Opinion of James Joyce

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

HP. He was basically Ayn Rand without the sociopathy. Basically as dense and unreadable

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The comparison is as both are basically unreadable. Although Joyce never wrote a 70 page monologue.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

FWIW, I have no doubt many of the zines I read would be considered unreadable, at least the stuff published around '04-'06 when that style of writing and the politics was so big, basically imagine a Tweed post stretched out to a multi-page essay except with more coherent and logical politics (though the overall message rarely amounting to more than "rar sexism sucks!" "rar homophobia sucks!" or "End the Iraq War now!")

But basically the point is that Joyce and Rand are about as equally readable and accessible for me. Although I'll also concede Joyce probably never wrote as big of a plothole as Rand, in that if some idiot managed to hijack the radio waves and babbled for three straight hours in one of the most dull as dirt lectures ever, everyone would just turn off the radio.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Judging Joyce solely on Finnegans Wake is like judging the Beatles by Revolution 9. Then again, I'm sure you don't care either because it doesn't fit the bogus narrative you are trying to spin.

I don't even know what Revolution 9 is, but I imagine an analogy that would work would be judging Sunny Day Real Estate on Jeremy Enigk's solo album.

But anyway I understand Ulysses is also pretty dense and unreadable though in a different way. The excerpts of it I've seen certainly are.

His stuff is all public domain now right? So if so link me to something readable of his.

It should be noted that BRTD is judging James Joyce as someone who basically doesn't read books.

That's not true.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

It should be noted that BRTD is judging James Joyce as someone who basically doesn't read books.

That's not true.

Well, you pretty much did admit you didn't read Joyce

Not reading Joyce only translates to not reading books only if Joyce authored literally every single book in existence, which is obviously not the case.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I don't even know what Revolution 9 is

And you expect us to take your opinion of the Beatles seriously.

Seriously?

Not exactly. It'd be like if you for some reason went to one of my music forums and said "Jawbreaker sucks" (as you probably think they do) which is basically about as blasphemous to someone in my subculture as what I said about the Beatles to a diehard Beatles fan. Honestly you'd probably just be written off as a troll who can't be serious, but hey you probably still hold that opinion.

BTW despite the claim I don't read books I actually did just start reading one, I liked The Hunger Games movie so I started reading that as I got the impression there was a bunch in the movie that got left out. Haven't seen the second movie yet but will soon, and might finish the whole trilogy before the third movie comes out.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I don't even know what Revolution 9 is

And you expect us to take your opinion of the Beatles seriously.

Seriously?

Not exactly. It'd be like if you for some reason went to one of my music forums and said "Jawbreaker sucks" (as you probably think they do) which is basically about as blasphemous to someone in my subculture as what I said about the Beatles to a diehard Beatles fan. Honestly you'd probably just be written off as a troll who can't be serious, but hey you probably still hold that opinion.

BTW despite the claim I don't read books I actually did just start reading one, I liked The Hunger Games movie so I started reading that as I got the impression there was a bunch in the movie that got left out. Haven't seen the second movie yet but will soon, and might finish the whole trilogy before the third movie comes out.

I don't know anything about Jawbreaker.  I can guess that they probably suck but why would I go out of my way to slam them or advertise my ignorance?  I know better than to do such a thing.

Well here's their signature song, most die hard fans would argue it's not their best, but it's the most well known, most quoted, and has been covered about a million times. It's also how I found out about Jack Kerouac.

This is commonly cited as their best song (I disagree, but I also think their best songs are also ones that aren't rather accessible, while this one is.)

Besides, it's not equivalent anyway because the Beatles are bigger than Jesus and your Gobstoppers or whatever are a niche of a niche of a niche.  A familiarity with their work would be a prerequisite for talking intelligently about your genre... but a familiarity with the Beatles is a prerequisite for talking intelligently about pretty much the entirety of pop music.  Even if you reject them- which is well within your rights, but if you're gonna reject them from a position of obvious ignorance, well you should be able to anticipate the reactions you're gonna get by now.

No Jawbreaker is one of those bands that's far more influential than they are known, pretty much every punk band since the mid-90s is heavily influenced by them, and actually are pretty well known in non-mainstream circles too, the AV Club even had one of their songs covered by the Mountain Goats as part of their series before for f[inks] sake (the one above Boxcar. As I said, covered a million times) and I've had people tell me "nice shirt" or "I love your shirt" when wearing my Jawbreaker shirt at places like the grocery store, Target and church, not exactly scene places.

Besides all I said was their best songs are in the later works and their earlier stuff is too polished.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Wait, wasn't the whole deal with Jawbreaker that their later stuff was way too polished and all their fans hated it?

It's kind of complicated. What initially occurred is before their last album Dear You they signed to a major label, which obviously provoked lots of sellout accusations, and in addition to having more polished production Blake had throat surgery before the album was recorded, so his vocal style was a lot less raspy than before. So it was their most mainstream and accessible album, got a poor reception, flopped, the band broke up shortly later and it went out of print. However then as new people started to discover it on early internet piracy sites and Napster got a better reception as you'll probably like it much better if you listen to it after listening to all the bands influenced by Jawbreaker rather than their earlier stuff first, you're not likely to be disappointment. So it ended up being kind of a historically vindicated classic that received a re-release with bonus tracks in 2004.

Of course you'll still find people who call it their worst album and hate it, but they're definitely a minority amongst people who got into Jawbreaker after Jawbreaker broke up, aka almost all their fans today.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

For the record I do think Dear You is a tad overrated. Not because it's too polished or mainstream sounding, but because it has more than a couple filler tracks that are kind of boring. But if you were compiling a Best of compilation of Jawbreaker, you can't ignore it for Accident Prone, Million and of course, Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault.