Virtuosity = Bad Music

Steve Vai can play anything on the guitar. So can Joe Satriani. So can Eric Johnson. The guys in Dream Theater are all incrdible musicians. The guys in Tool are good as well.

Why does their music suck so much?

I think it's because they're all too good. They don't think of rock music as being songs made up from chords and melodies and lyrics. They think of rock and roll as conceptual art made up from obscure scales, complicated rhythms, and grand scale theories.

And they don't ROCK.

Sure, I haven't heard everything that Vai, Satriani, Johnson, and Theater have recorded (I have heard every Tool album and besides being virtually indistinguishable from each other I find them to be extremely tedious and BORING), but I've heard enough to know that these guys don't even have the capacity to Rock. The three solo guitarists, like I said earlier, can play their asses off, but I've never heard anything approaching a good SONG from any of them. And they ain't got no soul.

Speaking of no soul, Dream Theater has to be one of the most soulless bands my ears have ever screamed for mercy upon hearing. Their stuff from the 80's and early 90's is "complicated" hair metal with a horrendous singer; you know, that kind of late 80's crap where the singer who went to Berkely or some shit for a semester decides he wants to rock out some opera in a desperate attempt to get chicks (and money to pay for his hair spray, mascara, and pleather outfits, which he has to buy in order to get chicks... it's an endless cycle).

Well, a guy I know tried to convince me that Dream Theater went through some big change (for the better) in the 90's, with grand concept albums and shit... I heard it and it was perhaps even more awful than the hair metal. At least with the metal they kinda approached being relevant for the time.

Whatever.

Dream Theater doesn't Rock. Simon and Garfunkel rock more than them. Put on "Cecilia" at a party and follow it up with any 45-minute multi-part Dream Theater wankery and see how long it takes for you to get thrown out a window. Hell, I'll do you a favor and just kick you in the face right now if you admit to me that you own a Dream Theater CD. You can bleed in the privacy of your own home and your friends won't have to know that you like to masturbate your ears while drooling over the sixteen different time signatures that drummer Mike Portnoy is playing in simultaniously on part thirty-six of their latest Five-CD album named after a very obscure disfunction of the pituitary gland.

Naw, on second thought, your friends probably like that same stuff too. And you're probably the kind of person that actually would play some Dream Theater for a houseful of drunks at a party.

Go ahead, pick a window.