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Comment by emil-lp | Hacker News Reader

What is Phish?

Phish is an American Rock Band. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phish

Old timey American guitar noodler band.

I was about to argue with "Old timey", but yeah, I guess any band that has existed for over 40 years is old timey. I've been a fan since '96. I guess we're all old now.

The late 90s was the first time I'd heard of them. I was a university student at the time, and one of my friends was a foreign student, from America, and a fan. He also liked this other band called The Grateful Dead. I'd never heard of them either. They sucked too.

(Though, that said: many years later - i.e., quite recently - I listened to a bunch of their stuff on YouTube, while thinking back to my student days. And, actually, some of it is pretty good. At least, it was when they had pigpen singing.)

(Also: if you are a connoisseur of almostbutnotquiteinsanepersonposting, allow me to highly recommend The Grateful Dead's sound engineer's series of posts about his diet: https://justmeat.co/archives/active-low-carber-forum-posts/)

Anyway, if it's from the last century, it's old timey to me.

now - 29 years = 1996: Phish - Billy Breathes

1996 - 29 years = 1967: The Doors - Light My Fire

It’s a full band improvisation when at its best not just guitar noodling thank you very much

Sentences 5 and 6 of the article, top of the second paragraph:

> That move is Phish fans in miniature. Someone cared enough about the song and the bit that they rebuilt a piece of pop culture around the band.

That doesn’t really clarify

It explicitly says "the band". All the context in the first paragraphs is about the music. It absolutely clarifies. The rest of the article talks about listening to the music, watching them (or wanting to watch them) in concert or in tour.

Read the article. Or just look at the top search result for Phish. Stop being lazy.

I literally read the entire article without understanding that Phish is a band.

Call me lazy if you will. You could also have chosen to just say they're a band and recommend me a record to listen to.

Something something 1 in 10'000.

It's very hard for Phish fans to only provide ONE example. :-). I will try to limit my suggestions to only 3.

This is a version of "Sand" from their trancey period and I would think makes for good coding time: https://youtu.be/B73cbfHSuH8?si=WPOI5pYYOfPg7OAi

Here's a rocking version of "Ghost" into a ballad "Mountains in the Mist" from 2003: https://youtu.be/7cMwsBUHjq0?si=5_p64FSvsY08dw0E

This is a multi-section crazy of "Simple" from 2021 where it really seems like aliens have landed: https://youtu.be/wF2j2UPLlA8?si=KWvvL3MlLFpc-LHy

Asking others to explain things without doing a single search of your own is lazy, as is not reading the article:

> Phish is a band that rewards you for staying in one place for a long time. The jams are long. The compositions unfold.

"Phish is a band". Literally. Verbatim.

Coworkers who do that get told not to, and if they do it a second time their boss gets told to talk to them about it.

Please don’t use ad hominem on HN. I did read the article and it wasn’t clear at all, as you can see others also faced that situation. You don’t have to engage if you think we are lazy. The aggressive tone is completely unwarranted for such a casual discussion

The top search results for "Phish" and "Down with Disease" show Phish the band. There is no ad hominem - writing a comment asking someone else to answer that question for you without doing that basic step is lazy.

The article says "Phish is a band". Verbatim. It talks about Phish and listening to music in every paragraph.

If people read this article and didn't get that, perhaps I should stop dismissing the news articles talking about the state of education and attention spans as hyperbole.

> I’d need to ask the interviewer to put Phish on....I could not, with any reliability, get into the zone without the music.

> All I ever wanted to do was listen to Phish and program

> I heard Phish for the first time at thirteen.

> Phish is a band that rewards you for staying in one place for a long time. The jams are long. The compositions unfold.

> The band would play in Hampton or Alpine Valley or wherever

> I have listened to Phish every day since I was fifteen...I have listened to certain shows so many times that I can sing the solos back, note by note,

> I tried to keep the music on. I’m writing this in the days after nine nights of Phish at the Sphere. Since I finished grad school and got a real job, I’ve gone to every show I could, every tour, every residency, making up for lost time. The music is more present in my life now than it has ever been. It isn’t what’s gone

I don't care if English is your first language - if anyone read the article they make the point that it is a band over and over and over. Explicitly.

Stop being lazy in this context is by definition ad hominem. I won’t engage with the rest though.

I re read that paragraph a few times hoping that I missed something. Then gave up and went on to find the answer in comments. I thought the author was describing some feeling, or maybe some action. That "that to me" isn't clear with "that".

That was merely the first occurrence. Elsewhere the article says verbatim "Phish is a band".

The whole rest of the sentence implies they're talking about something else based on the band, not the band itself.

It's who the dead heads follow around now.

As well as Billy Strings, Goose, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Sturgill Simpson, John Mayer…big scene these days

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