LIES GREED MISERY REACTION THREAD

Discussion in 'Linkin Park Chat' started by Jayhov, May 24, 2012.

  1. Dusty

    Dusty McNugget Buddy LPA Super VIP

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    While working today, I found myself either singing or humming the chorus over and over again.
    Some of the customers were giving me weird looks as I walked by. :lol:
     
  2. hawk

    hawk because the internet LPA Super VIP

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    Then you stared them in the eyes and shouted "you did it to yourself!"?
     



  3. +1
     
  4. deftonesfan867

    deftonesfan867 976-EVIL

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    I came.
     
  5. Jeff

    Jeff WORSHIP LPA Addicted VIP

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    Haha I know right? I had it stuck in my head all day.
     
  6. Manu

    Manu Seeking tenderness with a dagger

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    It's weird. Usually with LP when I don't like a song it gets better the more I listen to it.

    Or the other way around, I may like a song and stop liking it with time.

    This is probably the first time the song gets worse and worse with each listen.
     
  7. AkirraKrylon

    AkirraKrylon LPA VIP LPA VIP

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    ^ ouch that's rough lol. Sorry to hear that you don't like it.

    Hopefully you'll like it better in the context of the album. That happened to me with The Catalyst. I thought it was decent but as part of ATS it's brilliant.
     
  8. Ice Cream Sandwich

    Ice Cream Sandwich Member

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    Its actually fantastic.
    Heard it before at night on radio and was thiking, 'well good but meh'

    And then cometh morn and headphones and omlettes, and its absolutely fabulous :D
    "Let me show you how the breaking point sounds" is such a phaad lyric, and the last part of the song the bridge and chorus were phenomenal !!!
    The quitars were precise and the drums were rampaging :D

    The song hits you so fast, you barely have time to recover and you keep wishing for more.
    And in that case, PLAY IT AGAIN :D :D
     
  9. Sønic

    Sønic Searching for the last Chaos Emerald... LPA Super Member

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    I thought it was meh until I got it in the car. Even on my surround sound downstairs it just sounded alright, but in the car is a different story. Not much different in overall sound, but just having it in the car made it grow on me.

    Stil not better than anything on A Thousand Suns, but it's not comparable either. The band have found yet another opening to what may have been a dead end road and blew the fuck right through it.
     
  10. Xerø 21

    Xerø 21 I was Ree's 100th follower on Twitter.

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    Yeah, but the blog reviews about the song other than the "most innovative" comment were also pretty off the mark. Dubstep? lol. just lol. not even a hint.

    This is an electro anthem. It's great hype music. As I've said, it's basically as if they re-recorded Wretches and Kings without the "popper stopper." But that's about all it does for me, which isn't so bad I guess. It's great music to get yourself pumped up. But other than that...meh.

    This + Burn It Down + the track lengths have me feeling a bit deflated as far as album hype goes.

    It also surprises me (although it probably shouldn't) how...easily satisfied some fans are? Like there are a lot of LP fans who love the poppiest songs like LGM, Burn It Down, In The End, Numb, etc the most. It's like if they hear a certain instrument in a song + a certain style of vocal then the song must = omqqq epicz. But if the same elements are used in a more experimental song with unfamiliar song structures then they just aren't as into it.

    I guess people in the fanbase really love indulging in snappy pop songs the most. Maybe I'm just so far down the rabbit hole (over the past 2-3 years I've really made a conscious effort to look at music/film/media as art forms rather than social tools) that I just can't relate to that kind of indulgence anymore. A gift and a curse I suppose.

    Edit: Apparently the last bit of this post is being misunderstood as some sort of attack on fans. That wasn't my intention. If you like the catchier Linkin Park music, I don't think you're somehow below me. I was just trying to say that I can't really get excited about that kind of music anymore. And with the way some of the fanbase talks shit about pop radio music, they can seem a bit hypocritical as they turn around and blast Burn It Down.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2012
  11. lime treacle

    lime treacle Über Member Über Member

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    Exactly, dude. :lol:

    Okay now, people are saying A Thousand Suns lacked energy again. This is annoying but I can't prove them a point.
     
  12. Erica

    Erica Meh LPA Über VIP

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    I found I like it a lot better when I'm blasting it in the car :p
     
  13. Oliver

    Oliver Spela Shoreline!

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    The song has grown on me, and I really like the backing vocals in the chorus, it gives it a kind of "party" feeling! It's really different from BID and when reading the other song descriptions (campfire vocals and piano-driven ballad etc.) I'm not worried at all for the album. So excited!
     
  14. Qwerty19

    Qwerty19 Well-Known Member

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    Well, pop structures are more easy-listening, it's not that weird that people get more into it. On the other hand, they get boring faster, that's the bad thing about it. Personnally, I prefer compelx structures, but I don't have a beef with pop structures. If the sound is good, I'm ok with it
     
  15. Spaedin

    Spaedin Well-Known Member

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    YOU DID IT TO YOURSEEEEEEEELF!
    Love it.
    Dat breakdown :wub:
    Also waiting for this to drop in the shoutbox was by far the best wait for a song/album release I have ever had :)
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2012
  16. box1992

    box1992 and the sun will set for you

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    This song is now stuck in my head
     
  17. Adam.

    Adam. Well-Known Member

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    I'm posting this here but I think I'm gonna try to make it it's own thread. I wrote out a reaction to the song (and this thread) It's a wall of text but I tried to be reasonably thorough..

    # Thoughts on Lies Greed Misery.

    I've been reading the reactions on LPAssociation and been disappointed by them. Many members of the site, people I respect, are initially hesitant to express anything other than hedged support for the song—which is a real let down. The hesitancy arises, or seems to arise, from this feeling that unless Linkin Park produces Hybrid Theory again then they've somehow strayed from quality. I'm going to try to do two things here seem mutually exclusive but which help to form a more holistic picture of the song's features and what this *might* mean for the album. First, I want to try to put this song in context with Linkin Park's work, and second I want to tear this song back out of that context and try to examine it in its own right. I hope somewhere between those two extremes we can find the right feeling for this song.

    The song surprised me at first. It starts fast, transitions abruptly, and features sounds which no other Linkin Park song to date has. Many on the forums called this song a mix of Lying With You/Wretches & Kings/Blackout, but I see it as the spiritual successor to Bleed It Out. The song is short, fast paced, simple, and aggressive—all qualities it shares with Bleed It Out.

    In context with Linkin Park's previous efforts, this feels like a logical progression. The subject matter is much more what we expect from Linkin Park, but they've clearly grown no less experimental musically. I think that with A Thousand Suns LP came to see electronics as a layer through which everything in their music must pass, rather than as a separate instrument in its own right. If we go back to Hybrid Theory, Meteora, and even Minutes to Midnight (to some extent) we'll see that the electronics were always clearly defined against the sound of the guitars and vice versa. With ATS that stopped and we could no longer easily tell exactly where the guitars ended and the synth began. If we go back and look at the distorted remix of "What I've Done" we can see Linkin Park beginning to look at these kinds of effects on their music. The music on this song seems like a very mature version of the experiments they did with ATS.

    Lyrically, this song follows another trend in Linkin Park's music with simpler, shorter, lines and hooks. Some have argued that it seems "flat" compared to other Linkin Park music, and I can see where they're coming from. Chester's role in Linkin Park's music as of late seems to trend towards less advanced lyrics in favor of more raw, forward, lyrics while Mike has actually done the exact opposite and trended towards greater wordplay and poetry in his raps. My favorite line in the song is "Sayin' that I softened/I was duckin' down to reload," which is just an amazing visual he managed to throw in in a low key way.


    Where I think we really have to make the big comparison is with "Burn It Down" which is from the same album. Burn it Down features these exact same two changes again, and so I *think* it's probably safe to call it a trend we'll see on the majority of the album. I think Chester is where a lot of the hate for these songs comes in. We're not used to hearing his repetitions so clearly, nor having them so firmly shoved in our faces. Go back to listen to the more Linkin Park songs (even "In The End") you'll see that he repeats himself a lot, but in a far less obvious/abrupt manner. In other songs his repetitions tend to be obscured texturally by small lyrical variations or added lines combined with a much less frenetic delivery. Chester's usual choruses, even in other short LP songs, tend to be far less rushed/dense than his more recent work. The general rule here is that his lines are actually shorter in terms of raw syllables as well as delivery.

    The song, ripped out of that context, is still a great track in my opinion. My gut wishes it had been longer, but I think the point was that it be so short. For me the song represents the kind of frenetic energy that usually goes into defiance and anger. It's powerful, but short lived and abrupt. Mike's lyrical prowess really made the song for me, and while I initially found Chester's lyrics to be off-putting and too-simple, I've come around to really appreciating them after many, many dozens of repeats. I can't think of any way I'd make them better or more clear, they're distilled to their very core and there's no way to improve on that for me while keeping the song intact.

    Is any of this a problem? What I think is really at stake here is not Linkin Park's music, which is more advanced than it's ever been, it is the tension between product/art. Linkin Park is made up of honest-to-god artists (I own one of mike's paintings, he's way talented) that have shown us that their priorities lie with being artists first and producing commercial success later. A lot of the dislike for these songs can be shortened to "I don't like it," which is fine, but it suggests, "therefore it's not good," which is a totally different thing. Linkin Park has made absolutely no mistakes on these songs, everything they've done here was for a reason—it's our responsibility as listeners to get the value out of these songs rather than to rate them compared to other pop bullshit we like.

    As an aside, LGM feels like a song that was written for concerts, specifically for the people in the pit. It just FEELS like something that would absolutely pump up a crowd to mosh for a few solid minutes.
     
  18. Spitz

    Spitz Well-Known Member

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    LGM sounds like little more than album filler, but I've played it nonstop since it was released so I can't complain all that much.
     
  19. DaMU

    DaMU Well-Known Member

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    Point One: I would take issue with the claim that LP has made "absolutely no mistakes on these songs." That's a claim treated as fact, and it doesn't comfortably rest on the foundation that "everything they've done here was for a reason." (a) That doesn't mean their reasoning was without flaw. (b) Everyone does everything for a reason. You might as well say the song "is what it is," which is equally valueless.

    Point Two: People naturally compare artists to other artists and songs to other songs. That's how we develop our taste and understanding of a type of art. Nothing is viewed in a vacuum, everything has context, and we have no "responsibility" to a song. We can listen or not listen to a song, and if we listen to it, we can dismiss it, review it, compare it, destroy it, praise it, remix it, or burn a copy onto CD, break the CD in half, set it on fire, and urinate on the ashes.

    Point Three: "I don't like it" is essentially a prettier way of saying it's "not good." This is a common fallacy with judging any type of art - the refuge of "favorites" vs. "best" and "that's my opinion" soft attacks. In truth, "I don't like it" is "I can't defend my negative position." "It's not good" is "I can defend my negative position."

    Point Four: I can defend my negative position. "Burn It Down" and "Lies Greed Misery" are depressing signs of the album to come. They lack the structural invention and lyrical complexity of A Thousand Suns, and their subjects retreat to the meaningless vagaries of previous albums, which functioned foremost as pop-hooked audience mirrors thinly disguised as "hard rock." They sound unworthy of a band that, one album ago, was finally growing up.
     
  20. Adam.

    Adam. Well-Known Member

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    No, what I'm saying is that Linkin Park, the band, has made no mistakes. Everything is exactly as they want it to be. Whether or not we as an audience are receptive is a different discussion entirely. You don't operate at their level by making mistakes on your work.
    That's the problem with all forms of expression. We, the viewers/consumers/readers/listeners tend to compare what shouldn't be compared. It's easy to compare an LP song unfavorably with your favorite tune from a different band or genre. I could easily compare Hemingway to Stephenie Meyer since both are authors in fiction. We absolutely do have a responsibility as participants in the discussion that art presents. Readers have a responsibility to the books, listeners have a responsibility to music. Value is not created by the artists, it must be earned, eked out, by us.

    No, "I don't like it" SHOULD be an expression of taste. I hate, absolutely loathe, a lot of written works but I recognize that they're great. I can't stand a lot of Thoreau's work, but I would be incredibly remiss to call him anything but extremely talented and amazing. We don't need to have reasons not to like something, but we do need to have other reasons to suggest something's quality. When we take on the position of offering a review, or a strong opinion, our responsibility is to defend it adequately or consider that we may have overstepped. This "I don't like it so it's not good" idea is childish and common, which brings us to point four.

    You have come at this with an absurdly authoritative tone, and that's disappointing because it means we can't have a real discussion about the particulars of this track which is what I was hoping to do. Vagueness is part of what Linkin Park has always done. I wrote a marxist criticism of ATS for the hell of it and on the way I realized you could interpret that album a thousand ways just because of how vague its essential pieces were. Concerning the new tracks, I found it difficult to listen without being reminded of someone from my life, and I think that's just the right level of vague.

    Your "defense" is less a defense and more a vehement assertion of your correctness. This song doesn't suit your tastes, that's fine, but your taste is hardly authoritative. You prefer complexity and structural "invention," and I prefer simpleness and a form of delivery which matches the message. I think Linkin Park has carefully chosen forms for these songs which are both familiar and correct, but your emphasis is on being new and complex as much as possible. If those are your qualifications for quality then this album will depress you.
     

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