Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

It’s a long fluffy article that doesn’t even include the source of the famous quote. Miles Davis said this and would reference how important the fundamentals are to any instrument like the drums:

“Drummers ape each other. The way every rock'n'roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear. They know how to play everything now. It's the flood of records. Drums and trumpet and bass … it's like a big tree of goodies. You can just buy this record and pick this off and get this bass and flap it up! The good drummers don't play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can't lay in the pocket. He has to learn that basic stuff first.”

The author definitely knows how to optimize SEO, but not even googling their own title of an article and including one of the more famous examples seems a bit odd to me.

There’s quite some claims that modern creators are afraid to imitate each other? Has the author opened up TikTok, YouTube, or copied a popular tweet into Google to see the thousands of copycats getting the same recognition in their own bubbles of the world?

Weird, I thought it was a great article. One that actually gets better as it progresses. I don't see how it's fluffy at all.

In the first half, he is mainly referring to the current state of fine-arts, which is still in the grip of the "originality disease". It's a different way of describing a particularly outgrowth of modernism, the rejection of bourgeois values, which included conformity, propriety, and the existence of objective truth and beauty. The horrors of World War 1 were the turning point, how could something so grotesque arise in the pinnacle of civilization after all. The author mentions the influence of Freud's work, which absolutely demolished the collective psychic order, turning everybody into a neurotic.

Interesting too, is that he really highlights the self-absorption which underlies modern/contemporary "high" fine arts. That criticism is not new. The first real critical assault on modernism was in the seventies. However, it didn't stick, instead it turned ideals of bourgeois respectability into a form of pageantry. Think a critic like Tom Wolfe as an anachronistic dandy, or the weird Lego-classicism of postmodern skyscrapers. But the core of that criticism stands though: a half-century later, and we have still not overcome the absolute degeneration of artistic production.

I hope to see by the end of my lifetime that we have dug out of this hole, and art is unabashedly the pursuit of truth and beauty again. That will require artists and their patrons to stop navel-gazing though.

For those unfamiliar "ape" means to imitate here and "in the pocket" means to have fun with it / feel comfortable performing.

> In _The Jazz Theory Book_, Mark Levine defines playing in the pocket simply as grooving, where the rhythm section is locked in and working as a unit.

> in the pocket - When the music is rhythmically in a groove.

> groove - The “lock” between members of a rhythm section playing well together.

"In the pocket" has to do with a certain feeling or "groove" that occurs when the bass player and drummer sort of "lock in" (that's my terminology). I definitely know when I'm "in the pocket" but it's one of those things that's difficult to describe.

In hiphop culture “in the pocket” means perfectly on the beat.

In rock it's really tight timing and nailing transitions/fills. At least the way I've heard it used in my circles.

Seems odd to me to deem a post labeled as a long-form essay as "fluffy", especially when most of the "fluff" is substantial arguments padded with well-researched support. I personally perked up at the sight of a short scrollbar, it was a good read, I gained some security in my own case of Originality Disease.

I don't think a slew of bullet points could have accomplished the same.

Sometimes, it amazes me how some of you reason, the article deeply reflected on some crucial things that I personally I can relate to, and the only thing you could point out is one stupid famous quote that know one has idea about.

Give foolishness a break, at least for a week.

No wonder they said hacker news is a toxic community

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349222 | I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic (kg.dev)

Yep, my comment is toxic because I'm critical of the article and gave an opinion.

https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/critic-is-a-four-lett...

You aren't Roger Ebert. Everyone on HN is a critic.

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/2553/the-benefit-of-doub...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com