TJ Silverlake: "The team that beta tests over and over again so the cowards can have care free technology. The team that's having the fun..."

Let me get this straight. You are a COWARD if you don't get a frickin' iPhone?

Not just maybe not interested, or maybe don't have 600 plus dollars lying around to throw at Apple Corp and AT & T? If you need to flatter yourself as being part of a "beta testing" cutting edge team of transhuman secret agents or something, that's your masturbatory fetish, not mine.

I sometimes wonder if RealName spends as much time at sites like Free Republic wagging his fingers at the echo chambers there as he does wagging them here at Salon, which is a much more open forum for differing opinions.

Uvula, while I agree with a lot of your post, I think you're dead wrong about one thing:

"With the exception of the 1990s, which was a desert in the aggressive music world as well -- horror movies and heavy music, what go more hand in hand?"

The 90's were a stellar time for aggressive music:

diSEMBOWLMENT

Solstice

Lord Weird Slough Feg

Esoteric

At The Gates

Morbid Angel

Darkthrone

Sleep

Kyuss

Acid Bath/Agents of Oblivion

EyeHateGod

Satyricon

Borbetomagus

Naked City/Painkiller

Melvins

Electric Wizard

Meshuggah

Nile

Godflesh

Entombed

Emperor

Fu Manchu

Now you can still say you hate all these bands. But I don't know a single hard rock fan that think the 90's were a "desert" for aggressive music. And it's only gotten better since.

Uvula:

"Most of the bands you listed are middling to pedestrian chuggers, but I'll give you one you didn't mention: Fear Factory. Their death metal-y vocals weren't distracting or silly, like most death metal bands (which I found/find, as a potential successor to thrash, to be a supersonic devolution). Then again, I'm a guitar solo/wanking/fusion devotee, so I'm mostly not in those waters anymore (and thus not really qualified to comment!)."

Well, at least you admit that you're not invested in the scene enough to say you've listened closely to all of these bands. I like guitar solos too, and fusion, and Fear Factory. But actually, only a small percentage of the bands I listed (which is still only a small portion of bands from that era) are in the death metal camp (are Borbetomagus chuggers or death metal?). Not that I object to death metal. And not many musicians I know would call John Cobbett or Matt Pike or Joe Preston middling chuggers, etc. etc.

Besides, there are many standards (more important ones, to me) by which to judge rock other than technical capability or refined melodicism. C'est la vie.

"Stop trying to justify the selfishness, arrogance and egotism of heedless breeders with lame attacks on the rest of us. I'm gay, hot and get laid alot more than any poor hetero male."

Yeah, there's no arrogance and egotism involved at all when someone brags about getting laid and being hot, and also brags about being too enlightened and responsible to bring more tragedy into the world. Right.

I can't believe Ben Stein has turned into such a tool. Or rather, that his tool-ness has taken this long to overtake my fond Ferris Bueller memories. Although I'm more annoyed at him for the upcoming Expelled anti-evolution production than his econoblogging ubiquity.

as Prong would say. I liked the perspective offered by Simon Reynolds here, and it's very articulate and well written (I remember his reviews being some of the highlights of the Spin's Guide to Alternative way back in 1995--its sounds dumb to say, but that book really was pretty great).

But for me personally, what made shoegaze interesting was that very air of abstract, inhuman ghostly gauze that Reynolds' equates with political apathy and ersatz fakery here. Chapterhouse (and Ride and all the rest) was interesting because they were a pop band that deliberately numbed what normally would be the sonic foreground into the blurry backdrop--My Bloody Valentine was wilder and more innovative, and Swervedriver definitely rocked harder, but Chapterhouse had their own take on the fuzzed out inert drone that was pretty damn compelling.

And Slowdive is pretty much recognized as a canonical band at this point--one of the highlights of Eno's production work in the 90's. Souvlaki sounded like it was recorded at the bottom of the ocean, mysterious as a giant squid gliding around in a deep chasm.

If you want dance music, you can simply listen to the greats of the era--but to castigate some of these bands for what they simply weren't trying to do seems a little off the mark to me. To disagree with Reynolds, I've listened to a lot of the shoegazer bands recently, and felt that they were underrated at the time, mostly because the bias was weighted towards the more "streetwise" and abrasive American indies like Big Black and Husker Du.

"Nevertheless, for the most part, the British ought to stay away from the R&B, soul, and hip-hop until they've sorted out the ramifications of the loss of the Empire."

I don't understand your need to request that musicians go out of their way to stick to their national identities--it's the opposite of the cross fertilization that's created so many new genres from things that previously never mingled: the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Effect!

I for one love the way that native musics get ripped off, bowlderized and mutated when taken across national identity membranes. The "fakes" are often just as interesting as the "pure" source music. What they lack in authenticity, they gain in both intentional and accidental metamorphoses.

For example: Kodwo Eshun pointed out that the great trick of Detroit techno was to treat the native European symphonically oriented Kraftwerk the same way that the Beatles and Stones ripped off/misinterpreted Delta blues. And this bastardization turned into great alchemy, spawning an entirely new aesthetic.

Long live ripping off other cultures! The only alternative is mind numbing musical monoculture.