regardless, it is very clearly inspired by the Grebo scene that formed around what PWEI was doing.

One of my favourite bands, Boom Boom Satellites, were initially described as a blend of Prodigy and Chemical Brothers and, to my ears, they shit all over both. Their music is far more inventive and interesting and they just got better and better through their career. This is a cut-down version of a song from their 4th album, about mid-way through their discography -



This, to me, is so much better than anything I've ever heard from Chemical Brothers or Prodigy and it's not even one of their best songs.

As per my point on rock mixed with electro, you are absolutely right, there are many examples before but the way it was mixed in big beat is for me a turning point... It is really a new genre based on rock and dance/electro.

Seriously? I can't believe you can't hear how totally derivative of Grebo it is. OK, it' s a lot simpler and more repetitive but it's in very much in the same vein. Liam Howlett even collaborated with PWEI on Thier Law.

PWIE is more hiphop-ish and close to public enemy in my view.

What, and Chemical Brothers never used a rapper? The vocal arrangement in Breathe is also straight out of the Poppies playbook, which itself goes all the way back to the earliest days of Front242.

Nevertheless, my points remains on Liam Hewlett creating a super popular and unfluancal music style with a very artistic way of doing sampling...

I thought Fatboy Slim did it better and with BBS, you can't always be sure what's sampled and what's being played. To my mind that's the better achievement.

[BONES]

What a bad and sad way to look at your life

I don't really look at my own life, why would I? I look at the lives of everyone else, which I can see more clearly, and I am not so full of myself to think mine is not fundamentally the same. The difference between me and some Biafran born on the same day as me, who died a slow, painful death from malnutrition in the 1960s, is a simple accident of birth. A roll of the dice as to whether you are born into a failed African state like Biafra or into a comfortable Middle Class suburb of Sydney. Pure chance. One no more or less special than the other. Just bodies.

Your reality. Not mine. When really nothing matters, why do you still make music then

Why not? Gotta do something to pass the time.

It's a matter of perspective. You're important to your family. You're important to your band. You're important to the music you make. You're important to your fans. And so on. Every single person has some influence on the world around them. How much depends on you.

People aren't the world, they are a blight upon it. Being important to someone else means nothing. It's just herd instinct, another anachronistic survival trait. As for family and friends, I'm only important to them when they need something from me (and vice versa, of course). We all use each other.

Of course you can. Rigging isn't really that hard, it just takes some time to get good at it.

No it is not a matter of time. It does not magically become better just it is now half past nine and you repeated the same mistakes over and over again.[/quote]
I don't mean you get better at it over the course of an afternoon, it can take a few years and you have to learn, not simply continue to make the same mistakes. I got quite good at it just from doing customer demos and teaching, even though it's not something I've ever had need of beyond that. But I couldn't really teach the process of getting better at it, it was something I developed a feeling for by doing. Like most things.

But my point was that 90% of the 3D artists are not in a big team. And then you need to be a generalist. Not a specialist.

Either way, you're still just a cog in a machine. In the case of Viz work, you're at the end of the chain. You may be a 3D generalist but in that context, you are a specialist - all your work gets passed down to you from the previous stage of the process, you do your bit and hand it back, just like someone on a car production line.

Funny that people will write essays on forums about using A.I. as a shortcut but can't be bothered to learn how to write lyrics themselves or connect with people who can.

That's right, because for the first 40 years of my songwriting career I didn't write any lyrics at all, much less win prizes for them. (I won a pair of wedge monitors for the lyrics to ARMAGEDDONready at a battle of the bands contest in 1985.) But, you know, whatever bullshit you need to believe to get through the day...

that could only come from someone who never had kids

I picked it up from Stephen Fry, actually, so you may be right. That said, I'd suggest that's much more a product of the times than anything else. It wasn't true when I was growing up. Dad just had to start taking his belt off to bring us back into line, I'm not sure he ever had to actually use it on us.

Wikipedia seems to be on my side though : "Cultural origins Early 1990s, London, England"

Except for two things -

1. Get Carter was made in 1971, so if that's a still from the film, then clearly the term existed then.

2. The same Wikipedia article you've quoted also says "the term 'big beat' traces its roots to the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s.".

[machinesworking]

I'm mostly in agreement with Bones here. I've only been part of one song that we used AI on, and it was my country musician friend who wanted to make a song with me in a day that he was in town. He used AI to prompt it to write a song about waiting in line to take a piss! I don't think a single person should care whether all the lines were generated by a human or not.

On the other hand while I agree that most lyrics suck, there are the few musicians who really can write interesting things. People like Jello Biafra with Holiday in Cambodia, or Pink Floyds Pig. Honestly there's a solid list in post punk with the Stranglers, Gang of Four, Joy Division etc. Even more pop songs, like Depeche Modes Never Let Me Down. Here's the thing though, I have no doubt if those same lyricists used AI prompts they would still come up with better lyrics than everyone else. It's the person not the tool.

On the subject of human self importance, it's 100% an evolutionary tool, there are 200 billion trillion stars in the known universe, our "significance" is just a way of evading cosmic terror. I would go as far as to say free will is another useful evolutionary idea used by societies to blame bad actors for being a bundle of failed patterns. It also makes us think our particular music taste is "good", our ideas on what is music "right".

I'm a decent guitar player, mediocre keyboardist and IMO a good songwriter.
I don't care how something gets created, I've ran classical operas through granular synthesis to the point of zero recognition and used that as the basis for a break in a song. I've used computer crash scrambled audio to write a song around. As someone whose always loved experimental music and plain harsh noise I have no tolerance for people who put too much emphasis on technical ability, whether something is played live or sequenced, the level of training of the musician etc. You and your audience are all that matter, the peanut gallery is of no use.

[Jac459]

It is quite far from the music style I am describing here though.

Maybe to you but not really to me. As you described it, a mix of rock and electronic music (by which I assumed you meant dance music). In the context of what PWEI were doing in the late 80s, through the early 90s, Prodigy and Chemical Brothers didn't sound like anything truly new or innovative. If Clint and Graham sang pretty much any Prodigy song, it would just sound like another PWEI song, only less interesting. It's like a stripped back, more repetitive (and boring) version of Poppies.

Chemical Brothers were a bit different, a lot more dance music, almost no rock influence, which makes them a lot more boring. Hey Boy Hey Girl, for example, is one of the most boring songs you'll ever hear on the radio. There's only one musical idea that repeats for three-and-a-half minutes, with the same three lines of vocal repeated endlessly. Still, it's more interesting that Block Rockin' Beats, which is even more bereft of ideas, it's just a bunch of samples strung together. The only thing that makes Setting Sun in any way interesting is the vocals. There's nothing to the rest of it and even the lyrics are repeated, such that you can't wait for the song to finish.

This is a genre named as "Big Beat" that was basically invented by Prodigy and Chemical Brothers.

No, it wasn't. According to the internet, it came out of a club scene in which Chemical Brothers were involved, but they didn't necessarily start it. Regardless, it is very clearly inspired by the Grebo scene that formed around what PWEI was doing.

One of my favourite bands, Boom Boom Satellites, were initially described as a blend of Prodigy and Chemical Brothers and, to my ears, they shit all over both. Their music is far more inventive and interesting and they just got better and better through their career. This is a cut-down version of a song from their 4th album, about mid-way through their discography -



This, to me, is so much better than anything I've ever heard from Chemical Brothers or Prodigy and it's not even one of their best songs.

As per my point on rock mixed with electro, you are absolutely right, there are many examples before but the way it was mixed in big beat is for me a turning point... It is really a new genre based on rock and dance/electro.

Seriously? I can't believe you can't hear how totally derivative of Grebo it is. OK, it' s a lot simpler and more repetitive but it's in very much in the same vein. Liam Howlett even collaborated with PWEI on Thier Law.

PWIE is more hiphop-ish and close to public enemy in my view.

What, and Chemical Brothers never used a rapper? The vocal arrangement in Breathe is also straight out of the Poppies playbook, which itself goes all the way back to the earliest days of Front242.

Nevertheless, my points remains on Liam Hewlett creating a super popular and unfluancal music style with a very artistic way of doing sampling...

I thought Fatboy Slim did it better and with BBS, you can't always be sure what's sampled and what's being played. To my mind that's the better achievement.

Well, "Block Rockin' Beats" is maybe my favourite song of all times.

Fatboy slim is great but not at the same level to me.

PWEI is not at the same level at all. On the list you gave me, I knew some of the songs as a kid. And I liked them because near what I like. But they are far far far from anything of chemical brothers.

But here it is clearly a simple question of taste, like arguing about chocolate types or colours preference. No point at all.