Stop

To every single musical ensemble ever in existence:

Incorporating several genres and styles into your sound does not make you a great band. Making great music makes you a great band. In reality, every group can trace their style to any number of roots an influences and listing your influences does not make you cool. Nor does it make you anywhere near as unique as you think you are, for that matter. Saying you incorporate the sound of '70s prog rock groups does not make your band more any more progressive than the next group, especially if you can't list your influences past Yes, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, and Metallica. I'm sick and tired of bands that, while advertising themselves, first say things like "yeah, we mix a lot of styles," "we incorporate everything from hip-hop to folk in our sound," and doing things like listing hundreds of band on their "sounds like" section on their myspace. Seriously, if you can honestly say that Between The Buried And Me as an influence but play pop, you need to take a step back. Genre-bending sounds really unique and original, but its been done before, and quite possibly been done to death.

Of Song Lengths

I'm ashamed to admit that the length of a song is something that ultimately affects what music I listen to. I know it shouldn't, but "I'm only human," and it does. I believe the root is found in my old Dream Theater fanboy self. I learned of all these elements of "progressive" music from Dream Theater members talking about their own group. They'd either make reference to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, which isn't even a song, or they would claim that the average Dream Theater song is about 10 minutes long, which isn't the case. Its 7:33; yes, I did calculate it, and yes, I'm ashamed to admit it. This perception is one I'm trying to lose, but one that doesn't want to be lost. I owned Close To The Edge for months before listening to it. I somehow got the idea what a title track of 18 minutes is too good for my ears, so I put off listening to the album at all, which turned out to be a mistake. I initially looked up on The Decemberists because they wrote some long songs, like The Crane Wife and The Island. I looked down up bubblegum-era Beatles because their songs were always 2 minutes and something long. I didn't bother listening to Frank Sinatra because he just sang 3-minute pop songs, which, being 3 minutes long, were inferior to 10-minute prog epics. And somehow Death Cab For Cutie didn't contribute anything to music because they wrote shorter songs. Only when I got past that fact did I learn that quality and song length aren't remarkably correlated.

The only time I listen to music without knowing the length of the song is while watching concert DVDs, which is what brought me here. I watched Joe Satriani's Live In San Francisco DVD and one of the highlights was a bass solo from Stu Hamm that I remember as being well-developed and fun. What I didn't learn until skimming YouTube today was that it is more than 6 minutes long. It didn't seem that long while watching it without knowing the length. My interest didn't waiver and I didn't ever think "wow, this guy has been playing forever" or "this part is too repetitive." When I came across it on YouTube, I realized that if I hadn't already seen it, I would have noticed the 6:04 timestamp and skipped it. Unaware that it had multiple parts to it and was actually decent, I let something from my past self prevent me from enjoying music that interests me.