Stoney

Oh my God, how dare you mention the name of Eddie Vedder under a review of Baglioni? Are we kidding here? Oh my God, let me blast Vitalogy right now, I need to "purify" myself... :D

Poor us. If these are the "artists" circulating today...

Ah, you've been following him and even admiring him as an artist for 30 years. It's people like you that allow these charlatans to succeed when, instead, they should be in a mine shoveling coal.

Look, I'm not getting angry, first because I'm tired tonight, and second because from the way you write, it's clear you're about 17 years old... however, allow me to make a couple of observations. First, how can you even remotely compare Verdena to Nirvana? Do you even know what "grunge" means? Maybe not. Second, it seems that all you know about "grunge" is Nevermind by Nirvana, and not even the whole thing... you'll probably know just Come As You Are and Smells Like Teen Spirit, and that's it. In that regard, I recommend Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden, and also Dirt by Alice in Chains, just to make it clear that "grunge" has rather broad meanings and doesn’t necessarily mean acid guitars and incoherent lyrics. Unfortunately, yours is a typical review from someone who believes the musical universe is limited only to what airs on MTV.

So I tell you that if we set aside the "emotions" discourse, which is entirely subjective, and try to contextualize the production of the DT objectively, in my opinion, it turns out that this is completely devoid of any artistic or cultural value or ambition. Since you hold the opposite view, and since many have tried to demonstrate it, clinging to discussions of emotions, technique, and melody, which I consider flawed or incomplete as I just mentioned, why don't you give it a try? I'm open to any discussion. It's not a challenge, you know... I'm speaking seriously and completely sincerely. Bye.

Orion, how nice, you didn’t understand anything. See? You are the living proof that people only read what they want to read. Look, it’s not me who insisted on the technique... my speech should be read from a completely opposite perspective to the one you understood. The discourse on pop was just an example, and I didn’t bring it up; someone in the comments above said that rock is more complex than pop, which isn’t always true, as I tried to demonstrate. The point was: since many posts serve to demonstrate the preparation of the DTs and their infallible technique, I noted that in pop, there is ten times as much mere instrumental technique, so this reasoning doesn’t prove the alleged validity of the DTs, but quite the opposite. As for feelings, it was a discussion meant to advocate for all music listeners, including those of the DTs. The point was: it doesn’t matter what music you listen to, here we can’t judge the "feelings" one experiences while listening to music because who are we to do that? Those are personal and entirely subjective things, as well as independent of the music being listened to. I can say that Ligabue makes crap music, but I can’t afford to say that anyone who gets emotional listening to Ligabue is an idiot; do you understand what I mean? The same obviously applies to the DTs. I will never tell you that you’re stupid if you get emotional with "Through Her Eyes," on the contrary, maximum respect, because the reason why that piece gives you strong feelings is personal to you, and no one can interfere with that. So the discussion of "emotions" should be set aside because it proves nothing and especially risks being quite offensive. However, I can criticize everything else; I can say that from a compositional standpoint that piece is commercial, that musically it is invalid, that it adds nothing to what has already been said... basically, we need to distinguish the "universal" aspect from the "personal" one, which are two entirely different things. Everyone is obviously free to listen to the music they want, and everyone has their reasons for getting emotional about whatever they like, but we aren’t discussing that here. Here we are trying to contextualize an album within a broader musical and cultural discourse. To give a down-to-earth example, I think "The Betrothed" is rubbish, but I would never dream of saying that that work is useless or sucks, because that’s false. I fully realize the enormous importance of that book, but it just doesn’t meet my personal tastes. That doesn’t mean I allow myself to shoot it down. In the same way, I love "Cyrano de Bergerac" madly, which many say is just an ordinary little book that counts very little and nothing at the literary level. I am perfectly aware of that and would never dream of saying that it is the best book in the world just because it has given me unforgettable feelings. Do you understand the point?

Yes, lux, it's true, I certainly didn't mean to say that pop is complicated: usually, it remains easy-listening music (with some exceptions, of course), but I’m bothered by the relentless metalhead who claims that anything that isn’t prog is easy, so I chose pop as a glaring example, though I could have picked any other genre. The problem is that if we were to judge music based on technique, any pop record should be considered infinitely superior to every single album by Dream Theater, given that the musicians playing on those records are almost always masters with a terrifying background, who listen to, play, and teach the most diverse music genres, compared to which every member of DT would indeed look rather mediocre. This is something DT fans don’t know, or perhaps don't understand; they shoot down everything, spout a lot of nonsense, to tell the truth, and justify their closed-mindedness with statements that are immediately contradicted by banal and obvious facts like the one I just described. Any attempt to make the greatness of Dream Theater objective lasts just a few seconds: if they focus on innovation, they’re wrong; if they focus on technique, even more so; if they focus on melody, what can I say. The only thing that would be unassailable and wouldn’t generate my resentment would be to say “I like Dream Theater,” period, without clumsy attempts to confer a dignity they don’t have and can’t have. But no, for many people, this is not enough, because it would mean passing the idea that DT is just one band among many. There’s always this obsession with elevating everything to the absolute: here, we don’t even discuss whether Dream Theater is a "valid" band or not; here, we discuss bringing the conversation back down to earth and stopping the divine attributes given to five perfectly normal musicians. DT doesn’t have fans; they only have ultra fans; they don’t have listeners; they have worshippers. I once saw a seminar online that John Petrucci had done in Italy shortly before, and what shocked me was seeing people ask disarmingly naive questions. Imagine being face to face with your favorite guitarist... how many things could you ask (considering that to be there you would have paid at least eighty euros)? Infinite! And yet no, people only asked, “Show us your picks!” or “Play Metropolis,” and one even asked, “How do you play so fast?” And he, poor guy, I kind of feel sorry for him, felt like a clown in front of a bunch of clueless kids. In my opinion, he’s frustrated because if he ever played something sincere in his life, no one has ever noticed, since everyone only cares about how many notes he can play in a second.

Art in general, and this review along with its associated posts, is a clear testament to that: whenever someone tries to dissent from the universally accepted opinion, they are labeled a "detractor," someone who speaks out of envy or resentment. As if to say: EVERYONE LIKES Dream Theater, and there are those who openly admit it and those who pretend to hate them for some personal quirk, but deep down they only do it because they "haven't realized" that they're actually beautiful. This reasoning is extremely serious; it means that these 5 idiots have so thoroughly fried your brains that it is impossible for you to accept that there exists someone who criticizes DT with sound reasoning, and who, with sound reasoning, says they suck. Realize that.

"Emotions deeper than those of the banal pop, because we know that rock is a committed listening experience." And how do you know that someone who enjoys pop feels emotions less profoundly than yours? What do you have, a "sensation meter"? That's a somewhat presumptuous statement, don’t you think? I would never dare to go up to someone who gets emotional listening to, I don’t know, Laura Pausini, and tell them that their feelings aren’t deep. Realize that people consider Vasco Rossi and Ligabue as poets; they fall in love, cry, laugh, and have fun listening to music made solely to sell as many copies as possible, crafted to cater to the masses. You can get angry and say that music is garbage, but you can't delegitimize the emotions of an ordinary listener who projects their passions and meanings onto that music. Not to mention that according to your reasoning, then your feelings are nothing compared to those of someone who listens to jazz or avant-garde music, which are notoriously much more complex genres than rock. The argument that rock is a complicated genre while pop is easy doesn’t hold up either, because it’s simply FALSE. Behind the billions in commercial pop music, there are certainly not incapable musicians, but highly qualified masters with the skills to compose and perform in line with the directives of record companies who want a product that is easily accessible, and therefore sellable to the general public. And I assure you that it’s not easy at all to make a piece that appeals to so many people. It may be anti-artistic, expressionless, it may be garbage, but it’s certainly not EASY. If we think that usually a metalhead can barely play what comes to their mind personally, just imagine how capable they would be of composing pieces with the specific aim of reaching everyone's ears in a pleasant way. This is just to demonstrate that EASY doesn’t always equal UGLY, and DIFFICULT doesn’t always equal BEAUTIFUL. And then, sorry, but saying that rock is a complex genre means everything and nothing at the same time. Complicated compared to what? Just because a band plays rock doesn’t guarantee that they create complicated or difficult music to listen to—think for example of Europe, Poison, and all that slice of rock that filled the charts in the '80s; do you consider those complicated? And let's not forget that rock, no matter how complex it might be, remains a highly popular genre, to which many listeners can approach simply out of curiosity, and it’s not restrictive like other genres that require study and preparation to understand. In the case of Dream Theater, many believe they offer a complex listening experience because it was for them when they went from the cassette of Kill 'em All to that of Images & Words, not realizing that the musical world is much vaster than they dare to imagine. They discovered hot water and go around bragging about it. A band like DT will certainly be the first among metalheads, but they are the last compared to those who play all the other genres. I’ve formed an idea reading the comments above, which is that many people talk about "complexity" and "arrangements" without knowing what those two things actually mean. There are people convinced that the purpose of a musician is to play as fast as possible, and anyone who doesn’t is a failure. There are people convinced that either you play perfectly and cleanly like DT, or nothing. There are people who want virtuosity as a guarantee of a musician's true skill, and if they don’t find it, they think the musician isn’t worth a dime. This is the death of art. It would be as if someone went up to Kandinsky and said, "Sure, it’s easy to draw those abstract things, now give me a portrait that looks like a photograph, otherwise I don’t believe you can draw." It’s prejudices like these that ruin music and art in general, and this review along with its related posts is glaring proof of that: if anyone dares to disagree with the universally accepted o

"A TRIMORPH masterpiece," "an open-air fairy tale the instruments are CRUCCIOSI," "cheerful, naive, and LUPACCHIOTTA," "SGATTAIOLANTI blends," "ZIMOLOGIA IN VEEMENZA," "PROPULSIVE piano." I don't know the album, but the review is simply brilliant!!