Pain

I don't care what anyone else says, or how much other people like him - Richard Julian has no musical or lyrical talent whatsoever. His lyrics totally suck, his melodies are painful to listen to, and he can't sing.

He sounds like he's trying to do a Jack Johnson or a Donovan Frankenreiter, except that his music sounds more like something you'd hear in an exceptionally bad elevator.

His songs have totally meaningless lyrics that sometimes sound like he's trying to be all artsy and wistful, like "love like a cheap guitar" and one of his songs (it might be the same one) has the first line

"Hindenburg! Yeah!"


Yeah! How meaningless is that?!


Still another of his songs - one called Making Movies has the chorus

"We were just making movies.
Lights, camera, action!
Open the coming attraction
Open the coming attraction
Open the coming attraction."


Someone (it might have been Bono) once said that there are three sorts of art - the bad, the good, and the great. Bad art is art that makes you feel absolutely nothing at all and has no meaning or relevance to you (for example, elevator music and most post-modern art); good art is art that makes you feel something in response - be it wonder, joy, anger, revulsion, helplessness, terror, fear, hope, elation, or whatever; and great art is art that makes you feel something that you have never felt before - something that transports you, or takes you to another place, or enables you to see in a way you never have before.


Richard Julian's music is very, very bad art. His music evokes absolutely nothing from me at all.




P.S. To me most post-modern art (you know the stuff - things like this) is to the visual arts as the sound of a chainsaw is to music. Post-modern art isn't art at all; it's simply visual "noise".