Making great music is easy. All you need is a lot of booze and someone else with a lot of booze to listen to you make up songs about people within earshot off the top of your head.
Making terrible music, on the other hand, takes fancy instruments and years of music lessons and skill and self-confidence and expensive pants and dynamic range compression and influences and autotuners and blow jobs and publicists and sincerity. Really, unless you’re friends with Steve Vai or something, it’s kind of more trouble than its worth.
Taking great music and turning it into terrible music is even more of a pain in the ass. Some space travelers from Planet Baby will tell you that all you have to do to ruin a song is play it over the speakers at Starbucks or change some of the lyrics to make it about Totino’s Pizza Rolls. Other humorless losers believe that you can kill a song for the rest of time by adding a drum machine to it or letting someone who takes themselves very seriously cover it. Still more fags think that playing a tune all the way through on the kazoo means that no one can enjoy the non-kazoo version of that tune ever again.
They are all mistaken (and sad).
The only two proven ways to make a song you like sound bad forever are to get in a car crash while it’s playing, or to hire a guitar virtuoso to noodle it to death. The car-crash thing is pretty straightforward–whenever the notes that were playing right before impact touch your brain, they trigger the memory and make your adrenal glands shit themselves all over your kidneys. Unpleasant.
Noodling, however, is far more insidious. On the surface it seems no different than a bad cover, but there’s an ineffable quality particular to wanky, repetitive hammer-ons and bendy little treble notes that burns a subliminal imprint in your head which can never be removed. It’s akin to watching a copy of Vertigo that’s been intercut with spliced stills of child pornography. You probably won’t realize that it’s happened at the time, but the next time you listen to the song, your mind will go, “Wait, there’s something missing here…” Then, after stroking its chin for a couple of minutes, it’ll raise an index finger, say “Oh yeah,” and start filling in the gaps with deedledeedlededwaaaahwaaaaahBEEEwleedooobeedoobeedooodlebeedandandan. Good luck ever thinking about enjoying that song after that.
The crowning example of this dictum is the David Bowie bootleg Dallas Moonlight On April 27, 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughan–living embodiment of how abjectly corny blues music can be and the only person whose death I have ever fantasized about witnessing–joined Bowie on a soundstage in Texas to personally destroy 29 of the man’s greatest hits.
Wherever you stand on the Bowie fence, we defy you to make it all the way through this “bluesified” version of “TVC15″ (formerly one our favorite songs) without shuddering your headphones off.
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And before any of you try to deflect the trauma you’ve just been subjected to by making jokes about cocaine-descisions, please remember that Bowie’s coke phase was in the mid-70s and was more or less excellent. This has nothing to do with snorting white lines and everything to do with smoking white grooves.
Here’s one more little example just to prove our point. If the breathy phaser-jazz version of “Jean Genie” doesn’t give you chills (especially 0:44), just wait for the monumental jizz-off at the end of “Star.”
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OK, seriously, last one.
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December 14th, 2009 @ 10:49
Reader Comments
December 14th, 2009
I hate to be all music-nerd about this, but Bowie broke SRV into music professionally. He’s the guitarist on Let’s Dance.
But spot-on about only guitars being able to ruin guitar music by being guitars.
December 14th, 2009
Cracked actor wasn’t bad…
December 14th, 2009
yes, egotistical playing can ruin music, but he wasn’t hired to play rhythm guitar. look at Dennis Chambers. phenomenally talented, great imagination, but a much better clinician than a band member (IMHO).
December 14th, 2009
It’s Stevie Ray Vaughan smart guy!
December 14th, 2009
Eric Johnson was better than SRV at doing Hendrix , and Clapton is better than both combined , while Scofield exists in a category none of them can approach .
December 14th, 2009
Clapton? What has he done besides throw his baby out the window and right a song about it?
December 14th, 2009
All I have to say is -Blues Hammer-
Get it???
December 14th, 2009
Anonymous, on Dec 11, 2009 wrote:
It’s Stevie Ray Vaughan smart guy!
gee, are you sure?
December 14th, 2009
This is one of the most disrespectful, poorly written pieces of garbage I’ve ever read, as well as all of these ridiculous comments. Love or hate Stevie Ray Vaughan, but to sit here and discredit his OBVIOUS level of talent is mind boggling. Everything he did with Bowie was far from in poor taste, it was in fact the exact opposite. “Corny white guy blues”? Go to your local pub and listen to a 50 year old balding douche bag who has his signature Clapton model Strat that he sanded the finish in his garage so it looked like he played it for 25 years. Then you’ll hear corny white guy blues. I’m sorry, but if you cut records with Albert King, and sat on stage with the likes of BB King, Etta James, Chaka Khan and other folks of that nature, then by my book you’ve got some fucking soul.
December 14th, 2009
Your point is well taken, but where is the excessiveness? Are these examples the best you could come up with? These examples aren’t really all that bad.
December 14th, 2009
this is one of the most generic articles I’ve ever read. come up with a better argument before bitching about shit
December 14th, 2009
not sweet for Jane at all
December 14th, 2009
stevie ray rules an so does jean genie… ’nuff said
December 14th, 2009
Kirk Hammet is a wanker. Stevie was soul incarnate. Bowie notwithstanding. Those songs suffer more from the latter’s camp values at the time (christ, those horns) than the guitar which is not far from the originals. As if live music is supposed to be like your precious records.
December 14th, 2009
this article sucks. stevie ray vaughn is cool, across the board cool.
December 14th, 2009
Ignorant bullshit.
December 14th, 2009
I love the “you gotta admit he had talent” argument. When the product of your talent is absolute garbage, then what’s the fucking point? I’m pretty talented at jerking off to piss-porn for two hours straight, but no one’s building a statue of me in a poncho.
December 14th, 2009
Hahaha, angry SRV fans are the WORST. I had to work for this guy in high school who would play a cassette version of that double-live album on repeat EVERY day and lecture you for hours on how great a guitarist he was if you suggested turning it off or putting something else on. The only other music he deemed acceptable was solo Mark Knopfler. It goes without saying he was a guitar instructor.
December 14th, 2009
Stevie Ray Vaughan, as unlistenable as his fans are unfuckable.
December 14th, 2009
those who bag on stevie ray vaugh are typically not working class, or if they are, they have affectations of escaping said affliction, which usually means hanging out with NYU trust fund babies.
anyways, as i was saying. hence, the hipster must hate stevie ray vaugh and strive to make all many of comments about how sucks he is.
December 14th, 2009
SRV is fucking BORING. If you can’t figure out what a guitarist is saying, it’s just wanking. That is SRV, wank city.
December 14th, 2009
blurg
December 14th, 2009
Hey, hence guy. I really hope you’re not a native english speaker because you are going to be in for a rude awakening when you start trying to peddle your writing after high school.
December 14th, 2009
hahahahaha. i’m ninety already, so highschool is way byond me sunny.
why is it the hipster always attack people with the psuedo-intellectshual label? hahahahaha. i’ve notice this. they always say this when you make any sort of negative comment on hipsterdom.
could it be….it takes one to know one? hahahahaha
show me a hipster who knows more than the latest band review and a couple of manga novels, and i’ll show you a hipster that still lives in his paren’ts house.
wait, non-sequitur. oohh, he’s using latin, he must be a psuedo intellectual.
or in your case, a suede intellectual.
go learn something yorself fool
http://www.math.umn.edu/~whitehouse
and suck a knob bitches
December 14th, 2009
My comments aren’t showing up, but safe to say whoever wrote this post likes keytar skinny pants crap. None of that lasts past 18 months in Pitchforkland.
December 14th, 2009
i hate hipsters. that is why i read and reply to vice magazine comments, to show them that they are all self hating hipsters… because i am not one.
December 14th, 2009
“Suede intellectual”… I like it. Nice turn of phrase. Maybe if hipsters really exist (instead of just being relatively normal people who are being judged and categorized by other relatively normal people for who knows what reason), that’s what they would actually be going for.
But seriously, aside from a bit at the beginning and a bit in the middle, there’s really not that much SRV on TVC15. Not a very good example.
December 14th, 2009
I like that the guy complaining about non-sequiturs is basing his argument on a 404 link.
December 14th, 2009
it’s become a fad in music criticism to shit on any form of blues. to say that a band is inspired by hendrix or zeppelin is to say that they’re boring throwbacks, while only fashionable bullshit like grizzly bear and animal collective is worthy of THE DISCERNING AND SOPHISTICATED HIPSTER.
December 14th, 2009
Wow the Vice staff are working really hard this morning getting the debate going and then editing out half of the entries. i really like the Scum comment you removed. That’s been the best quip of the day, but why remove it?
December 14th, 2009
not to be a pussy, but i think both sides have a valid argument. however, lou reed with metallica makes me want to die. and the bowie/ stevie ray songs are fucking terrible.
December 14th, 2009
Oh Lou, why’d ya go and do that.
December 14th, 2009
the only other shit i’ve seen like that came out of my arse
December 14th, 2009
Yeah everyone knows Dream Theatre are shit
Why does Vice have a massive boner for people who can’t play their instruments or mix a record properly?
December 15th, 2009
[...] Fuzzy Crew wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptMaking great music is easy. All you need is a lot of booze and someone else with a lot of booze to listen to you make up songs about people within earshot off. [...]