what could he mean? (re: questions forum)

[xoxos]

as a response to the recent thread in "questions" -

i wouldn't object to elaboration on "I achieved musically on the Cubist album is what I was trying to accomplish on each of the Legacy albums" :O

whatever achievement is being referred to eludes me. TWSB seems firmly established in the immaculate.. (with both precedence and antecedence) i can't imagine how TWSB could come to exist without inviolability between intent and realisation. christiansongs seems in all parts to be solid "this is exactly what i want to say and exactly how i want to say it".

how does "shepherds of the northern pasture" onwards fall short of the objective? isn't "the phonograph plays" one example of a crafting that requires this compact between artist and medium?


i expect that a relatively comprehensive answer to how/why these works aren't ideal wold be involved, so i'm posing it here instead of in the Q forum. maybe someone remembers some comment that would begin to answer it, or maybe this isn't a question at all, and simply an expression of appreciation.

[charis]

what i don't get is the part where he says he drinks alcohol. everyone knows that christians don't do that. could it have some deeper meaning?

[jjmini]

Maybe he was just talking about the overall concept of Cubist. If i remember correctly cubism was Ronnies personal experience in learning and exploring various types of art and artists. The inspiration for this was because Ronalds upbringing didn't have much of a focus on art and the like.

Maybe he wanted the legacy series to be more of a journey within a journey (Inception 2: Ronnie Martins Surrealist Nightmare) rather than a personal commentary or view? The songwriting and structure imo also transcend time frame where as you can easily get a mid 2000s vibe from ministry and mannequin (maybe im just biased because im so nostalgic towards those times?)

Maybe it even had something to do with rawness of the record itself? Stripped vocals, different songwriting (at least I feel like cubist songs differ from what the norm is on Joy E albums)?

Note how every point started off on maybe. These are all poor assumptions so take it as they are : )

actually, he says "musically" in his post and not "conceptually".........

"I dunno lol " ¯\(°_o)/¯

[WhiteSongBoy]

Perhaps his "failure" was from an attempt to make the "new sound" he was searching for. He stated that his overall goal was to reach the sound of Cubist. He tends to "theme" his albums with a certain sound, so perhaps he got started with a new sound and got addicted to it, then having to complete the album following that trend in hopes of finding his sound.

[goodpastleads]

[]

[xoxos]

i think that 2000s thing is you jjmini i ordered those at the same time and don't see it.

i'd guess you're right whitesongboy, likely a personal standard inscrutable to others. i don't hear that he wasn't entirely within his element for TMOA, i think most people would say that MGTC feels the most hermetic. maybe compromises ended there.

[Dr. M]

Yeah I was very disappointed to read that, personally. This is why it can be hard hearing artists talk about their own work, because their perspective is so skewed. Every album in the legacy series is incredible, each one a unique and powerful artistic statement. But the way he put that seems to completely marginalize this entire body of work for the sake of one album, and it doesn't help that this one album is so sub-par next to the others. Cubist was the album he tried and failed to create five times over, and then finally got it right? But Cubist is so different from those others, and it SUCKS! It's a bad album! Quite disappointing indeed.

[xoxos]

hehe, i don't agree with that, i find the title track quite flattering

i imagine from the public success i've had that one becomes cautious of what one says due to it's influence on people who seem hyperreactive to youe every nuance. i think i turned onto JE about the time of robot rock - and teh internets was already like OMGOMG RONNIE UR SO

a strong point for me is that imo a *good* artist (little overlap with a "commercially successful artist") should challenge their listeners.. maybe at an extreme to disappoint and upset them.. with the objective of improving their discretion.

modern music is a lot like.. waking up and eating twinkies and tang for breakfast, memetically speaking. tang never upsets or challenges or disappoints (until premature aging ). you know that what's good for bodies is a breakfast of locally grown, organic sustenance.. so a *good* musicians wants to wean their listeners off of tang, even if they have to package themselves in the form of tang to do it. ergo MGTC?? i think this is sort of the message of "draw for me, 'em see, ah sure" - the sounds are so pure and simple, and hermetic (phase modulation or something on the bass osc? it sounds very *particular*).

it is a load of bollocks though.. he's _got_ to have a good idea of the worth of those albums. maybe cubist is the challenge he's wanted to record throughout.

[Dr. M]

MGTC doesn't sound challenging to me. If Ronnie was interested in challenging us, he might give us 7 minute long instrumentals or try writing a song using nothing but diminished chords. MGTC sounds to me like an average set of JE pop tunes that went badly astray in the production and performance.

[xoxos]

in this case more challenging "expectations"

the same way that some songs, ronald of orange, these should be the good times use stark, stock rompler timbres that sound overtly "amateur".

in these cases, i think the strength of the songs clearly outweigh the production values and that this is part of the overall message. i think the hermetic, well.. odd timbres, minimal (and often similar) production on MGTC is part of the gravity..

i wonder if cubist was written by picking several of his long-standing, synthesizer using fans and writing a song about each of them..

[xoxos]

oc that could be wildly missing the mark..

[Jono]

This is rare, but, on this point, I completely agree with Ronnie's viewpoint.