I read an article about a band from Iceland called Sigur Ros(See Rohs-Victory Rose). I had never heard of them, went to amazon.com and listened to snippets of their songs from an album with no title. The absence of a title is represented by a symbol:
()...a set of parentheses.
Automatically, who else but pops into my thoughts?

The 8 tracks of the Sigur Ros CD have no titles. The androgynous falsetto vocals have no lyrics.
Their aim is to break all the rules of pop music form.
I'd like to quote this band from the article by Steven Chean, and ask if you think Prince held or holds to some of these ideas/views and to what degree?

Can anti-pop music become popular music? Or is this just an irrational exercise in artistic nihilism, contradiction and futility? An oxymoron? Can you eat your cake and have it too? Can you bite the hand that feeds you? Can artists like this really change music and the way people think about music, and what they want to listen to and buy?


[i[In pop music the rules are that the verse goes here and the chorus goes there. The rules mean that almost all pop songs sound the same. We don't like those rules, and we don't play by them.

We don't want to seem pretentious or to be difficult. What we want to do is change music forever-the way people think about music. We want to touch people's hearts, and pop music cannot do that, because pop music is manufactured crap with no soul. So we have our own way.

We would spend four hours a day, every day, playing the same riffs over and over, trying to create the purest sounds possible.

It's a cliche. People say, Make music for yourself, and if one person buys the record, that's the goal. Well, that actually was the goal.

Only much later did we start getting letters from people who lost a parent and how our music helped them through that, or a guy who was going into the army, but when he heard our music, he decided he didn't want to go.

I'm interested to see what people think(band member says of American audience reception)- and whether it, in fact, changes the way people think about music.

If we ask a lot of people, it's only because we believe they want more than what pop music gives them. They want an experience. They might not know it yet, but they do.[/i]

Sigur Ros prefers to stage their shows in candle-lit churches instead of traditional rock venues, recorded their album in a converted indoor swimming pool instead of a conventional studio. They have asked listeners to devise their own lyrics to () songs.

That was a long promo...

mistermcgee said:[quote]
Automatically, who else but pops into my thoughts?


Isn't it funny how it all comes back to HIM??!!


But on a serious note what about those monks that recorded an album years ago(forgot their names) it was a baroque style/religious theme and it was popular for a minute. Popular in the manner that it was played on the radio. Anything is possible.

WatchThemFall said:

I am not promoting this band. I don't know them, had never heard of them until reading the article. I don't know the writer of the article I read. If you perceive this as a promotion, then you are mistaken. That was not my intention or motivation. I just saw apparent and "possible" parallels with things regarding Prince and wanted to generate a discourse on it.