vrbavritaspotnsarmast

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

I've been listening to the langtime studio chats and it's made me wonder, what are some of your favorite hard rock/heavy metal bands? What kind of genres do you tend to enjoy?

What is and is not metal has changed over the years. It's kind of like how in the 90s every single new band was "alternative", a genre designation which ended up meaning nothing. I loved (and still love) bands like Van Halen, Bon Jovi, the Scorpions, and Def Leppard, which, believe it or not, were considered metal at one time or another. I was also a huge fan of Soundgarden which was called metal on an episode of Northern Exposure I recently rewatched. But my first real metal band was Megadeth.

In 1994 Megadeth came out with an album called Youthanasia which was accompanied by a music video for the song "Train of Consequences" that ran on MTV. The same way that Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" begins with a drum solo that's reminiscent of a motorcycle engine, the guitar in the beginning of "Train of Consequences" is reminiscent of a steam train engine. Trains are something that have always fascinated me, so the video caught my attention. Soon I was looking forward to it in the regular rotation of music videos on MTV (at the time, this would've been Weezer, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Coolio, Nirvana, Liz Phair, TLC, etc. [all good stuff!]). The singer of a band can really turn me on or off, and Dave Mustaine's voice is unique. At the time, when I thought of metal, it was primarily screaming, but Dave Mustaine was singing, and I found that interesting. I bought the album, and soon had all of Megadeth's albums. I was hooked.

From Megadeth, I moved on to Metallica, when I learned that Dave Mustaine formed Megadeth after getting kicked out of Metallica. Metallica itself was an interesting story at that time. They came out with the black album, which was a mega mega hit (and controversially so, as metal fans saw it as a departure from real metal), and then they disappeared, with Nirvana and alternative taking over. Then, after years of nothing, suddenly they release a new song, "Until It Sleeps", which sounds...weird. It was followed by the album Load, which...I mean, listen to "Mama Said" and tell me that's metal. I heard "Hero of the Day" played on Coast—the adult easy listening station. Whether you could get into or not, it definitely did not sound like Metallica—or metal, as we understood it. They did accidentally invent the band Volbeat with Load, for which we must all be grateful, but still, with Megadeth getting a new lineup very album, Metallica going off the rails, Iron Maiden with Blaze Bailey, it was clear that metal was moving forward, so I needed to move backwards.

I started going back and finding any metal band from the 80s that I'd heard of to see what I liked. Guns N' Roses and Ozzy Osbourne were easy favorites. I dug everything they did. Other more glam/hair metal bands I didn't really get into as much—Poison, White Snake, Mötley Crüe, LA Guns… But then I found Queensrÿche. Queensrÿche was the favorite band of my history teacher, so I gave them a listen. They'd come out with a new album, Promised Land, and then I happened to get as my second album of theirs Rage for Order, and I lucked into what would end up being my two favorite Queensrÿche albums and two of my favorite albums of all time. The album Rage for Order is sheer perfection—and one of my name-alikes is thanked in the Special Thanks section! I mean, look at this photo:

If that isn't a fuckin' mood! Geoff Tate singing like a gothic opera singer, everything that can have a harmony being harmonized, every one of them taking every aspect of it so desperately seriously. This album is an entire genre all by itself. It was so good Stratovarius wrote, essentially, a terrible fan fiction song based on "Screaming in Digital" (with, perhaps, some influence from "NM 156" from Queensrÿche's first album The Warning). It also serendipitously to introduced me to Dalbello (a real life Robin Sparkles transformation), whom everyone should check out (seriously, check out whomanfoursays. She just laid it all out).

Queensrÿche also disappointed after Promised Land in the 90s, but I want to return to Iron Maiden. My introduction to Iron Maiden was The X Factor. This was their 1995 album, the first with former Wolfsbane singer Blaze Bayley. I didn't know that. I assumed what I was listening to was the Iron Maiden—the ones Bill and Ted waxed so eloquently about. All I could determine is that maybe they just got old...? I didn't get how the band I was listening to could have ever been popular.

Fast forward a couple years and I'm listening to the only metal show left on SoCal radio after KNAC died and I hear a song that sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. Fast-paced with a beat like galloping horses and a singer with power, range, vibrato, but also a kind of wild, undisciplined menace not found in more refined singers like Geoff Tate of Queensrÿche. Who was this band?! Clearly someone from the 80s I hadn't heard, but I thought I'd heard everything. The song finished, and then the DJ came on listing all the songs in the set, finishing up with "Run to the Hills" by Iron Maiden.

Clearly I had been duped. I went back to the record store to look up Iron Maiden's old albums and, lo and behold, only the most recent album featured Blaze Bayley. Before that there were seven albums featuring lead singer Bruce Dickinson.

A few albums later, Iron Maiden was my favorite metal band. Pretty soon I'd listened to everything—including the first two with Paul DiAnno which I would come to appreciate later—and I was disappointed. There was nothing left! Iron Maiden came out with a new album with Blaze, and we were cursed with "Como Estáis Amigos?" and other disappointments, but it became clear that the Iron Maiden I'd falle in love with was a thing of the past. Imagine what I felt when I was back home from college and heard on the radio a commercial for a new Iron Maiden album with a song I'd never heard being sung by none other than Bruce Dickinson. The song was "The Wickerman", the album was Brave New World, and I would go on to see Bruce Dickinson and Iron Maiden in concert six times—and a seventh coming this October (with the Hu!!!!!! I'm so pumped!!!!!).

There's a lot more to tell here—like the time I visited my ex-girlfriend in Michigan after she'd moved away hoping to rekindle a relationship that I didn't realize was deader than 8-track only to be introduced to Dream Theater by her older brother, or the time the company my friend worked for was hacked with all computers playing a song that would introduce me to Finnish heavy metal, or how looking into James Ronny Dio led me to the truly baffling yet kind of sweet story of Blackmore's Night—but as this is getting long, here are some highlights that haven't yet been mentioned with one song I'll recommend (bands with an asterisk I've seen live):

European Power Metal

Nightwish* ("Bless the Child")

Sonata Arctica* ("My Selene")

Epica ("Cry for the Moon (The Embrace that Smothers, Part IV)")

Lacuna Coil* ("Our Truth")

Delain* ("Stardust")

Amberian Dawn ("I Share with You This Dream")

Helloween ("Power")

Sound-Alike Bands

Crimson Glory ("Lonely")

Autograph ("Hammerhead")

Enforcer ("From Beyond")

The Sword ("Lament for the Aurochs")

Proto-Metal

Black Sabbath* ("Sweet Leaf")

UFO ("Doctor, Doctor")

Deep Purple ("Burn")

Hawkwind ("Assault and Battery/The Golden Void")

Not Quite Metal

Faith No More ("From Out of Nowhere")

X-Japan ("Silent Jealousy")

System of a Down ("Chop Suey")

Tool* ("Sober")

Monster Magnet* ("Mastermind")

The Mars Volta ("Goliath")

Mdou Moctar ("Ilana")

All right, I put a lot of time into finding all those links, so listen to some of those songs! I could write a book on this. I've already taken two hours too long, though. Need to get back to the stuff they pay me to do! >.<

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

English usage question--no judgment, simply curiosity:

Feel free to say where you're from in the tags, and to reblog!

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

I don't know if this helps (& I'm not a PhD, just undergrad) but this gets kicked around a lot between the post-grads and our lecturers in my courses, so here's the best de-jargonified explanation, sort-of peer reviewed, that I can give.

Chat isn't a pronoun because, as has been pointed out several times before, it can't replace any other noun. That's the literal definition of a pronoun: can be used in place of an antecedent (i.e. a reference that comes before it in the sentence or is otherwise well-established).

That is, the test @official-linguistics-post is talking about people latching on to, where chat can be interchanged with a pronoun, is a test we use to determine whether something is a noun. Or more commonly vice versa, to determine whether something is a pronoun by whether it can replace a noun. So you can say:

I'm taking chat out the back and shooting chat, or

I'm taking chat out the back and shooting them, but not

*I'm taking them out the back and shooting chat.

Sure, if 'them' and 'chat' have the same referent (are the same group of people), the problem is that there's no established antecedent for the first them. But you also couldn't say:

*I'm taking my viewers out the back and shooting chat,

Unless 'chat' is a completely separate thing to which you're referring, and your viewers are maybe going to watch the execution. And this is because 'chat' cannot replace any other noun, which is what would make it a pronoun.

Well-established pronouns do pass the test, though: I'm taking my viewers out the back and shooting them, or I'm taking my viewers out the back and shooting you (other third-person pronouns don't work on account of the fact that pronouns, in English, must agree with what they're referring to in whether they're singular or plural, and first-person pronouns don't work because 'me' and 'my viewers' cannot refer to the same entity).

As to what 'chat' is... yeah, I think I once spent an hour debating it with classmates, but the consensus seems to be that, to the extent English can be said to have vocatives (which is a class of words, or a grammatical case, that addresses someone), it's a vocative noun. See also, as above, 'ladies and gentlemen', 'reader', etc. Also 'America' as in wake up, America. If for argument's sake we say that English doesn't have vocatives, then it's just a mass noun (used to refer to things of which the constituents are indistinguishable or undistinguished, like rice) with a common usage of addressing a group (see also 'committee').

So I hope that helps? I also have a lot of feelings about the whole 'chat is a pronoun' debate, mostly consisting of 'if you're going to throw around linguistics words please take an actual linguistics course, or read a linguistics book, or anything', but I get that that doesn't work for some people, and others aren't interested in the topic beyond 'why is this discourse?'

I enjoy linguistics but I have bad memory so it's a pretty casual enjoyment because I regularly forget like, the classes of words or at least the intricacies of it. Would you mind explaining a bit about why "chat is not a pronoun"? Not because I disagree with you, but I absolutely would be unable to explain why not myself to someone and I would like to have a more thorough understanding.

Like they(multiple) is a pronoun? Is chat something like a 'group noun'?

Feel free to disregard this if you don't want to do it, I just remember better with.. I guess real world discussions than trying to read general information or textbooks so I thought since there was no harm in asking.

"chat" as it's generally used is what i'd call a term of address, like "reader" or "friends, romans, countrymen." (other linguists may prefer other specific terms for the role of "chat," but there is overall agreement that it's NOT a pronoun.)

forgive me, this is a very complex topic and one that i find very hard to translate into layman's terms because i'm still trying to understand its nuances myself. "chat" does not have the syntactic and semantic properties of a pronoun, namely the binding to an antecedent. "chat" is more often the antecedent itself, which is why people keep latching on to examples where "chat" and an actual pronoun can be interchanged – because the pronoun is bound to its antecedent, "chat."

if there is anybody on tumblr who actually studies this topic in depth, PLEASE jump in, especially if you can do a better translation out of jargon.

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

It also happens in German, sort of:

ihres Gedächtnis hat einen Moment lang ihr versagten vs

seines Gedächtnis hat einen Moment lang ihm versagten.

I mean, in German the genitive still has to agree with the noun it modifies (so ihres Gedächtnis), but the root word, ihr, is the same in genitive and dative. English doesn't really distinguish accusative/dative forms, so it's just a generic 'object case'.

But the real reason this happens in English is that the Old English third person feminine singular pronoun hēo had dative and genitive (possessive) forms that were exactly alike (hire), so when the accusative form hīe was lost and hire won the merger, we were left with two hire forms which became modern 'her'. The third person male singular pronouns, on the other hand, had dative him and genitive his (already), so when the accusative/dative merger happened that distinction was kept.

Now, why the accusative/dative distinction happened, I don't think anyone knows. Though feel free to correct me, I'm curious.

pronouns are weird because I can say "her memory failed her for a moment" but not "his memory failed his for a moment" can some linguistics person please explain

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

I'm not sure if the langblr community is still active but I have to do a survey for my research paper in english. I'm writing about second language acquisition and if anybody would like to fill out the survey it would be greatly appreciated!!

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

All throughout childhood, while my peers were socializing and making friends, I studied the blade read so many books that I am now almost legally blind, which left me with vast and deeply instinctual understanding of English grammar - and next to no ability to explain how it actually works. Friends will often ask me to proofread their writing and then get very mad when I say things like, "You need to completely reverse this sentence and cut this clause entirely; no, I'm sorry, i don't know why, I just know that the way it is now ITCHES 😭"

Now, what I want to see is a fantasy story where this plays out with MAGICAL grammar. Someone from a backwater town deeply steeped in folk magic arrives at Wizard Uni where all their fellow students are like "What do you mean, we should add another '𝞯∘⋇𝞿' to the incancation because it 'sounds better'? What do you mean, 'it could just be a regional thing'?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'THIS SPELL JUST FEELS LIKE IT NEEDS A LIVE RAT'????"

[vrbavritaspotnsarmast]

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