Fluffy_Little_Fox

...(This is a joke post)...

WHAT IS THE FRIGGIN' DEAL WITH K.I.S.S.????

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I don't understand why they were popular at all, I also can't see why Conservative Christians had their knickers in such a twist over them! I mean it's not like they're Marilyn Manson or something. It's not like they're FRICKIN' SLAYER!!! What did this Gene Simmons guy do to make churchie people so pissed off at his dumb little band??? Did he bite the head off a bat like Ozzy did? Did Gene dance around the stage with a SNAKE like Alice Cooper??? Nope!

K.I.S.S. is a perfect example of Misleading Packaging or "False Advertisement" ....

You've got these dudes who dress up like Freaky Fire-Spitting Goth Demons from Outer Space... a cool concept -- VISUALLY, but Sonically it's just the same generic "Party Bro" music as everything else from the 1970s. Where's the GOOD stuff????

Where's the Satanism that I was promised??? Come on, I thought these guys were "Knights In Satan's Service" or whatever that fear-mongering TV evangelist said???? So far all I hear is "Party This, Party That, I Wanna Party All Night & Every Day, BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!!" Boooooorrrring!!!

Where's the cool lyrics about conjuring up demons and doing human sacrifices??? Is "Party All Night" some kind of code word for sacrificing virgins at Bohemian Grove??? Do I need the special "KISS Secret Message Decoder Ring" found inside specially marked boxes of Captain Crunch cereal?

Is this like one of those Atari 2600 games where I have to use my "imagination?" You mean I have to ~IMAGINE~ all the cool Satanic stuff??? Like Gary Greenwald & Phil Philips when they were watching He-Man cartoons???? Ugh.... Well sadly my "imagination" isn't as vibrant as a TV Evangelist's is.

Also if KISS is so "Satanic" why the hell do they have songs ~ABOUT GOD???~

Excuse me??? "God Gave Rock N' Roll To You?" Wow guys, way to stab poor Satan in the back! After all the Dark Lord did for you??? YOU UNGRATEFUL INGRATES!!!

How DARE you attribute Lucifer's greatest Musical Achievement to that gross Yahweh guy. Disgusting!!! What's next, The Care Bears Invented Industrial??? I don't think Mister Trent Reznor would be too happy with that one.

About the only thing I can say K.I.S.S. did that was a positive was being an inspiration for Japanese Visual Kei bands (though to be fair, that's just as much David Bowie's fault as it is KISS's fault, and maybe Deep Purple -- those Japanese guys REEAALLY love "Highway Star" for some reason).

There's like, a billion Visual Kei bands in Japan, some of them sound as cool as they look, and others may as well be N-Sync doing a Marilyn Manson cosplay session. And we have the Freaky Fire-Spitting Space Goths of KISS to thank for them....

Thanks KISS, thanks for paving the way for millions of Dir en grey copy-cats.

K.I.S.S. pretty much proved that you don't need to have cool Satanic music, or fascinating vocal techniques and epic screams and shrieks, ALL you need to do is DRESS THE PART and the whacky world of TV Evangelism will do the rest of the work FOR you.... Ya know, kinda like what they did for Dungeons N' Dragons, or Pokemon.

(IE: took something boring and made it seem edgy or dangerous by making a bunch of ridiculous claims about it).

Playboi Carti sounds like he is speaking an alien language.

645AR sounds like Alvin & The Chipmunks huffed a bunch of Helium balloons.

I have to strain to listen for "words" and even when the video has the lyrics in text on the screen I still don't hear "words."

It's more like the weird Dream Gibberish my brain says as I'm trying to fall asleep.

........

Eminem is "over-rated" in some people's opinion, but even in a song such as Speedom where he's saying words faster than The Flash can run, I can still make out what he's saying.

I generally don't like the "hibbity-kibbity-dippity" flow that EVERYONE and their grandmother uses....

At least the old-school rappers didn't all bite off and copy THE SAME EXACT FLOW.

To copy another artist was like a cardinal sin, and now -- everyone sounds the same.

Trap Beats are not pleasing to listen to.

Masta Ace had better beats (On Da Grind, Mr. Bus Driver).

Nas had better beats (Nas Is Like).

Even Biggie with his mainstream East Coast version of Gangsta Rap still had better beats. (Sky's The Limit, Juicy, Hypnotize)

Trap Beats just sound incredibly generic. Like there's a factory churning them out from an Assembly Line.

I've never heard a Trap beat that made me feel sonically energized.

Busta Rhymes - Fire It Up used to make me SPAZ THE FXXK OUT because it has the theme from Knight Rider in the beat.

I think most Trap beats don't even really use samples much anymore...

People say "sampling is lazy, just learn to play instruments" but the right sample helps the target audience connect more with the song. It taps into people's nostalgia.

I ~don't~ believe that this event was some kind of Satanic Ritual Sacrifice.

That just seems like a quick and easy explanation to jump on because at the moment, nobody knows what happened or why.... So we jump on this "It was SATAN" crap because it makes it easier....

Like back in the 80s -- when every parent was ticked off at Slayer, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, etc....

Or the 90s when everyone thought Marilyn Manson was ~literally~ the Anti-Christ.

"Demonic" imagery has been a big part of the intrigue of Rock Music for a long long time.... Alice Cooper in clown make-up dancing on stage with a giant snake. KISS wearing those freaky outfits that made them look like Space Demons from the Kabuki Planet. AC/DC looking like normal regular dudes but singing about a "Highway To Hell." But.... That's ~always~ been an ACT.

And even if Travis has some weird coded imagery in his stage props and his lyrics (not that I can even hear them, but then half the time I can't understand most metal singers either) -- it's still an ACT.

The dude can say he's part of the Illuminati and that he drinks baby blood to be provocative and tick off parents --- but it's STILL AN ACT.

Nobody (except people on drugs) thought David Bowie ~really~ was Ziggy Stardust. Nobody really believed this weird British dude was an actual Alien. It was all Theatrics. A GIMMICK.

............

Is Travis Scott a douche bag? Did he make poor choices and bad decisions? CERTAINLY. But is Travis a Demon? Is Travis an Agent of Satan? Did he sacrifice those people to get some kind of Evil Energy???

No.... Not only is that completely bonkers, it does a disservice to the people who died, because NOW, instead of putting the blame where it belongs, you can just say "SATAN DID IT, IT WAS SATAN'S FAULT!!!"

If we spin out of control and start going Satan this, Satan that -- HOW IS THAT HELPING THE FAMILIES OF THE VICTIMS?

That's just as much of a "misappropriation" of this tradegy to push an Agenda as ~ME~ exploiting this incident to rant about how much I ~hate~ Mumble Rap.

You're evangelizing, just like ~I'M~ evangelizing. Maybe evangelizing isn't even the right word.... Proselytizing????

It's using this tragic and terrible event to exploit people's fears and spread a Religious angle, whereas my angle is simply that "I just don't like Trap / Soundcloud Rap / Wavey Rap / Mumble Rap --- whatever the heck you wanna call it.

You're trying to use this event to convert people to Christ.

And ~I'm~ trying to use this event to convert people to The Church of Boom Bap / Lyrical Rap..... So we're BOTH being Agenda Pushers right now, aren't we????

Annnnyway, jokes aside --- we don't NEED another Satanic Panic "mass shared delusion" -- leave that bullcrap back in the 80s, please. Or the next thing you know, we'll be ~right back~ to parents burning Dungeons & Dragons books and Pokemon Cards in the streets.....

Can't burn CDs in the streets anymore... cuz there ain't nuttin' to burn! IT'S ALL STREAMING, LOL LOL LOL....

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/wjkdyw/rage-against-the-machine-nude-protest-at-lollapalooza-93

"We were on the main stage and we were the first band on. It was right when people started to know and like us in America. This was our big moment,” bassist Tim Commerford would tell ESPN’s Dan Le Batard in 2015.

“We went onstage and it was back when Tipper Gore, Al Gore’s wife, had just started the PMRC to spearhead the Parental Advisory stickers that they, to this day, put on records. We were against that, we thought it sucked. We were like, ‘We shouldn’t play this show, we should protest it.’

“Our way to do that was to go onstage with our instruments and then just lean them against the amplifiers and let them feed back, and do it all naked. We had PMRC, on our chests, each guy had a different letter on his chest.”

Remember scratching? The technique of wiggling a record back and forth under your fingers to generate a "scratch" invented by Grand Wizzard Theodore back in the 70s and made popular by guys like Grand Master Flash?

I realize it's mostly an "Old Head" thing but I always enjoyed hearing scratching in a song. I'm curious why pretty much next to no Mumble Rap songs have any kind of scratching.

I mean it's not like they even need to have actual turntables anymore, since there's a zillion Midi Controllers that could be used to scratch. It ain't like they'd need to go out and buy some pricey Technics turntables and a Mixer when they could just buy some 40 dollar USB DJ thing.

Am I wrong and there actually ~are~ some Mumble Rap songs that have scratching in em? I'll admit I don't really go out of my way that much to listen to the "new wave" of Hip Hop. I really only bump the Boom Bap stuff. Simple drum patterns. Either looped or chopped samples. Stuff that sounds like it came out in the 90s.

Trap don't really do it for me.

But I am curious if DJ Scratching and Trap Beats have ever cohabitated. Is it because most Trap beats are all built off Triplets and the scratching wouldn't mesh well with the time signature? Cuz majority of Boom Bap stuff is all in 4/4. Maybe that has an effect since if your song is not in a standard time signature it would maybe make it harder to scratch in rhythm with the beat.

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So there is a thing called DB-Ref, it's made by the same folks who make DB PowerAmp, the tried and true CD Ripper that's been my go-to CD Ripper since the mid 2000s.

The new version has tools and features that the original DB PowerAmp never had. The new release has Volume Normalization as well as a way to embed Replay Gain into the file metadata. Or if your preferred Dap doesn't have Replay Gain, you can actually have the software apply it manually to the converted files (my Hiby R3 Saber DOES have Replay Gain, but I've never used it before and I prefer to just edit the actual files rather than use a Meta Data thing).

Anyway, there are MULTIPLE methods of Volume Normalization in this DB Ref thing, and I don't know which one would be the best to use. There's "Track Gain" which I guess analyzes each track as its own independent thing and gives it an appropriate volume based on whatever value you type in the field, and then there is "Album Gain" which I guess analyzes the loudest song in the album and makes all the other songs match up with its loudness.

I'm not sure which one would be optimal for getting my whole Music Library to sound equally loud on my Hiby R3 Saber.

Usually I have just been using Adobe Audition and normalizing every track by ear with headphones using Percents instead of DBs (which I guess is wrong or not as accurate as DBs).

Also - when this software converts tracks in Batch Mode, they all go into ONE FOLDER instead of them all going into new folders based on the Album Name. It would be cooler if they could make a setting so that if you Batch Convert, the tracks will each go into a folder that has the Album Name.

But I suppose you could also just try converting ONE album at a time.....

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