Dumb? Ugly? Rhythm section

Tomorrow I am going in for a job interview. When I say "going in" I mean much like Luke went in to the Dagobah system: confused, stupid, and piloting stolen rebel equipment he would later submerge into a swamp. This interview will determine whether or not I am fit to join something called "Pro Security", a possibility I find both financially appealing and personally nauseating. Although I am certain I could kill a man if I were needed to.

I wonder if that'll come up in the interview. Hm.

About three years ago I picked up the four-stringed variety of guitar known as "bass" and foreswore all other loves. Three years later, I've learned how to use it, and it only took the whole of the in-between time to get me there. It's not so much that I'm good now, but I have dedicated a large enough chunk of my listening life to picking out the low end from songs and judging it as harshly as my frail white body could manage: an exercise which has led me to muster pretension enough to present the following list. In addition to spiking a concentrated globe of my own hate out of the interwub and - hopefully - into your neural network, I'll suggest two tracks as listening material, one supporting my claim (i.e. this bassline sucks!) and the other refuting it (this bassline pwns in spite of Josh's efforts!). I know most of you can't be bothered to track down such things and think, "Hey! Josh has a point!" But then I don't believe any of you exist anyway.

Top five reasons your band's bassist sucks

5. They're using a pick

It's a widely held joke in the music world that all the good bassists are ugly, much in the same way that all decent drummers are dumb as a post. Rifle through your favourite bands with talented four-stringers: would you bang any of those folks? Chances are overwhelmingly against an affirmative, and even freakier are the odds that should you find the odd exception to this rule, and Carlos Denglar and Paul Simonon do jump immediately to mind, you almost always have discovered an accomplished bassist who plays with the condom of the rhythm world: a pick. I have investigated this phenomenon with exceptional acuity and discovered my hypothesis to be accurate in one thousand percent of cases.

Look at a bass, then a guitar. The strings on the former are considerably thicker, more spread out, and fewer than on the latter. The use of a pick on a bass screams, in nearly any corner of the world, that the artist in question wanted to play guitar but thought bass would be easier, or some other pejorative those solo-getting fellows like to lather onto an instrument which has been preposterously lumped in with the guitar because of its overt similarity. Worse, reliance on a pick almost always leads to over-sharp and soulless basslines that lose the rhythmic detail the bass needs to shine. Guys, the whole spectrum of tone, cadence, and technical complexity possible with a bass can be wrought with two or three fingers. Stop picking at it.

The case for: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Parallel Universe
The case against: Interpol - The New

4. They're playing all of three different notes

This is an almost universal problem in popular music, ever since a generation of young people misinterpreted Nirvana's intense minimalist approach to punk rock, eschewed the less easy stylings of classic rock, and became idiots. But even bands with great technical merit succumb to this rejection of the bass's qualities, leaving it to hold down one or two points of a low end as a glorified drum kit. Sure, songs (plenty out of Refused's canon for example) can be provocative by relying on heavy rhythms instead of melodic nuances, but it's a shortchange. The kids that look at the bass as lesser than a guitar like to point out how admittedly gorgeous a handful of chords can sound with six strings, while the bass's capacity for even the simplest chord is limited and Smoke On The Water, when you get right down to it, is about as interesting as it is complicated.

A bassist is ruined by idleness. The instrument has a startling capacity for beauty, vibrance, and acrobatics that begs for full scales, alternation between multiple octaves, and use of the highest and lowest frets for dramatic changes in flavour. And yes, the low-end crunch loosed by a bass can and will crush those tiny guitar's fickle bodies any day of the week, but they can do so much more than just that.

The case for: Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water
The case against: Refused - New Noise

3. They're playing a heap with the tone of warmed over elastic bands

Growing out of the abusive mentality pickers and guitarists pour onto the bass is the belief that the hardware doesn't make much of a difference, that a bassline is a bassline and technical matters which are critical to guitarists, drummers, and any synth op out there are unimportant for the b-tar. The very real difference can be immediately found in even a cursory comparison of the gorgeous punk strains found in any (old) Dan Adriano line to the shambling piles of parts the Beatles inexplicably stuck Paul with for most of his career.

Oh snap. Josh is debating the technical merits of the Beatles' rhythm section. Let's hurry away from this.

The case for: The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
The case against: The Clash - Rock The Casbah

2. They're playing whole notes

Don't get me wrong, every single piece of rhythmic possibility open to a bassist finds a critical place in the instrument's oeuvre. It's the songs that resign only enough faith in the bass's appeal as to restrict it to clunky full-bar plunks that utterly fail it. Any number of pop-rock numbers try to pull this shit off, or instead resort to its mathematical equivalent, the nothing-but-quarter-notes-boogie, and it is uniformly awful. Yes, the bass is a rhythm instrument. It is not, however, a metronome. Giving in to this sorry strategy not only sounds terrible and requires positively zero-skill with a difficult instrument, it rips out fully one-half of most such band's whole rhythm section.

The case for: The Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
The case against: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Porcelain

1. They're playing like it's just another guitar

This is the damned philosophy that runs through every other ridiculous idiocy inflicted upon my fair instrument. I'm not so well-schooled in music theory to argue the merits of counter-point and polyrhythms and whatever, but in listening to any number of radio jams over the years it continually sickens me, and it doesn't take an aficionado to perceive this, that when a bassist is playing precisely the same freaking rhythms and melodies as their more popular brothers the instrument actually disappears. You might be able to hear it, maybe, but its presence in a song is completely invalidated and pointless. Not one song has ever been made richer by the inclusion of a redundant bassline allowed only to ape what's already there, so much so that I can't find a single example to pose as a case against me.

Seriously, fucking pop-radio. Amirite?

Y: The Last Man is the best thing I have ever read and I spent a good portion of the past few years doing nothing but reading. If you ask me nicely I will give it to you for free, but unspeakable rituals of the flesh may or may not be involved.