Stoney

But what if we just didn’t give a damn about how many comments Albano has and how many the Jethro Tull? If people want to come in here and talk trash, they can do it, it seems to me, with all due respect to the Supersoul of the moment, right?

Having something against Albano is not a matter of lynching or not; it's a matter of simple common sense to understand that certain people should be tilling the land instead of having billions coming out of their ass. It seems elementary to me.

Maddeché, it's so nice to throw shade at people like that! Why should we stop commenting!? It's the only way we have to oppose the overwhelming media power of such people in Italy. If he died now, I would jerk off 20 times, him and that bitch of a wife. These people steal the spotlight from young musicians by convincing everyone there are none. Italy is a country of old folks, and you can see it even in these little things.

Carmen Consoli makes me shit tables. Anyway, I wanted to propose a standing ovation for the genius up there who coined the neologism "cant'autrice." Congratulations!

The fact is that when you listen to Pull Me Under, you don't ask yourself questions like, "But what do they want to tell me?" There's nothing that stimulates reflection or makes you think there’s something more underneath. That Pull Me Under is about Shakespeare is something only you, I, and a few others know; that Metropolis is divided into three because it talks about the three dances of life is perhaps something only you and a couple of other fans have noticed (and maybe it’s not even true); who knows how many really know the story behind Scenes From A Memory. Apart from the fact that I wasn’t talking about the "meaning" of their music in that sense, you can listen to Dream Theater without ever questioning what they want to express, and everything still works perfectly. There’s no hint of communication behind their music; as Lux said, they’re "super accessible." On the other hand, if you put on an album by Slint, the feeling that "there's something more" comes to you spontaneously, immediately, because they leave you with a sense of perplexity like, "What did I just hear? There must be something else." Ignoring the context and background of Slint is impossible if you want to appreciate them, and if you don’t, there's a risk they come off as inconclusive or even annoying. In fact, try playing Slint to a metalhead and see what they say.

Great, someone who finally understands! Those who hear 3 riffs in half an hour while listening to this record are right. But they’re looking at it from the wrong angle. They clearly don't realize that here we shouldn't judge the "riff"; this work can't be assessed with the perspective of a metalhead looking for a cute little riff. The problem lies not with the album but with those who listen to it using utterly flawed measures of evaluation. Anyway, don’t worry, if you’re still stuck in 1980, it’s not your fault, it’s a widespread condition. Cheers.

The fact that you see passion and love in Images and Words is your limitation, I'm sorry. This is the classic case where personal taste leads to inventing the most convoluted ways to justify the objective beauty of things one likes, because if you were even a little bit objective, you would realize that there are practically infinite solos that are fine in themselves. Consider the bridge of Pull Me Under, or the solo of Another Day, in which certain flurries of notes could have easily been spared. The solo of Under a Glass Moon, pure masturbation. Every solo is perfectly standard, zero inventiveness, they're scales taken and copied from the harmony book meant for the metalhead who gets high listening to Petrucci's flashy stuff. Each solo is constructed by alternating syrupy parts with stunning picked sections, which, as far as I'm concerned, is elementary and immediate, let alone depth, and it serves only to astonish the listener. This line of thought is represented not only by Dream Theater but by all the clone bands, like Symphony X, Pain of Salvation, Pagan's Mind... and in general all that rock/metal scene where the fan goes to the concert "because the guitarist is a monster, how does he do it?" Let's be honest, the awe that DT provokes in the AVERAGE fan is due to their technical skill, certainly not to what they say or communicate, because very few care about that. You mentioned Shakespeare. Well, then provide me with A VALID REASON why a piece inspired by Shakespeare should be specifically Pull Me Under. What does that piece have to do with Shakespeare? If Wait For Sleep had addressed the same topic, no one would have noticed, nothing would have changed, do you understand? That text ended up there by chance; it could have easily appeared somewhere else with the necessary modifications and it would have been the same. This is what I mean when I say that expressively they are zeroed out. Take Home, what sense does the Indian sitar make in a piece like that? NONE, it serves no functional purpose; it’s just there because “it's cool,” and that's it. What’s the point of the interlude in Metropolis? What reason does it have to exist? If the notes had been different, would anyone have noticed? Take Disappear on Six Degrees, a very banal ballad that used a 5/8 instead of the classic 6/8 to try to seem original, but which has no expressive meaning. What is the ultimate purpose of their harmonic, rhythmic, melodic choices? NONE, except that they are pleasant, or deliberately difficult. In a DT piece, there isn't a dissonance, a note out of scale that stands out or loads the piece with some meaning; it’s all strictly standard. The DT puts on airs as poets, but in reality, they are not at all, and those who fall for it are only those who have no means to distinguish the poet from the charlatan. And, of course, maximum respect for those who admire charlatans; everyone is free to do what they want and enjoy the pastime they prefer, but please, don't try to give them dignity by elevating them to a level that doesn't belong to them.

Do you remember the kids playing with action figures like He-Man, Big Jim... projecting their desire to smash everything in their games, proving their strength, competing to see who has the meanest toy? An attitude that only testifies to their unexpressed need for attention from adults. Well, the people who listen to this crap are exactly the same; they've just changed their toy (but their brains have stayed the same).

Do you still believe that JUST BECAUSE they play black metal THEY are bad? HAHAHAHAHAHA... It's like that little girl who thinks the Backstreet Boys singer is truly in love. And excuse me, but wasn't rap the genre where you had to go to jail 10 times to prove you were tough before making a record? How old are you? 10? You and the music you listen to are ridiculous.

"If a metalhead is really passionate about the music they listen to, it's likely that they arrived at it through a much more dignified and respectable personal journey than the average fan of Laura Pausini or the All Saints." I could respond that someone who listens to Laura Pausini isn't even passionate. And anyway, the Pausini fan keeps to themselves while the average metalhead annoys you because they think they’re enlightened; the Pausini fan doesn’t believe that their favorite singer is better than everything else in the world, while the metalhead with their records of obscure bands often does. Then there’s the fact that if someone is an idiot, they’re an idiot, whether they listen to the All Saints or any useless metal band; there’s as much crap in metal as there is in pop. I wonder why, when talking about pop, we only mention Laura Pausini and not bands like Queen, Depeche Mode, U2, The Cure, bands with a rich history who certainly can’t be said to have never paid attention to market logic, who were or are in rotation on MTV much more than Laura Pausini and Tiziano Ferro, but whom I still don’t feel the need to disparage just because they sold millions of copies. It almost seems that pop is always synonymous with banal and disrespected. Honestly, I don’t feel like saying that those who listen to such bands have less dignity than those who listen to metal. On the contrary, I prefer someone obsessed with Depeche Mode to someone obsessed with Gorgoroth, if I may. Just as in pop, where it’s easy to make quick money by relying on silly melodies, in metal, you just need to respect those two or three classic canons that have been the same for decades. In short, it only takes reading any review to understand that when there’s clean sound, decent technique, and evil lyrics, metalheads go crazy. The other day, I was reading a review of an Opeth album (which I like) that talked about neither the album nor Opeth but merely stated that since they’re the baddest of the world, the album must be amazing. Even the alternating of growls and clean vocals, something that characterizes their style, was treated only in technical terms like, "the singer is a monster because he can do it," as if it were a self-evident thing. Similarly, I once read a review of Catch 33 by Meshuggah where the album was slammed because the band had chosen to use a programmed drum machine instead of a live drummer, and that was enough to destroy them, without anyone asking, "but why did they do that?" It was taken for granted that it was because the drummer "wasn't capable" of playing certain things, which was obviously entirely false and ridiculous. In short, is this the passion that metalheads have for their music? Or that of certain guitarists (I know billions, not "some") who spend their lives doing the exercises from Rock Discipline? Or the double kick pedal enthusiasts who don't care if they can’t keep time, as long as they’re banging away? I prefer the girl who sings love songs by Pausini; at least I can get by thinking, "she’s naive now, she’ll grow up." You can’t give dignity to low-quality stuff just because it sells less than a Christina Aguilera album in absolute terms: if a musical product sucks, it doesn’t gain value based on how little it plays on TV, nor can you automatically strip it of merit if it does happen. We can’t justify everything with passion or commerciality; to me, that’s nonsense. And one last thing: I make comparisons because others do, precisely to demonstrate how futile and stupid it is to make them. If it were up to me, the only measure would be the music, the end product, the notes, and THAT'S IT, beyond everything else.