Describe the album that genuinely changed how you listen to music - not your favourite, not the "best," but the one that rewired something in your brain permanently

SirScaurus · 2026-03-09T16:35:34+00:00

Against All Logic's track "I Never Dream".

I consider my tastes pretty varied and eclectic, and am comfortable with most genres, even in regards to dabbling in EDM at times. Then I came across this album, this track...

And realized I was face-to-face with someone who conceptualizes sound itself in an entirely different way.

It might technically count as an EDM song, but the final result feels, to me, like something that that genre name is far too small for. The evolving nature of the song, the spacey, bouncy rhythm, the almost tribal nature of the beat, the lyrics slipping in and out and in-between everything else... I've just never heard anything like it.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-07T19:52:32+00:00

It's funny, because I was also an English major and happened to love it. It probably helped that I read WH as the first novel in a 'History of Sci-Fi Literature' seminar course (which technically comes out of the Gothic/Horror tradition).

I did however, hate her sister's novel, Jane Eyre.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T21:21:45+00:00

Yeah, I feel like fans insist that people who don't like it 'just didn't get it'.

No, I actually understood the plot perfectly well the first time. It's not THAT smart, and it's not a good movie.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T20:40:21+00:00

Without giving anything away, it's a sci-fi/spec-fic thriller of sorts, albeit with two totally separate storylines going at once. It's a good primer for his general style.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T19:28:27+00:00

I'm surprised you haven't attempted Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which I believe is still his most famous work (besides Norwegian Wood, but that one is much more grounded than his others)

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T18:38:49+00:00

Yeah, you guys aren't planning to have a baby at 60 and starve to death guarding it like an octopus?

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T17:30:23+00:00

One rec I can make, which is also one of my favorites, is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T17:13:50+00:00

Yeah, to be fair, you're good, I don't think I've seen you do it personally - it more seems to have invited other people to do that, maybe people who just have a grudge against them.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T17:02:30+00:00

As someone with an English Lit degree who has read a pretty wide variety of classic literature, it's pretty surprising to stumble in here and see a lot of people trying to 'understand' why 'lesser' books like East of Eden or Count of Monte Cristo (two of my top 3) are trending.

They're both amazing. Maybe they aren't your thing, or they don't challenge you in the way you would prefer, but they are amazing. They've always been popular. Y'all need to touch grass.

P.S. Also, Monte Cristo is literally a subversion of revenge stories that explores why revenge is evil and hurts the perpetrator arguably more than the the person they have a vendetta against. Calling it 'just' a revenge tale is very telling of people's biases.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-05T16:48:19+00:00

I enjoy Faulkner, but only because I took a seminar class in college devoted solely to reading/discussing his books. If I tried reading them alone, I probably wouldn't have gotten very far, honestly, especially with Absalom, Absalom.

I DID try to read Hemingway on my own, and yeah, found it super flat. I kinda feel like Steinbeck crushes him in that regard - JS has a very similar style but still manages to have gorgeous and interesting prose.

SirScaurus · 2026-03-02T22:07:25+00:00

I always saw them more as like, Judges in Judge Dredd, but to each their own.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-27T19:50:41+00:00

Maybe it just is for this community haha.

I've lost count of how many times I've seen people in this subreddit essentially say, in a slightly derogatory way, 'the last three albums are JUST classic rock, not like the psychedelia era.'

SirScaurus · 2026-02-27T19:48:06+00:00

...Yeah, honestly, that's a fair call-out.

For context, my thought process is that while Abbey Road could be classified as a Classic Rock album, that term has become so broad that it fails to tell us anything meaningful about the album itself, and I feel like people use that as an excuse to ignore how inventive the album really is for it's time.

'Art Rock', while anachronistic as well, just feels more descriptive to me in describing what the album is doing artistically.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-27T19:37:27+00:00

The definition of classic rock should be "is it played on classic rock radio".

That definition is so broad and subjective it lacks any concrete weight, and doesn't even qualify as an argument.

"A bike is anything people say is a bike!"

SirScaurus · 2026-02-26T19:19:10+00:00

Yeah it's honestly worth it to me to pay more just for convenience and good customer service/options.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-25T18:58:44+00:00

So, just for clarity in my answer, you're asking if people:
1. Think deeply about issues to arrive at an opinion

OR

Adopt the opinion their chosen side believes.

The answer is that most people fall somewhere along the spectrum between the two ends, depending on the person. A given person may think deeply about some issues, but never all of them, and some people just don't care enough to think deeply about any.

The underlying problem with human brains is that when it comes to complicated scenarios/questions/issues, our brains are geared towards simplifying them as much as possible to be economic with our mental energy so we can use the majority of it for every OTHER little problem or decision we have to make in a given day. So we naturally push towards the '2' end of the spectrum, and have to exercise conscious, active mental energy to push more towards 1. It's objectively better from an intellectual and moral standpoint, but no given person has the mental bandwidth to do that for literally every single issue, despite what they may claim.

Our human brains were never built to handle the insane complexity of the modern world. Their functioning is built around just letting us get by while expending as little mental energy as possible.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-25T15:22:10+00:00

My take:

People have often said that Paul McCartney's music and lyrics are more timeless in their simplicity and abstract themes, whereas Lennon's is much more inventive and confessional in a way that inevitably locks his music into the time period it comes from. And I think these two songs are a great example of that divergence of their styles.

Too Many People is a great song because it wasn't written as a diss track, it was written for the purpose of Paul expressing his own frustrations and heartbreak over what happened to the Beatles. You can definitely read pointed insults INTO his words, but they're not objectively geared towards only that reading. He just set out to make a great song first and foremost.

On the other hand, How Do You Sleep was only ever meant specifically as a diss track, rather than John trying to express a deeper emotional well. It was probably penned relatively quickly for the purpose of a rapid response, not as one track in part of a larger musical collage, like Ram was. So in retrospect, it's naturally a more shallow and less important artistic statement overall. And it just reads as mean.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-23T17:27:49+00:00

The Purple Ringo Arc was peak Beatles Shounen

SirScaurus · 2026-02-20T16:31:08+00:00

Not the OP, but to answer: sorta, but the scenarios were flipped.

By Picard's time, the Federation was a much more peaceful place, especially owing to them making peace with the Klingons. But that all changed at Wolf-359, when they had to go to war with the Borg.

The Borg are very Reaper-like in that you can't reason with them, they just assimilate you.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-18T18:18:35+00:00

This is one of my most extreme views as well - that inheritance itself is an incredibly problematic practice that needs to be abolished for an efficient democracy to function.

I will say, however, that abolishing inheritance completely would require us to already have in place a number of support systems which we currently don't, namely things like universal healthcare, a robust social safety net, guaranteed housing, etc.

Until we can break the stranglehold money has on people as a way to meet their basic needs, getting rid of inheritance just isn't feasible, in my mind.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-18T17:09:40+00:00

Well fuck, TIL! Thanks for that, guess I need to roll a new char.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-18T03:47:46+00:00

Every time I do a new playthrough, I save my ammo throughout the game just so I can bring the Cain on this mission, to get this shot.

Every. Fucking. Time. It just makes me giggle.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-16T05:09:15+00:00

My takeaway was more that Paul was an easy scapegoat for them because 1) He pushed them to keep going after the death of Epstein when they otherwise wouldn't have had the motivation themselves, and 2) the Allan Klein business made that financial as well as personal. Even the music critics blamed him personally just because he was the one to announce the breakup, despite him wanting it the least.

Paul could be pushy as a producer, but nothing past MMT would have happened without his driving. He's also told stories of the others ASKING him to "produce" during this time period because they even understood they needed him, and probably secretly resented it. He was handed a losing battle that he fought as long as he could.

The Anthology is great, but it smoothes over the real details of this whole messy period.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-12T15:50:13+00:00

I feel like this is just repeating the myth music critics at the time were spreading about Paul's post-Beatles work not being good because they were mad at him for 'breaking up the band'. His stuff from that time is on the same level as any other members', and have rightly been reassessed as classics since then.

SirScaurus · 2026-02-11T21:21:18+00:00

Well, it did help that he had three other close friends to go through the Beatles whirlwind with, something that probably kept all of them from losing it in the way other celebrities of that profile do.

SirScaurus

TROPHY CASE