[frott]

I wouldn't say bands are genuinely "ripoffs," they are amalgams, unless they are a put together entity made specifically to sound the same. Look at all of those 90s bands that sounded strikingly like Nirvana without pulling off the tortured artist routine?

And yea, LOL at Tool "ripping off" Isis. Someone needs to look at the history books where Tool basically started as a cross between the prog-rock of Rush and the techno-industrial metal of something like Fear Factory.


That is they take elements of styles/genres/other bands and mush them together.

Interpol is a great example of this. Listen to every interpol song and really in the end the only similarity between them and Joy Division is that the singers have vaguely similar "down in the bottom of their throat" voices. So what? Joy division never used reverby "walls of sound" or lurching drones in their songs. They were crisp and jagged.

The Strokes had that go off as well, where you could take songs like When It Started and say "Hey, they're ripping off the Velvet Underground." Just because he's sorta doing a lou reed voice and it is recorded raw. I anal-yzed one of their albums and found all of the songs that sounded really strikingly similar to the chord progressions or sounds: dolly parton, sonic youth, reo speedwagon, the cars. Rip offs? Nah, just picking and choosing the bits of music they give a shit about and forming that amalgam.

And Warrik - that's what the post-industrial music biz was about in the late 1800s till the 1940s, and it never went away. Just look at the Billboard charts of every year and you'll see that most all of it is filled with "produced" music, rather than music created by the musicians.

I don't think anyone would be surprised if the various bands that are viewed as hard-working artists were revealed to simply be doing what a team of songwriters, craftsmen and PR specialists were packaging them as. There are very, very few of these artists anymore. There was a boom of them in the early 90s, but it basically goes hippies -> punks -> metalheads -> grunge. Most everything else in there has a AR Team sponsorship to some degree, that has been seen in the public eye.

Of course any group of folks can get together and make songs, but those that touch the sacred channels of radio and tv? Artists crafting art? Puh-leese.



Besides, when you start talking about music forms, isn't everyone ripping it off after the first person does it? Aren't "rock bands" just Led Sabbath? You mean to tell me there's something new with prog since Magma and Rush? Or something new with metal since Exodus, Slayer and Sepultura? Synth-Folk will never be more than a modern Silver Apples. How can you bother with post-punk when epic bands like Joy Division and Wire did it decades ago?

Besides duder killing himself, synths weren't exactly cheap and easy and free for all to get when joy division were doing that. It makes them special, and made New Order what it is. People forget that part today where anyone can download a freeware synth and go beep bop boop.


It is a chilly day in Hell when you've got a new generation of tweenie girls getting moist to a fucking Supertramp song covered by some douchebag who's music career ties directly into his show on tha WB or what-have-you.