What did awful people do before the internet? Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda, has written this on her Instagram account:
The question is whether the Internet created these people by providing anonymity and celebrating a lulz culture, or whether they always existed but had nothing to do with the curdled thoughts that rattled around their empty heads. Perhaps both. Doesn't matter. It makes you want a separate internet just for the decent.
There's a Gawker story about the matter, but, well, it's a bit difficult to see a Gawker site getting het up over trolls. Better to read her own words, here.
AD OF THE DAY This is a nice restorative pick-you-up: a TV dad who's not a stupid oaf!
MUSIC There was a schism, and it was deep, and two camps faced each other across the great divide:
Perhaps if you were eleven they were bleep. (Note: "bleep" not in the original.) Sure, progressive rock was reviled by the punks, but it was reviled by everyone who liked other genres. The only thing anyone could agree on was that progrock was a bloated corpse of a dinosaur in a tar pit on a planet with 10X gravity, and oh by the way jazz-rock was worse. (Phil Collins, the drummer for Genesis, brought the Force into balance by drumming for a progressive jazz-rock group, but that's another story.)
That's where "New Wave" came in. Same idea - strip it down, tighten it up, and for heaven's sake dump the strings. Squeeze, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, dozens more. The work holds up. Sid Vicious does not.
Anyway. New Wave influenced prog-rock, in a way; when BeBop Deluxe came out with "Drastic Plastic" in 1979, you could tell that Bill Nelson had decided less is more, and went for a stripped-down, straight-ahead sound. No more vast overlaid guitar symphonies. The very idea of the Heroic Guitar Solo seemed outdated.
