The Music Social Gig v. I'll Trade You My Shirt For A Grilled Cheese

“When I think about kids watching a TV show like American Idol or The Voice, then they think, ‘Oh, OK, that’s how you become a musician, you stand in line for eight fucking hours with 800 people at a convention center and… then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it’s not fuckin’ good enough.’ Can you imagine?” he implores. “It’s destroying the next generation of musicians! Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy and old fucking drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too. And then they’ll fucking start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some shitty old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-ass shit, and they became the biggest band in the world. That can happen again! You don’t need a fucking computer or the internet or The Voice or American Idol.”
— Dave Grohl (via blacktooth100)
 
ChickenScratch said:
And then they’ll fucking start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some shitty old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-ass shit, and they became the biggest band in the world.
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Biggest band in the world?! Lol.. And coming from the guy who wasn't part of Nirvana until later on down the road, like early 90s I believe, who is he to try to pretend he helped form Nirvana lol?
I hate this new Dave Grohl who think he's a spokesperson for freethinkers. Go fuck yourself Grohl. But fuck American I-doll as well.
 
^ Notice how he says "they" and not "we" in that quote. Dave Grohl, for being in the mainstream musical spotlight for as long as he has, is a pretty humble guy. Certainly one of the most down-to-earth musical celebrities these days.

And it's hard to deny that for those first few years of the 90s Nirvana was the biggest thing going.
 
Fine, you got me. He danced around that one. I'm sure his manager or attorney wrote it for him anyway. It's easy to be humble when you have the money to be so.
I'm sure people who audition on those shitty shows are not taking it as a one night karaoke type of thing. He's making assumptions that people these days are automatically entitled to things rather than having to work towards them. But I think a hard working musician would take the time to audition for one of those shows, it would be part of his drive to cover all bases for potential routes to success. I'd imagine most of them are active musicians that figure "why not?" when they realize the show will be in their area. The good musicians probably get weeded out in the first rounds since they seem to be honing in on Pop-type sensations.

Or you can look up to him for inspiration. The world will always need back up drummers, lol.
 
^ He wasn't talking about hard-working musicians though, he was talking about amateurs who think that AI, X Factor, and all those other bullshit shows are the ticket to becoming a professional musician when all it really takes is getting together with friends and working things out. There are probably thousands of people who have tried out for these shows who think "This is it! My big break!" and then get put on the American Idol "blooper reel" and get mocked and degraded in front of national audiences and become discouraged from future musical endeavors. It's not just contestants either - millions of viewers also vicariously experience the humiliation and it warps their idea of what a talented musician "should be". He's not saying people feel entitled, he's saying people have lost perspective and I agree to a certain extent. Luckily this thing called the 'internet' exists for all of the people who aren't wrapped up in the sterilized, commercialized notions of the modern music industry..
 
MrGrunge said:
when all it really takes is getting together with friends and working things out.
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Have you tried this? I consider that hard work. Regardless of if the process is fun or not.

If he's telling people not to use shows & not use the internet, then I would think he's implying to get out there and work your ass off if you want to be heard.
But I guess that's just how I'm reading into it.
 
^ I get together with friends and jam in garages almost every weekend. We suck, but we're not trying to be good - just playing because it's fun. Becoming a competent musician, let alone a good one, is hard work - it's not something you can just luck into (unless you're some kind of savant).

I don't think he's disparaging the internet, either. It would undercut his point, I think, to talk shit on the one platform most effective for broadcasting independent music.
 
MrGrunge said:
Becoming a competent musician, let alone a good one, is hard work - it's not something you can just luck into (unless you're some kind of savant).
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But I thought that was his central message in that paragraph..
 
so your buddy has a tumblr? what's his url? how many followers does he have?

i took my baby to the mac hospital to get her trackpad fixed. came home with new keyboard, new trackpad, new rubber bottom, new battery, and new hard drive. which means i'm basically music-less. because i don't use the cloud :( i would like to think of this as a rare opportunity to start all over, even though i started all over two years ago when i got her.
 
Kenickie said:
so your buddy has a tumblr? what's his url? how many followers does he have?

i took my baby to the mac hospital to get her trackpad fixed. came home with new keyboard, new trackpad, new rubber bottom, new battery, and new hard drive. which means i'm basically music-less. because i don't use the cloud :( i would like to think of this as a rare opportunity to start all over, even though i started all over two years ago when i got her.
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Yeesh that blows. My gf bought a track pad from the internet and a little repair kit with tools and did it herself in about 10 minutes.
It was about 35 for the pad and the kit was 25 but came with every tool you would need to work on a mac. It woulda been 10 if she wanted the tools just for the pad fixing.
Sorry for your loss.
 
does she have the unibody? or the white one with the square corners from like 2007/8? because i don't think you can do shit to the unibody. which is probably why they don't make them anymore. but i'm still under apple care so it was free. i asked them to do everything, and i'll probably take it in again before my apple care runs out just to get a tune up, and to get more ram installed. i'm trying to get at least 5 years out of this expensive toy before i bite the bullet and buy a macbook pro like Pander did when his white macbook bit the dust.

my itunes is so sad right now.

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The unibody I suppose, we both picked one up at the beginning of 2012. They are the MacBook Pro 13''ers
 
then why didnt she just take it in to be fixed instead of doing it herself? you guys should still be under apple care?
 
Nope that was up in like March. They wanted to charge her $200 bucks to fix it. And I'm glad she did it herself because somehow she didn't wipe anything out. Your poor itunes :( It's so..so pitiful atm.
 
i know :( and i just look at all the torrents on what and am overwhelmed by the choices i don't even know where to start. i've just been listening to my last.fm radio and thinking --- do i want to get a pixies album? do i even still like the pixies? enough to get an album? it's like torture but it has to end soon because my running playlist is hella stale.
 
Been there. First it was an old laptop that devestated my music collection. So I got a new computer and an external hard drive, 500gb I think it was. I filled that mofo and fucking loved it and truly believed I had my collection in a permanent archive of sorts. But then I plugged it in one day and it refused to work. Something about it was shot and it needed to be reformatted. I smashed that fucker to pieces instead. Now I have a 2tb external harddrive that I've had for maybe 2 years now. It still doesn't have everything the first external harddrive had on it but then it has stuff that has been released since the great fall of the 500gigger. But now I can't put stuff onto it from my macbook. I can take things off of it and put it onto my laptop, but not the other way around. I've slowly been burning many folders of albums onto a blank dvd as a data disc and storing them away. That's really the only way I can think up to preserve my music collection the best. I should make multiple copies when I'm finished lol.

Whenever I have to start over with my music collection I just scroll down my last.fm charts whenever I was bored enough to do so and work on the tedious process of gathering up bulk free music.

Fucking first world problems.
 
dude, right?

that seems ridiculous that discs are the fucking answer for this. isn't this 2013? hovercrafts, holograms, etc? all my apple products want me to use the cloud but there are too many vague ownership questions and things that make me uneasy about it except for the bare minimum of ABSOLUTELY NEEDED ON ALL DEVICES documents (like my calendar). plus they make you pay for iTunes match (25$ for a year) but PB has it and i'm kind of wishing i did now :( if we had closer musical tastes then i'd just steal everything from him again, but as it stands, we don't overlap on much, and i don't want to spend forever listening to Serge Gainsbourg. first world problems indeed.
 
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