I know I said I was going to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich next, but I wasn’t quite up for it, so I decided to read Aksyonov‘s 1961 Звёздный билет (translated as A Starry Ticket), which is a delight. (And I’m reading it on my new Kindle, which is also a delight! See the comment thread to this Lizok post for my decision process.) It’s fun to get a snapshot of the slangy speech of hip Soviet youth circa 1960, and one word in particular gave me a peek into the odd folkways of the Eastern Bloc in that era. At one point Dimka, one of the protagonists, asks an Estonian who has invited his little group of adolescents (who have fled the tedium of their Moscow lives) to a Tallinn club for dancing, “А что у вас тут танцуют?” [What do you dance here?] The answer is “Чарлстон и липси” [the Charleston and the lipsi], and he thinks “Вот это жизнь! Чарлстон и липси!” [Now, that’s life! The Charleston and the lipsi!]. But what was lipsi? A little googling turned up the fact that it was a dance invented in East Germany in 1958 to try to distract young people from the vile temptations of rock-and-roll and the sexy hip-swaying associated with it. As Anna Funder describes it in her book Stasiland
Incidentally, does anyone know if the film made from Aksyonov’s book, Мой Младший Брат, is any good? And does anyone know how many pages Звёздный билет takes up in a physical book? On the Kindle I can only see what percentage of the text I’ve read, not how many pages there are, and I’m curious.
my new Kindle
Mazl tov!
Just FYI, having done extensive testing, I recommend Hanlin readers. The batter life is excellent and there’s a large community of users who offer tweaks and alternative firmwares. Kindle is cool, but it’s lack of support for epub ist just appalling.
The Izografus edition of Звёздный билет apparently has 640 pages, which don’t sound right to me.
Does your new Kindle have native Unicode support or have your hacked it ? Love my DX for the large screen but it can’t even display Latin extended A without being hacked. It’s a real “why oh why” moment for me. Unicode support is hardly rocket science these days. I have to convert Russian texts to pdf to read on my Kindle and find my reading glasses.
Alex,
Kindle 3 has Unicode support.
One YouTube commenter caught the fact that the Lipsi is in 6/4 time. This may have been the only meter that could suit the committee’s various requirements.
The Izografus edition of Звёздный билет apparently has 640 pages, which don’t sound right to me.
Yeah, I presume that has other texts as well. I found that and editions with 65 or 66 pages, which is also clearly not right—I’m sure I’ve read more than that already, and I’m only a third of the way through.
a dance invented in East Germany in 1958 to try to distract young people from the vile temptations of rock-and-roll and the sexy hip-swaying associated with it. … a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing.
Since I don’t dance and know nothing about dancing, I am excellently equipped to opine on the Lipsi. I first saw it briefly on West German TV in the ’70s. In the last 20 years it has been shown in those documentaries, tenaciously mocking though mildly so, that make up three-quarters of German TV documentaries on the GDR.
I see nothing in the least “bizarre” about it. The clip shows that the Lipsi, contrary to the claim in the above quote, does involve hip-swaying, but of a kind more restrained than in rock-n-roll, of course. The Lipsi meets conventional Western expectations as to how dancers are supposed to move decently, and yet the dance step is light-footed – at least when performed by professional dancers, which I suspect is the case here. The man does not waggle around, but the woman is in fact swaying to a degree fit to churn butter – it is just not directly visible because of her skirts.
In any case, when a woman wears high heels she must sway at the hips when she moves, otherwise she falls on her face. That is what heterosexual men like about high heels on women. Women have to move their butts around to keep from falling, and so look vulnerable while moving as if intercoursing. But I digress.
The primary failing of the “committee” was not that it was a committee, but that it did not know how to create a product marketable in the given climate, and then actually sell people on it. That the committee members even tried to do this shows, I think, that they were very much in tune with the times. They were no more incompetent than many show-biz operators in the West who were learning to mass-produce popularity. Think of the unsuccessful attempts in the ’60s to create successful bands by fiat: The Monkeys, for instance.
Since then, we have seen successful “boy bands” cut out of whole cloth – Take That, Backstreet Boys etc. etc. Garage-bred groups such as the Beatles and the Stones have not a chance nowadays without professional backing. I’m not suggesting here that garage-bred is “more genuine”, but rather merely pointing out the different development processes now at work.
By the way, as to the name “Lipsi”: the German WiPe says it was derived from the Latin lipsiens = “a person from Leipzig”. The people involved in the creation of the Lipsi were from Leipzig.
I was given a Sony reader as a present, but I must be doing something wrong, because its battery life seems to be nonexistent – after reading for no more than three hours (if that) I have to recharge it via my computer, which completely defeats the object of using it on holiday.
I am following these reports on e-readers with great interest. My general disposition is not to buy one, because of all the hassles with character sets, battery life, book format availability etc. that people complain about. Paper still works fine for me.
bruessel: perhaps you were presented with a Sony that had a dud battery. I like the fact that German has a word for rechargeable battery – Akku(mulator) – that prevents confusion as to what kind of battery is meant. A non-rechargeable battery is just a Batterie.
Think of the unsuccessful attempts in the ’60s to create successful bands by fiat: The Monkeys, for instance.
Au contraire: The Monkees (note spelling) were extremely successful. Wikipedia:
This induced considerable bitterness in those of us who were fans of “real” rock-and-roll, but the passage of a couple of decades and the loss of several layers of pretension led me to realize that those hits are actually damn good songs; I’d rather listen to “I’m a Believer” than some of the crap The Beatles tossed into their albums as filler (“A Taste of Honey,” anyone?).
My general disposition is not to buy one, because of all the hassles with character sets, battery life, book format availability etc. that people complain about. Paper still works fine for me.
That’s how I used to feel, but when you’ve got over 5,000 books paper has its drawbacks, and the new Kindle has plenty of battery life and no problems with character sets (that I know about). Not trying to sell you one, just letting you know the feelings of a former skeptic. I find that reading on a Kindle is a completely immersive experience—you just keep clicking for the next page and the world fades away.
I’d rather listen to “I’m a Believer” than some of the crap The Beatles tossed into their albums as filler (“A Taste of Honey,” anyone?).
I agree with you there. I had forgotten that “I’m a Believer” is by the Monkees (sic).
I’m merely trying to drum up a little sympathy for a few Communist functionaries who were doing their best. In the spirit of your recent blog “Everything was forever”, where considerable sympathy was extended to Russian “speech performance” under the Communists – what I dismissed as creative communication under totalitarian monitoring.
Is this the Kindle you’re talking about ?
The very one.
I’m surprised it costs only 140 EUR. I thought these things were much more expensive. Maybe I’ll go for it after all.
Nice posts, Grumbly. Nothing helped the dance forms spread as much as the feeling of being illicit, usually a product of finely tuned official disapproval and bans (not too much, not too little). Obviously in Aksenov’s story the German dance has turned excitingly illicit a mere thousand miles away from its place of birth (or design).
To large degree it holds for the literature too, of course … the restrictions imposed by the officialdom and the constant pushback of the creativity. Too much or too little oppression, either way may snuff the flickering flames of art.
So isn’t it the case that we reserve most “sympathy for a few Communist functionaries” not to those “who were doing their best” but also to those who were doing their jobs kind of inconsistently or hesitantly, in a human way, sometimes hewing to the perfect line, at other times straying? The GDR machine is often thought about as too perfect and too efficient to elicit true sympathy…
No problems with UNICODE, and the 3rd-gen Kindle shows the number of locations a book has (which gives you a good idea of its size; an average novel is about 5000 locs) and the number of pages as well, which more or less corresponds with the regular paper pages.
I honestly can’t fathom how book lovers these days could do without an ereader.
P. S. From flibusta.net, you can download Russian ebooks in .mobi format, which is kindle-ready. Another must is calibre software which gives you the tool to convert anything into anything (also, with some tweaking, remove DRM from Amazon-bought books if you need it on your PC, for example).
Yes, flibusta.net + Calibre is my new double deity.
OK, I figured out how to use the “Go to” feature and discovered I’m on page 105 of 269 (and location 1601 of 4111, whatever that means).
How does the Kindle do with RTL languages (e.g. Hebrew/Yiddish)?
Don’t know; try googling around. Or maybe someone here knows.
Language: I’d rather listen to “I’m a Believer” than some of the crap The Beatles tossed into their albums as filler (“A Taste of Honey,” anyone?)
So you want to compare the biggest hit the Monkees ever had with a song on the Beatles’ first album, from 1963, the one that they didn’t even produce themselves, and probably track 2 on side 2? Fine, go ahead.
The lipsi doesn’t look _that_ bad. It looks a lot like how Polish people danced at parties (at least up into the 90s).
In the 80’s even teenagers were doing something like it. Not exactly but in the same neighborhood.
At any rate, it’s far better than this (warning viewing may sap your will to live):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSEqyraGFVo&feature=related
So you want to compare the biggest hit the Monkees ever had with a song on the Beatles’ first album, from 1963, the one that they didn’t even produce themselves, and probably track 2 on side 2? Fine, go ahead.
As I said, I’d rather listen to “I’m a Believer” than some of the crap The Beatles tossed into their albums as filler. I’m not sure what you’re finding offensive or bizarre about that proposition. I’m a Beatles fan myself, but I don’t genuflect before everything they did. (It was all downhill after Hamburg, as John used to say.)
At any rate, it’s far better than this (warning viewing may sap your will to live)
Here‘s the direct link, if anyone’s feeling suicidal.
Nothing offensive or bizarre, just an unfair comparison. Actually, I don’t mind hearing A Taste Of Honey once every 20 years or so, and I prefer it to their pretentious final songs, when half the record was just repeating the lyrics over and over (Let It Be, Hey Jude etc).
just repeating the lyrics over and over
(I think I mean “repeating the titles over & over”.)
That second dance clip reminds me of the Freddie (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqwjo_freddie-the-dreamers-do-the-freddie_music), which was properly speaking not a dance but a novelty number; that’s what generally results when a dance is invented or cobbled together as an entirety, rather than emerging as the waltz and the Lindy Hop and other steps seem to have done. It isn’t the specific movements of the Lipsi that make it such a non-starter on the dance floor, it’s the arbitrary way they’re strung together.
Zachary,
How does the Kindle do with RTL languages
Not that well, unfortunately, see for yourself.
Nothing offensive or bizarre, just an unfair comparison.
Well, it would have been unfair if I’d said “The Monkees were a hell of a lot better than The Beatles: just compare ‘I’m a Believer’ to ‘A Taste of Honey’!” But I don’t think it’s unfair to compare the songs while explicitly pointing out that the latter is one of the band’s worst. How would you have preferred me to make my point?
I love “A Taste of Honey”.
I must admit I had forgot it, but it was one of my favourites songs when I was adolescent and had a crush on Paul McCartney.
I’m very happy with my kindle too, you can carry with you the equivalent of 1000 kilograms in books.
it was one of my favourites songs when I was adolescent and had a crush on Paul McCartney.
Ah well, there are Paul people and there are John people. I have what is probably an unjustifiable fondness for “Revolution 9.”
Yes, I was definitely a “Paul people”. Now that seems a bit stupid to me. But I love his voice. That doesn’t change.
Were there any Ringo people?
I confess that the only version of “A Taste of Honey” that I ever knew was the one by the Tijuana Brass.
I’m not sure how you could have made your point, because I don’t think the Beatles ever had crap on their albums.
I’m a George person. I like that guy in the Monkees whose mother invented whiteout.
an unjustifiable fondness for “Revolution 9.”
hey, me too. It’s like a wall of sound version of Tarkovsky’s Mirror.
It’s true, the Beatles never had crap on their albums. Though I never listen to Revolution 9 ’till its end.
Now that I’m a grown-up (or so the calendar years says so), I’m a George Harrison person, he and Ringo are the nicest Beatles.
Well in fact, I always like the four guys and I never tried to take sides or begin wars… But as I said: ¡Paul’s voice!
As a small child in the mass hysteria of Beatlemania I was a Ringo kid. I even named my first dog after him.
On the other hand, after that I wasn’t much of a Beatles fan … ever. I recognize how great and influential they were yada yada yada and love a lot of the individual songs but …. I don’t have a single Beatles album and have no plans to change that. It should also be noted that I have kind of awful taste in music (by most conventional evaluations).
I also love A Taste of Honey (though the beatles version doesn’t do much for me).
I’m a Pete Best person myself.
Don’t knock The Monkees. If the world has to have manufactured boy bands then at least give them decent songs…
Were there any Ringo people?
Marge Simpson.
Bonus: Ringo remembers “Imagine” (courtesy of Peter Serafinowicz).
I have kind of awful taste in music
This reminds me that Mrs Thatcher’s favourite piece of music was (is?) How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?. That says it all. To keep it on topic, there’s a version by the Lennon Sisters.
You learn something new every day. I had no idea Mrs Thatcher even saw Pink Flamingos….
It’s not John Waters, but there’s an incident in Christopher Hitchens’s memoir where Mrs Thatcher makes him bend over and then she smacks him on the bottom for being a bad boy.
Well, why else would she make him bend over ? I am always apt to fall into amazement when the subject crops up, even though only in a jokey way, of male English yearning to be punished by Matron, Nurse etc. This is not a Zwangsidee-as-urban-legend of Americans and Germans, as far as I know: but maybe they’re just too shy to bruit it abroad.
The Greek scholar Sir Kenneth “Ben” Dover was entirely another kettle of fish. I was told that there is a wall full of obscene graffiti about him in the gents at Corpus Christi College’s library in Oxford. I think this was because of his 1978 book, Greek Homosexuality.
Hitchens was beaten quite a lot at school but according to his memoir this incident was a big surprise to him and entirely Mrs Thatcher’s idea.
Joyce gives the British beatitudes as “Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop.”
buggerum bishop
Unintended irony, coming from someone who’d attended a Christian Brothers’ school in Ireland.
according to his memoir this incident was a big surprise to him and entirely Mrs Thatcher’s idea.
Yeah, yeah – it has to be Matron’s idea to punish you, doesn’t it ? Otherwise you don’t get what you deserve, and that’s no fun.
Of course you’re right, G. Still quite interesting that beating was her choice, though. She could instead have tried torturing him with a “rendition” of How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?”
Count me in with Michael Farris and Marge Simpson as a Ringo fan.
I blame it on the fact that my atrocious vocal range make ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’ and ‘Octopus’s Garden’ the only Beatles tunes I could ever passably sing, but I’ve really come to appreciate his drumming. ‘A Day in a Life’ wouldn’t be half as interesting without it.
This Lipsi looks like something my parents used to dance they called a “two step”. It would have predated Elvis slightly. This “two step” also has something odd about the timing. I found steps like waltz in 3/4 time and polka in 2/4 time and even dabke, which as far as I can figure out is a 6/8 step superimposed on 4/4 music, not that hard to learn, but I was never able to learn this two step.
John, Paul, George, and Ringo fans tend to cluster, it’s said, around the Jungian psychological types: thinking, feeling, intuiting, and sensing respectively.
“the Jungian psychological types: thinking, feeling, intuiting, and sensing respectively”
I thought that was thinking, feeling, intuiting and totally rocking out.
I’m still not sure why Ringo’s unique drumming has always been disparaged in comparison to the musicianship of the other Beatles. Is it because he never played other instruments too, only sang? Big deal, there was never a similar dissatisfaction expressed against John Bonham, Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, Robert Wyatt etc. etc. – Charlie Watts’s inarticulateness has been taunted, but not his playing. I think Ringo’s big mistake was singing Act Naturally, it was hard to take him seriously as an individual musician after that.
Yeah, Ringo’s a wonderful drummer; unfortunately, self-deprecation is not usually a winning move, reputation-wise.
Just finished “Stasiland” btw. Thanks again Language for the recommendation. Now I see how the author felt tense, scared, weirded out, and disgusted all at the same time during her foray into the TV archives of the defunct GDR – and how it might have colored her perception of her surreptitious discovery of the Lipsi 🙂 !
I’m delighted! (And delighted as well with the ability to add to old threads like this; in addition, I always get pleasure from rereading them.)
I wonder if Stu ever got a Kindle?
I still wonder if Stu ever got a Kindle.
Nope. No more electronics in this life. Enough already.
You were standing on the brink of bliss, and backed away.
I stamped my little feets and swept off in a huff. Idle reads are the Devil’s workshop. I must be a crypto-Calvinist.
I’m Kindle-free too, but I own a lot of Kindle books, I just read them in my browser. Indeed, I generally have at least one tab open to read.amazon.com.
My brother is the same way.
I actually do have a Kindle, but it’s one more device to keep charged and I’m usually sitting with the laptop when I feel like accessing non-fiction books, so the web reader gets used much more. (Or the native Android app, since phones got night mode it won’t ruin your sleep to use that in bed).
The -i doubles as the nickname suffix – a clever conceit to delude people into assuming the dance was already popular when they first heard of it.
Mrs Thatcher’s favourite piece of music
Homer and Jethro version. ObHat: This is a fine example of hyperrhotic AmE, with window, Louisiana, jambalaya, all ending in [ɚ] before pause.
viewing may sap your will to live
And yet when Michael Flatley did much the same thing all by himself, the world went mad for him. Context is all.
I’m watching Mikhail Romm’s 1962 movie Nine Days of One Year (Девять дней одного года), and about halfway through, as people are walking down a corridor of a particle physics institute they pass a wall notice for lipsi classes.
Having watched the two videos and these two, I find what’s really horrible is the music – as diverse as it is!
…and so is the rechargeable one in your car. But your phone does have an Akku.
Oh, is that where Myers & Briggs got them from? …And is that why their 64 personality types (such an improvement over the 12 signs of the zodiac…!) don’t seem to have spread beyond the US?
…And is that why their 64 personality types (such an improvement over the 12 signs of the zodiac…!) don’t seem to have spread beyond the US?
Over the last decade, my (German) employer has sent me to three communication-related trainings (“leadership” and sales), with different sets of trainers, and the MB framework was used in all of them. I’ve come away with the impression that it’s currently a standard framework for “how to deal with people” trainings.
is that where Myers & Briggs got them from?
I believe M&B is a cut-down version of the Five Factor Model‘s acronym OCEAN.
Cutting five down to two makes it useless — see wikip at ‘pseudoscientific’. And that’s why it hasn’t spread outside the country that still thinks lie detector tests are a thing. I’m very surprised at @Hans’s report. Employers in UK tried it in the ’90’s, and stopped pretty quick.
@AntC: Your link isn’t working
@Hans try this. Or search wikip for ‘Five Factor Model’ ==> ‘Big Five personality traits’. The See also includes M-B Type indicator
I’ve come away with the impression that it’s currently a standard framework for “how to deal with people” trainings.
Sounds about right.
Cutting five down to two makes it useless
It’s useless however many bits you add or subtract. It’s all just bullshit attempts to avoid having to deal with actual people. “Sorry, we can’t hire you, you’re a BXCZ — doesn’t matter how good you are at the job!”
I believe M&B is a cut-down version of the Five Factor Model‘s acronym OCEAN.
Cutting five down to two makes it useless — see wikip at ‘pseudoscientific’.
Just mentioning that Myers-Briggs has four factors, and according to Wikipedia, dates to the early ’40s, whereas the statistical studies that led to FFM didn’t come down to five factors till 1968. The arguments that MB is pseudoscience aren’t based on the number of factors.
I too have seen implicit faith in MB here in the U.S.
I’m glad to note that there’s an alternative acronym, CANOE.
I won’t pretend Myers-Briggs is based on anything genuinely scientific (unless you count Jung as a scientist), but years ago, when my ex-wife and I were doing marriage counseling, I found it illuminating in some ways. The counselor was an MB fan and had us fill out the questionnaire to discover our types, which were almost completely opposite. This explained, she said, why I reacted like this when my wife did or said that, and vice versa. Light was thrown. I daresay similar enlightenment might have come in other ways, but still.
I got one of those books that explains your type in great detail and gives examples of famous people of the same type as well as professions you are suited/unsuited for. I learned that in another universe I might have excelled as a secret assassin, which I found strangely pleasing. OTOH, one of the famous people like me was Nancy Reagan, which did not please me.
“Sorry, we can’t hire you, you’re a BXCZ — doesn’t matter how good you are at the job!”
For a surprising number of jobs, being good at them includes interacting appropriately with akshull people — customers, suppliers, colleagues, regulators, …
At the time I ran into M-B, Managers were promoted for how good they were at the mechanics of the job, with no regard for ‘people skills’ nor an ability at interview to assess the people skills of potential employees. (I joint interviewed a candidate with my boss. I formed a view within 10 minutes; their technical skills were not in doubt; the boss kept going round and round asking more questions; then decided to hire the person — in a customer-facing role, against my recommendation. They lasted 3 months. I’m not claiming to have great intuition.)
So a checklist/framework for assessing ability outside the strictly technical would be useful (in the absence of an ability to intuit a ‘fit’). But M-B is not that framework.
Just mentioning that Myers-Briggs has four factors, …
Ok, thanks. As at the ’90’s it had two. So you could map personalities on a two-dimensional quadrant thingy — aka flipchart.
statistical studies that led to FFM [**]
Yeah, what M-B lacks is statistical studies, and that’s what makes it pseudoscience. Probably lack of statistical studies to support two dimensions makes it more pseudo; upping to four just makes it impenetrable.
to discover our types, which were almost completely opposite. This explained, she said, …
Are you sure this process would be any different to ‘discovering’ your star signs? Note that proper Astrologers look into not just the 12 constellations you’d meet in the standard magazine treatment, but also which planets were rising/setting at the precise moment of your birth.
Or perhaps your counselor was quite intuitive; the M-B terminology was just to make it sound scientific? (Isn’t it rather to be expected that marriages are of opposites, up to a point Lord Copper?)
[**] There is a linguistic angle wrt FFM. The statistics looked at the clustering of repeated keywords as used by professional Psychotherapists assessing/reporting on personality traits in clinical settings. This was chiefly for identifying pathologies, so might not be much help with the population at large.
What I find perplexing is the keywords they came up with: a mix of solid Anglo-saxon (with Latinate nominalising/abstractising suffixes), Norman French, Latinate, Greek-through-Latin. I’d have expected a cline of terms in the same register.
Also I’d’a thought Intelligence would be a persistent underlying characteristic of a personality. Of course hugely problematic to measure/arrive at a definition of the varieties, but then so are all Five Factors. It seems using Intelligence became too socio-culturally charged, so got bleached into so-called ‘Openness to Experience’. But this takes us right back to the Autism Spectrum discussion: people can be deeply knowledgeable (obsessive) and inquisitive on some narrow topic, but not Open-to-Experience more generally.
I think the narrow linguistics of the statistical methodology might be a topic for the Hattery, but I’ve seen no recent news item on which we could hang a discussion.
I don’t want to go overboard defending M-B (and similar psychological tests), but at least introversion vs extraversion gets at a real difference, unlike Gemini vs Libra.
But you’re right, I think, that it comes down to whether the counselor/therapist can make good use of such tools to get people to talk about their, ewww, feelings.
You could probably concoct categorizations based on other dichotomies. Prescriptivism vs descriptivism, for example, or Abba vs Zappa.
The most significant dichotomy* is of course Stones versus Beatles.
The Economist once ran an actual article on this. I am glad to report that after examining the question exhaustively with their customary rigour, they came up (of course) with the correct answer (Stones.)
* Cosmopolitan used to be a great source for such important questions. Or so I am told. (Perhaps it still is. My wife is no longer in the central part of the target demographic, and my daughter is too Extreme Radical Socialist to read it.)
introversion vs extraversion gets at a real difference
So there’s three versions of the extravert/intravert dimension (per the middle quote). Do all three of them distinguish a real difference? Will each categorise the same person the same way?
Jung is widely disregarded these days, yet M-B still uses his definition.
As I understand it, the “popular sense” lines up with the ‘Sample item’ list: life of the party, etc, as observed in someone’s outward behaviour. The current psychological usage is more about “energy creation” (ewww, feelings) from being in social situations.
You can fake being the life of the party (being drunk helps). An introvert will find that energy-sapping.
For example somebody who can be the life of an intimate dinner, but not the office Christmas Party.
Whereas M-B treat it as a on-or-off dichotomy.
The most significant dichotomy* is of course Stones versus Beatles.
Or Bach vs Mozart?
Very few people feel the need to choose one in “Bach vs Mozart” (not to mention that only a small proportion of the population even cares), whereas very few rock lovers are indifferent to the choice of Stones versus Beatles (even though most of them love both).
I myself, of course, am a Stones man; as DE says, it is self-evidently the correct choice.
The Stones is the correct choice when you are a teenager/early 20s, but most of swing back to the Beatles as we age I think, especially if one is a musician. If you grab a guitar in open g tuning and start bashing on it, you can play almost any major Stones song written between 1968 and 1980. Keith is great, but limited in a way none of the Beatles were, including Ringo (I like his new country album).
On the other hand, the Stones were certainly a better live act.
especially if one is a musician
That I can believe. Musicians have a distorted view of music (professional deformation); they tend to favor complex/interesting/virtuoso over simple-and-effective. This is exactly why rock music was so despised when it appeared: only three chords, and no fancy rhyme-and-meter stuff like in the Great American Songbook! But guess what, that’s not what rock-and-roll is about. From Ike Turner and Bo Diddley to the Kingsmen and the Trashmen to the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols, basic chords and bellowed dumb lyrics have defined the essence of r&r, and people with sophisticated tastes have always drawn back in horror. Yes, the Beatles used sophisticated chords and Mixolydian modes; so what? That’s catnip to the elite, but you can’t dance to it. Rock is basic, and it doesn’t get more basic than the Stones.
Beatles, of course. The Stones were good at what they did (and may still be for all I know), but to apply what Vanya said to their work as a whole, limited.
Similarly, every jazz pianist I’ve known has worshiped Oscar Peterson. Me, I find him perfectly acceptable, but I’d rather listen to Errol Garner, Bud Powell, Ahmad Jamal, Mal Waldron, or any of a number of others who have more to offer to the listener who isn’t focused on pianistic perfection.
limited
Yeah, to blues-based rock and roll. Which is the name of the game.
Look, I love the Beatles — I own all their records and used to play them frequently. They were peerless in their realm, but that realm is its own thing and not rock and roll. Nothing they did can touch “Get Off of My Cloud,” “Paint It Black,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Gimme Shelter,” or pretty much everything on Exile on Main St., and those are what I play when I want to rock out. (Or The Who, or early Kinks, or Creedence, or…)
Which is the name of the game.
That’s fine, but it’s not the only game in town.
The point of a genre is that you can always get what you want. But in rock as in SF, many of my favorites are among the least generic.
Incidentally, I’m not a musician at all. I can’t tell when the key changes or connect any but the simplest variations to the theme, and jazz solos—forget about it.
My four favorite Stones songs partly agree with yours—”Paint it Black” and “Gimme Shelter”—but I’d add “Satisfaction” and “Sympathy for the Devil”. But I like the Who better. (And to bring this to copyediting, some style guide, I think it’s the Guardian‘s, recommends lower-case “the” with bands except for “The Who” and “The The” and one or two others, but I don’t see a problem with “the Who” or “the The”.)
I happen to be one of the few people who care and feel the need to choose Bach over Mozart, though of course I admire the latter too. Bach embodied order and discipline, his counterpoint and formal structures are a reflection of the Platonic ideals of precision and intellectual rigor. His deeply religious compositions also align with the Platonic ideal of moral, structured, uplifting music.
I am persuaded by these comments that adding the Stones-Beatles axis to the Myers-Briggs test would be very helpful. There is absolutely no science to it, but the choice arouses strong feelings that are, at bottom, totally irrational yet highly revealing. Just what the doctor ordered.
So true!
I’d add “Satisfaction” and “Sympathy for the Devil”.
“Satisfaction” definitely — I probably omitted it because it’s so obvious (like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the moptops) — but I’ve never been that fond of “Sympathy for the Devil”; the lyrics are just too silly/pretentious. (“When after all it was you and me” — oh, come off it.)
And to bring this to copyediting, some style guide, I think it’s the Guardian‘s, recommends lower-case “the” with bands except for “The Who” and “The The” and one or two others, but I don’t see a problem with “the Who” or “the The”.
I actually thought about that as I typed my comment; I decided that at least at the moment the capital looked better. I can see the Graun’s point. But I have no problem with “the Who” and might well use it at a different moment. (I know too little about T/the The to have an opinion about their name.)
I’m with David L: I found it illuminating vis-a-vis my growing-up experience that I’m an INTP while my father (if I have him figured out, a matter I once put much effort into) was an ESFJ.
The Guardian now recommends lower-case “the” for all band names including the The, so either they’ve changed it since I last looked at it or I remembered wrong, for the first time in my life that I can remember.
i’m right on the edge of “musician”-ness, i think, and if it’s between those two bands, i definitely side with the Stones. in part that’s because i’ve rarely heard covers of Stones songs that are as good as the originals* (i fully expect some solid counterexamples in this thread, now that i’ve thrown the gauntlet), while for my money the best versions of Beatles’ songs are pretty much always by other people (and often the originals aren’t even the second- or third-best (take Blackbird, for example: sarah vaughn, sylvester, jaco pastorius…). that may speak to the bowlcut boys having an advantage as songwriters over team shag, but that’s different from quality as a band.
(but really, the best band** of the Beatles’ & Stones’ peak period wasn’t either of them: the Motown Records first-call list wins that one hands down)
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* especially excluding covers that are aiming for the same sound or style as the original.
** in the pop/rock sense – any mingus unit beats all of them by a mile (with at least a half-dozen other jazz groups filling that gap), but that’s comparing apples and orcas.
There was no Rutles equivalent for the Stones, which goes to show something or another.
Some previous discussion of unscientific but potentially interesting personality types.
As someone who was once a semi-professional musician (as in, when I was a student, I played some gigs for pocket money), I prefer Bach over Mozart and the Beatles over the Rolling Stones. I could listen to either “Paint it Black” or “Paperback Writer” on continuous loop for hours, but that’s the only song by the Stones I really love, while the Beatles have several others.
I don’t particularly care for the live performance experience either. Under most circumstances, I would prefer a carefully curated recording to a live session. I probably always felt this way, but after seeing a soloist get a standing ovation after making a complete disaster of her performance convinced me that live audiences have no idea what they are getting. I remember that night looking around at the other members of the orchestra and seeing the terror in their faces; presumably I looked the same. We just did not know what the pianist was playing. (Afterwards, someone gave the probably correct suggestion that she had put one of her hands in the wrong place but didn’t dare stop playing to reposition.) The conductor, who was a retired professor who had worked on understanding what gave audiences the most enjoyable performances, resorted to whispering during the long and terrifying solo section. He told us to ignore the pianist; he would give us a downbeat, and we were to come in fortissimo and drown her out.
The current psychological usage is more about “energy creation” (ewww, feelings) from being in social situations.
You can fake being the life of the party (being drunk helps). An introvert will find that energy-sapping.
Generally, people are a combination of extraversion and introversion, …
[from same place as the third quote above; there’s similar in the second source]
For example somebody who can be the life of an intimate dinner, but not the office Christmas Party.
Whereas M-B treat it as a on-or-off dichotomy.
I can only say that what was presented to me as M-B in those trainings was not a simple dichotomy, but as a continuum, and the definition was similar to your quote (gaining energy from external sources). I am not sufficiently interested in the details to investigate further – whether M-B evolved, whether the trainers mixed and matched frameworks and just used the label M-B (although I think it’s unlikely that three different sets of trainers came up with the same mix), or whether you may have been sold an incomplete or distorted version of M-B in the 90s.
(And categorizations don’t have to be scientific to be useful; if you want to decide what to eat during lent, it may well be useful to categorize beavers as fish.)
that may speak to the bowlcut boys having an advantage as songwriters over team shag, but that’s different from quality as a band.
That’s a funny way to say “essential to”.
That’s fine, but it’s not the only game in town.
Exactly. I have my days when I just want to crank up the volume and blast my brain, or move my body to the rhythm, and then the Stones’ catalog is generally the better choice, but that aren’t all the reasons I listen to music for.
When I was a teenager, the Beatles were long gone and the Stones were old guys trying to stay relevant and failing, so the idea that one’s credibility and coolness once depended on choosing one of them, as relayed to me by my mum, was simply baffling to me.
The first time I remember getting that eheu fugaces feeling was when I read a cri de coeur in the NME from a correspondent wondering why old people couldn’t just listen to their Rolling Stones and Beatles and let her appreciate the Bay City Rollers in peace.
This would be about the time that I first noticed that some mothers with small children were actually quite attractive.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near …
@JF: i think you’re mistaking my meaning! (as well as getting a good line in!) i was trying to distinguish between the functions of writing songs and performing them, and to say that a band is primarily a performing unit, so can be fantastic without writing it’s own material (like many (most?) of the classic Motown first-call-ers, who i think are basically one band with a bunch of rotating members), but has to be judged by what it does with its material. part of why i come down against the Beatles is that i think a big piece of what makes a great band – as a performing unit – is being the best interpreter of what it plays.
Rock is basic, and it doesn’t get more basic than the Stones.
If you are going to go with basic is better, than AC/DC is far better than the Stones (and a lot of people in my generation probably agree). I would also argue that early Van Halen is better than the Stones if you are just looking for music that “RAWKS!!”.
But that’s unfair because actually the Stones are very far from basic. They incorporate a lot of rhythmic complexity, interesting chord voicings, and great guitar tone. They have also always been geniuses about borrowing from different genres – blues, gospel, country, reggae, disco – and coming up with catchy songs. But whereas the Beatles (as well as The Kinks and The Who) were innovators, the Stones were always followers, but perhaps more gifted at interpreting and synthesis, especially in their peak late 60s-late 70s period.
But the Beatles are better musicians. But not in LH’s sense of being prodigies throwing in tritone substitutions, using diminished scales and being over sophisticated. In fact most of the Beatle’s most famous songs are also 3-4 chord standard pop progressions (Paperback Writer is basically two chords, same with Get Back), I think LH is confusing the Beatles with Genesis or Yes. No, the Beatle’s are simply better at the basics of actually singing and playing music. As vocalists, it is no contest. Paul is a more inventive and interesting bass player than Keith (who is actually the best bass player in the Rolling Stones, much better than Wyman). Ringo was a more interesting and inventive drummer than Charlie. John was actually an excellent rhythym guitarist. Mick Taylor is of course a brilliant lead guitarist, but he didn’t last.
I respect your opinion, but it is only an opinion, and I’ll stick with mine.