That's the trouble - what you hear on the radio actually IS mind-numbing-tosh, well most of it. As I keep saying and probably said right near the beginning of this thread, if you want to find the good stuff of any genre you've got to go and look for it. If you just sit around and wait for it to come for you, all you'll get is cheap commercial crap. Examples of that are - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik representing Classical Music, Busted representing rock music, Ja Rule representing Hip Hop, Kenny G representing Jazz, Daniel Bedingfield's "Gotta get through this" representing Garage, Shitty hard house outfits like Scooter representing not only hard house but trance, many forms of house, techno and probably a few other things as well leadign people to think that all of them are the same and the music from Riverdance representing Irish Traditional music. As far as RnB goes though, it is by definition a commercial form of music and it's all shit. The singers on it have great quality voices (well some of them do) but they might as well be shit too because the material they have to work with is dire and could be written by a GCSE student in five minutes.
Nope, you're confusing it with Pikey. That was (and still is) used to described travellers/squatter/tax-dodgers etc. etc. (not to be confused with the actual culture of people known as the Gypsies). Chav has always been the word for barry/ned/scally etc. It is derived from the name of the town Chatham which is to Chavs as Reigate is to Tories. Read up on it at www.chavscum.co.uk and then watch some brilliant flash cartoons at www.cecimoz.co.uk (sound on!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chav Origin For a full discussion of the etymology of chav, see Wiktionary. The word chav is commonly thought to be from the mid-19th century Romany words chavi, meaning "delinquent youth", "chavo", meaning child and possibly "charver", meaning prostitute. Due to a mention in The Independent it has been suggested that it comes from a nickname used for people from various towns in the UK, including Chatham and Cheltenham in conjunction with the class label Average, but this is almost certainly incorrect. It is sometimes mockingly redefined as one of several backronyms, including "Council Housed And Violent", "Council Housed And Vile","Council House Assault & Violence" and "Council House Associated Vermin" — although there is no etymological basis for these terms, although British Police forces do use "chav" as a slang term when referring to 'them' on a regular basis. It is also said that the word was used in Edinburgh, Scotland in the early 1990s, leading to widespread bemusement on the part of Edinburghers at the sudden popularity of the term in South-Eastern England.
Yeah but a monkey who's raised his intelligence to the level of a chav must be a pretty special one. I don't know many monkeys who can swear at twenty people per minute.
A lot of that music is done using computers...so from a computer idiot I vote they must have talent, IT wise if not musical. I like some R'N'B and drum and bass....I prefer not to make sweeping statements.
Oh for fuck's sake! Of course you've got to have musical talent. It's nothing to do with using computers whatsoever. Yes you have to use them but you only have to know the programmes involved, not computers per se. You've got to know about acoustics, synthesis, how to create the exact sounds you want, and how to manipulate them in the way you want. let me give you an example of how much musical knowledge you need to control one aspect of a synthesised sound, and also how synthesised sounds are used in a way that someone who plays an acoustic instrument wouldn't be able to even approximate. Pitch control. In an orchestra, everyone tunes up so they're playing exactly in tune with each other, common sense after all. When you've got a load of synthesised sounds together, you can control the pitch very easily so that everything's always perfectly in tune. You can then modulate it with a low frequency modulating signal to add vibrato and of course to do it properly you want to design the sound so that the modulating signal can vary according to the loudness, pitch and envelope of the note so that it sounds like someone is playing an instrument and adding vibrato as part of their technique. in order to be able to do that, you've got to know the instrument as well as a musician. But if you've mastered pitch control, you could also alter the pitches so precisely that you could actually create effects like beating by deliberately having the sounds out of tune with each other by exact amounts, and having the detuning alter dynamically so that for example, as the sound builds up towards a climax, you could have the volume go up and the frequency-difference of the detuned components in order to make the timbre evolve to give that spine chilling effect you hear in a lot of trance music. now that's just ONE example, mind. Another one I might mention is recreating formants and envelopes and changes in the spectrum with different notes so that your synthesised sound doesn't just sound like the same sound played at different speeds to change the pitch. I could go on all day, it takes a LOT of knowledge and talent to create a piece of synthesised music. One more thing I will say though, is that because you're not confined by any physical limts of the capabilities of instruments, it's completely open ended. Just imagine if you sat down to compose a song in which you could have absolutely any sound you wanted. Where would you start? You need to be able to hear SOUNDS in your head, not just notes and know how to realise them. And of course you need to know how to write your notes as well to best exploit your sounds, or vice versa. Think of it as Orchestration but with an orchestra of infinitely diverse instruments.
