User:Dgh2125

Introduction

So, who am I? I am just a guy in a pretty special, but ultimately pretty regular U.S. town, hustling and bustling with life, yet surrounded by rural and suburban being; sprawling, in fact. I was privileged enough to attend schools, from my small-town elementary school through miraculously acquiring my Bachelor of Science degree at a state university. These learning environments and opportunities fostered in me a love of truth, of fact, of reading and writing, of many sorts of things.

I would be lying if I didn't say that initially this page is just here to provide an additional space where I can learn how to edit and format Wikipedia articles more comfortably.

Why am I here?

As stated above, I feel as though I have grown up into a system, thankfully, that has given me good reason to serve and protect the truth (perceived or actualized or new to me). And as an online place of purported truth (if not the primary websource of purported truths), one to which I am indebted for well over a decade now, Wikipedia is something that I want to help maintain as pure and as representative of reality/fact.

I believe the truth, so to speak, is #1. I'm not a journalist. But I am a human, thinking and breathing and experiencing and living (for now). When I see something that is inherently, or covertly, false or wanting, I am more than happy to take a little bit of time to make it aright to the best of my knowledge and ability. Things that I presumably should be biased by, based upon my history with those subjects, I am seeking to remove all bias. This is of course difficult at times, but not impossible. I think that people who hold truth and hold fact must hold them with a vigor and determination to not fowl them up or be irresponsible with them. This irresponsibility with the truth is something I have seen in my peers (and in those who should know all the better: journalists, and so-called scholars and experts), and I have been embarrassed and bothered by this for a long time, time and again.

[Remarkable how so much time can pass, as I now find this section to be ridiculous and just straight-up wankery. Regardless, if you're somehow here and somehow reading even this, then welcome, and cheers!]

Why are you here?

I have no idea in the slightest... Seriously, what are you doing here?

[Again, I repeat, welcome, and once more, cheers haha.]

Personal interests and history

From the time I was very young, I have always enjoyed knowing things. It is like a treasure that you come across and, if you do not forget it, keep forever. I also have a number of things for which I am passionate.

Music and the arts

First and foremost is my love of music. From the time I was 3 or 4, I had some of my earliest memories of this particular fascination. I would dance around and sing along to my favorite musical artists, performing on my Fisher-Price cassette player with a built-in microphone: at the time, as I have said many times, these were The Beatles, The Monkees, and, of course, Barney.

Adolescence

For the longest time, I did not divert my attention from the Beatles or the Monkees. Besides, speaking of an acute attention span, I was severely ADHD. By the time I was 11, I had started delving deeper into what is usually, and unfortunately, referred to as "Classic Rock"; I know that it was by that time, because in 2005, when I had turned 11, my mother took me to see Styx at a local fair. At this time and well through high school, the majority of bands that I loved best were of this general categorization (ya know, the radio format like numerous others, which we just go around calling a genre, nbd). Some of my other favorites included Boston, Foreigner, Van Halen, The Cars, Queen and the not-so-well known Progressive Rock act Starcastle (I can thank my father for adding their song "Lady of the Lake" in my 12th birthday mixtape CD). It wasn't until relatively recently that I actually did the "fan thing" and listened more seriously to the later discography of Foreigner, Van Halen and The Cars, specifically (more than just the hits, for once). Additionally at this time, I was trying my hardest to get into more current bands and artists (despite having quite a few close and not-so-close friends in school who had similar musical interests). These included Relient K (seriously, check out the albums Mmhmm, Five Score and Seven Years Ago, and, I would say most importantly, Forget and Not Slow Down), Blink-182 (mostly Take Off Your Pants and Jacket), Hawthorne Heights (obsessed for a long time with The Silence in Black and White) and Fall Out Boy. I remember my dad scolded me the day that I brought home FOB's album Infinity on High on CD. I would imagine I will go into some level of detail about that relationship in another section (nothing to really worry about).

College and expanding musical interests

By the time I had graduated with my Associate degree from a local community college and was living away from home at university—a small, very rural college town with friends that I had known from church, one who became my best friend—I had started to reach out into other musical interests. [Was that a run-on sentence?]

It is still beyond me exactly how (aside from the obvious answer of "the internet" and YouTube video suggestions), but I became a bit familiar with better known bands representing two then fairly foreign genres to me: Math Rock and the even more oddly named Post-Rock. The idea for the former simply welcomes the concept that music is itself mathematical, utilizing odd time signatures and switching between metres (sometimes, but not often, frantically). Today, Math Rock is more closely linked to an inherent sound, such as "twinkly" arpeggios and tapping, a technique that was made popular by one of my favorite childhood musicians, Eddie Van Halen. I still have an affinity and interest in this rock sub-genre. The latter referenced genre, Post-Rock, can simply be described as the use of instruments historically used in the context of Rock music for purposes outside Rock's normal scope and objectives—much of it to me resembles neo-classical music, exploring multiple movements, and great swelling arrangements, ultimately (and vitally) with the use of often very few instruments (with the aide of guitar pedals and other effects tools). I now have very little interest in this sub-genre. As a Prog dork, Post-Rock is at best utterly boring, lifeless music; as a grateful young-Millennial poptimist, the genre is soulless at worst. I don't care if someone likes something I don't like haha. 'Tis life.

Progressive Rock and Jazz Fusion

Most important to me, I recognize even now, is the work of Todd Rundgren. I first came in contact with Rundgren, not through radio play or by any other "normal" sheer chance, but because I was obsessed with That '70s Show while (and plenty before) I was in college. I had probably watched through the series 3 or 4 times (from high school onward, to be more exact). During the end credits of the series pilot, released August of 1998, the main cast is seen loudly singing Rundgren's hit song "Hello It's Me". In the episode, the characters get out of town for a Todd Rundgren concert in Milwaukee. When I first heard this song, I had to know who it was. It fascinated me. It had such a great sound and it wasn't quite like anything else that I had heard before (genuinely good, somehow still interesting Pop Rock. [This was a poor attempt at me trying to come off ironic. In text form. Godspeed.] After really obsessing over Rundgren and while delving into much of his early discography, I discovered his first successful band the Nazz and his Progressive rock side project Utopia. It is this band, Utopia, that really helped open me up to an entirely different world of music that I should have obsessed over years before: as already mentioned, Progressive Rock. And the way it did was a little odd, I guess.

In what became the more stable lineup of Utopia, bassist Kasim Sulton, whom I liked best in the band after Rundgren, apparently on his first studio recording ever—even before appearing on a Utopia release—performed on an album by a British guitarist by the name of Steve Hillage, his second, simply entitled L. I later discovered Kasim appeared here with the other members of Utopia, sans Rundgren. I imagine it was the same day, but thereafter I discovered that this album was produced by none other than Todd Rundgren himself (it was all making sense). This album reflected an interesting ethos of carefree, spacey psychedelia. It featured a cover of the classic Psychedelic rock song "Hurdy Gurdy Man", as well as the George Harrison-penned Beatles tune "It's All Too Much", thus further solidifying the legitimacy of this Hillage character in my Beatles- and Psych-loving mind. Steve Hillage himself was a key to yet another door: a sub-genre of prog rock known as Canterbury Scene (or "Canterbury Sound"). Keep in mind, none of this knowledge would have been so attainable were it not for Wikipedia. Praise be! [And again I say, "Rejoice!"]

The Canterbury Sound was greatly dependent upon jazz. It was sometimes jazz colliding with whimsical British humor and a pastoral, psychedelic folk sound, and it was sometimes a psychedelic play on Free Jazz, experimental and often improvised. This group of musicians, largely spawned from the group the Wilde Flowers, found their base in Kent, thus the name "Canterbury Scene". The important early Canterbury Scene bands are Soft Machine (Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, and Elton Dean), Caravan (Pye Hastings, Richard Sinclair, and Dave Sinclair), Egg (Dave Stewart and Mont Campbell), and Delivery (Phil Miller, Pip Pyle and Lol Coxhill). Wyatt went on to form Matching Mole with guitarist Phil Miller, who then proceeded to leave for supergroup Hatfield and the North with Richard Sinclair and Stewart (Wyatt then furthering his solo career). Phil Miller and Dave Stewart, I believe, are the most talented and interesting musicians in the whole scene (Stewart is by far my favorite keyboard player of all time, closely rivaled by Chick Corea and Gentle Giant's Kerry Minnear). They both went on to form a second supergroup called National Health, moreso a focus on what had by then been well-established as "Fusion" (a not so uncommon outlet for these Canterbury and Kentish musicians).

The second point of interest for the Canterbury Scene is Gong, which was spawned and is the brain-child of Daevid Allen, an Australian export to the U.K. (as I said, earlier, he was a founding member of Soft Machine). He brought Hillage and Stewart into the band, who before any other projects, were in the band Uriel, which, after Hillage's departure, would become Egg. Also of note, Hillage and Stewart, a few years following the release of Uriel's first album Arzachel, formed the band Khan with their one-off release Space Shanty. This album, released in 1972, is one of my all-time favorite albums. Much of Hillage's first solo album, Fish Rising, was intended to be material for the next Khan album (and also features Stewart and Gong musicians with whom he was then playing). Other bands of note include Gilgamesh, and Isotope; bands and musicians who are associated with the Canterbury Scene include Bill Bruford (forming the band Bruford with Stewart and Allan Holdsworth), Mike Oldfield, Holdsworth (who additionally features on albums by Gong, Soft Machine and others) and Camel (featuring Richard Sinclair on bass and vocals in the late 1970s). As anyone can tell, I care an awful lot about this scene and sub-genre. I have long wanted to make a chart/diagram showing the near-incestuous nature of the Canterbury Scene, how everyone is connected and how other extraneous bands come into play.

Hey you... talk about other prog bands; the important ones in general and the important ones to you.

Academic and scholarly interests

I like geography and history lol. I speak a little German. I play guitar. I sing.

Personal life

Jesus. Family. Work?