Piero Scaruffi
Piero Scaruffi ( born in 1955 in Trivero, Italy ) is an Italian- American music journalist. He also published poetry books and books on artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
Education and career
1974 made Scaruffi his computer science degree with honors at the ITIS Giuseppe Peano in Turin. Subsequently he worked until 1982 as a software consultant at SofTec in Italy. At the University of Turin in 1982, he completed his studies in mathematics, summa cum laude, during which he had dealt with general relativity. From 1982-1995 he worked as a software engineer, manager and consultant for Olivetti in Ivrea and Cupertino. During this time he had a visiting professor of Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University ( 1984) and Stanford University ( 1995) holds.
Scaruffi was 1995-1998 President of OmniwareE in Redwood City and then to 2003, senior systems engineer at IntelliCorp in Mountain View. At the same time he was a member of the 2000-2003 Governing Board of Directors of the journal Leonardo Journal. 2003-2006 Scaruffi worked as an independent consultant. In June 2008, he led the first Big Bang Conference in the University of California, Berkeley.
Journalism
Piero Scaruffi wrote books on the history of rock, jazz, pop music and the Avant Garde, which he published all by yourself since 2003. These books are also available on its website, which was the subject of a 2006 article in the New York Times.
Controversies
Piero Scaruffis view of the history of rock music differs considerably from almost all other music journalists and thus deviates significantly from the popular general view from ( for example, regarding its assessment of relatively unknown bands from the Canterbury School of the British progressive rock and Krautrock ) giving him great fame and a lot of recognition, on the other hand also brought a lot of criticism on the one hand.
His assessment of the position of Elvis Presley and, above all, the Beatles in rock history has been working for years against for much controversy and even hostility to him. Scaruffi called Elvis Presley as the first great hoax of rock ' n ' roll and the ultimate predator black hits and he no longer sees the Beatles though as really good pop group ( also for its performance by George Martin), but also. Because of the enormous difference between their skills or achievements and popularity he called them therefore as the überbewertetste band of all time.
His assessment of the Beatles:
- The Beatles were not good songwriter even good composers still good musicians.
- The music of the Beatles had no technical innovation without creative depth. Only registered three -minute pop songs and also later albums like Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles, on which experimented the band with other genres, consisted only of ( at the time also completely outdated ) Pop songs. ( This " faux avant garde ", ie pretending to be Avant Garde, but in reality lovely pop music playing, he sees above all in the work of Radiohead. )
- The "Aryan" music of the Beatles removed every trace of black music from Rock ' n ' Roll and replaced African rhythms with linear western melodies.
- They represented the perfect response to the ( black ) Rock ' n' Roll, against an imminent musical revolution and beyond the social and political revolution ( student protests, Bob Dylan, hippies ).
The best rock albums
For a better understanding of Scaruffis view of the history of rock below a table with his opinion 42 best rock albums of all time (rating from 9) and compared to the top 42 (excluding jazz and live albums ) of the website Acclaimed Music ( A), a database that compiles as possible all available music leaderboards. (Note: 3000 means that this album is ranked between 3001 and 4781 square; 4781 means that this album does not appear in the database.)