Perhaps "deliberately disengage" to you might be
challenging the listener to others.  A listener must
take artier forms of rock (or jazz or classical, etc.)
on his or her own terms.  What you see as some attempt
by acts like Sonic Youth or The Fall or Pere Ubu (not
cited, but on the same page) to turn people off, is
really an effort by the artist to create something
different.  Not all music has to be cuddly or user
friendly.  The price that is often paid for that is
lower popularity.  But often it's your Ornette
Colemans and Husker Dus who break with established
paradigms and inject something new into music which
eventually fileters into more mainstream efforts.

Husker Du and My Bloody Valentine are prime examples
in rock -- Bob Mould and Kevin Shields came up with
new ways to look at the guitar.  In terms of power
pop, Mould, directly or indirectly, had a huge
influence.  A good example would be the dynamics heavy
Swedish bands like Eggstone, Melony, The Wannadies, et
al., who would add mega-loud bursts of guitar into
their melody fests.  That's Bob Mould in a nutshell.

Two other comments --

1. Bad production techniques?   Often it was no money
and making do with what they had.

2. I wonder how much of the music that you cited
you've actually heard.  After Psychocandy, the Jesus
and Mary Chain was never that feedback heavy. 
Darklands is a fairly quiet album that your sensitive
friends might be able to stomach.

Mike Bennett

--- Jaimie Vernon <bullseyecanada@hotmail.com> wrote:

> At Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 11:57:41 Jimmy Prell

> It's one thing when you're John Wesley Harding or
> Lou Reed treading the line 
> of the melodic hook and couching it in avant-garde
> or subtle nuances of a 
> pop structure. It's another thing when you take a
> good, melodic song and 
> wash it in feedback, and bad production techniques
> to deliberately disengage 
> the listener. My reaction to this is not cynicism,
> it's disappointment in 
> their lost opportunity to engage me, or probably a
> lot more potential 
> listeners. I'd throw My Bloody Valentine, The
> Cynics, Husker Du, Sonic Youth 
> and a whole rash of other
> self-realized/self-important acts in there as 
> well.
> 
> I just don't see the point in producing work that
> only YOU, as the creator, 
> can stand listening to. Why insulate yourself in a
> musical form that few 
> people appreciate? I'm sure I could have turned a
> lot of people on to the 
> Jesus And Mary Chain had they, y'know, released a
> song that didn't make you 
> want to stick a pitchfork in your eye or decapitate
> your next store 
> neighbour after the first 45 seconds.
> 
> I'm not looking for pristine Beach Boys pop
> melodicism here. I'm looking for 
> some semblence of melody in a pop format even if it
> means disjointed guitar 
> chords or atonal delivery. Bury it in
> self-indulgence and I'm moving on...


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