(no subject)

[petronia]

(You know what I hate about livejournal comments, that are otherwise so nifty? The fact that I have to answer them absolutely immediately, or the entry gets shunted down the friends' page too far. Do you read comments on old entries? I don't read comments on old entries. Nobody reads comments on old entries. But on pitas/blogger, 'old entry' means 'within the last 2-3 days', whereas on lj it's 'within the last 2-3 hours'.

So this is actually a reply to the comments section of the last post:)

Never heard the Last Live! Have heard the other one - saints alive, there goes *my* brain - the Tokyo Dome one. (My friend Dave went and bought the CDs during his two weeks in Japan.) Yoshiki wrote the music to *match* Toshi's voice, by me; tunesmithing comes out best if you take into account the range of the prospective singer, and he probably didn't care very much about other bands attempting covers. XD Songs like 'Crucify My Love' do work rather well... with a soprano vocalist.

hide was the accessible one, that's for sure.

And on the subject of pretentiousness, I've just been forcibly reminded that Guns N' Roses' 'November Rain' is a full nine minutes as well - and it really *is* the same type of music, isn't it? ^^; I missed said era entirely, but my friends are kind enough to educate me retroactively. (I did watch the music video of 'November Rain' once, though; during someone's presentation in my sixth-grade class. Don't remember the subject of the oral, but do remember the video. Have the most embarrassingly crystalline memory for music videos. You'd think every time I watched MTV constituted an extraordinary world event.)

Re Driver's High: yup, it makes me think that too, at the beginning. :P (Then there's Gackt's 'Wasurenai kara', which is all motorcycles...) The lyrics don't work, though, not really - not the same kind of driving. The music video was about the band robbing a bank in some tumbleweed town in like Texas or Nevada or somewhere, and hightailing it off in a beaten up rust-coloured car, popping champagne and tossing bills out the windows while being chased down by the cops. ...Case in point, my memory. ^^;

Laruku is an acquired taste. I couldn't stand the music at first; then Dave lent me all the CDs, so I made myself listen to them, then ended up listening to them nonstop for about a month.

Comments

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

heh, that's why I have emailed notification of comments on :) I occasionally get a comment from an entry I posted three weeks ago :)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's more that people comment me, then I comment back three days later, and if they read me off their friends' page they'd likely never see it. :) ...Or does the notification take care of that as well?

(Hope the work situ is easing up! *encouragement hug*)

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if they have comment emails enabled, which most of us dedicated LJers do :)

It's gotten quieter, at least. And I'm still snickering over the karmic retribution.

[metempsychosis.livejournal.com]

Plus, well, the November Rain video is complete genius. It's one of the first music videos i can remember /completely/, and every time i see it i get this huge wave of nostalgia: followed by the usual speculation on what the girl died of. I say emphysema, all those guys did was /smoke/. ^_^

[petronia.livejournal.com]

^_^ I was entirely ignorant regarding popular music at the time, though. (My dad perceives electric guitar riffs as noise, so his music stops with the Big Band era. Later, after he discovered MP3s, it jumped forward to include house/dance. Anything, just not guitars.) The video wowed me, but it confused me as well - I was like, isn't Guns N' Roses supposed to be really loud and raucous? ^^;

It never matters what the girl dies of, so long as she dies. ;)

[metempsychosis.livejournal.com]

It never matters what the girl dies of, so long as she dies.

That's very... essentialist? Stylised. Something cool, anyway. ^_^

I hadn't actually /heard/ of G'n'R properly before then - which is more surprising when you consider that i had heard quite a bit of /Rage Against The Machine/ and really quite liked the smashing pumpkins at this point, along with the early stirrings of britpop - so I was just sitting there going "ooh! the strange man's playing the piano!" and the like for the most of it. To tell you the truth, the video stayed with me far more than did ever the song: Slash playing the guitar at the white picket fence was just such a perfect moment, despite the fact that i have /always/ hated guitar solos. (But, then, this was me brought up on the rolling stones and the beatles and, well, the most of sixties guitar-pop, so. ^_~)

Re: Acquired Taste

[flamebyrd]

*laughing* I still can't listen to "Niji" (from the Kenshin movie) because it sounds like he's dying a slow and painful death in the opening verse...

But I love "The Fourth Avenue Cafe". *shrugs*

[juuchan.livejournal.com]

In the case of LJ comments-- I check them by email. Occasionally, I pour through friends' pages and whanot. ^^I catch some things sometimes.
I think Forever Love was performed two times at Tokyo Dome...once was '96 at Dahlia Tour Final, and the second was the Last Live ('97 -- first heard this one, brain went "Ow."). So...if you say Tokyo Dome, I must ask, "Which year?" The easiest way to tell is if Toshi misses his lines after "All I see is blue in my heart." Said version is the Last Live. X Japan is absolutely amazing live. Whatever mistakes they make in their performance, you tend to overlook or not hear at all. I would agree with Yoshiki writing to match Toshi's voice, and balance with the rest of the instruments as well. So much talent in one band, I say. It's not just Toshi's voice people can't replicate, and it probably gives Yoshiki that extra boost of ego he doesn't really need.
I'd say November Rain is the definitive American rock band ballad, though I haven't heard much. Guns N' Roses is one of the few bands I do like. Granted, I first saw November Rain as the Axl/Elton John performance (with a much skinnier Elton John ;p) on VH1, and then the video. It was out of a fit of boredom one summer when I caught it. Very very nice song and video. Appropriate piano parts.
As long as a song is good, the length is not really noticed. Quoted from my friend, "Whoa, that was nine minutes?" when he heard Forever Love. Good boy. Then again, length was never a big deal for me. Playing classical music tends to make you forget the length of the pieces, since you're so preoccupied with your performance that time is forgotten. The only piece I'd say where the length caught up to me was Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.5 (?) with that horrendously long harpsichord solo.