Monday, May 23, 2011

Being For The Benefit of Mr Eden

Po-Faced Folkie Playlist

16 comments:

NickPheas said...

What? Your trying to tell me that there are no folk musicians desperately longing for a lost rural idyll that never actually existed and disapproving of anyone who adds a bit of joy to 'traditional' tunes?
No-one reaching for a fire axe if someone plugs in an amp (sorry Pete, but...)?
No-one that the man shouting 'Judas' would have approved of?
And never has been?
As Bob said, 'I don't believe you'.

Any happy birthday to Bob while we're at it.

Andrew Rilstone said...

No, Nick, dear heart, I am not saying any of those things. I'm providing you with some examples of songs by the group I was writing about, and who you said (for reasons which are still not entirely transparent to me) that you'd never heard. So you could, like, listen to their songs and form a, like, opinion. I never read a book before reviewing it: it only prejudices my mind.

>What? Your trying to tell me that >there are no folk musicians >desperately longing for a lost rural >idyll that never actually existed >and disapproving of anyone who adds >a bit of joy to 'traditional' tunes?

Nope. Or at any rate, no-one in the fifty or sixty gigs I've been to fits that category.

>No-one reaching for a fire axe if >someone plugs in an amp (sorry Pete, >but...)?

That was nearlly half a century ago Nick. Move on.

>No-one that the man shouting 'Judas' >would have approved of?

That was also half a century ago.

>And never has been?

"Never" is a very long time. Just to be clear, your refutation of my argument "Show of Hands are not especially po-faced" is "Between 1920 and 2011, there has been at least one po-faced folk singer", yes?

Do let me know what you think of the play list when you've had a chance to listen to it.

Andrew Rilstone said...

@Nick - Is the problem here actually that you are still looking at some kind of text only version of Mr Blog, so don't actually see links, You-Tube vids etc? There's probably some kind of widgit that will put placeholders in if I knew where to look.

NickPheas said...

No, I'm looking at a normal version of the blog but at work. I can read text while jobs are running, but fooling about with headphones is too obvious.

One thing you can say about A Show of Hands, is that it's probably my favourite live Rush album, so if your people decide to name themselves after that then they can't be all that bad.

The suspicion of po-facedness though rather stems from the way you were pulling lyrics out which would certainly fit a 'bastards, bastards, people listening to jolly celtic music and having FUN, and not listening to me,' mindset.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Okay: but can you perhaps see why "I have never listened to them, but here is my opinion on them" might be considered unhelpful, even provocative? There are, presumably, times in your life where you do have a set of headphones? And that posting a response to the title of a play list that you haven't listened to is slightly odd behaviour, almost as if you were deliberately trying to annoy me? Which is, you know, a perfectly okay internet game. I've lost track of the number of discussions I've had about my Cerebus articles with people who turn out to have read neither a: Cerebus not b: my articles.

I put time and effort into this shit; I don't ask anyone to read it who doesn't want to, but its rather hard not to percieve sneery comments "Hmph, never heard of them" comments as an attack on my self-esteem.

Did you find Jon Boden joylessly purist when you heard him, incidentally?

Andrew Rilstone said...

possibly time to take a little holiday from the interwebs, me thinks

Phil Masters said...

Not trying to be annoying, Andrew, but do note that not everyone has a Spotify account. I'm sure that I could get one if I had the time and an urge, but for now, clicking on that link just gets me an error message.

Andrew Rilstone said...

That's good. That's helpful. That's the piece of information I was asking for. "I'm sorry, I can't read that link" -- helpful, relevant. "Peter Seeger was jolly cross at Newport in 62, so you must be wrong about Show of Hands", not so helpful. I thought that when you clicked it (the link, I mean, not the cable) you got a message saying "You need spotify to read this" and another one saying "Get Spotify"? Is there a more user friendly way of posting play lists?

Mike Taylor said...

For the record: I wanted to listen to this playlist and got as far as registering with Spotify, before it told me that the alpha-testing Linux client is only available to paying subscribers, not freeloaders such as myself.

So, yeah, for me Spotify isn't a good mechanism. I'm not sure what else to suggest, though -- AFAIK, Grooveshark (which runs entirely in the browser) doesn't have persistent playlists that you can link to. Or does it?

Oh, and Andrew, please don't feel obliged to take a break from blogging. If a particular comment, or sequence of comments, strikes you as flamebait, just ignore it and move on. Othwerwise the boy-bands^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hterrorists have won.

NickPheas said...

"Did you find Jon Boden joylessly purist when you heard him, incidentally?"

No, though I thought the couple of Folk-Song-A-Day I listened to a touch affected. Bellowhead is rather different.

"I have never listened to them, but here is my opinion on them"

I think you're confusing my opinion on them with my impression of what your article was trying to say. Which was surely itself intended to some degree to be provocative, so you shouldn't get too upset if your readers might be provoked.

And like Phil, I am not a Spottiman.

Mike Taylor said...

... but in the evenings, I use a Mac laptop, and that DOES have a free Spotify version, so despite what I said in my previous comment I am now happily listening to your playlist.

Mike Taylor said...

I listened through the playlist, and liked it enough that I will do do again. I pronounce Show Of Hands "Not Po-Faced". Quite the opposite, if anything -- I'd have thought they were a bit too mainstream and crowd-pleasy for our host.

(My capcha text for this comment is "ships", which I find pleasantly easy to retype.)

Phil Masters said...

I thought that when you clicked it (the link, I mean, not the cable) you got a message saying "You need spotify to read this" and another one saying "Get Spotify"?

That's what I got the second time I tried, I admit. I'm sure the first time (on an earlier playlist link) I got a slightly less friendly-looking message that boiled down to "Error: Dunno what to do with this thing". But whatever. I got the general idea either way.

Is there a more user friendly way of posting play lists?

Umm, cut an paste a text link? I'm sure most of us can find most things somewhere, in a place and form which suits our personal foibles, if we're interested.

Phil Masters said...

(Should have been text list there. Sorry.)

Johnson said...
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Kigurumi said...

Chipmunk Onesie