Apple - "Say it with Stickers"

Uggh. 

DarkRealmStar wrote: Another reason to hate on Apple.    That noise that is supposed to be music sounds like a reject from some 60s pop song jumped up on drugs.   I have no clue what the stickers are for or what you are supposed to do with them.  Looks like more mindless cell phone bs to me (remember Pokemon Go?).  Another reason for @$$holes to keep their eyes glued to their cell phone screens while real stuff happens around them.

yet more millenial self-involvement tools for ifone obsessed a-holes...sorry apple the force has LEFT u

I've never heard of the Monks but that's a great rant!

the raytownian wrote: Regarding The Monks: I think it's fair to call them rightly obscure. They certainly didn't have scads of commercial appeal. But they did have some interesting quirks that made them stand apart from other 60's beat, garage and psychedelic bands from the same era. I think it's really only within the last 20 years or so that they've been "re-evaluated" and deemed a "cult sensation" by the cooler-than-thou music press. I'm personally more liable to call them a novelty than a sensation. Some of their songs are just annoying, even though I really like others.

Thor wrote: But I like when obscure bands of the past get "reevaluated".  The Sonics and Music Machine are a few.  When punk rock happened in the 70s, such garage bands of the 60s got exhumed from the dead.  And then there was the NY Dolls who couldn't sell 10 records when they were together, but a few years later, people finally figured it out.

Don't get me wrong. I like it when unknown or forgotten bands, as well as bands I like personally, experience new/renewed popularity. They deserve it! The obvious plus side is that you get lots of original bands reforming, re-releasing old stuff and new stuff, etc. I was really excited about the recent ("recent" meaning "within the last decade") shoegaze revival (ostensibly following My Bloody Valentine's reformation), if only because it prompted a slew of unlikely bands (Slowdive and Lush come to mind) to reform. I can put up with the cynical bandwagon-jumping for that, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me.

I don't like it when the music press exploits the concept of "re-evaluation" and hyping unknown/"re-discovered" artists in a desperate bid to maintain relevancy. Or when garbage gets hyped and over-valued by virtue of its obscurity alone (some people want desperately to be seen as authorities or tastemakers, so they will praise anything as long as no one's ever heard of it). Or when a genre revival becomes a trendy self-parody, full of mediocre johnny-come-lately imitators who bring nothing new to the table, yet somehow get successful (the press has to have its pet bands to let us know "what's hot and what's not"). It all reeks of dishonest, self-serving calculation.

Still, bitter, jaded and mistrusting as I am, I would never write the phenomenon of bands being re-discovered or being re-evaluated off as pure, cynical exploitation. I would only assert that exploitation/hype-mongering is an unavoidable, aggravating product of the times. It's the result of an increasingly irrelevant music press. One that has built its empire on being an authority on all things music-related in the pre-Internet age. That, and a generation of mediocre, nostalgia-addicted youth who want desperately to be as "cool" as all the hack journalists/reviewers working for Pitchfork and Vice.

Jimbo wrote: Geez, the lengths companies go to in order to make young people think all this social media crap is cool and by association, will make them cool too if they take part in it. This is about as dorky and uncool, in a fad following kind of way, as anything I've ever seen.

Now if some of the "stickers" were things like bird poo, butt faces, (and other things that are not PC), it would be funny, but if they are charging real money for using "stickers", it just goes to show that some people have more money to waste than sense.  Then again, you have to remember they already spent $cad$ on the "newest" iPhone fad... 

I suppose that's what 30 years of "I believe the children are our future. Teach them well, and let them lead the way" gets you.