I finished the post now, so if you've only read the first part, scroll down for the soulful sounds of Part 2.
So we got to talking at Viscious Circle last night, and the topic of conversation turned to musical genious. Phil proposed that musical genious is dead, and cited classical composer Bach as the bar that's been set. Supposedly he could compose fugues on the spot, sort of a renaissance version of the freestyle rap, if you will. Although I would expect that composing several overlapping melodies on piano is slightly more difficult than rhyming your favorite brand of alcohol with your favorite brand of car.
All of this is kind of bugging me, because I don't want to believe that musical genious is dead. I know that I've thrown the term around here and there in reference to The Flaming Lips and such, but I guess that all comes down to how we define genious. If we define it by how complicated we can make music while still sounding good, then maybe nobody will beat Bach, I don't know. But I still think that there's something to be said about creating songs that illustrate the beauty of things such as death and seeping head wounds.
After some thought, I've found that one of the reasons this topic bugs me is because we're trying to quanitfy an already debatably evil term. But on the other hand, there's nothing quite as annoying as the person who wants to be everybody's friend by saying that everything's subjective. When the guy in line behind me at Ticketmaster is yakking on his cel phone about how he's so excited for the Velvet Revolver tour, I want to punch out his teeth and quietly tell him that his taste in music is poorly formed, at best. But at the same time I can imagine some high school prick walking up and saying that this douchebag has the right to listen to whatever crap he wants, and I have no right to intervene on that.
Did I get off-topic? Ah, fuck it.
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