ZGangsta

Someone hit it on the head when they said that it's the fault of the return of the "single market." That's not only the problem with the quality of mainstream music these days, but also the root of the music industry's money problems. Who is going to spend the time and money making a quality albumn when they can just push the fuck out of whoever has "teh HOT SOUDZ" at that point in time? The industry just focus groups everything to death to try and get that number one single. There's no focus on writing a quality album. And this hurts the industry much more then they realize. Why does the consumer want to buy an albumn when the only worthy thing on it is the single. Why do you think illegal downloading became so damn popular. ALL THEY WANT IS THE SINGLE. Point. The top grossing artists of 2003: Paul McCartney The Rolling Stones Dave Matthews Band Fleetwood Mac Eminem Bruce Springsteen Mariah Carey* Ozzy Osbourne *due to her huge payoff from EMI So where is the single mentality from the most sucessfull artists? Not there. They made their money touring. Singles DO NOT SELL OUT ARENAS. None of the new bands elicit enough respect from their audiences to draw huge crowds because the albums aren't strong enough. Good muscisianship is what makes the legendary bands. It's what makes the most sucessful bands. Many of the groups/artists since the video age that are percieved to be hugely sucessful actually never were. You think that the bling-bling rap videos actually represent those guy's lives? No, it's all image. The guys that do live those lives are either producing, or are going to be in soooo much debt to their labels. Now, back pre Zeppelin/Rise of FM, the single had the same effect as it did now. Actually it was worse; I remember reading one of the Beatles complaining that the singles weren't even included on the albums. The huge record sales numbers, and GIANT concert revenues that started happening in the late 60s/70s are a result of bands putting out amazing records that drew people in. Not some 3:30 club hit that you forget the minute you stop dancing. Could any modern band tour to 90,000 person crowds like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were doing in 73? Not likely. The single market is what's smacking down mainstream music. Unfortunately it's just going to get worse with the rise of iTunes and such. Now on top of a shitty song, you get shitty quality mp3 music as well. Say goodbye to labels caring about good sound quality in a recording studio.

That's not true at all. While you won't get an increase over AGP with PCI express (because the graphics cards havn't evolved to take advantage of it yet), the PCI-E bus is certainly not worse than AGP. The AGP slot will have completely diaspeared within a year on new motherboards. Oh, and the Geforce FX series was a complete abomination, never buy one. You could get a Radeon 9700 pro for cheaper than either the 5900 or 5950, and it will kick the shit out of them performance and quality wise. Thankfully NVidia seems to be back on track recently though. Also, for an OS, definately go with Win XP Pro over regular XP. What kind of P4? They go from 1GHz to 4GHz. Most of the time it depends on what you want to do with the computer. Though AMD and Intel desktop chips are pretty evenly matched these days.

Yeah, that happens. Wait a few months until the next generation of top level cards come out, save up some cash, and buy one of the current generation's top level cards. Maybe a Nvidia 6800GT or Ultra, or an ATI x800 variant. Unless you need a decent card now.

The processor is nice and beefy, and I'm feeling the 2G of RAM that's in there. But I hate to be the one to break it that the video card is a piece of shit. Wait, that's a bad way of putting it, it's not a piece of shit (it's a brand new video card) it's just very low-end. The X300 series is meant for the cheap cheap entry level "grandma needs a video card for her new PC" market. It will not perform on any new games out there worth a damn. Now, if you're not planning on doing anything graphics extensive (ie video production or gaming), then I'm sure you'll be fine with an X300, but if you are definately upgrade that mofo (if you have any money left after the comp that is) It just pains me deeply to see a machine that powerfull with such a weak GPU.

Does anyone use the Thunderbird 0.8 email client by Mozilla? What's the word on the street about that? It's different from the client that is part of the Mozilla Suite. And has anyone else noticed that the Mozilla website looks fine in IE, but is completely fucked up in Opera. Ironic.

Yeah that's true, but this is far beyond using the traditional swastika. I mean, look at the pictures from the news article. They're obviously using nazi imagry with the whole red/eagle/swastika/iron cross deal. Plus the whole part about how "One branch broadcast Nazi propaganda films on a wall with a projector." Yeah that's a pretty dumb move. Although hell, lots of North American shirts and hats are using stuff that's pretty damn close to an Iron Cross these days. (HHH's symbol anyone?)

U2 Guns n Roses Van Halen Iron Maiden REM Michael Jackson Metallica You pretty much left out the most sucessful (financially and critically) and memorable bands of that decade. Of the bands that are there I'd vote for the Clash, but I always consider them a 70s band. Their peak, London Calling, came out in 1979. My pick for best band of the 80s: U2

I stumbled across this on a Canadian arts website. It's called Pantomimus and it's completely fucked up and gut bustingly funny. http://zed.cbc.ca/go.ZeD?POS=3&CONTENT_ID=...74&page=content

Don't forget Men Without Hats. You guys loved the Sfety Dance. Admit it

Exactly what I was thinking

I expected to see "1984" and "Houses of the Holy" much higher on the list and am pretty surprised that "Whitesnake" got a higher placement then those two.

Im just confused as to why there's been 22 replies and no one's mentioned "hey Mickey" or whatever the fuck that song with the clapping cheerleaders was yet.

Oh my God, that was brilliant. Wilson came across as a complete dumbass who had no clue how to properly make a movie. Like when he's trying to get Moore's company's adress and it takes him forever to finally come up with the idea to call directory assistance. Then Samantha Bean lets them wander around like morons for an eternity and then finally "realized that I had Michael Moore's phone number." The highlight was the part where she deadpan talks about how elusive and camera shy Michael Moore is and nobody will ever film him, as she walks right by him standing there nonchalantly on the side of the street.

The ironic thing is that for so long I'd pray that RVD got traded to Smackdown, but now I just keep thinking about how good he'd fit in on RAW these days.

About that No Way Out 2001 buyrate. I've checked around and all the numbers I've seen have these numbers listed Summer Slam '01 1.32 InVasion '01 1.63 King Of The Ring '01 0.96 Judgment Day '01 0.84 Backlash '01 0.90 WrestleMania XVII 2.18 No Way Out '01 1.6 Royal Rumble '01 1.35 Armageddon '00 1.15 Survivor Series '00 1.0 No Mercy '00 1.35 Unforgiven '00 1.5 Summer Slam '00 1.4 Now I don't know what that tranlates to in total number of buys, but it's pretty damn high compared to the other PPVs around it so I doubt the PPV market could have fluctuated enough for just that one month to account for th low number of buys that keeps getting tossed around And yeah, NWO 01 was a damn fine show.

There's not really a riff in Stairway per say. I don't know if you're thinking of the intro or the solo but neither of those are really 'guitar riffs.' I love Sweet Child (which Slash supposedly played as a joke the first time), but I think Smoke on the Water, Layla, and Heartbreaker are better, more memorable riffs.

Wow, lashing out a reviewers, singling them out personally, and then challenging them to a fight. Looks like someone's channeling Axl.

I'd tend to agree with this. I think firt "disc" is absolutly awesome song by song, but doesn't really flow, and the second seems thrown together. The album was composed of outtakes from the Houses of the Holy sessions and new stuff, so that might explain a bit. It's all worth it just for "Trampled Underfoot" though. God I love that song

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Please say you're kidding me... Oh, God you have to be kidding me... Page couldn't play live????????? Are you fucking joking me. You obviously haven't heard "How the West was Won" or seen the Led Zeppelin DVD. And as for the overdubbing, Page overdubbed extra guitar tracks to add harmonies. He DID NOT use it to cover up existing tracks. Listen to the "Heartbreaker" solo. That was one fucking take, improvised on the spot. Same goes for "Stairway to Heaven" solo (although he did 3 versions and just chose one). I can't belioeve you're making this dumbass assumption about Jimmy Page of all people. He is the LAST person you should be accusing of cleaning up his riffs and solos. You're obviously just trying to sound different (and in your mind smarter) than everybody else by slagging a popular guitarist. I understand people who don't like him or think he's not THE best guitar player, but you just come across as a predjudiced dumbass. PS: The darkness do rock, but they sure as hell aren't timeless. PPS: Duran Duran also rock

Actually I'm pretty sure I read about legislation (that damned Digital Millennium Copyright Act of course) in the States that actually makes it ILLEAGAL to do that. Which is just insane; you can't do what you want to your own property?

Definately one of the stupidest music statements I've ever heard. That's like saying U2 is a hair band because they realeased a huge albumn in 1987 and Bono had sorta long hair. Guns and Roses was way closer to Metallica then any of their other comtemporary hard rock/metal bands.

Yeah, you'd think that would be the case, but it's not. It's illegal thanks to the Windows user licence and a few well lobbied bills from Washington. Welcome to Microsoft's America.

So American children are learning that you should live in a state of common ownership of production with mercantilistic tendencies while striving to abolish government and kill religion shutting out all foreign influences ina n attempt at creating a disjointed utopian society. Or are you just labelling everything left of conservatism "communism." And I'm definately not calling an argument against illegal immigration "racism," I'm competely against illegal immigration. I'm saying that people will sometimes twist racist messages into "patriotism" and other nice politically correct statements.

Communism? You're calling communism a problem in America in 2004? And come on let's not put nice labels (like "anti-illegal immigration") on the things this guy's saying; he's obviously a racist dick. I do agree however, that if all this were happening to a Gay Club or something like that, the uproar would be huge.