Needs serious work: Epic Riff

Can there be a better guideline for putting examples on the list other than being able to recognize it from a two second sample? If the point is that examples are supposed to be instantly recognizable, shouldn't they be fairly well-known? Perhaps they should come from albums that have at least gold certifications from the RIAA or its equivalents? Yes, I'm aware this betrays one of our mantras, but I feel the trope has been rendered useless and become an anorexic Crowning Music of Awesome.

edited 20th Feb '11 8:47:25 AM by KitsuneInferno

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt." - Some guy with a snazzy hat.

It says in the intro, 'immediately recognizable from a small fragment, even by people who don't generally follow the type of music it is from'. That's two thirds of the entries out, at least.

The problem is working out which songs are well-known enough to go on the list. I would suggest removing all the examples, but then it would be a paragraph and two lines.

edited 20th Feb '11 12:42:53 PM by halfmillennium

I'm going to declare it YMMV unless the mods want to step in and say "yes, everyone knows these characters".

Fight smart, not fair.

It's a real shame, because the definition works fair enough in theory. There's just no way to test for it in practice.

I say we axe the example section and provide a link to charts of top radio/music channel airplay. Those are exactly the places you hear music you otherwise wouldn't be following. The charts will have a lot of false positives (not distinctive enough), but that's nothing compared to the amount of Fan Myopia false positives the example list has. Basically if we want to say to people "Okay, if you want to hear some epic riffs here are some examples" this is our best shot.

I have to say the title is unfortunate. A YMMV trope is supposed to be about "well depending on your point of view element X does or doesn't appear here", but we have a really bad track record with cases where basically X = "OMG THIS IS AWESOME!!!!111". I think the opening to Alice Cooper's Poison is Crazy Awesome as much as the next person, but we really shouldn't be using this wiki to hand down music awards.

edited 21st Feb '11 5:08:48 AM by TripleElation

Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate to

Perhaps I'm just a cynical git, but wouldn't that mean the list was completely biased toward new songs? The backwards grandfather clause ensures new songs get far more plays than the average old song on 'popular music' stations. A list for UK airplay in 2010, for example, is likely going to be full of Lady Gaga, JLS and that bird who did Tik Tok.

edited 21st Feb '11 10:33:27 AM by halfmillennium

Which is why I suggested going with sales certifications from the RIAA. It might be skewed toward songs that were released during a time when people actually bought albums, though.

edited 21st Feb '11 11:24:44 AM by KitsuneInferno

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt." - Some guy with a snazzy hat.

Problem there is international recognition. I don't know what the RIAA is, but I'll assume it's something to do with the American charts. If we only used that, it'd be too America-centric; if we used others, it'd be too many to organise.

And making it gold records means it's skewed away from recognizable songs and actual Epic Rifts which is actually kind of ironic. The most recognized songs are the ones that are used the most in media which tend to be the ones that didn't do that well in sales, but instead sold their rights for cheap or are part of the public domain.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

The Other Wiki deals with this through citations from Top 100 Arbitrary Criteria Albums from Proper Magazines.

Posting because I remember this discussion coming up during launch last year... or was it the year before...

edited 24th Feb '11 3:04:36 AM by zevans

The other wiki has notability standards. We believe Theres No Such Thing As Notability. Also, it would mean we automatically couldn't have "Ride of the Valkeries" on that page and that's just not right.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

The thing about Epic Riffs is that limiting it to top 100 hits or gold records will completely override the current defining characteristic — "Hearing only this riff, you'll recognize the song." I can't emphasize enough how strongly I oppose redefining a page to make the examples fit. Especially when the definition is clean and clear already. It's called Epic Riffs, not Popular Songs.

Clean it up. I've taken off the "Hey, it's ok to just add songs you like" note at the top of the examples. That's just speeding up the decay, by essentially saying "Screw the definition, add whatever you like.".

edited 24th Feb '11 7:03:18 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Is Epic Riff not supposed to be like "Hey, It's that guy/voice!" but with songs instead of people/voice-actors? "Hey It's that Song!" is a better name for the trope than "Epic Riff".

Right now, Epic Riff looks like it is dependant of taste, but it is really about snippets of songs that you can immediately recognize, not just because you like them or their Ear Worm quality or because you hear them 24/7 on the radio lately.

"Popular songs" are too general to be a trope instead of songs so popular that a great amount of people know them just by hearing some bars, or maybe only remember those bars, even if they are not able to remember the title of the song. Like "Hey it's that X", you remember the face, or the voice but you don't necessarily remember that guy's name.

edited 22nd Mar '11 3:17:19 PM by Albir

Read TV Tropes 1 hour a day. Editing has no time limit

Not exactly. With an Epic Riff you may or may not know the name of the song; a Hey Its That Guy is by definition somebody whose name you don't know; they're just "that guy".

edited 22nd Mar '11 3:44:57 PM by tbarrie

My biggest problem is that "For Whom the Bell Tolls" isn't mentioned in the Metallica entry

May contain nuts.

It definitely needs cleaning.

"Periphery's "Icarus Lives" is possibly the single most easily recognizable djent riff ever written. "

Not knowing what a "djent" riff even is, I figured if I recognized it, it would perfectly fit the trope (something that even people who don't follow music can recognize). Nope.

Honestly, it should be a very SMALL, select sample of examples that ANYONE can recognize. Not fans of the band, or fans of the genre, but some dude who's never even heard of "grunge."

Perhaps each example could link to the song on youtube. It would make it easier for people to check, at least.

edited 3rd Jul '11 7:05:18 AM by UK

Limit it to in-universe examples? :)

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

God, I hope you're joking.

Something needs to be done with this page, but I'm not sure what. The page seems to be part trope (the riff lays the foundation for the song), and part audience reaction (that riff is memorable enough to be all it takes to identify the song). It should be one or the other, not both.

I think part of the problem is the name. Epic is suppossed to mean "large in scale" or "extreme" in some way, and we use the word that way in several other tropes, like Epic Movie and Epic Fail. However, here the word "epic" is being used to mean "awesome", which is not what the trope is going for. The word does not work here. A riff can't really be "large in scale". Sure, it can be loud and prominent in the song, but "epic" doesn't describe that. We could rename it to something like Prominent Riff. Or if we make the page an audience reaction the name could be something like Instantly Recognizable Riff.

First, a stupid question. Is this really a trope?

Second, provided the answer to that question is yes, there really isn't any way to monitor this article. What are we supposed to do, look and up and listen to a small snippet of every song listed and take off the ones we dont recognize? Doesn't that make it subjective as hell? There really isn't a way that I know of to make this objective. :/

Actually, the sticking point with this is notability. "Epic Riff" is all about subject notability with is not a TV Tropes thing, which would make this run counter to most other articles.

If this were to be cleaned up, the easiest way to do so would be by vote. Thumbs up: you know the song within three-ish seconds. Thumbs down: Who is this? Huh? This would clean things up while being fair.

This page might need locking after cleanup or a periodic vote to clean it.

It's about memorability, not notability. Something can be completely obscure, and still be the sort of thing you can identify in two seconds or less, assuming you're familiar with it. Of course, what people find memorable may be pretty subjective (especially given cultural differences on different parts of the planet).

Why this wasn't YMMV from day one, I definitely don't understand.

Of course, there's also the fact that the term, as used in conversational English, means something completely different (and even more subjective).

ah, well that makes sense. :)

edited 13th Sep '11 5:08:04 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

^ Because when it was made we hadn't started separating out the YMMV pages yet.

edited 13th Sep '11 4:59:37 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

So are we going to do anything here?

So far the course of action that seems most reasonable to me is to:

1. Make the page YMMV

2. Relegate the examples to a huge crowner as suggested above

This is a bit unorthodox, but the current example list can be safely replaced with "every troper's favorite song ever".

Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate to

What about redefining the trope to be an objective trope about "riff-driven" songs? As in songs that have a repeated riff throughout that is the basis for the melody or general song structure. I got this idea from The Other Wiki's article on riffs that has a little blurb on "riff-driven songs". The part of the current definition that says that an Epic Riff "lays the foundation of an entire song" is close to this idea of a riff-driven song, so maybe we could expand upon that part and get rid of the "instantly-recognizable" part of the definition.