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Al Dimeola is very angry

#121
stringthrough said:
Big ego, yes. Intolerance, yes. But give the man credit for saying what's on his mind.
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A crazy hobo yelling at the top of his lungs on a street corner is speaking his mind, too. Anyone can do it.

el murdoque said:
I've never really liked his music as a matter of taste. All I could muster was a great deal of respect for his abilities on the guitar and as a composer.

In that interview he sounds like a grumpy old man that does not fit into the modern world any more - and blames the world for that fact.
Most of his opinions feel wrong on so many levels. Don't get me wrong, I'm also old enough to think that back then everything was better and this world is slowly falling to pieces, but this man sounds like he is angry at the fact that his style of music no longer creates a demand in the public - at least not on a level where you can live off it like a rockstar.

The fact that he raises the topic that most modern music is 'low quality' and then drops the name Eminem along with a few adjectives that are closely connected to what happens about eight hours after you eat gets me kind of angry. I'm not big on hip-hop - but as a musician, I have a lot of respect for what Eminem can do. You have to close your mind to a lot of factors to really hold the opinion that Eminem has zero talent. I know this interview is old, but he was proven dead wrong on that particular point - I just looked it up and Eminem has had an album in the US charts for 303 weeks - and he made songs that still get played on the radio after more than a decade (I don't know about US radio though - in non English speaking Euro countries, no one cares about a song's lyrics that much, not even the F-words get bleeped out).

And this whole conspiracy theory that the music industry, the radio stations and the people who send the invites to Letterman etc. want to silence him? Seriously?
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Yeah, exactly.

There are incredibly talented and skilled individuals in any given genre. I don't particularly enjoy Eminem's music (and yes, it is still played on the radio), although I've come to appreciate it more in recent years, but the guy is very creative and very good at his craft.

To be honest, I never much liked Jaco's music, either. But I'm not going to deny that he was a great musician.

Things change. How much ragtime were people listening to in the 50s? And how much dixieland and swing music in the 60s and 70s? Sure, there was still audience for it, but not nearly as much as there had been 50 years earlier.
 
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#122
IamGroot said:
I am sad that RTF never had a reunion.
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jerry said:
They had a reunion, but it didn't last long because of a rift between Chick and Al again.
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I saw that RTF reunion tour in 2008. My god they were good! Did not know about a rift between Chick & Al, but I guess that explains why a year or two later RTF went out with Frank Gambale in the guitar chair.
 
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#123
Korladis said:
To be honest, I never much liked Jaco's music, either. But I'm not going to deny that he was a great musician.

Things change. How much ragtime were people listening to in the 50s? And how much dixieland and swing music in the 60s and 70s? Sure, there was still audience for it, but not nearly as much as there had been 50 years earlier.
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Haha, I don't own a single record where Jaco plays bass, I have a mild dislike for 80% of the stuff the Beatles did (and the things I like are not on the radio) and could go on with that list - but the point is that I recognize that stuff as legit, but not my taste.

And time is a nice filter for music. Sure, someone like me who's not even been born in the sixties knows a lot of records out of that period that are epic. That is the small percentage that survived that long because it is that good.
When I have a look into my parents' LP collection from that time, or even worse, throw a few of these records on my turntable, my toenails will curl and my ears will try to shut down. My parents don't have a very good taste in music.
They accumulated a pile of records where 95% are so terrible, I could not finish an entire song without experiencing severe health issues - this was the majority back then, as it is now.
Albums will pop up from time to time, seemingly out of nowhere, that will amaze at first, but stand the test of time, too.

Being extremely talented is not enough in the age where you can record a quality album at home after investing less than a single studio grade compressor cost in the nineties. (You basically need a couple of quality mics, a few gizmos that connect to your computer, the software and the time to get it working). Every other town with 50k people will have a guy or girl (or, as we're talking about modern times, one of the other 72 genders) that can rip off most of the fancy stuff the great names in guitar playing did or can do - and could be just as good if they were paid enough for guitar playing that they can quit the day job and practice 8 hours a day.
Apart from talent and quality, you need to hit the nerve of the zeitgeist.
It's never been easier (and cheaper) to get the songs that are stuck in your head onto a record and that record to a big audience, that's what makes it so hard.
 
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#126
Very thought provoking. My initial reaction is to get on the bandwagon, "When I was playing in the 70's ..." but the music world is so different now, it's hard to compare. I do think there is more generic garbage than in the 'olden' days and less moving music, but I could be wrong.

For today only kids, while I think about it, you don't have to get off my lawn!
 
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#131
Just read through the article, and I was expecting to be more irked by it than I was for what it's worth.

The very last line, I think, sums things up really well:

"It’s no longer about dazzling people with really interesting, super-adventurous compositions and technique anymore".

I have to say, I'm not all that upset by that. In fact, I'm quite happy about it.

IMO there's much much more to music that reaches people on an emotional level - at whatever level or style of music, than just adventurous compositions and virtuoso level technique. I feel like this is something that is often overlooked by uber talented instrumentalists/composers. Just my 2c.
 
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#132
LOL, of course if you don't like anything remotely ambitious, you're going to think the current music climate is awesome and Di Meola is horrible. Doesn't make it so in either case.

And to paraphrase Dostoevsky, unambitious bands are all the same, ambitious bands are all ambitious differently.

So if you don't want ambition, that still means everything was done to death decades ago so why not just listen to that since it's almost certainly better played, better recorded, and better written than most stuff now.

If you do a RATIONAL assessment of just the sheer quantity of amazing music in previous decades vs now, now definitely falls short. The amount of killer music in any decade from the 60s through 90s is literally bottomless, and that includes much of what was popular. And sure there's crap in any decade, but before, the crap was kept with the crap and you knew it was crap.

Now though?

There are like half a dozen decent songs on here, and most of the rest are by artists so forgettable I honestly have no clue who a lot of them are, even 3 or 4 years later.

Hot 100 Songs - Year-End 2014

So compare that to THIS, which sure, has it's share of cheesy pop, but is fairly diverse, has some absolutely LEGENDARY songs (and I just picked a year at random basically) and legendary artists that are still iconic 40 years later. I mean, in 2054 will taylor swift still be considered to be worth talking about? I highly doubt it. Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney and Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder still will be. Also, these are SINGLES charts, if you look at ALBUM charts from then vs now, the difference is going to be WAY more stark. Because I doubt many people were buying Terry Jacks album back then, because in all my years of vinyl searching, I've LITERALLY never seen a single one.

Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1974 - Wikipedia

The 74 list also just seems a lot more diverse. I mean you literally go from The Way We Were to I Shot the Sheriff, with For the Love of Money in between with Grand Funk and Roberta Flack on the side. It was a wild time to be alive, I'm sure.
And I know someone will say "but you just have to look deeper now!" That's my whole point. Back then you didn't HAVE to look anywhere, good music was just everywhere.
 
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#133
Kro said:
IMO there's much much more to music that reaches people on an emotional level - at whatever level or style of music, than just adventurous compositions and virtuoso level technique. I feel like this is something that is often overlooked by uber talented instrumentalists/composers. Just my 2c.
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I think Al may be talking about the stuff that is so utterly bad that it couldn't possibly go anywhere without the help of a top-level music exec pushing it. I deeply respect what Al has done as he's been pushing the envelope since the 70s. For all that to be pushed aside in favor of something that is widely viewed as having less or no substance would offend me too.

Just my opinion.
 
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#134
Al is not the first musician to find himself less popular later in life than his younger years.

I don't begrudge his rant. I may not agree with the conspiracy theory, but I get why he's pissed that Clear Channel wants to put their banner up but not play his music locally. I happen to listen to a lot of XM Satellite radio that has turned me on to new music and old music, plus there is KEXP that is pretty eclectic and very supportive of local music. Part of what makes both of those work for me is having curators that are passionate who will play music because they believe in it. Clear Channel will never be that.
 
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#136
twinjet said:
I think Al may be talking about the stuff that is so utterly bad that it couldn't possibly go anywhere without the help of a top-level music exec pushing it. I deeply respect what Al has done as he's been pushing the envelope since the 70s. For all that to be pushed aside in favor of something that is widely viewed as having less or no substance would offend me too.

Just my opinion.
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It's definitely thought provoking, but I still can't help but feel that there's more to the story - that things aren't as simplistic as he's wishing it to be. His audience is obviously diminishing, but I think there is too much blame simply being put on newer, so called "less worthy" music pushing him out. I think it may just be his scapegoat TBH.

I don't know, i think it's a complex situation.
 
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#138
This pretty much sums up my feelings on this subject.

4bUV7Ls.gif
 
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#140
It's easy to look at Sequencer through the lens of 30 years and laugh at its 80s-ness, but that was pretty contemporary back then. And Al was embracing current brand new technology (the Fairlight) in the best way he knew how AS A 26 YEAR OLD. Not as groundbreaking as PG 3 maybe, but what else is?
 

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