shifts in popular opinion you have noticed

noticed this with The Clash over time. to people my brother's age (the forgotten Foghat tail-end of Boomerdom) they were the only band that mattered and now to a lot of younger folks they are forgotten/dismissed in favor of sayyyyyyy...Wire? someone like that.

and today on the FB record freaks and geeks page i am on every day people were going OFF on Tom Waits. in a way that i don't think i would have heard in years past. he's a hokey maudlin goofball to some people now. of course i had to post a link to that made-up waits lyrics thread on here because it just might be my favorite ilm thread ever.

anyway, i think these shifts are healthy. i like the back and forth of generations/time.

obviously, it goes both ways. i never in a million years would have thought i would be selling hoyt axton and paul williams albums to 20 and 30-somethings in the 21st century.

the first time I saw a woman wear fur on the NYC subway and no one bitched her out or glared at her, sometime in the late 90s, was when I knew the leftward tilt in this country was gone gone gone--and I was right

The Dead is the biggest one that comes to mind -- they were much more divisive when I was younger -- you were either the hippie deadhead type or you hated them, with the occasional "guilty pleasure" straggler.

yeah Dead resuscitation is def a thing

ppl that hate the Clash are fools

At one time, Deep Purple were considered part of an early-70s heavy rock trinity with Zeppelin and Sabbath iirc. I don't think they're quite seen in the same regard as the other two these days.

No one really thinks of Clapton as God anymore, do they?

Every Picture Tells a Story used to be listed as one of the top essential classic rock albums of all time, alongside the Beatles and Stones.

Shift away from Beatles -- they're still loved by many but no one bothers talking about them, and it became a cool guy thing not to like them.

re: the Dead, their rep probably benefited from stopping touring, I would think. One of the most unappealing things about them was their shitty-fan-travelling-circus-of-burnouts, which have now been dispersed/diversified across the jamband spectrum. Now the Dead can be safely enjoyed without all that baggage.

I still hate them tho

The shift wrt at least the last of those would have occurred too early for me to have noticed as it was happening, though.
2xp

i guess it's cool to malign pavement now?

obviously, i can still sell Clash records. in the same way that i sell Springsteen records. they are classic rock now. but you certainly don't get that feverish coveting going on like you see with the Smiths or Joy Division. that's partially derived from scarcity (Clash records not uncommon here cuz they sold a bunch...). but it's also a deep fandom you see with JD and Smiths among people who were not around for those band's heydays that is definitely not there for Clash. but maybe that's too apples and oranges...

in any case, i think Clash have faded from view over time. and the youngsters are the ones who have to carry those old banners.

70s lite rock going from the enemy to ironic "yacht rock" to essential.

That's a good one.

I haven't experienced it personally, but I keep seeing mentions here that those damn kids today malign REM. Which is just nuts.

I don't think they malign REM as much as they don't know or care about them.

"I'd like to do my presentation/paper on REM"/"I'd like to learn an REM song": things I have literally never heard from anyone born after the 80s

(in years of teaching popular music-related classes and guitar lessons)

Fleetwood Mac becoming a hip influence to cite.

I said this before but that P4k 80s list where like Flipper and Devo are garbage for old dorks and like Womack & Womack and George Benson are cool, is a world I never could have predicted

Yeah, a few younger kids at the local record store think of U2 and REM as "oldies." Don't even mention Bob Dylan or Neil Young to these guys, it'd be like someone convincing 12 year old me to jam some Burl Ives or something

Obvious answer here is embrace of corporate pop / poptimism etc. Most people who bought Clinic and Arab on Radar albums ten years ago didn't give a shit what the new Janet Jackson single sounded like. For better or worse, feel like we've sorta witnessed the death of the "guilty pleasure," for better or worse (except, like, praise and worship music, or Michael Bolton or something - the final frontiers)

anyway, i think these shifts are healthy. i like the back and forth of generations/time.

this is why i should never ever have discarded any album.
at periods in my life i have hated hip hop/techno/industrial/80s electro etc,
and so, at the time trimmed the collection accordingly, only to massively regret it a few years later.
but yeah, the in/out spin re certain bands/genres is fascinating.
and the clash idea is interesting.
i have wondered this myself recently.
BH loved them with a passion, whereas me, i always preferred B.A.D + variants thereof.
those 4 years difference clearly made a difference in how we saw the band/off-shoots.

i actually revived that REM thread not long ago to mention the lack of caring among younger people. but they were big and kinda boring for longer than they were indie and shadowy. that makes a difference. someone in their 30's only remembers the later stuff.

Every Picture Tells a Story used to be listed as one of the top essential classic rock albums of all time, alongside the Beatles and Stones.

― Hi! I'm twice-coloured! (Sund4r), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 7:13 PM (7 minutes ago)

i still rate this as one of my favorite albums ever, but yeah i've hardly met anyone else who's even heard it. most ppl i know, even major music buffs, think of stewart as a kitschy figure and seem shocked that anyone would take him seriously.

"i always preferred B.A.D + variants thereof."

lol, the only clash-related stuff i own is the first BAD album/medicine show 12 inch/cmon every beatbox 12 inch.

70s lite rock going from the enemy to ironic "yacht rock" to essential.

― human life won't become a cat (man alive), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 3:16 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Isn't designed-for-radio pop kind of experiencing the same trajectory? Dismissed as disposable and/or ironic novelty listening for years, now people are truly valuing the more successful examples or going out of their way to champion it. Not saying there's anything wrong with this!

and yet ABBA still hasn't become a cool favorite

ABBA has tunes. intricate melodies have never been less cool than now

the intensity of clash fandom seemed to have a big element of personal identification with the band, where you really cared about joe, mick, etc., maybe closer to the way ppl care/cared about the beatles than the way they care about wire. and that's something which might be hard for younger ppl to embrace, since the clash are gone and will never play again and their story is kind of messy and sprawling, not short and neat like the smiths or joy division. i've always loved them but always wondered if i would've loved them even more if i'd gotten to live through their existence, seen a couple shows, etc.

he's a hokey maudlin goofball to some people now

I've always kind of felt this way about Tom Waits but felt like I was very much in the minority and was missing something that everyone else apparently saw.

A couple of years ago me and another guy my age (41) talking to some people 10 years younger who all thought Guns and Roses were no different than Poison and Winger while we were trying to argue how different they felt when we were kids but I don't know how true this really is in retrospect.

Acceptance and fandom of New Age was not even close to a thing for record snob types two decades ago was it?

xp Those lines are p blurred now, yeah. Why was Soundgarden good and Ugly Kid Joe and Silverchair terrible? They just were, kid, OK? I can't explain it.

it's interesting if people are starting to diss Tom Waits now, because even though I like a lot of his stuff, it's always amazed me the kind of critical free pass he seemed to get. Like, every time an album came out, boom, 4 1/2 stars. In the 80s, what he was doing was so different than what you normally got from even underground pop acts, he was seen as breath of fresh (rotten stinking) air. Like, there was the moment when something like Capt Beefheart aesthetics broke into the mainstream, and in the context of the time, that was a pretty cool thing to happen. And yeah, he WAS hokey -- it seemed he went out of his way to be hokey sometimes, and that's part of his thing.

"and yet ABBA still hasn't become a cool favorite"

they were for people my age kinda. along with the carpenters. i think mamma mia! might have ruined them for later generations.

yeah, was gonna say ABBA was cool in the 90s, fwiw

most ppl i know, even major music buffs, think of stewart as a kitschy figure and seem shocked that anyone would take him seriously.

Hasn't this been the case since at least the early '80s, though?

abba prob would be cool again if not for the nazi stuff.

well I didn't know anyone who liked them but me and my one music nerd friend. I actually pitched a big ABBA retrospective to a certain popular indie music site about 15 years ago, and they passed. Ended up writing it for Stylus

oh wait, that was ace of base. sorry, abba.

GnR is totally better than Poison and Winger, Soundgarden is totally better Ugly Kid Joe and Silverchair. I don't think there's even any subjectivity to those declarations, they just are.

One of the weirdest hip namedrops of our time, for me, is Enya.

I guess I don't know who her actual fanbase was in the early to mid 90s, but at the time she sort of seemed like vapid earth mom music to me.

Really? Huh. So what you're saying is that there's hope for the eventual validation of my evergreen Basia fandom.

I never thought I'd see a festival headlined by Radiohead, LCD Soundsystem, and Lionel Richie and yet here we are.

Similarly the whole new age thing. My parents used to make fun of new age stuff, and I associated it with this one hippieish friend of my parents who wrote her own feminist Jewish songs for holidays. One of the Passover songs included the word "afterbirth" and I think it was my introduction to that word.

tori amos

One of the weirdest hip namedrops of our time, for me, is Enya.

― human life won't become a cat (man alive), Tuesday, 5 April 2016 19:51 (9 minutes ago) Permalink

I guess I don't know who her actual fanbase was in the early to mid 90s, but at the time she sort of seemed like vapid earth mom music to me.

― human life won't become a cat (man alive), Tuesday, 5 April 2016 19:53 (7 minutes ago) Permalink

i think this has to do with Grimes. also Brad wrote a pretty positive review of her album on pitchfork

enya probably due to "only time" reaching the age of millennial nostalgia

One of the weirdest hip namedrops of our time, for me, is Enya.

i have had a new age/ambient groove recently,
and after the recent critical love-in for enya i picked up a couple of their cds from the cheap bins.
nope.
still aint feeling it.
give me the relative mad sonic non-excess of enigma anyday over her dreary nothingness.
summary : next time i catch up with luke from tQ i will be having words.

young'uns don't care about REM now because they are totally boring + irrelevant to modern musical landscape

my piano and guitar teachers in middle/high school fucking loved enya

I have bad associations with her, because for some reason Orinoco Flow and the video for it caused me nightmares when I was a teenager. The song has a suffocating effect on me.

most ppl i know, even major music buffs, think of stewart as a kitschy figure and seem shocked that anyone would take him seriously

Definitely me; I've tried to like the Faces three or four times now and it's never taken.

I like some of Waits' songs, especially on the tribute album New Coat of Paint, or just about anywhere, as long as *he's* not "singing" them; like him as a storyteller and bandleader on his live albums, and the studio sets also flaunt hip taste in and access to musos.
Even in his early heyday, Stewart was conceptually (and manipulatively) corny, switching back and forth from the Rooster to Sensitive Kid Inside, but those were the man-rock times, and track by track, most of his pre-American LPs were often pretty effective (I ain't listened to none since the big move, but hehad some okay radio hits later---even "If You Think I'm Sexy" was an effective use of part of Jorge Ben's "Taj Mahal," in a new, ridiculously archetypal 70s context).(Also, much later, did a good if subway-yachty version of Waits' "Downtown Train.")
The albums he made with (originally as one of) the Faces are uneven, butworth checking out too---especially for Ronnie Lane songs---although think it was Ron Wood who said that several (of the best) tracks he thought of as Faces tracks somehow ended up on RS solo LPs instead.
Oh yeah, and speaking of (those particular) man-rock times, he did that white rock star thing of following templates pretty closely, on covers of The Temptations' and especially Four Tops versions of "(I Know) I'm Losing You," Sam Cooke's "Twistin' The Night Away," and Etta James's "I'd Rather Go Blind," although you gotta have the chops to follow those acts, and he did add his own raspy etc. trademark sound to the shadow of their phrasing (and James said that hearing his cover while she was in rehab made her determined to get back to her career).

Rod Stewart/Faces were definitely part of the vinyl nerd canon when I was in college, but that was a pretty distinct and relatively small subculture on campus -- vinyl had not quite blown up to current levels yet.

I think a common thread of a lot of these reappraisals is that the artist actually benefits from a loss of context. E.g. when an otherwise talented artist makes a style move that makes him/her seem like a cynical poser tagging along with the "authentic" bands of the times, those records often sound better in later years when you lose that frame of reference.

yeah like how Tunnel of Love is now a well-regarded springsteen album

young'uns don't care about REM now because they are totally boring + irrelevant to modern musical landscape

i aint no young'un, but having tried a few albums recently, i concur with this judgement.

Watermark was the first ever album I became obsessed with, I had a cassette taped version of my dad's cd so I could listen to it in my room when I was about 6 or 7 (this would be the early 90s). I don't remember any of my peers expressing any interest in Enya throughout my teens or early 20s, though i do recall being excited when the NME published a letter from someone about the release of A Day Without Rain.

Definitely me; I've tried to like the Faces three or four times now and it's never taken.

ahh ... you see i have been tempted by recent boxset,
but i have real problems with rods vocals i.e. they are like bovril.
and i fucking hate bovril.
guess that's my quest over.

Also the whole stink that can attach to a band because of who the perceived audience is. E.g. presumably you couldn't be an intellectual post-punker in the 70s and also be down with the cokehead party boys and music magazine-reading dorks who played the Dan on their hi-fis.

my piano and guitar teachers in middle/high school fucking loved enya

Ha, are you young enough that precocious girls from my high school cohort could have been your teachers?

This might be the most obvious one: I remember how everyone thought it was hilariously ironic when I bought Journey's Escape for a quarter in 2000.

the only Rod i own is Jeff Beck's Truth. everyone should own that album.

I still hate Journey, especially *that* song.

I don't like Jeff Beck, either. Of the big British guitar players, he's the one I have the least use for, including Clapton.

Ok I put on some Enya and this shit is still awful, possibly the most unpleasant music I have ever heard.

Truth rules. even if you hate Jeff Beck. it's just a great album.

It makes me feel like someone is tightly holding a silk sheet over my face. xp

I think I started a thread once where I rated Truth over Zep I (and I'm a huge Zep fan).

is popular opinion shifting away from Led Zeppelin? I feel like about the time grunge happened, Zep's profile was higher than ever, and then over the years, they kind of faded into the background again.

Faces' Four Guys Walk Into A Bar... box is essential; can't say the same about the individual albums (except maybe A Nod Is As Good As A Wink).

Every Picture and Gasoline Alley are great, too, but Stewart basically never gave a shit if he was taken seriously or not. He never even made a clumsy/fumbling/self-conscious late-career attempt to get back to his early '70s peaks.

the crematorium where both my grandfather and later my great-grandmother were cremated in the early 00s had the title track from Watermark piped in as background music during the cremation; which seemed kind of odd. I suppose you could choose specific music if you wanted to, but Enya was the default?

Yardbirds stuff + Truth the only Jeff Beck i own. and need to own. kids should get into the Yardbirds. post-Clapton Yardbirds anyway. best band.

Ha, are you young enough that precocious girls from my high school cohort could have been your teachers?

oh nah, they're about the same age as my aunt (70s), and in fact engage with enya in roughly the same way i think (all the other music they listen to is classical and abba, which i think informs what they enjoy about enya)

and yet ABBA still hasn't become a cool favorite

In America.

But, hey, it's an American thread.

Truth rules. even if you hate Jeff Beck. it's just a great album.

― scott seward, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 4:23 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wouldn't say I hate Jeff Beck (certainly not his playing in the Yardbirds), but this is otm. I love Truth and haven't been the least bit tempted to dig into any of his other shit (except Beck-Ola which has mostly the same band, but is much worse).

"is popular opinion shifting away from Led Zeppelin?"

if all i carried in my store were zep, floyd, and beatles records i swear i could make a decent living.

he's a hokey maudlin goofball to some people now

I've always kind of felt this way about Tom Waits but felt like I was very much in the minority and was missing something that everyone else apparently saw.

I am part of that minority.

But, hey, it's an American thread.

we're an american thread!
we're coming to your town!
we'll help you party it down!

Some of the circa-Truth live sets are said to be Beck Group at its best, when he had Waller and Wood in there (with Rod o course)---posted here and there, I'm also told, but can't be arsed (too many boots, gotta take a break)

The move from identifying yourself with a tribe (metal, rock, jazz, alternative, etc) to the expectation that your tastes will dip into everything at least a little.

He never even made a clumsy/fumbling/self-conscious late-career attempt to get back to his early '70s peaks.

Well, he decided he wanted to be Frank Sinatra, Jr. instead.

I like some of Waits' songs, especially on the tribute album New Coat of Paint, or just about anywhere, as long as *he's* not "singing" them;

I've actually had the opposite happen a couple of times - songs I thought kind of sucked until I heard his versions and they totally made sense in that context.

speaking of Rod Stewart!

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/b0/a6/de/b0a6de2b6ba48d01192f6426aac69401.jpg

jazz fusion surely has had a reappraisal right

though i guess jazz fusion means a lot of things, some of which are perennially hip e.g. electric miles, some of which are never hip e.g. spyro gyra, some of which change, e.g...idk...weather report?

wait no not weather report, maybe more like return to forever

Patti Smith: My wife was surprised when I told her that I saw Patti in a half-full theater in 2000. I think if she played the same theater now (which she probably wouldn't), she'd sell it out fast. It's not that she wasn't a legend 16 years ago, but she was a middle-aged legend, and middle age is hard on a lot of music careers. Now she's an elder statesperson, a living link to '70s NYC bohemia, en eminence grise. It's interesting the shifts people go through as next generations either embrace them or don't.

There was definitely a subset of jazz people who were sour on electric Miles, and I think that set has mostly died out or quieted down.

wait, DO young people like/listen to patti smith? we would have to ask one.

can we get whiney's world of young people in here

My impression is that young hipsters have definitely embraced her. I don't know if that extends beyond streaming Horses and owning a used copy of Just Kids, but I think she's beloved at least in theory.

She's like Woody Guthrie - everyone reps her no one listens to her.

some people dislike her

Patti Smith is interesting as a person/figure but man her records (apart from "Gloria") are such a snooze

i'm still fond of people have the power. that's like the one thing i always like hearing. bernie should make that his theme song.

wait, pissing in the river was cool too. don't forget that one.

I will rep for Easter and "Dancing Barefoot," but that's a different thread...

bowie. played shit like Phoenix Festival (*twice*) in the mid 90s. there was an odd period between say Live Aid and headlining Glastonbury 2000 where he felt like more of a cult artist.

i tried to listen to horses and lost interest. she looks super rad on the cover though

yea i think i have made at least 4 unsuccessful attempts to listen to horses

Patti was elevating 70s schmaltz right from the start. Yacht rock pioneer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j90pMqadsII

lol marcos

Another conversation with my wife: trying to explain to her that Asia was actually a really huge band for a few years. ("Heat of the Moment" came on while we were at a restaurant.) Not that I'm expecting an Asia revival.

i thought i saw patti smith in a bar recently and then i thought it was actually charlotte gainsbourg, who looks older in person. turned out it was an unfamous person.

"bowie."

for real major big time! younguns loooooove bowie! 70's bowie anyway. and his stuff could be found cheap forever until like 5 years ago. and was going up up in price on vinyl even before he died.

interesting. i bought like all his 70s records for 2-5 dollars a piece a few years ago. is that impossible to do now? i haven't been looking for bowie albums recently

I feel like Elvis Costello has been declining in popularity amongst the youngins, or at least that's the vibe I've gotten from the declining rating trends for his album on RYM.

Asia was actually a really huge band for a few years

The end of the corporate rock era. That record and Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon were both huge at the same time.

Rush have definitely become cooler.

i think elvis costello has been a nonentity with the young folk for....uh, decades.

x-post

I feel like Elvis Costello has been declining in popularity amongst the youngins, or at least that's the vibe I've gotten from the declining rating trends for his album on RYM.

I always thought of Elvis Costello as a big thing for people 10 years older than myself tbh.

lol 2xp

Definitely true re Rush.

Rush have definitely become cooler and even more specifically 80's Rush has become a thing. which it wasn't so much even in the 80's after moving pictures.

(meaning, i can sell Power Windows for more than two dollars now...)

the big one this decade has been the relegation of almost all guitar-based records to old fogey music. The kids love their synths.

And Lady Gaga seemed to usher in an era of thinkpiece pop, where every song and video is close read and deconstructed. It's not my thing but I'm glad the kids are doing it.

Has anyone born in the last 25-30 years ever identified as "goth"?

LOL...when did the term Goth originate? It wasn't prevalent in my high school in the late 80s, even though there were plenty of people that would be categorized as Goth.

It became a thing in the 90s, right?

there's definitely a lot of count chocula music being made now, but i'm not sure if it's young people who are listening to it.

(xp) Early 80s

http://www.electronicbeats.net/venus-x-on-the-origins-and-future-of-ghe20g0th1k/

I think the guitar thing can be misleading, because anywhere you look, you'll find young bands with guitars, in pretty much every genre. The main place you don't see it much is in the top 40.

and haha yeah I see plenty of gothy kids in my tumblr feed

Has anyone born in the last 25-30 years ever identified as "goth"?

― Hi! I'm twice-coloured! (Sund4r), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 10:25 PM (5 minutes ago)

Yes, fucking loads! Goth doesn't go out of style (though it frequently gets modified with subgenre markers).

I still hate Journey, especially *that* song.

"Don't Stop Believin'" is one of the only cases where I feel like I could consciously observe my opinion shifting in relation to the world's relationship with it, as much as I'd like to think of myself as above these things. I saw it as cheese; then began to be fascinated by its OTT hookiness; then began to love it and defend it in defiance of critical wisdom, fashion, and good taste; then felt vindicated when it became the best-loved song in America; then started growing sick of it when it became just another piece of ubiquitous pop wallpaper.

OK wow, I've seen plenty of kids incorporate black makeup into other things (e.g. what they were calling emo 10 years ago) or listen to the Cure alongside a million other things but hadn't heard of any young people identifying as goth, going to goth clubs, etc. anymore.

still waiting for the day when I stop seeing teenagers in Nirvana t-shirts

the big one this decade has been the relegation of almost all guitar-based records to old fogey music. The kids love their synths.

Which is a reversal from the '90s reversal of the '80s. In the late '90s I was volunteering for Big Brothers, and the kid I was paired with really loved Marilyn Manson's version of "Sweet Dreams." I told him that the original version was all synthesizers, and he said, "What's that?" At the time, keyboard-dominated music seemed very distant.

I think the guitar thing can be misleading, because anywhere you look, you'll find young bands with guitars, in pretty much every genre. The main place you don't see it much is in the top 40.

Yeah, I mean, my perspective is obv slanted, but I come across plenty of young people into guitars. What I do find is that they have less of a bias against synth/electronic music than they might have 10-15 years ago.

Like, someone's buying all those Mumford & Sons/Lumineers/Vance Joy albums.

young'uns don't care about REM now because they are totally boring + irrelevant to modern musical landscape

I'm not sure how representative kids or 20-somethings that buy vinyl records are to the whole public. Like, when Scott revived the REM thread a couple of months ago, I was looking at it and it's not like New Order '80s has more Spotify plays than REM '80s. If they don't have cache with the modern musical landscape it's because they've become esoteric, but so have the Clash.

Yeah I find that even kids who are really into and good at playing guitar/drums/etc are very open to electronic music/rap beats and have dabbled in production etc. It's only their music teachers who are all "argggh real music" (not you Sund4r, but you know what I mean).

And maybe they don't have to go to goth clubs anymore because that aesthetic has kind of suffused everything.

(sad rap music, dark dance music, etc)

my 13 year old kid and his band did "where is my mind" at the school talent show last week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2jh5zRakVA&feature=share

they did bowie last year.

Cool!

Oh yeah, the Pixies definitely seem to have become canonized in a way that they never used to be imo. I feel like Sonic Youth is going the other way.

my kids love electronic stuff too though. stuff they hear on the internet/spotify. "electro".

Pretty good cover! What is your kid playing?

he's playing electric guitar and singing. the one with all the hair.

Yeah I find that even kids who are really into and good at playing guitar/drums/etc are very open to electronic music/rap beats and have dabbled in production etc.

I wonder if the Rush revival is related to this, actually.

Lead guitar and lead vocals, that's more than Black Francis could manage.

OTM!

re: the origins of goth

Pete Scathe on the history of goth:
http://www.historyofgoth.com/

Goth - Name
http://www.scathe.demon.co.uk/name.htm

Similar to goth, are there young rockabilly guys and girls, or are they all older than me?

I love this thread because I teach university students and sometimes music comes up and it fascinates me in terms of what makes it into their media bubble and what doesn't. One student was telling about how much she loves Rush because her dad got her into them, another was way into NWA and Eazy-E (before the movie came out) because of her mom. And the most boggling one to me was a totally stereotypical blond sorority girl type listening to music in the computer lab and it was like Drake, random EDM I don't care about, some Mumford and Sons sounding shit, then "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

LWTUA has been used a ton in films/tv

Not a popular shift but a personal one: I used to think the Beatles were timeless but I've been hearing them lately and everytime the songs sound more and more shoddy and simplistic. Verse chorus verse chorus pretty arrangement chorus chorus chorus chorus.

Not every song in their catalogue, but some of it is starting to lose its magic to me.

are there young rockabilly guys and girls, or are they all older than me

I think this was a thing for people who were older than me (mid-30s).

is popular opinion shifting away from Led Zeppelin? I feel like about the time grunge happened, Zep's profile was higher than ever, and then over the years, they kind of faded into the background again.

I don't think they ever really faded into the background?

some things

-i've noticed B-52s and OMD records selling much better than they used to
-definitely more interest in obscure 80s R&B than their used to be -- or as the kids call it, "modern soul."
-Leo Kottke is cool now
-Windham Hill appreciation (skotrock def ahead of the curve on this one.)
-younger people being more into genesis & Yes. somehow ELP still terminally unhip.

I think people hating on tom waits is a "serious record collector guy" thing. still sell lots of tom waits to 21 year olds.

Another obvious one is the increased urban appeal of country music.

In Spain and partly in Mexico there are several young mid 20s rockabilly-esque people but it seems it's more of a fashion thing and they're not that actually interested in the music. Talked to a group in Spain who pretty much the only "old" rockabilly music they knew was by Elvis and Cash. They were more into modern bands which I know nothing about and sound closer to punk than rockabilly to me. They did love the cramps.

i don't know a lot of younger people who are into sixties garage and mod stuff. seems like instead of liking the seeds and the sonics and whatever, kids now go straight to private press psych monsters.

everyone should love the cramps

xp

can't sell a shadows of knight LP to anyone these days!

xp
the cramps suck

even worse than the clash.

something i never would have expected is the number of ppl under 30 i know who collect 78s, be it old-time music or 20s pop.

Grunge and Nu Metal almost completely faded for younger generations in my city. Was talking to some younger clients in one of my bars and they only knew Nirvana and Korn by name but couldn't remember any song by them. I thought they were trolling at first.

that stuff got so overexposed so fast, the last real major label profit orgyfest before the internet/fall

i think there's been a definite reappraisal in some circles of dylan's 80s and nineties material.

i just asked rufus what he is digging lately and he said he really likes listening to You're Living All Over Me. and he wants a wah wah pedal. the stage he was playing on at the talent show was the same one that Deep Wound used to play on back in the day when they had hardcore shows at the grange hall. also, Lou was at the talent show. Western Mass 4lyfe.

(he also loved the Weeknd album a ton when it came out. i think this is what you see with the really young kids out there and that was mentioned above. they listen to the beatles but also mod radio/interweb sounds.)

I'm 25 and Every Picture Tells A Story is probably my favorite album ever but yeah, nobody I know agrees with me or even gives it a chance. They just think I'm being weird for the sake of it.

always felt like the Beach Boys went through a huge shift in the late 90s. they seemed to be a joke and somewhat lame, uncool band when i was growing up. then suddenly Pet Sounds and Smile were the best things ever and secretly they were way cooler than the Beatles.

maybe i am just imagining all of that and music critics were always hip to the Beach Boys and it just took me that long to find out.

Beach Boys definitely went through a period of uncoolness until millennial indie nerds discovered Pet Sounds. The Smile release certainly helped.

The Monkees i think are maybe more respected now than ever? people aren't as hung up on the manufactured aspect anymore due to popism and honestly how can you be when it is songs by Carol King and Neil Diamond.

Also, The Monkees weren't about music. They were about rebellion, about political and social upheaval!

"maybe i am just imagining all of that and music critics were always hip to the Beach Boys and it just took me that long to find out."

there was actually a LOT written about brian wilson in the 60's. and his whole genius thing. and even more in the 70's. and tons of books/fan tributes in the 80's. and the 90's was peak indie rock beach boys love. calmed down a bit by the 2000s but it'll never go away entirely. so, critically, they/he have been taken really seriously for decades. as far as young bands go, i guess it will ebb and flow like the surf.

Upon reflection--and scott's post--I was definitely way off with my "millennial indie nerds" thing re: the Beach Boys. It definitely dates back to at least the 90s. There were obvious straight-up imitators like the High Llamas, but on a somewhat more prominent scale, weren't the Elephant 6 bands always being likened to Wilson?

The first time I ever really figured out that there was a thriving cult around Wilson (the perils of being an 80s kid include the Beach Boys always being "Kokomo" and "oldies" radio, to me) was when I read Lewis Shiner's Glimpses around '97 or so.

I think the Beach Boys (or Brian Wilson anyways) were a phenomenon that "heads" kind of always knew was cool. I remember my dad talking about the Smile era before I was even old enough to know or care about what it was. Heck, there was a reason John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd wanted to save Wilson on SNL in the late 70s.

In reality, the actual lowest ebb for Beach Boys popularity would have been the late 60s, when they were still very much an active, progressive concern. Scott is otm, people were always writing that Brian Wilson was a genius, but circa 1968, their kind of music just wasn't what cool folks were looking for.

ABBA definitely gained a critical reappraisal when Gold was released; they're even in the Spin Alternative Record Guide from 1995.

i saw the Beach Boys at a fairground or something in the late 80s, was not entirely impressed. then i saw them a few years later on Full House. even less impressed.

yeah E6 was a huge part of that revival.

it was everywhere in the 90's though. japan, canada, europe, u.k. beach boys fever.

The turning point for ABBA was Muriel's Wedding (1994).

I thought it was Ace of Base.

(not in that Ace of Base were critical faves, but in that the critical response to them was largely "hey, ABBA did this better!")

Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla Queen of the Desert -- Aussies definitely ushered in the Abba reappraisal -- culminating in Mamma Mia, I guess, but I feel like Abba is pretty canonical at this point.

I think '90s hip-hop is going to be the next victim of this wheel. When I saw Jay-Z at Bonnaroo in 2010, all the kids knew the songs. That probably wouldn't be true now, and definitely not in a few years. Unless he gets a biopic.

i think that might be true of rap in general though. most extreme rap fandom begins in teens/20's and focuses on the now almost exclusively with the exception of the super-extreme who are history buffs.

I feel like Elvis Costello has been declining in popularity amongst the youngins, or at least that's the vibe I've gotten from the declining rating trends for his album on RYM.

Really hoping this is because the kids finally realized Joe Jackson was better, but probably that's not it.....

discussed this a little wrt to how they now compared to the smiths, but millenials who are generally into indie pop don't care about REM. at all. they don't have the status lots of other classic bands/acts from the 80s/early 90s are enjoying at the moment.
around the turn of the century they were still described to me as the first 'alternative band' and despite their huge status were still revered, something didn't happen. you would think that the break-up would have created a sense of nostalgia.

I remember when I was a kid in the early 90s REM had two huge hits with Losing My Religion and Shiny Happy People. To me as a little kid they seemed like a boring adult band that was for grownups only. Talking Heads, B-52s, and Dee-Lite were way more interesting to me.

You millennials show some respect to REM goddamnit! What's the matter with you kids? I blame the synths.

What rem songs should i listen to? I only know the radio staples and they dont do it for me

Murmur 4ever - anything from it will do

I get the feeling that REM's music is too earnest for the times we're living in now, maybe excepting Chronic Town and Murmur

Sonic Youth is an interesting one, I thought their influence would live on like VU's, but that doesn't seem to be the case

fables of the reconstruction is the one rem album likely to appeal to hipsters of the future - dark, murky difficult even by early rem standards. plus the joe boyd connection

Stockhausen definitely saw a rise in popularity in the last ten years or so of his life. I saw a concert of Hymnen he gave at the Royal Festival Hall sometime in the late 80s where the place was no more than 20% full. By the time of his last London concert in 2005 he was selling out concert halls easily.

Even as a 90s kid REM felt like a band you respect, but you don't really love.

I think he would have sold out concerts in London in the (late) 60s and the 70s, don't know what was going on in the late 80s. Critically he's been in decline since the 70s, the whole Licht thing didn't help there. (xp)

My brother's dog name is dylan. I named mine Bowie (is it not an awesome name for a dog!? Bow-ie... erm) and he thought naming it after a classic rock artist sounded cool. Asked him what he thought of Dylan's music and couldn't really tell me any song by him. He said he liked that one that guns n roses play.

It happens a lot with classic rock artists and it shouldn't bother me but it does. Everybody knows Dylan, Hendrix, Elvis, Bowie to name a few but when I want to actually talk about their music it seems most people only know them as icons but don't really know much about them and only recall one or two songs. They're supposed to be remembered by their music not their fashion style.

Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla Queen of the Desert -- Aussies definitely ushered in the Abba reappraisal -- culminating in Mamma Mia, I guess, but I feel like Abba is pretty canonical at this point.

Erasure's Abba ep that went to #1 preceded this. There was an abba special on tv not long after this. think that influenced the aussie stuff

i think that might be true of rap in general though. most extreme rap fandom begins in teens/20's and focuses on the now almost exclusively with the exception of the super-extreme who are history buffs.

disagree with this; i don't think it's true in the UK, at least. i'm 24 and when I was at school and university there were loads of people who were massively into some of the touchstone 80s/90s rap albums (Enter the Wu -Tang, Straight Outta Compton, The Chronic, Doggystyle, People's Instinctive Travels...). it definitely wasn't just history buffs because plenty of those guys would never dig any deeper into the genre, but you could stick that stuff on at any kind of gathering of people and everyone would know what it was and be into it.

if anything i encountered far more people who were anti-contemporary hip-hop and privileged the perceived authenticity of stuff from the 90s.

re-appraisals in the early-mid 90's for ABBA were topped off by this in 1999 which seemed utterly bizarre but fantastic

http://www.mojo4music.com/media/MOJO66_Abba.jpg

re: the origins of goth
Pete Scathe on the history of goth:
Goth - Name
http://www.scathe.demon.co.uk/name.htm

Aargh, such an apparently painstakingly researched article which repeatedly gets Mary Harron's name wrong (unless there was also a Mary Hannon writing articles about Factory Records at the same time, but I'm guessing the article referred to may be this one, though I can't read the full text)

I'm not too into her films but I think her career arc is p. cool and interesting btw and would like to read more of her (post)punk-era music writing

It was cool to like the Beatles in the mid-90s, then in the 00s it felt like that baton got passed onto the Beach Boys. On the whole though, sixties rock/pop has never felt so, maybe not 'unfashionable', but irrelevant to hip musical discourse as it is now. When bands talk about psychedelia, they're not talking about the sixties bands, they're talking about Spaceman 3 or Can or whatever...

I always thought ABBA were considered a bit of a cheesy musicals and student-nights band until more recently, when people started digging out The Visitors again...

I was thinking about how, if anything, grunge has developed a huge cultural cachet that didn't exist at the time. I remember radio personalities and the music press being all 'grunge is just people who can't even be bothered to enunciate properly groaning over standard-issue four-chord riffs' (an interesting parallel with some of the critique levelled at a lot of trap hiphop today).

I don't know enough "young people" to know the real shifts in opinion but it has been weird reaching the age where the music of my tween years is now oldies, and what does and doesn't get played

the local stations and Radio 2 play a whole lot of early 90s stuff at "drivetime" (at least on the occasions I get a lift home with someone who listens to the radio), and recently I heard Ugly Kid Joe and Jesus Jones, both such a joke at the time and mostly forgotten by the late 90s that I never expected to hear them on cheery nostalgic radio 25 years later

plus it makes me feel old thinking, does this music really serve the same purpose now as the doo-wop-to-"California Dreamin'" Golden Oldies stations of the 80s?

Get used to it, you'll grow old and die to the soundtrack of Meghan Trainor, Kanye and Maroon 5 playing on the radio.

is indie-rock, in the traditional sense, still even a thing among people under 30? With Radio X in the UK, which is supposed to be an 'alternative' station but very clearly targets a 30-45 year old contingent of men who just can't throw away their Oasis CDs.

natalie merchant waits in the wings, expectantly, ready to lecture and uplift a new generation of listeners

It seems like the same process that's broken up musical tribalism has also broken up the 20 year cycle of reassessment. Like, in the early 00s, there were all the guitar bands revisiting disco punk and Gang of Four, skinny tie punk, and the electroclash rethink of synth pop. Then the yacht rock thing. Then there were motions toward nu-pigfuck later in the decade, but it didn't really happen, and now it's just mish-mash. With everyone free to explore everything, I'm not sure you get the gravity to pull a discarded genre back together.

yeah, sometimes revivalism feels like a rote thing that 'just has to happen' now, rather than an organic rediscovery of a forgotten style of music. failed attempts to resuscitate Britpop and grunge in the past point to this. now it's more like media and label execs just look at what was popular exactly 20 years ago and find acts based on that, which means that in the UK we're about to get a nice big dose of eye-liner rock (Placebo, Skunk Anansie, Garbage), Scot-pop (something that happened in the NME) and err... Kula Shaker.

seriously, my college age son listens to what he calls "indie rock" yet there's no accompanying ideology or hermetically sealed clique/scene. he seems to likes everything BUT rock/pop oldies though he reveres 90s rap/R&B. he's amused by 70s new wavers in my collection like talking heads & pere ubu just because of their sheer weirdness. he insists david byrne is some kind of comedian.

I'd definitely say Talking Heads, Pere Ubu and Devo have a comedic element to them, and that's part of why they're good.

"Fear of Music" has some of the funniest lyrics ever.

oh yeah

which means that in the UK we're about to get a nice big dose of eye-liner rock (Placebo, Skunk Anansie, Garbage), Scot-pop (something that happened in the NME) and err... Kula Shaker.

what is Scot-pop?

There's something condescending about the current spate of Lionel Richie love but I can't quite identify what's so off-putting about it. But if Lionel leads to a rediscovery of Jerry Bulter and Lou Rawls all is forgiven.

xp as I say, I think it was a thing the NME tried to start one week circa 1996 after Bis appeared on Top of the Pops.

did people know of Can, Faust, Neu! etc. in the 90's?

I knew of Can and Faust (pretty much just Future Days and Faust/So Far at the time) because some of their stuff was still in print. Neu! I'd heard of but never actually heard until the CD reissues.

When you wrote Scot-Pop I thought you meant Travis and Texas.

I knew of Can and Neu! via Stereolab etc but I'd only heard covers of their songs until Audiogalaxy.

I can't remember the first time I heard of Can/Neu!, myself. That kind of thing seems like the 'old' music with the most current hip cachet though.

I'd say their reappraisal coincided with the rise of long-form noodly post-rock circa 2000 - Sigur Ros, Coldplay, G!YBE etc?

Can and Neu! I knew about through Stereolab, or at least through people who were big Stereolab fans. This was the late 90s. I have no idea if they're still a thing with anyone under 30.

yeah I dunno if this is just my own little internet experience but I don't recall anyone talking about those bands until right around the time of those Neu! CD reissues, which I think people managed to romanticize quite a bit, along with say Future Days, because they were several decades old and yet didn't sound dated in the slightest - confirming there was more to the narrative than just Kraftwerk, who were indeed prescient but those albums were clearly recorded in that late-70's/early 80's era

The first time I probably heard/heard of Neu! was the Ciccone Youth album but I don't think I knew what the eff a Neu! was at the time.

Faust still doesn't sound at all dated to me, fwiw.

yeah I mean - how could they? you'd be crazy to want to pick up that particular baton, though I'd argue that maybe Animal Collective did, in some sense?

I saw Faust live in the early '90s; they toured after Rien came out in...'94 maybe? They set off a road flare onstage and almost choked everyone in the club to death.

Punkers like John Lydon and Pete Shelley were bigging up Can at the end of the 1970s, and there's a Neu! track on one of those NME 80s compilation tapes - in the UK at least, they've been in a pretty constant state of reappraisal/rediscovery

Every Picture and Gasoline Alley are great, too, but Stewart basically never gave a shit if he was taken seriously or not. He never even made a clumsy/fumbling/self-conscious late-career attempt to get back to his early '70s peaks.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat),

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d7/RodStewart_Time_albumcover.jpg

Answering a post way upthread: in the '90s loving Bowie and Roxy in America was a lonely thing. My friends thought I was bizarre, for Bowie was still a joke b/w 1989-1995.

Few bands' respect/credibility/influence have just gone over a cliff like The Police. Like, NO ONE gives a shit anymore. Young people in particular, but also olds who may have liked them in the past.

Here's a thing: Dub music is a thing that seems to ebb in and out of popularity every 6-7 years, right? I don't think it's particularly popular right now, but even as recently as 2011 you had people like Ekoplekz and Demdike Stare doing their own underground takes on dub.

You know who is having a rough decade? U2. So much that it probably has hurt their overall standing.

Few bands' respect/credibility/influence have just gone over a cliff like The Police. Like, NO ONE gives a shit anymore. Young people in particular, but also olds who may have liked them in the past.

Like, recently? I can buy that but I was at one of those 2007 shows and people definitely gave a shit then

Yeah, since the reunion tour. After that happened, nosedive.

I hang out around college students all day, and while some may not identify Sting or the Police as the band playing "Message in a Bottle" or "Every Breath You Take," all of them can hum or sing at least a few verses.

Basically this thread is confirmation bias.

When i was 19 in 1988 i moved to Philadelphia and after I got a job I went to 3rd Street Jazz every week and bought a Can album until I had them all. I'd never heard them! I don't know what I read that made me do that. They had every album on vinyl there too. 80's Spoon pressings.

You know who is having a rough decade? U2. So much that it probably has hurt their overall standing.

This might be true, because now they're the old band who forced you to download their new, not very good at all, album. If The Stones had forced me to own Steel Wheels, I might have a different opinion of them at this point.

You know who is having a rough decade? U2. So much that it probably has hurt their overall standing.

― kornrulez6969, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 8:29 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They don't really have anyone but themselves to blame. They weren't bad back in the day but they were never good enough to override their last two decades of mostly bullshit. IMO.

xpost lol

But after that stupid itunes fiasco, they still filled arenas and stadiums, didn't they?

krautrock i knew *OF* in the 90s but had very little of as it was OOP I had a faust cd, couple of amon duul cds and a best of vinyl , Can cds and bootleg cds of the neu albums and kraftwerk 2 on vinyl i found in tower records (philips original, a warehouse find)

everything else i got when i got napster along with thousands of other things that were rare.

The students I've got in class or advise (i.e. not the radio station kids) listen to music (a) the old fashioned way, i.e. parents' collections, recommendations, curiosity; or (b) social media, YouTube clips, commercial soundtracks, and other kinds of ubiquity.

The second is the biggest change I've seen. That's why I said most students can identify "Every Breath You Take" but not that The Police performed it. When music is knitted into the fabric of your consumption habits – food, cars, sex, whatever – its creators are irrelevant.

It's absolutely fine to like Phil Collins these days.

That's why I said most students can identify "Every Breath You Take" but not that The Police performed it. When music is knitted into the fabric of your consumption habits – food, cars, sex, whatever – its creators are irrelevant.

Yeah, when I was in college, I could hum the melodies of all kinds of old songs without having much/any knowledge of who recorded them. But for a very long time, The Police were afforded "elite" status in journo world and musician/music geek world, and all of that seems to have evaporated.

Looking at Spotify the Police have 173,000,000 listens so far. I don't know how the statistics work, but that's a big number. I could never get into their music, though, as much as I've tried.

It's absolutely fine to like Phil Collins these days.

I remember the UK music press reacting with real incredulity and disgust when Urban Renewal, that 'R&B and hip hop artists cover Phil Collins' tribute album was released in 2001.

Maybe you guys are right, and the thread title is about popular opinion after all, but their rep has definitely taken a hit critically/influentially.

> I think a common thread of a lot of these reappraisals is that the artist actually benefits from a loss of context.

Yeah, Lionel Ritchie went away, Rod Stewart didn't. Elvis Costello soldiers on with a new batch of songs every few years, unlike Patti Smith. Bowie's rep definitely benefited by taking a decade off.

yeah, definitely knew Can, Faust, Neu, Kraftwerk, etc in the 90s. Can't remember when I found Cluster, but it wouldn't have been far after. The thing is, the internet was actually around in the 90s, so sometime around 97 or 98, anything I wasn't aware of suddenly became a lot easier to find.

The Police is kind of a sad case imo, and pretty much totally down to Sting. I personally still revere Stewart Copeland's drumming, but Sting's persona (and a lot of his lyrics) is absolutely cringeworthy.

I thought Sting might be cool after that Simpsons episode where he was described as a "good digger", but whatever credibility he got from that was destroyed by that lute album he released.

Jane's Addiction, whatever reunion stuff they do, they're just 'there' nowadays.

Copeland's majorly hit-or-miss for me. Generally dig him on some of the early stuff, but after a while I just want someone to take his hi-hat and splash cymbals away from him.

Xxpost Are we talking about popularity or critical rep though?

When I lived in Italy everyone revered the police as an unimpeachable classic but I think you'd be hard pushed to find a less credible classic rock artist among young music fans in the uk, even if they could all hum 'every breath you take ' or whatever.

yeah, I think this is about critical rep. Recently, I actually had the (mis)fortune of attending a benefit where Sting was performing, and people loved him there.

In their heyday, every profile of the Police mentioned "with lyrics that reference Nabakov and Jung" like it was a big deal, which just seems silly now. The first two records still sound pretty unique, and could probably find fresh fans, especially if Sting fades more.

did people know of Can, Faust, Neu! etc. in the 90's?

When was Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler? Can were well known enough in the 70s to do tours of the UK (I feel like I've covered all this in another thread); Faust Tapes was sold for 49p, plenty of people bought it (whether they listened to it more than once is another matter); Neu! not so well known, though Cherry Red released a compilation in 1982 which I suppose they were expecting people to buy. This is all in the UK, no idea about the US. I'm not sure, but do people think Can were more obscure than Van der Graaf Generator or Gong or Gentle Giant or whoever, 'cos I'm pretty sure they weren't.

Rush, oddly enough, seems to have displaced The Police in the critical corner they used to occupy.

Dominique, i didnt get internet til the last few months of 1999

Can were on top of the pops :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0nfjguTclg&nohtml5=False

Krautrocksampler was published in 1995, but, as I remember it, Can/Faust/Neu were all well known by then, it was more useful for some of the more obscure artists he covered.

xpost

Can had a critical visibility from the 70s on that straight prog never did -- mostly because punk and post-punk bands repped them. You could read about them in regular rock mags here in the US, usually accompanied by a reference to Talking Heads or David Bowie.

Discussions of The Police these days usually devolve into making fun of Sting, whether putting down his new age-y solo albums or cliched jokes about tantric sex

For what it's worth, I'm 25 and the Police have some jams. I was at that last concert at MSG with my piano teacher--I was 17 then and probably loved The Police even more.

Dominique, i didnt get internet til the last few months of 1999

I think I used at my college's library in the late 90s, but had friends with services like Prodigy as early as '93 or so (which they was using almost exclusively for porn!). But should also add that I knew about krautrock before all of that anyway, just from reading about music. Blue Rolling Stone record for example had reviews of all these bands as I recall?

Probably due to his twitter account and ability to self-deprecate, Richard Marx's credibility seems to have had an upward swing in recent years.

Michael Bolton too.

Lionel Richie went away, Rod Stewart didn't. Elvis Costello soldiers on with a new batch of songs every few years, unlike Patti Smith. Bowie's rep definitely benefited by taking a decade off.

I think these are all different cases. The recent Lionel Richie rehabilitation is a complete fucking mystery to me, I confess: The guy was garbage in the '80s, why is that garbage suddenly popular again now? Who will children discover next, Kenny Rogers? Rod Stewart never went away, except he kinda did - all those "American Songbook" albums effectively removed him from pop cultural discussion. He was suddenly making music for grandparents. Elvis Costello, I agree, labors in relative obscurity, making albums for his natural constituency of NPR critics. Van Morrison is the real "how can we miss you if you won't fuck off?" guy IMO; he put out a record basically every year or two in the '80s, '90s and '00s, and nobody gave a fuck. His longest break was four years between '08 and '12. Bowie's rep improved because it took about a decade for the stink of his last three or four albums pre-The Next Day to waft away. Those records sucked, I don't care what anybody says now.

Can were definitely more obscure in the U.S. than VdGG or Gong or Gentle Giant in the 70's. though Gong were pretty underground here even by underground prog standards. solo Hillage records had more of a presence. Most Can was not released here at the time. That's the main thing. Lots of Hawkwind records in the U.S. and not so much Can. United Artists almost singlehandedly responsible for what did get over here. they put out Soon Over Babaluma in the U.S. and Ege Bamyasi. but finding a U.S. copy of Ege Bamyasi is REALLY hard.

Thought it was different in US.

Cluster's a good one, I don't think I heard them till the 90s. I borrowed a lot of albums from the sister's ex-husband's sister's boyfriend (phew) and it had some Cluster ... and Harmonia.

Hawkwind is a band I had heard of, but never heard, until the 2000s when Sanctuary/Castle remastered their UA albums.

it took about a decade for the stink of his last three or four albums pre-The Next Day to waft away. Those records sucked, I don't care what anybody says now.

Hush yr mouf. Heathen is badass.

I started writing a bit of music yesterday which unwittingly ended up sounding a bit like an electroclash track from the early-2000s. It made me think about how, growing up in the 90s, I didn't even know what electro was - it was a touchstone that had been left behind in the 80s. When electro came back into style, and then stuck around for well over a decade, it felt like it would never go away. But I haven't heard an electro rhythms in quite some time now.

U.S. copies of the first Neu! album probably easier to find than an american Ege Bamyasi. my U.S. copy of Hijack by Amon Duul II is on Atco! so cool to look at that label. there were some weird distro deals at the time. but all that stuff barely existed.

... and Kraan. Yes, seems like a lot of German bands had trouble even getting released in the US.

Pretty sure I first read about at least Can in the Spin Alternative Record Guide? There were probably also mentions of the Krauts in the '90s Trouser Press guide.

I just got a cheapish walter wegmuller double cd in the mail the now (not the box set with the tarot cards).

xxxp Late 90s/early 2000s electro, I remember that being a thing... went from that to electroclash. ADULT. as like the transition point. Afrika Baambaata, track suits, breakdancing, graffiti culture. That stuff seemed so fresh to me back then, for being retro at least. Weird how I've almost totally forgotten about it.

Hawkwind is a band I had heard of, but never heard, until the 2000s when Sanctuary/Castle remastered their UA albums.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:06 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A friend of mine in high school was way into Hawkwind -- this was 1989-90, and it's safe to say no one else at our (3000+ students) school knew who Hawkwind was. But you could easily find their albums used and (sometimes) cheap.

(Said friend is now a professional bassist who owns/plays the bass Richard Davis used on Out To Lunch and everything else from that era.)

Can (and John Fahey) get a mildly dismissive mention from Christgau in the back of his Rock Albums of the 70s

Fahey, btw, def a beneficiary of hipster adulation from the early 90s onwards

i'm guessing i first read about Can in Spin mag. Byron probably raved about them. or i read an interview with Thurston or something. in order for me to go buy their albums back then in the 80's.

Probably due to his twitter account and ability to self-deprecate, Richard Marx's credibility seems to have had an upward swing in recent years.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:04 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Diane Warren too.

forgotten super vibey tech-house records that nobody cared about and were £1 before are disappearing from view on discogs like Sunderland fans in the 80th minute

Jim O'Rourke did a lot to bring Fahey to hipster attention, or so it seemed at the time.

Mute reissued all the Can albums in CD in 1990/91 and had a major label distro deal with Warners(?) so you could suddenly find them at most record stores. I bought Tago Mago at the mall iirc.

On cassette too. Was it all of the albums? I don't remember seeing the later ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx5Eotio26U

I'm pretty sure the dinky little independent music store in my hometown had all of the '70s Can albums in stock in the '90s, so I have to believe they were pretty widely available.

I bought Future Days at a Best Buy (along with Sun Ra's Other Planes of There) in 1995, so yeah, they were everywhere.

When music is knitted into the fabric of your consumption habits – food, cars, sex, whatever – its creators are irrelevant.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

feel like this is a key point here

^^have observed this in my son too

I never heard Can until the mid 90s reissues. Cluster I discovered via a 1985 vinyl reissue. The tiny import section at my record store job in the late 70s had a few Can albums alongside Nectar, Gong and Hawkwind. For some reason the debut album from Lucifer's Friend was lurking around in a few friends' record piles when I was in high school.

Nana Mouskouri, speaking of 70s import bins, is overdue for re-evaluation

I actually fell in love with the album she made with Quincy Jones just last year. Fucking sweeeeet.

I bought Future Days at a Best Buy (along with Sun Ra's Other Planes of There) in 1995, so yeah, they were everywhere.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:43 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Best Buy in the mid 90s, in step with the "alternative" revolution actually stocked quite a bit of what had been obscure stuff to the point where in Minnesota at least they were even stocking local alt/indie band CDs, which I think it turned out to be a bit of a disaster for some bands that were used to consigning at the local indies (i.e. they'd stock the CDs, and later give the bands the money for any they sold minus a consignment fee), Best Buy I believe in some cases treated the bands as they did the distros and labels - buying the CDs upfront wholesale and then expecting refunds for unsold returns -- money that had by that time long been spent on practice space rent, ailing Econoline vans and weed/beer, so the bands ended up in debt.

I only first heard of Nektar a couple of years ago when Sherman Hemsley showed up on an ancient SNL episode wearing one of their shirts, and I figured they were worth checking out on that basis alone.

My local thrift stores are just getting filled with Bill Cosby records now, and I don't really see him having a career resurgence any time soon.

forms of metal feels like they takes up some of the space that used to be taken by noisier 80s/90s indie… like younger people with taste patterns that I generally recognise (contrary, 'alternative', maybe cerebral) seem more likely to be pro-metal and dig backwards into a metal canon that's alien to me (rather a Nuggetsy, garage one). but idk this is some colleagues in their 20s, my sample size isn't huge.

i mean i guess this is a version of hipster metal talk, but it feels like a shift to me

in Minnesota at least they were even stocking local alt/indie band CDs

Weird, didn't see any local stuff in Chicagoland Best Buys at the time.

Yes, you're right, i think. (xp)

forms of metal feels like they takes up some of the space that used to be taken by noisier 80s/90s indie… like younger people with taste patterns that I generally recognise (contrary, 'alternative', maybe cerebral) seem more likely to be pro-metal and dig backwards into a metal canon that's alien to me (rather a Nuggetsy, garage one). but idk this is some colleagues in their 20s, my sample size isn't huge.

― woof, Wednesday, 6 April 2016 15:58 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

YEs - black metal etc has taken the noise-rock mantle that was popular about 10 years ago.

I think these are all different cases. The recent Lionel Richie rehabilitation is a complete fucking mystery to me, I confess: The guy was garbage in the '80s, why is that garbage suddenly popular again now? Who will children discover next, Kenny Rogers?
― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:05 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.theonion.com/article/new-roommate-has-elaborate-theory-about-how-kenny--1411

What's wrong with Kenny Rogers?

Lionel Richie - popular because All Night Long has been a mainstay of populist dancefloors for quite a few years now

i remember when the beach boys were a joke to a lot of people around the time "kokomo" came out -- seems like mass (not just aficionado) worship of pet sounds became a thing some time after that?

i wrote about Kenny and the First Edition in the Pitchfork Review and i'm more than happy to get the ball rolling.

and early commodores were a magnificent funk band

i remember when the beach boys were a joke to a lot of people around the time "kokomo" came out -- seems like mass (not just aficionado) worship of pet sounds became a thing some time after that?

― reggie (qualmsley), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 11:17 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea when i was a kid the beach boys were often guest stars on full house

yeah, Kokomo was pre-pet sounds/brian worship. it came out when i was listening to all those Can records i bought.

During the 20th anniversary celebrations for Sgt. Pepper (and there were many...it got annoying) in 1987, Pet Sounds was frequently mentioned as "the album that inspired Sgt. Pepper!" It placed high in RS' best-records-of-whenever issue that year, and in this book:

http://www.timepieces.nl/chart/10489/1987-critics-choice-top-100-rock-n-roll-albums-all-time

pre-INDIE rock pet sounds/brian worship.

plenty of parents still loved them.

That's why I said most students can identify "Every Breath You Take" but not that The Police performed it. When music is knitted into the fabric of your consumption habits – food, cars, sex, whatever – its creators are irrelevant.

I mean, I still have plenty of moments where I learn the name of a song/performer that I've heard a million times. Also (from what I can tell) radio stations don't really announce the names of artists & songs as often as they once did though.

i went on a really heavy beach boys bender around 1994 or 1995? when i had a basement shop in philly. listened to them all day. that's when i was selling lots of exotica records. can't give away martin denny records now.

the Lionel Richie revival begins and ends with Can't Slow Down, his only good solo album, and critics were praising it in 1983 too.

i had a boss at the restaurant i worked at in philly who LOVED "Kokomo" and that album. she always put it on during the day. drove us all nuts. before she got to work and before we were open we would play straight outta compton and the land of rape and honey a lot.

Again, in the UK I associate the Beach Boys w/ that 'hip pop' axis of groups - Big Star, The Byrds - championed by eg ZigZag mag in the 1970s, and Creation Records in the 1980s (as far as the Beach Boys go, this was probably kicked off by a long and legendary 1970s NME piece on Brian Wilson by Nick Kent). Not so sure that The Byrds in partic have anywhere near the same kind of hipster cachet today.

WHO DARES DIS KENNY ROGERS IN THIS THREAD

People don't seem to really give a fuck about ska these days, be it 1st, 2nd or third wave, do they?

that was kinda my last favorite year for music. sad to say. 1988. i don't know how it happened because i was not the hugest fan of 1985-1987. Lovesexy and I Am Kurious Oranj and Spirit of Eden and EPMD all day long. not to mention Mary Margaret O'Hara. and all my fave 12 inches. i still listen to it all.

ska just sneakily turned into "gypsy jazz" i think. the last refuge of a SKAoundrel.

For most people, and I don't know about today, the Beach Boys was a bunch of fat blokes in stripey shirts singing corny songs about surfing. It didn't feel, to me, like they were any different from other sixties pop groups until I properly discovered them in the late 90s.

Jazz seems to be really popular and hip at the moment but I get the feeling it wasn't always that way. The Mighty Boosh even made a point of having the saddo strait-laced guy be really into Coltrane and fusion back in the mid-00s.

jazz is popular and hip?!! that's cool.

What about Hall & Oates? It seems like I've never met a millennial who doesn't love them, whereas for me as a Gen Xer in the '80s they carried too much of a dad-rock/yuppie association to ever be completely cool, and even if some tracks were impressive, like "I Can't Go for That," they seemed year-to-year more like commercial whores or schlock peddlers. I'm not fully aware of which aspect of their music draws in younger people, whether it has to do with yacht rock cachet or if they just seem, out of context, like classic soul.. or something else.

is it just because of that one hip album? fads have started with less, i guess.

x-post

My real epiphany with the Beach Boys was this 1982 compilation: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/comp/the_beach_boys/sunshine_dream/

I already had Endless Summer, and I liked a lot of the older songs, but Sunshine Dream was a comp of mostly 1966-70 stuff that I had NEVER heard before. There was always a die hard cadre of fans who knew about this stuff -- I guess the 90s is when people actually started talking about it. Of course, Andy Partridge was talking about them in the 80s, have to imagine all that paisley underground scene were onto them. You have to think Tim Gane didn't just discover them in '92 when Stereolab started releasing records -- for my generation, and slightly before, it seems like a long, gradual underground swell until all of a sudden in the mid 90s, it seemed obvious that the Beach Boys Pet Sounds era stuff was cool.

(and yeah, in the UK, it seems like they never really stopped being "cool" like they did in the US -- where they still sold out huge shows, just to "uncool" people)

we are to blame in some small way. ILM is totally a place where people come in all innocent and waif-like and then end up liking Hall & Oates. we are ruiners.

i mean it's an internet thing, but ILM has a lot to answer for.

I think the first time I was aware of Pet Sounds as being canonical was when the gay character in Doonesbury died of AIDS to the tune of "Wouldn't It Be Nice". And then it showed up in "Roger and Me". Dukes did their BB pastiche (Pale and Precious) in '85, DLR cover is '85, there was plenty of BB fandom bubbling around in the 80s.

xp

Dukes did their BB pastiche (Pale and Precious) in '85

'87 -- it was on Psonic Psunspot.

oh right agh sorry

The Ramones were all about "Fun Fun Fun" era Beach Boys, right?

when was that Sunkist Good Vibrations commercial

That was in '80 - '81, iirc. I only knew it as an ad until I heard the Beach Boys' original a few years later.

i never got to write about Danny O'Keefe for that pitchfork magazine. makes me sad. :(

I still hate Hall & Oates.

in Minnesota at least they were even stocking local alt/indie band CDs

Weird, didn't see any local stuff in Chicagoland Best Buys at the time.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:01 AM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

corporate HQ is here so maybe they do small test balloon things here....for a minute a couple years ago they had big racks of vinyl too

maybe it was different being California, but there kind of isn't a time I can remember when I wasn't aware of the Beach Boys, they were just kind of always there somewhere. I think around '85 or '86 my dad got a greatest hits cassette that had Heroes and Villains and Let Him Run Wild on it and those totally blew my mind

xp

Bonnie Raitt got some cool points with the indie crowd when Bon Iver came out as a big fan.

I think the guitar thing can be misleading, because anywhere you look, you'll find young bands with guitars, in pretty much every genre. The main place you don't see it much is in the top 40.
Yeah, I mean, my perspective is obv slanted, but I come across plenty of young people into guitars. What I do find is that they have less of a bias against synth/electronic music than they might have 10-15 years ago.

― Hi! I'm twice-coloured! (Sund4r), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 4:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you know i know ILM hates to give Radiohead credit for anything but I really do think Kid A/Amnesiac really did break a lot of barriers wrt to rock and indie and mixing electronic stuff (and i mean more for mass market ppl, because Radiohead is much more mainstream and almost fits that nu-Pink Floyd type thing in society)

radiohead was my intro to good music and opened a lot of doors for me (bona fide millenial here)

the beach boys always existed to me but they were doing 'Wipe Out' and getting featured in Tetley tea adverts

Radiohead is much more mainstream and almost fits that nu-Pink Floyd type thing in society)

how do younger people view radiohead these days? like people who were children when kid a/amnesiac came out?

like is their nu-floyd "serious rock" legendary status cemented among college kids and younger twenty-somethings?

What about Hall & Oates? It seems like I've never met a millennial who doesn't love them, whereas for me as a Gen Xer in the '80s they carried too much of a dad-rock/yuppie association to ever be completely cool, and even if some tracks were impressive, like "I Can't Go for That," they seemed year-to-year more like commercial whores or schlock peddlers. I'm not fully aware of which aspect of their music draws in younger people, whether it has to do with yacht rock cachet or if they just seem, out of context, like classic soul.. or something else.

Yeah, "I Can't Go For That" is totally ubiquitous at a certain type of party and has been for years. I think that younger music fans are definitely aware of some of the context, it's not like they've mistakenly heard Hall & Oates and lumped it in with a load of more "credible" music without understanding its less than revered place in music history.

There's definitely a certain glee taken in that kind of reclamation I think, particularly if you grew up with parents who were especially well-versed in the canonical stuff, the classic rock canon most of all. Can't do as they did and outrage your parents' sensibilities by playing your unintelligible punk rock at full volume but we can upset them by playing Lionel Ritchie or whoever. For this reason my dad was always down with my teenage obsession with the drug-addled insanity of The Libertines and Babyshambles but he couldn't handle it at all when I started getting into "bad" 80s synth-pop.

xpost - amongst acquaintances my own age (9/10 years old when Kid A came out) Radiohead had that god-like genius status as a general thing from when we were 15 until we were maybe 18 or so, at which point some people seemed to go off it entirely, while others progressed to like Aphex Twin and Autechre and started digging deeper into Warp Records and similar. I still know a few guys who rate Radiohead at that genius level, but I think for a lot of people they are simply very good and rather over-rated.

Hall & Oates are kind of like Fleetwood Mac, in that there's a long career that's all over the place, and people who don't know that won't really understand the band.

Like it's really fun to play this for people who think H&O are schlock, and watch their heads explode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6MVlSeaWEE

Hall & Oates are kind of like Fleetwood Mac, in that there's a long career that's all over the place, and people who don't know that won't really understand the band.

not sure that any effort is made to gain that kind of understanding by most people though. and i don't know if that's a recent thing or not. I know loaaaads of people my own age, girls in particular it seems, who very vocally worship certain parts of Fleetwood Mac (Rumours, 'Rhiannon' and 'Everywhere' primarily) but couldn't name more than Stevie Nicks and maybe at a push, Lindsay Buckingham, have never listened to Tusk and would probably be amazed to learn where the name came from or that there was ever such a thing as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. in spite of that, some of those songs really do have an extraordinary amount of cachet right now

Anyone who's seen a live NY Dolls video will appreciate the similarities. So a lot of this generational thing possibly just has to do with the way people are introduced to various bands. FWIW, I think B.A.D. are much better than Clash too, and I'm old. I felt that way at the time too...

If that video was the H&O I'd heard on the radio all the time, instead of their bloodless and pointless cover of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling", I'd dig them. I like "Out of Touch" and "Family Man" ok, but "Maneater" and "Private Eyes" were just excruciating(ly inescapable).

Also, holy hell is that drummer a dead ringer for Keith Moon (visually, not musically).

lol yeah I thought that was Keith for a second too!

I think the lack of looking into bands' history is a constant. Nobody (when I was growing up) who liked The Wall knew Syd Barrett from applesauce.

Radiohead is much more mainstream and almost fits that nu-Pink Floyd type thing in society)

how do younger people view radiohead these days? like people who were children when kid a/amnesiac came out?

― marcos, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 12:17 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like is their nu-floyd "serious rock" legendary status cemented among college kids and younger twenty-somethings?

― marcos, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 12:18 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes I believe it still is. Source: pretty much just things I've seen on reddit. Also when I worked at a record store 4 years ago if that isn't too long ago.

college student here - radiohead absolutely have that sort of legendary status, or at least did for a while when i was a teenager. i think people generally recognise the hyperbole around them now though.

You guys are invited to watch my H&O panel at EMP Conference, where we'll show the depth of their careers.

I heard a weird electronic song once at a venue and I was like "hmm this is interesting" then Thom Yorke's voice came in and I felt unclean

What about Hall & Oates? It seems like I've never met a millennial who doesn't love them, whereas for me as a Gen Xer in the '80s they carried too much of a dad-rock/yuppie association to ever be completely cool, and even if some tracks were impressive, like "I Can't Go for That," they seemed year-to-year more like commercial whores or schlock peddlers. I'm not fully aware of which aspect of their music draws in younger people, whether it has to do with yacht rock cachet or if they just seem, out of context, like classic soul.. or something else.

― Josefa, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 11:44 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think as you get older you drop these unprovable associations and if you're younger you never had these associations in the first place. H&O wrote good songs and sung them well. What's there to dislike?

the length and breadth of H&O's career makes me respect them as both craftsmen and guys (particularly Hall) who are obviously deep music fans themselves. also hooks for days and a good singer, Alfred otm.

Sorry guys, but even my beloved Emm Gryner recording an EP of H&O covers couldn't convert me (her version of "She's Gone" is pretty enough, though)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URsyvChOu08

People don't seem to really give a fuck about ska these days, be it 1st, 2nd or third wave, do they?

― draxx them sklounst (dog latin), Thursday, April 7, 2016 1:34 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people still love all the No Doubt singles but not really anything else I think

The Police sound is all over the place these days (Maroon 5, Bruno Mars, etc.), the gypsy melody in high voice over reggae-lite arrangement.

the only time the H&O revival annoyed me was when Sacred Songs started getting press in the mid and late '00s; like duh OF COURSE the Robert Fripp collaboration would get more attention than "Say It Isn't So."

Hall & Oates dislike is really just a function of ignorance, ultimately. And no judgement on people who don't know things like NYCNY. Access to info about music is weird and comes from very constrained sources. There's some interesting Madness stuff out there that isn't "Our House." Literally one article in a major media spot can completely change a band's status.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epLXwup4bpA

The Rolling Stones are cool again, comment upthread about not liking The Beatles now "a cool guy thing to do" is so otm. I was having a Beatles vs. Stones conversation with a friend about a year ago and he said "I'm more of a Goat's Head Soup kind of guy." Maybe it's the fact that they haven't released an album since 2005.

H&O wrote good songs and sung them well. What's there to dislike?

But then so did Teena Marie, and I don't hear her records when young folks party. It just seems H&O are being specially singled out out for some x factor.

The Police sound is all over the place these days (Maroon 5, Bruno Mars, etc.), the gypsy melody in high voice over reggae-lite arrangement.

agree with this, and again think this discussion is more critical reception than popular appreciation. Among pop pro songwriters, I'd wager Sting's value has depreciated much

hasn't that is

Not music, but I am profoundly dismayed by the ascendancy of professional wrestling's hipster cachet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJt50iT0HIg

http://www.feelnumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Screen-shot-2011-04-25-at-4.15.13-PM.png

i've always felt like it was really healthy to deny thy father and hate the beatles or whoever when you are young and find your own way and embrace what is happening in the world NOW or find alternate streams. and then listen to nothing but steely dan and Mccartney II demos when you are sad and old.

At the end of the day, one band basically predicted everything...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMGMhX-d0IY

yeah hating on Beatles. I get it -- but it's kind of like hating on Gershwin or someone. You don't have to listen to that stuff, or think it "holds up" as entertainment or whatever, but if you're in any way invested in songs as pieces of art, it's silly to hate them.

Yeah, and it'll come back around. Remember when the Beatles 1 compilation came out in 2000 and was the best selling album of the year? Maybe second behind N*SYNC? I remember Jim DeRo was flabbergasted it sold so well.

Disagree fwiw (xp)

Not that I hate them.

I'm open. I mean, I happen to love the Beatles -- but even if I didn't, it would be hard to argue they weren't game-changers. Not just because they were big, but because people didn't write songs like them until they came around -- and at the same time, they seemed to be a part of the same continuum as the old classic pop songwriters.

A better example for me would be Dylan. I don't care about him, but to deny his importance as a songwriter is kind of silly. Too many people using him as a model to deny the impact.

i was too cool for the beatles as a 90s teen. and even once i came to terms w/ being deeply uncool i guess i took them for granted or something, b/c i never really tried to listen to them outside of the ubiquitous stuff. (my parents were super-young country/pop fans who never made me listen to them either.)

last year i started going slowly through their stuff in chronological order, and having listened to so much other music at this point it's kind of been an interesting experience. (currently about to start rubber soul.)

Re: Beatles, hasn't Ringo opinion shifted from "luckiest man in pop history" to "underrated drumming great with perfect time and tasteful fills"?

waiting for "with better solo career hits" to be part of that reappraisal (cos it's true)

I've thought a lot about this, specifically relating to my own (and the world's broader) appetite for drone, experimental and electro acoustic music. All the Stockhausen samples on Demdike Stare electrifying my ears and the ears of my friends were eye-opening.

Much discussion in this thread pertains to the staying power of the artist, or larger societal notions of "cool", but I think the two biggest factors in changing people's taste are simply: broader accessibility of music, commodification of music.

Neu! has lost its appeal to most because it's already been bettered by so many of its followers. Its accessibility leads people to not view it as "seminal" but just as something that's been done better since then. Original distaste to Lionel and Phil was probably due to over-exposure, now? nobody is overexposed except maybe Drake. Accessibility has evened the playing field and I don't think people care nearly as much about music's context so much as they care about its quality and the public persona of the artist...

Commodification has made people move more difficult imo, never thought SOTL would be the clearest and biggest and best band on Kranky, after Grouper. Classical music is back in a big way because those textures just don't exist outside of film score in people's daily environments. Idk I see basic hipsters at solo gong concerts and Concord Sonata and it's not for cool points. They're actually looking for "new" sounds. In 2016 Boulez sounds like a relief to my ears and theirs. Too much CRJ in the cab and in the thinkpiece.

Nana Mouskouri is better than Carpenters, and def is in need of a revival. Never understood why the world had not so much interest in Yma Sumac and Buffy Sainte-Marie and other ballsy female voices (Dagmar Krause, Diamanda), but I think that's more patriarchal than aesthetic.

Tom waits? What is that music even for? I don't understand what usefulness that music serves, there is no mood created that serves as suitable accompaniment to any activity except maybe sillydancing with toddlers, nobody wants to be him or have him over, he is a filmmaker pretending to be a musician or something, and I can't deny how great his songs are-- so great!-- but the drunk-not-actually-drunk I-made-a-drum-out-of-a-bleach-bottle aesthetic is actually my uncle's steampunk cosplay. Worst musician after Zappa. Who, thankfully, most people have forgotten existed, I feel like he's more famous for his terrific 80s testimonials before congress now than he was for his terrible "dick joke in 15/8!" music.

I heard a weird electronic song once at a venue and I was like "hmm this is interesting" then Thom Yorke's voice came in and I felt unclean

― ejemplo (crüt), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 11:46 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maybe it was a Flying Lotus track or one of TY's fantastic solo records.

In my world of young people, Radiohead is very present, even among people who mainly listen to rap and have them as their token arty electronic rock type band.

In 1996, Time Life Music gets to the heart of a decade...

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpl1/v/t1.0-9/12923265_1584782645168715_4628087803903826249_n.jpg?oh=03e496ddc99b831051d650ff8fd66a95&oe=57BA18C8

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1/v/t1.0-9/12923234_1584782788502034_8895001366037045360_n.jpg?oh=07429e5aad0fad4a4d1e36530ca9fd89&oe=577E18D0

Feel like in the 90s both Elton John and Stevie Wonder were hideous, mawkish figures of fun that your grandparents might like. Fast forward to the days of X Factor and you'd think they were all people listened to.

I think the pendulum has swung so far with h&o that now they're actually kind of overrated

"Sarah smile" and "your kiss is on my list" aside

i've always loved sarah smile so much. such a glorious creation.

sorry sara smile...

I always thought ABBA were considered a bit of a cheesy musicals and student-nights band until more recently, when people started digging out The Visitors again...

― draxx them sklounst (dog latin), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 7:06 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

playing this now! i have always liked my ABBA gold collection or whatever it's called, but i didn't know they had a moody latter day cult favorite.

"Laptop DJs aren't real DJs" isn't something I hear anymore, but was the de rigueur sentiment a decade ago.

first time i heard H&O outside of the radio (loved rich girl on the radio) was when my father brought home Livetime. which is a pretty good live album. i don't know why he bought it being the jazzhead he was. but he did like steely dan and stuff like that.

yeah the Visitors is classic, probably their best record, though Super Trouper is about as moody, maybe a bit more solemn sounding

Feel like in the 90s both Elton John and Stevie Wonder were hideous, mawkish figures of fun that your grandparents might like. Fast forward to the days of X Factor and you'd think they were all people listened to.

― suffeeciant attreebution (aldo), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 1:47 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think stevie wonder ever lost his cache among the kinds of people with wall to ceiling LP shelves. he is to big of a talent to dismiss like that.

elton john is a different story. he is amazing of course but in a sort of campy, sing-tiny-dancer-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-when-the-bar's-closing kind of way.

Re: Beatles, hasn't Ringo opinion shifted from "luckiest man in pop history" to "underrated drumming great with perfect time and tasteful fills"?

― dinnerboat, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 12:26 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Probably accurate, although I always thought the latter (tbh didn't even know he was "underrated" until I started spending time around muso types who dissed him). FWIW, I just heard an old interview with George Martin where he talked about how instantly impressed he was with Ringo's drumming when he joined the band, and how in-demand Ringo was at the time, so I think it's only bitter chops monsters who ever propagated that idea.

when i was little i associated elton john with billy joel. it's my impression now that millennials have no time for the latter. i kind of have time for billy joel, but i think truly liking him means embracing the fact that the personality that comes across in his songs is an embittered, passive aggressive pos

xp paul mccartney has led the reappraisal of ringo's drumming skills. he makes a point of mentioning it all the time in interviews and stuff. "always on time" "the secret of our success" (these aren't exact quotes but still)

xp

well Ringo did get subbed out on their first single, so G-Mart might be knitting some patch-up work there

Billy Joel is someone who has NOT escaped his audience for me. In addition to disliking the things you say, I also associate him with certain moderately conservative, obnoxious Long Island types.

George Martin where he talked about how instantly impressed he was with Ringo's drumming when he joined the band, and how in-demand Ringo was at the time, so I think it's only bitter chops monsters who ever propagated that idea

so impressed that he had him sit out their first recording session with Ringo

lol xpost

haha

i don't think stevie wonder ever lost his cache among the kinds of people with wall to ceiling LP shelves. he is to big of a talent to dismiss like that.

impression slightly different in England

if you want to get on the hepcat ground floor you gotta spend a dollar and get the 1978 album by Pete C. Johnson that i'm listening to right now. so cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpFMglrO7Qs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYXMTBhDY90

i think young ppl do like billy joel, though. didn't he headline coachella last year? and i def heard jack antonoff or somebody like that singing his praises recently.

"snowblind" is my new anthem. even nils lofgren sounds great.

Worst musician after Zappa. Who, thankfully, most people have forgotten existed, I feel like he's more famous for his terrific 80s testimonials before congress now than he was for his terrible "dick joke in 15/8!" music.

― got a long list of ILXors (fgti), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 1:37 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. I don't think I've ever encountered a single musician under 50 (and not many over 50) who extolled Zappa's work. The handful of people I know who liked him in the '80s or '90s now either see him as an unfortunate but necessary stepping stone to much better shit, an embarrassment, or both.

i think young ppl do like billy joel, though. didn't he headline coachella last year? and i def heard jack antonoff or somebody like that singing his praises recently.

― dc, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 2:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa. i was not aware of this stuff.

man, living Queens has revealed a level of Billy Joel admiration I never knew existed

in bushwick i never hear billy joel. i hear elton john a lot.

my parents are from long island and i think billy joel and bruce springsteen were the two artists they mainly listened to in the 70s and 80s

Motorhead were considered kind of scuzzy and icky back in the day. Then about 10 years ago people realized they loved them.

my in-laws are from southern CT and fuck they LOVE billy joel, like fucking billy joel sing-alongs at the piano at family gatherings, it is brutal, for me he was always just this anonymous voice behind radio hits, i never even knew that a bunch of his famous songs were by the same person

I also associate him with certain moderately conservative, obnoxious Long Island types.

― human life won't become a cat (man alive), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 2:00 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea just sub CT for long island here

in laws standing around a synth playing "You're Only Human."

haha

Got to love that Lennon zing though, "Best drummer in the world? He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles!"

are people going to reappraise joel's early work with attila? has anyone ever heard this album?

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0003/338/MI0003338328.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

yeah billy joel is not remotely cool hey? I can't listen to tell her about it or for the longest time while my wife is at home or she would probably murder me

when i was little i associated elton john with billy joel. it's my impression now that millennials have no time for the latter. i kind of have time for billy joel, but i think truly liking him means embracing the fact that the personality that comes across in his songs is an embittered, passive aggressive pos

Two or three years ago I worked with a bunch of people in their 20s who fucking loved Billy Joel. It was horrifying. Billy Joel is the worst.

he is a bad person, and a bad person in the way a million conservative long islanders are, as man alive said. but there is a kind of universality in that. he is the ugly voice of the people, an apolitical pop demagogue lecturing listeners about how only fools are satisfied and how beautiful women are shallow bitches unable appreciate the fact that he loves them "just the way they are"

man, living Queens has revealed a level of Billy Joel admiration I never knew existed

― Dominique, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 1:03 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yup

i remember the reverend posting something about being at a high school event in the gym and everyone is singing "hey jude" and knows all the words but this the first time rev has heard the song, i had the same experience w/ "piano man" at a high school party, it was awful and alienating

I picture a lot of Billy Joel fans as having thought "finally, an artist for the rest of us!"

one thing to say to his credit: he really does capture the experience/milieu he is writing about, and does it in an accessible pop format that usually resists that sort of idiosyncrasy. i think captain jack is a brilliant masterpiece of self-loathing.

man, living Queens has revealed a level of Billy Joel admiration I never knew existed

billy joel karaoke is near-inevitable at my local bar's karaoke night

i have a poll idea

u should post on the queens thread brad, it's so desolate

fwiw sometimes refer to my part of Queens as "Gateway to Long Island"

http://www.clickhole.com/article/lucky-break-couples-house-tripled-value-after-bill-4172

Motorhead were considered kind of scuzzy and icky back in the day. Then about 10 years ago people realized they loved them.

― kornrulez6969, Wednesday, 6 April 2016 18:08 (32 minutes ago) Permalink

Teh ace of spades being in tony hawk 2

re ringo, i wonder if more generally the value of chops has diminished in record nerd circles in the last 10-15 years (though i imagine it's generally been up and down, less and more niche)

you still get a load of eww guitar solos. esp towards metal but even any older alt rock band (except stone roses but even then you get less how amazing is squires guitar/manis bass/reni's drums than you did way back)

I do get the impression rock is at its lowest critical point in the us the past few years. modern pseudo-indie doesnt even have a lot of guitar at this point does it? the radio songs i here about from brad and maura have given me that impression at least.

Landfill indie killed rock off in the UK i think did you guys see that johnny borrell thing?

He came across quite well and surprisingly self-aware
http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/landfill-indie-johnny-borrell-razorlight-the-strokes-kooks-definitive-history

Tupac alive vs Tupac dead

i don't think i've ever listened to a tupac album. more likely to play a billy joel album. i liked billy joel in the 70's! he introduced me to phil woods.

so many saxophones in the 70's. and the 80's! r.i.p. saxophone.

been a lotta sax in pop lately. circle of life!

really? guess i haven't kept up on the sax pop front.

Maybe the steepest decline I've noticed is Eric Clapton. He was G-d as late as the 90s unplugged business, while now any interest in him is baffling at best. Probably related to the decline of guitars and "rock" generally mentioned upthread.

H&O wrote good songs and sung them well. What's there to dislike?

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

as I mentioned on FB, if you had been forced to listen to those hits MULTIPLE TIMES EVERY DAY FOR YEARS on the high school cafeteria jukebox, I'm guessing your take would be different. it's formative-years overexposure that's my issue, not that they are "bad" per se. I recognize that this is totally subjective.

also, I get earworms easily and they can last for a week, getting one of those stuck in my head is like being in hell for days

see also: Toto

Oh yeah, I never thought Toto would not only be cool, but basically the future of 80s nostalgia

Toto isn't cool though, everyone hates that song

y'all had high school cafeteria jukeboxes? being of the walkman generation i was not aware of this phenomenon.

it was torture, "Elvira" was really big back then too

(The Oak Ridge Boys, for you young'uns)

Ha, well, see, if I love a song I don't mind listening to it often.

it's formative-years overexposure that's my issue, not that they are "bad" per se.

OTM – 30+ years of distance from high school has been a great help to me. But nothing will ever make me not want to blow up a radio playing Bob Seger, Supertramp or Styx.

toto doesn't seem particularly cool to me except in like really specific contexts maybe?

i mean, i really hope silk degrees is considered super cool right now and i'm just unaware of it

Toto isn't cool though, everyone hates that song

o_O

Teh ace of spades being in tony hawk 2

for real, I think half the people in my school first became aware of the Ramones because "Blitzkrieg Bop" was in Tony Hawk 3.

now I have "Maneater" stuck in my head

THANKS ALFRED ;)

I remember hearing about Motorhead in junior high, kids writing "eat the rich" on their notebooks. I think if you were into punk or metal, Motorhead didn't need any kind of critical resuscitation

for real, I think half the people in my school first became aware of the Ramones because "Blitzkrieg Bop" was in Tony Hawk 3.

― frogbs, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 3:41 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Back in my day we learned about it from beer commercials

i might've learned about em from my so-called life

I learned about them from my babysitter, who liked to play "Beat on the Brat" semi-ironically.

"i wanna be sedated" was in regular rotation on alt rock radio, at least on WHFS in dc, in the early/mid 90s

MSCL also

either my so-called life or hfs, then.

well Ringo did get subbed out on their first single, so G-Mart might be knitting some patch-up work there

― Dominique, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 1:00 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the new book covers all this in a lot of depth. one, sounds like ringo wasn't having a good day but also it was extremely commonplace, to the point where the beatles were even getting to play on their record was almost odd, so i don't think it reflects that poorly on ringo, it was just the BBC way it sounds like

(but it does sound like martin felt bad about it in retrospect and really did admire ringo's playing and ringo always did hold it against him)

the weird part of the book was how the "ringo got lucky" thing was completely on its head, he was leagues above them and they really pursued him hardcore

ppl in middle school loved to wear ramones t-shirts

this is like 2000-2001ish

Maybe the steepest decline I've noticed is Eric Clapton. He was G-d as late as the 90s unplugged business, while now any interest in him is baffling at best.

I feel like 90% of the Clapton references I've heard in the past couple of years are about his racism and not his guitar playing.

he's so boring. and tedious. i'm glad nobody likes him anymore except for old whitehairs.

i heard my kid start to play tears in heaven on the guitar at home once and i exploded. scared him a little. absolutely no solo clapton in the house ever. i made him tell his guitar teacher not to teach him that filth.

hahaha

lol scott

you realize that's going to make him want to learn it extra bad

Even back in the metal 80s most people were like "What's the big deal with Clapton?"

But nothing will ever make me not want to blow up a radio playing Bob Seger, Supertramp or Styx.

I've been waiting 30 years for the critical reappraisal of Styx and I believe I'll see it before I die

lol i agree

was with my 12-year-old niece last weekend. pointed to the house on my mom's block where the hassles used to practice. said "billy joel used to play in that garage." "who?" "this famous pop star used to play in that garage right there!" "huh."

later on in barnes & noble: "that guy singing the song they're playing is the guy who used to play in that garage!!!" "oh...uh...that's cool."

Given the kind of stuff that's been revalued in recent years I still wonder why those first few Rundgren albums aren't hipper

billy joel is like a curse, you shouldn't burden your niece with that cruel baby boomer mojo

she should stay ignorant of billy joel, jgnorant and free

Got to love that Lennon zing though, "Best drummer in the world? He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles!"

― Terry Micawber (Tom D.), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 6:10 PM (2 hours ago)

What you often hear is “As John Lennon famously said, Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles.” My question to that is when did John Lennon say this exactly? Not only is he being quoted saying it but he’s being quoted “famously” saying it. And actually, when you really look at it, he never said it.

http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/mark-lewisohn-interview-the-long-version/

I don't have the personal historical context for this, only anecdotal, but besides the exceptions above (mostly major artists and/or closer to some other genre like enya) female singer-songwriter seem to be resistant to any sort of reappraisal across the board. reaches up as far as "the death of indie rock" -- regina spektor was ubiquitous in those types' canon and has now entirely disappeared

john lennon was genuinely an asshole though so it's the kind of thing he would say

yeah i think that's true katherine and it's a shame.

But nothing will ever make me not want to blow up a radio playing Bob Seger, Supertramp or Styx.

haha you can tell WmC is a few years older than me b/c when I was in like 10th grade Paradise Theater seemed like their post-New Jersey failure, and Pieces Of Eight was like "the cool old shit from the 70's"

I used to walk down the boardwalk in Virginia beach blasting "Renegade" on a tiny boombox

like, what do people think of sinead o'connor these days? i really like her early stuff but don't hear about it much from my peers or in coffee shops or whatever

styx is garbage

kids these days, smh

i don't think they should be reappraised and if they are, they shouldn't be. supertramp has more merit but the singer is one of the most annoying singers of all time so that's a mark against them.

See for me it was Paradise Theater that came out when I was like 10 years old and I was like holy shit this is what music can be, and by the time I was 12 I was all "I'm really into the album tracks on The Grand Illusion right now, you probably haven't heard them"

john lennon was genuinely an asshole though so it's the kind of thing he would say

― Treeship, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 8:46 PM (11 minutes ago)

yeah, why bother to get things right when you're writing about people you don't like

I don't have the personal historical context for this, only anecdotal, but besides the exceptions above (mostly major artists and/or closer to some other genre like enya) female singer-songwriter seem to be resistant to any sort of reappraisal across the board. reaches up as far as "the death of indie rock" -- regina spektor was ubiquitous in those types' canon and has now entirely disappeared

Maybe this is a '90s/'00s thing? Would need to consider some other examples. It seems to me 1970s ladies are constantly being reappraised to their benefit.. Dory Previn, Vashti Bunyan, Judee Sill et al.. (an exception might be Rickie Lee Jones, whose stock seems down). Fwiw I still hear Regina Spektor a lot, though I have no idea how she fits into the canon.

Aaliyah has been back for going on 8 years. But probably at the expense of all the other female r&b stars of the late 90s

It seems to me 1970s ladies are constantly being reappraised to their benefit.. Dory Previn, Vashti Bunyan, Judee Sill et al.

It seems to me 1970s ladies are constantly being reappraised to their benefit.. Dory Previn, Vashti Bunyan, Judee Sill et al.

Linda Perhacs, I think even Joni (who's never really been down) is respected even more now, the McGarrigle sisters, Sandy Denny, Linda Thompson, Jill St. John...cult-ish late 60s/70s folkier female singer songwriters have gotten some overdue props in recent years...though i guess this is all taking place in the cult world of reissue labels, Light in the Attic Records type stuff not like the mainstream convo

Phoebe Snow?

yeah, i tried to buy a linda perhacs lp at a store in philadelphia and it was like, super expensive

Worst musician after Zappa. Who, thankfully, most people have forgotten existed, I feel like he's more famous for his terrific 80s testimonials before congress now than he was for his terrible "dick joke in 15/8!" music.

― got a long list of ILXors (fgti), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 1:37 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. I don't think I've ever encountered a single musician under 50 (and not many over 50) who extolled Zappa's work. The handful of people I know who liked him in the '80s or '90s now either see him as an unfortunate but necessary stepping stone to much better shit, an embarrassment, or both.

This is really not my experience. Actually, I was talking to a young student yesterday who was telling me about a Zappa-influenced project she's working on. She gave a presentation on Jazz from Hell in my class last semester.

And then there's this

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alexwinter/frank-zappa

Yeah I know a woman I used to work with who is maaaaybe 30 now, she LOVES Zappa, Ween et al.

On the first day of a different class, a freshman mentioned his longstanding love of Zappa as a motivating factor for taking a post-1945 music history class.

ween is better than zappa i think. they have a terrible name and lots of terrible songs but there are moments of inspired brilliance peppered throughout their catalog

i like ween but frank zappa annoys me a great deal

i watched a Ween live DVD, must've been recorded right before they broke up, but i was really suprised at how many women were in the audience, which is probably just dumb assumptions on my part but they seem like such a dude band...but i guess the biggest ween fan i know irl is a woman as well

i like ween but frank zappa annoys me a great deal

― global tetrahedron, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 4:15 PM (32 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you just haven't heard the right stuff man

yeah I think Zappa is going to live on for a long time, there's so much to discover and I think regardless of what you think of him it's very hard to argue that he wasn't brilliant at least SOME of the time, and also that there isn't really anyone else like him - Zappa's work compares mostly to Zappa's other work

though I will say Ween > Zappa is pretty much otm. first of all, Ween have a great name. secondly, they're actually funny.

I've been waiting 30 years for the critical reappraisal of Styx and I believe I'll see it before I die

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:38 PM (40 minutes ago)

I have been trying for some years to convince people that 'Mr Roboto' is a fucking great song, to limited success. I don't really rate/know enough of the rest of their catalogue to be a proper front-runner in their rehabilitation, though.

lilith fair was mostly good, i hope those people get some reappraisal. i heard "adia" by sarah mclachlan song in the grocery store the other day and was like damn, we are still innocent.

I've done my part wrt 70s Styx. I hate "Mr. Roboto", though.

afaik, outside music circles people think sinead o'connor is the person who ripped up a picture of the pope and bjork is the person who wore a terrible swan dress and that's the sum of it

I don't see it here but a lot of kids in Buffalo seemed to know and like Styx in the mid- to late-00s, tbh. Also in Windsor. Maybe it's a Rust Belt thing.

well, "Blue Collar Man"

everyone otm with Hall & Oates and Yacht Rock in general. it was always soft corporate radio crap and then one year the ironic porn stache got big and they've been hip ever since.

strange relief to get old and realize, as all of these things cycle in and out of perceived coolness, that all is meaningless

everyone otm with Hall & Oates and Yacht Rock in general. it was always soft corporate radio crap and then one year the ironic porn stache got big and they've been hip ever since.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 2:34 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can explain this all fairly easily in my case, and i feel it's maybe pretty typical for people around my age (im 31). i know the music of hall and oates from my early childhood. im sufficiently distant from any kind of punk or rock'n'roll rockist ethos - probably helps that my sexagenarian mum and mother-in-law think like this - of thinking of pop music as "corporate crap" vis-à-vis some imagined purer, cooler music so when i was in my late teens around the turn of the millennium i started listening to hall and oates albums, along with a lot of other people of my generation.

strange relief to get old and realize, as all of these things cycle in and out of perceived coolness, that all is meaningless

cosign except i don't think this is actually strange

this is weird, because I just associate Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, the Eagles, and most Southern/dad/yacht rock with horrible tailgates/cookouts one wants to get away from fast

the girls don't seem to care

But it's as if there's a weird reversal that often happens where music that's comparatively bloodless (to use someone else's word from upthread) or edgeless in its time sometimes turns those flaws around and they become assets for future listeners

i watched a Ween live DVD, must've been recorded right before they broke up, but i was really suprised at how many women were in the audience, which is probably just dumb assumptions on my part but they seem like such a dude band...but i guess the biggest ween fan i know irl is a woman as well

― rockpalast '82 (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:16 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when pichfork did that survey of readers favourite albums a few years ago, with a breakdown of what people voted for by demographics, didn't Ween come out as the artist with the highest ratio of male to female voters? I think Spektor was highest female to male ratio. idk if that was statistically significant, or how representative of Ween fans in general etc

Regina Spektor, that should say

But it's as if there's a weird reversal that often happens where music that's comparatively bloodless (to use someone else's word from upthread) or edgeless in its time sometimes turns those flaws around and they become assets for future listeners

― Josefa, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 6:06 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i think about this a lot. like in the 80s there was all this 60s revivalism of new psychedelic bands and Live Aid and people aping The Velvet Underground. then in the 90s the 60s revivalism was about all the corny exotic/easy listening records that were probably considered lame when people were looking back to VU.

do young people dig Robert Palmer? I dig Robert Palmer, but I am 30, so not really 'young' anymore

i think kids can re-discover classic punk rock and find out what it means to them now without green day spoiling it all. sex pistols, clash etc. i've seen a few sex pistols shirts lately and not on mohawked heads.

the convo has long moved on but my boyfriend still listens to a lot of patti smith and always has. also kristin hersh. is kristin hersh / throwing muses more or less relevant now? maybe a flat line? i think alt rock made by women is registering on trend-o-meters to some degree right now though.

Sade to thread

Heh, one of my recording students submitted a recording of her friend playing "Doll Parts" for an assignment this term. Apparently, they have a band together and they cover that song. Hole is one of their favourite bands.
xp

so much of that mid-90s Lilith Fair stuff sounds incredible viewed through the prism of nu-balearica, I'm amazed it wasn't reclaimed a few years ago... and I think there's too many depressingly obvious reasons why it won't happen now

Sade has been and always will be cool.

wait weren't you just bla-blaing about corporate crap rock? sade has definitely not always been cool.

yeah, when I was a kid, Sade was like the last thing I ever would have wanted to hear, and seemed to be the essence of lame grown up music. And today... well, she still is, but Pfork covers her.

but Sade was't rock. she existed in the realm of adult contemporary/quiet storm.

that is entirely different from The Eagles or Toto's smooth crap in the middle of an AC/DC-Zeppelin Rock Block.

the convo has long moved on but my boyfriend still listens to a lot of patti smith and always has. also kristin hersh. is kristin hersh / throwing muses more or less relevant now? maybe a flat line? i think alt rock made by women is registering on trend-o-meters to some degree right now though.

― map, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 6:19 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am the least objective person to comment on throwing muses but alt rock made by women is way too broad a category. riot grrrl, sure. actual alt rock, pretty much just hole and maybe the breeders. everything else? lol no nobody even remembers or rates this stuff despite it being perhaps the single greatest form of music in existence. (an interview with one songwriter, I forget who, said the biggest market for it these days is children's TV themes, which is something I'd love to research and write an article about if I knew who would be even remotely interested in it or me)

i'm still waiting for people to get around to accepting Yoko Ono

well, I'm talking like when I was 10 years old, so it's not like I was a rock hipster looking for Zeppelin. It was like, if she comes on Friday Night videos, turn the channel and wait for Duran Duran or "Safety Dance" to come on.

By people, you mean Paul McCartney (xp)

veryone otm with Hall & Oates and Yacht Rock in general. it was always soft corporate radio crap and then one year the ironic porn stache got big and they've been hip ever since.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 2:34 PM

yes this is precisely what happened, congratulations

it's like posters can't accept that other people grew up without these hangups and preconceptions. H&O have never sounded bloodless to me.

Yoko seems like a good example of someone who's rep has improved over time actually

xp

whose

Her music was hard to find before Onobox tbh

it's like posters can't accept that other people grew up without these hangups and preconceptions. H&O have never sounded bloodless to me.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 6:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can accept it and i do! i am just stating my own personal take on the matter. everyone grows up w some kind of musical hangups. i'm not pretending to speak for other people because i have only my own experience to draw from.

bunch of disconnected thoughts here but it's already a long (and interesting) thread. not sure how much this adds to the understanding of popular shifts but things have triggered some memories. context: i've been putting a lot of time into scanning film from college and trying to kind of put my digital archive of my life to date in order. which is stupid and navel-gazey and a classic kinda mid-life-crisis-y thing to be doing at age 34 but it's helping me deal with life in whatever way so hey.

re: the Police - The first two records still sound pretty unique, and could probably find fresh fans, especially if Sting fades more. yeah those were my gateway, now shockingly a long time ago. but circa junior year (2003) my roommate and i were totally digging outlandos, it sounded very hot, very live. very 'punk,' i guess, which jibed with the kinds of shows i was actually going to at the time. we probably were very close to trying to cover "truth hits everybody" until my roommate realized he was not saying "she hates everybody!" anyway, i could see people continuing to rep for and promote that album in lists and so on, than i could a rehabilitation of their whole career. "they have this one great record, the early new wave stuff, it's great" - basically how it was pitched to me and that's always a clear enough narrative to win over a sketpic. but i could be totally wrong and in fact the later records, with the much bigger and less raw "rock guitar" sound, might actually sound more like where hip music is at now!

around the same time, i knew a house of women who all REALLLY liked "young turks." i don't know if they identified with it as a rod stewart song or as an anthem in its own right but i think the idea of young hearts being free etc is a good sell for college kids. this is of course within a sort of college town indie rock hipster bubble, the kind of place where you could indeed find people who would want to talk about Can and Neu!, who were both becoming fashionable to an extent - - - but let's not kid ourselves, almost NOBODY in the united states has EVER heard of either of those bands. and even compared to them, electroclash-y stuff was certainly a bigger deal, if we're counting le tigre and the faint in that. everybody had those records or at least everybody who hosted parties and put on records. but none of the local bands yet SOUNDED like them, it was all still post-elephant 6 stuff, some post-rock acts, and a lot of what is now probably very unfashionable straight up "indie rock" mixed in with the much-hyped "rock revival" that was happening at large. dudes with chin-length hair playing guitars and (in the stereotype) one woman, playing bass, as old ILM threads long ago discussed, debunked, unpacked, etc.

but the electro stuff didn't translate into functioning bands, except weird 'electronic music night' one-off acts with deliberately unlistenable, un-song-like noise and warbles, and nerdy backpacker dudes in dorm rooms who fancied themselves the makers of 'beats' exclusively. i think there was a real missing facility with electronics in what was primarily a guitar-band town. that's very different now; when i was in town in december i caught a couple of local acts and it was allll samples, electronic drums and keyboards going through pedals and stuff. so that's some kind of shift in popular opinion, though i didn't think to ask what records those kids like the most. i was in college too early tbh, i had a lot of tinkering electronic song things but never really got off the gruond. other than that i think woof's point about metal and especially 'black metal' having this huge huge youth cachet replacing nuggets (or beefheart, or indeed neu! or...) is totally otm.

a lot of this, then and probably now, is hard to separate from college students kinda still just liking what they grew up with and what was in their houses growing up. i knew a woman who was real into robert palmer. would have made a good comic strip about myself as an insecure hipster, with thought bubbles: wait, does that mean robert palmer is cooler than i think he is? or that this person is less hip than i think she is? (like the people who really only still listen to disney soundtracks or whatever...) but the people who actually start bands kinda get to determine how these things shake out. obviously when vampire weekend came out it was apparent that their being children in houses where 'graceland' was played all the time played a role in establishing this particular sonic palette. lionel richie is probably a slightly different phenomenon from this but maybe not? hall & oates probably did benefit from their music never really going AWAY for anybody who's ever been to the dentist, but their negatives kind of fading with time, as others have pointed out. the "yacht rock" video series (2005!) was a really key turning point for a lot of related acts imho. turned more people onto that stuff than one might realize, and maybe also just acts as a landmark of a trend that was already happening.

meanwhile scott's comment about exotica records makes me wonder if the bottom has at some point finally fallen out from under the whole "sending up the smiling sunny postwar sincerity" thing that runs more or less from the b-52s through soooo much 90s 'alternative' culture. as late as 2002 i dropped a sample from some hokey PSA film from the 50s into a song, but it already felt a little forced or 'obvious,' and i remember a friend kinda rolling his eyes at it... surely nobody still gives a shit about tweaking "50s suburbia" or whatever right?

a while ago a guy i know was saying "i've got this idea for a band, we're gonna play music people like." and i had just discovered "chuck e's in love," probably thanks to ILM, and was like "you mean like rickie lee jones?" and he was like, "fuck no." so maybe she's not quite there yet.

biggest surprise in this thread: ilx has actual new young posters! college students, 25-year-olds! there's hope for us yet. welcome, y'all. it feels like just yesterday when i showed up here a decade ago i was just starting to discover hall & oates! the funny thing is that for all the hype i've never quite taken to 'sacred songs' and i don't think its weirdness or frippery would actually get it very far with the crowd that's embraced 'you make my dreams.' doesn't deliver the same goods.

ACTUAL CONTRIBUTION TO CURRENT PART OF THREAD: i think "90s alt rock" might be on the upswing. to the extent that i hear young guitar bands they sound a fuck of a lot more like Hole or Bush than would have EVER been acceptable when i was in college, when basically the initiation experience was to realize that what you thought was 'alternative' was the inauthentic corporate shitty stuff you hated. i guess i'm thinking here of waxahatchee - there are some 'current' production flourishes with sorta dreamy echoey drums coming in but the space created by minor-key moaning guitar of a certain timbre is soooooo grunge. not radio hit grunge but the album track stuff. i don't know if college kids are actually passing around "sixteen stone" as a secret classic that you gotta here or whatever, but...

omg that's even longer than i thought, sorry y'all

multiple x-post to katherine: I think about your comments in the Belly reunion thread about their (and Lush) doing comebacks because nobody actually bothered to care about their work in the interim, how Tanya Donelly could do self-released EPs and nobody pays attention - the trend is ambivalance

for me it's definitely all that middling alternative rock from the nineties that used to make me groan as a child born in '92 listening to the radio in my dads cars but now i'm youtubing soul asylum and goo doo dolls tracks, like, every other day.

it just sounds like the replacements now (except suitable for a dentists office)

he funny thing is that for all the hype i've never quite taken to 'sacred songs'

yeah I realized after a few listens this weekend for the sake of a long piece of writing that it's more "interesting" than "good."

a while ago a guy i know was saying "i've got this idea for a band, we're gonna play music people like." and i had just discovered "chuck e's in love," probably thanks to ILM, and was like "you mean like rickie lee jones?" and he was like, "fuck no." so maybe she's not quite there yet.

lol

Hall & Oates were just kind of wallpaper to me growing up. I never really paid attention to them, but when all the yacht rock stuff happened (10 years ago?), it did seem funny they were brought back as something cool somehow. I mean, they do actually have some nice chord progressions, and the production is always great (if dated, but I think that's part of what people like about them now). My context for them was definitely not a "cool" one, and I guess that's really the thing that changes wrt the band over time. Old people context doesn't change that much.

the references to lounge in the 90s in this thread are a great example for this thread IMO -- that's stuff my mom thought was totally uncool, like the kind of thing *her* parents might buy for their dinner parties. To me, it was just great, cool productions, easy to listen to at any given moment.

sorry for sniping, Adam.

Robert Palmer was cool, he wrote and sang many good songs, including "Addicted to Love."

haha also not cool to me as a kid, but probably cooler than Hall & Oates

i had no use for palmer at all until i discovered "simply irresistible" in my mid-to-late-20s, and then a few years later got into clues again via ILM iirc and i've been tentatively exploring some of the surrounding albums. he really didn't have much of a cool presence at all in the early 2000s. halloween 2003 i saw a group of friends dressed up as the 'addicted to love' video but i think that was an isolated incident.

Addicted to Love is pretty awesome! i had to learn the keys on that a few years ago and was really into it. made me think of T-Rex for some reason.

no harm, Alfred! sorry for calling H&O corporate crap, they have a lot of really good music. using that dumb phrase is a bad habit of mine.

Didn't he work with Gary Numan too? That was pretty cool.

the bad thing about Robert Palmer, even slightly apparent to me as a kid, was that he tried so hard to be cool. Getting the Duran Duran guys and Tony Thompson for Power Station (who did cover T Rex), using those models in the videos (which is an admittedly iconic image). When I got older, and realized he was just a workaday classic rock guy who wanted to update his act for the go go 80s, he seemed even lamer. The actual songs are pretty time capsule mid-late 80s tho.

re: sade, "smooth operator" was the first song i ever loved, and possibly the last song i ever fully committed to performing, at the age of 3.

isn't the standard line that the band's uncool rep in the 90s had to do with the grunge era: the fact that their music was unabashedly successful and sellable, they had a vibe you could place in a hollywood film, the production was smooth and sophisticated, they were "multicultural", sort of a code for 80s excess when viewed from the vantage point of grunge and indie, which had some truth to it even though it was really misguided and threw the baby out with the bathwater and didn't offer much in return. of course now it's clear that sade made perfect music. thank someone with an ironic mustache. or any fan of music who is black.

to me he was the definition of a dilettante in the best way: he tried a style, often approximated it, moved on.

Sade's relaxed release schedule helped her rep. She only released one album in the '90s!

i heard "every kinda people" for the first time this year. really good tom moulton production on that one. anybody that good at selling out is okay in my book.

he had an exceptional ear for R&B too

i was into 'johnny and mary' in the early '00s but i don't recall how random that was

Todd Terje has a great cover of that on Its Album Time. Tbh I had never heard it before then. I detested what little I knew of Palmer in his heyday

Not every 80s smoothie made a habit of covering "New Day Rising" live.

One sort of annoying thing (that kind of puts a spin on how popular opinion can shift) is that you can post videos *in this actual thread* where Hall and Oates are clearly not yacht rock or wallpaper or whatever, and it's like water flowing off of an anti-water surface. I mean, they sound like fucking Led Zeppelin in 1977, but nothing in the world will apparently erase the 80s. Time has been kinder to Fleetwood Mac, though I'm not sure why. Same holds true for a bunch of other people here: they're frozen in a particular time, strangely. That doesn't happen to all artists. I sometimes wonder how this happens (or doesn't)...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgPjzwRzK2Q

also worked with the comsat angels, rescued them from jive

palmer track i've really been loving recently is his cover of 'you are in my system' (funny 80s video too obv if you like that sort of thing) xp

i was into 'johnny and mary' in the early '00s but i don't recall how random that was

Todd Terje has a great cover of that on Its Album Time.

'Johnny and Mary' is one of the all time most wonderful pop songs imo. Placebo covered 'Johnny and Mary' in 2003, not sure what that says about Palmer's hipness at that point, if anything

Time has been kinder to Fleetwood Mac, though I'm not sure why

Bootylicious happened

I'm turning 30 in a few months and I'm amazed to find I can qualify as a millennial, I thought I'd have to be at least 5 years younger.

REM are one of the first bands I really got into. I thought they were boring before that and I understand why people think that but they still fascinate me in a way that most of my other early favourites don't (I still love Radiohead, Captain Beefheart, Smiths, Morrissey, PJ Harvey but I don't think of them much). As much as the last few albums disappointed me, I really don't think many bands have something comparable to their 80s-90s output. Swans are about the only other band that I know that has like 5 essential albums.
I have faith that younger listeners will agree with me eventually. Fucked Up (not really a hip new band anymore) have a song that sounds so much like something from Monster but it could just be a coincidence.

I really should get more Tom Waits, "Innocent When You Dream" is so incredible.

I've always felt quite resistant to The Clash. I think a few of their songs are amazing but I never liked the London Calling album much and they always had this aura of dullness. And that stuff with Sex Pistols and Banshees criticizing them for being like a really annoying type of lefty students.
Perhaps I'd like their other albums much better because I've seen a lot of enthusiasm for the others. Doubt I could ever love the guys voice who sounds like he's singing with ulcers and a really hot roast potato (that hasn't even been sliced open) in his mouth.

Haven't listened to Patti Smith in ages but those b-side bonus tracks on Horses and Easter left a really strong impression.

I think Frank Black's first 3 albums should be up there with the Pixies albums, they still really amaze me.

It's really odd, the tribalism and prejudices of the not too distant past seems really oppressive and unpleasant to look back on. Vaguely nightmarish even, thinking of having lived longer with all that bullshit.
I would like a tad more of a backlash against the thinkpiece stuff though, but I guess that stuff will easily be forgotten and the pop music can easily detach and live on.

Since there's less emphasis on rock bands being fashionable, do you still get any embarrassing attempts to keep up with the trends?

Has Lisa Germano's fanbase altered at all. Haven't listened to her in ages.

i like hall and oates (again, millenial). my other all-time favorites are john fahey, sterolab, and my bloody valentine. i grew up listening to john williams soundtracks, beethoven (weird 7 year old obsessed with beethoven) and then pop punk like operation ivy and dillinger four. radiohead openeed my ears to weirder stuff. also the internet has ruined my brain. thx for reading

Recent BBC documentary on women in bands had Elkie Brooks on saying Robert Palmer broke up Vinegar Joe because he was jealous that she was getting more attention than him.

re: hall & oates and "this actual thread" - yeah totally, but the thing is the hall & oates that's getting revived in popular opinion is not their "zeppelin" sounding stuff (a bit of a stretch imho but sure) or even sacred songs, it's exactly the stuff that defines their hit sound, and also the smoother/rainy-day pop stuff from the 70s (e.g. abandoned luncheonette). i would have thought that the latter was just me, but i saw a peer posting about that album on instagram a while back. it's not the totality of their career, but neither does the totality of fleetwood mac = rumours + "rhiannon" + "gypsy" but there you go.

picking up a lot of threads at once:

lisa germano's fanbase probably has to do with her music becoming absolutely awful, pretty much everything after lullaby for liquid pig is not good (happiness is a classic though)

not only could tanya donelly release a bunch of EPs without whatever "public opinion" we're talking about noticing happen -- it's happened! there are a lot of them! they're great! (kristin hersh probably comes out a bit better here, but mostly because of rat girl -- afaik the last throwing muses album is classic to me and only me, and I bet 75% of this thread doesn't even know her last solo album even exists. (let alone its original, superior tracklisting, but I think I've proven that I am not the barometer of public opinion here)

re: lounge -- trip-hop is an interesting case because its sound has been reappropriated en masse -- I still find it hilarious that one of the single most influential people in how critically beloved music sounds is from fucking ESTHERO -- but with the exceptions of the first three massive attack albums, mezzanine and reddit threads about people's sex lives, nobody will touch the rest of it

Fleetwood Mac always had its English rhythm section and several incarnations (some wonderful) before Buckingham-Nicks. Their catalog's deep enough for old timers to say, "Er, the Bob Welsh-Jeremy Spencer period was the best, man."

"i think "90s alt rock" might be on the upswing"

i've had a lot of young bands play at my store and i hear that Matador sound a lot. or stuff that sounds like it could have been on Matador back in the 90's. it's a pretty big thing now.

what other 90's stuff has been reclaimed/revived by young groups/artists now?

(not that matador was one thing - my craycray brother had a record on matador! - but you know what i mean...)

well, i'm a zep-head who scorned hall & oates back in the day and has only recently come around to them, and yes, it's their '80s hits and "abandoned luncheonette" that strike me the strongest, because these songs play to hall & oates' strengths. hall & oates don't sound bad when they're trying to ape led zeppelin, but they're at their best when the focus is on the melody and their voices (though "abandoned luncheonette" isn't as 'smooth' as its reputation- "lady rain" sounds like the violin solo was flown in from "larks' tongues in aspic part ii"). and i also love their todd rundgren album, which is all different kinds of fucked up and crazy, but it's hard to consider it straight up _good_.

anyway hall and oates are one of those bands that were, i think, unfairly held back by cultural genre barriers, and are benefiting now that such barriers are no longer really relevant.

as for fleetwood mac, of late i'm mostly a fan of the danny kirwan era, which doesn't even get recognized as an "era" by most folks.

there is a local radio station here that is really popular with the boomer/npr/quinoa crowd and its the only time i ever hear lots of people that i kinda forgot about. including lots of 90's women. joan osborne and tracy chapman daily. also elvis costello and joe jackson! but usually the good stuff like sunday papers and the angels want to wear my red shoes.

http://wrsi.com/playlist/page/5/

the only time you ever hear Melissa Etheridge deep cuts on the radio...

geir would be a fan of that station. crowded house up the wazoo.

(they also play tom waits and the clash quite a bit!)

elvis costello is one of the few critically acclaimed guys with a decent sized fanbase from his era whose records you can still find for super cheap. i always see 'my aim is true'/'next year's model'/'armed forces' and the other early ones for just a few bucks each. springsteen vinyl, waits vinyl, clash vinyl, that's all pretty expensive (though i found a super clean copy of bruce's 'the river' at a comic book shop in illinois a few months ago for $5.)

a friend of mine - old ex-skinhead from boston - actually came in the store today and asked if i had a copy of cut the crap.

In the SPIN Alternative Guide, Bill Wyman observes that Elvis Costello was the "least full-bodied and least influential" member of the rock pantheon. In 1995 -- when people still bought stuff like Brutal Youth!

i always see 'my aim is true'/'next year's model'/'armed forces' and the other early ones for just a few bucks each.

Probably 'cause they've been reissued about 17 times each?

Waiting for fretless bass to make a comeback

Going back to school a few years back (in order to obtain an MA, and now a PhD, yes, but I still interact(ed) with plenty of undergrads), the first thing I noticed in my discussions about music with people who were a decade/decade-and-a-half younger than me was that way more early-twentysomethings listened to Kate Bush than was the case when I was that age. True, she had come out of exile in the years since (two albums!), but these guys were really into the classic stuff too--hell, one of the kids I taught actually lent me The Dreaming!

OTOH, another student referring to The Clash as "cheesy 80s rock" nearly made me lose my shit on him.

A friend of mine once seen a Clash video and genuinely asked if they were Duran Duran.

Yeah I read somewhere, maybe on Marcelo Carlie's Brit #1s blog, that Kate bush was seen assort of "naff" previously. Sort of like Peter Gabriel, seems like his early albums have picked up more cache in recent years maybe thanks to increasing temporal distance from chuck the monkey and other assorted "wack" stuff

chuck the monkey to life!

ftr I'm fine with H&O's 70's output, Fleetwood Mac is a good comparison imo

also love Hall's vocals on Exposure

but I never want to hear most of those 80's hits ever again

I love blue eyed and Philly soul but Hall and Oates are just dull shit. Billy Joel is the worst, no questions about it.

xxxp Yeah, I'm 25 but I've been on ilm for ten years too and feel ancient with regards to taste and (to be honest) enthusiasm.

shout-out to ILM for turning me on to that Double album years ago. had no idea how good is was. never would have listened to it.

Curious where Elvis Presley lands in all this.

that brimstead post is epic

yeah, when I was a kid, Sade was like the last thing I ever would have wanted to hear, and seemed to be the essence of lame grown up music. And today... well, she still is, but Pfork covers her.

― Dominique, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 5:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

insane

^^^

xxxpost

I don't know that I have an answer for this, other than to say that I have known two types of Elvis fans in my life: the ones who acknowledge the brilliance (according to them; I have only really heard the hits) of the early work and think he became a cartoon afterwards, and the Graceland-vacationing types who love all of it--the crap movies and the Vegas stuff very much included. I find that I encounter far more of the latter than the former, and I kind of think that a lot of people make assumptions about Elvis based on these fans (and the aspects of his career they celebrate).

I've said this a few time: I've felt for the last few years that Elvis is fading away in the public consciousness, as unfortunate as that may be. In a way the Beatles aren't yet, although it'll happen at some point.

one of the big things, obviously, and a way in which women did receive a reappraisal, is '80s R&B in general. In the last ~8 or so years (?) where people moved on from disco revival & started "rediscovering" '80s R&B with the rise of Dam Funk and record collectors getting into jam & lewis etc. It's seeped into musicians' toolkits as well...I think in part, people looking back undervalued R&B a lot but when you listen to, like ABC or Madonna's "Lucky Star" and realize how incredibly similar it sounds to the R&B which essentially invented it (cf the work of Kashif—what is 'Lucky Star' but a Kashif record—of Jam & Lewis, of Quincy Jones [the George Benson record Whiney mocked on the Pitchfork list is in the realm of Jones' work on Thriller aesthetically...], of Leon Sylvers ("And the Beat Goes On"). With time, it becomes a lot easier to see how artists like Anita Baker and Whitney Houston (the latter of whom has had songs which transcended their era and remain floor-fillers today even among white audiences despite negligible attention from critics). It is not surprising to me that there has been a rebalancing where people "rediscovered" songs that have basically remained in rotation on R&B radio because the music was innovative and brilliant

of course in hip-hop '80s R&B was always cool, so we're speaking about a particular demographic's idea of 'cool'...Puffy was revisiting '80s R&B as far back as '96-'97

xpost

Reminds me of a convo I had with my old boss years ago about whether or not people will still listen to Frank Sinatra 50 (or whatever) years from now. Like, I'm sure there will always be an interest, however niche it may become, but once no one who has any memory of him is around any more, what will happen to his status?

in my estimation, madonna's stuff from the '80s in particular has settled a little further down in the canon and something like "love come down" has risen...without the cultural context of madonna as a superstar, and hearing her music w/ her persona flattened by the distance of history, it's hard not to hear how aesthetic lines travelled and think, well, this song is cool, but so is this R&B record that arrived before it (which tbf some better singing...)

i mean, i don't think you can discount someone's icon status entirely, or something, and im not trying to rewrite history, more just thinking about what i'd want to listen to

going off the other post... this is something i'd deplore at twelve. but now i'm like "oh that's sincere" and it was on rock radio. i can listen to it and kinda enjoy the nineties vibe that is completely frozen in time. it's not earth shattering, but it sounds so good compaitively that the snob factor has been erased.

and then when then you find out soul asylum or the goo goo dolls were actually sorta "punk" before their mainstream breakthrough it gives the whole thing more credibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQOBUrRaPU0

(xposts) Yeah, I don't know if the Beatles vs. Elvis is mostly a case of first-generation Elvis fans dying off a little quicker, or if it has more to do with McCartney and Ringo still being alive. (Or if, as I'm sometimes accused of around here, it's more Boomer myopia in general.)

Speaking as a casual-at-best Elvis fan, I think his fading away is a terrible thing. His importance is just ingrained in me.

fuck him & john wayne

i'm sure someone will disagree, but the beatles largely went from strength to strength before stopping, unlike elvis

pretty sure zep would be less of a thing now had they gone on into the 80s

Elvis had some downtime, yes.

imo elvis's "decline" is overstated, elvis made awesome records (and bad ones) at every stage of his career

elvis is at sinatra level by now right

thinking of hall & oates over-saturation in the 80's and it did actually take me years before i could hear some journey/styx/loverboy without wincing because the memory of radio and MTV playing the crap out of them was so strong. but i got over it. now i can hear them and enjoy them for what they are.

stuff that was hugely popular (like hall & oates) coming back never surprises me. cuz obviously if millions of people liked it back then...

i mean if i have to hear about one friggin' stone roses album for the rest of my life i can handle phil collins and lionel richie. (though again like with the above groups, MTV collins/richie carpet bombing took some time to recover from...)

H&O sounded great to me in the early 2000s and by the time i felt more comfortable with '80s R&B in general they seemed a little overrated

like, rene and angela's production sounds leagues better than theres just for example

*theirs

There's a conscious effort underway right now to draw attention to Elvis again, though, and I think (I hope, 'cause I'm a huge fan) it's having an effect. In particular, the 3CD Elvis At Stax compilation from a couple of years ago puts a spotlight on some really incredible, overlooked (because at the time they were split up into three fairly mixed-bag albums) songs from 1973. He actually did a lot of really great stuff between 1969 and 1975 that deserves to be heard by people who think nothing he did after he started making movies was worth a shit.

(xpost) I'm not enough of a fan to speak to the music he made during his soundtrack era, JD, but isn't fair to at least say he had little connection to changes going on around him?

I know the comeback stuff (and reawakened interest in the '50s in general) brought him back after '69.

people will always listen to elvis and sinatra. they've been gone a long time and their fans have been dropping like flies for decades and people still listen to them. i totally sell elvis and sinatra records to kids!

the madonna thing definitely makes sense though. as her icon status/stardom fades and she is left with the fans she has had for years her old songs become divorced from that glitter. and its definitely not a given that people will be playing them 20 years from now.

shits in poopular opinion

elvis's decline is real, but has been happening slowly but steadily for, like, my entire lifetime. the man had literally dozens of number one singles and a lot more hits besides, but i could maybe name ten elvis songs if you gave me a minute. probably if i'd been born a little bit earlier, i might have caught more - just the inexorable roll of oldies radio moving forward, and a very very big gulf between his sound and subject matter and what's now current... so that it's very hard to imagine a current teenager hearing one of his songs and being dumbstruck, omg i've got to hear that again... whereas i think this still could be true of most things from the beatles/dylan forward (to name two 60s acts that i had that experience of circa 1995).

meanwhile more generally i think elvis jokes, elvis impressions, etc., are definitely on the wane, with 'without me' maybe marking the end of an era in this sense. if you never really see elvis on TV - especially the vegas-era version that sort of spawns the classic impression - then there's no need for an elvis impersonator. and his films haven't been go-to late-night TV filler for a long long time (in fact i don't know if they ever were but i'm kinda just guessing?). i don't imagine he'll 100% disappear and it's maybe still possible he'll become someone like sinatra where even if they're not like "popular," they do attract a subset of contemporary listeners either for their style or what they evoke.

fuck it, maybe i should just put an elvis comp on spotify and educate myself. i've been digging this double-disc lee dorsey for a minute, probably time to switch it up.

"like, rene and angela's production sounds leagues better than theres just for example"

i'd just like you to know how alone i felt listening to rene and angela records in the 90's...

like, rene and angela's production sounds leagues better than theres just for example

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:26 PM

Well, this goes back to your point about Kashif, Evelyn King, Alexander O'Neal (and, I'd add, Stephanie Mills) serving as ur-texts for the white MTV saturation of their innovations. Street Called Desire and Hearsay are two of my favorite records ever released, but unless you listened to R&B radio you had no exposure. I know what you mean about liking Madonna but loving King (and in my case Mills).

I only recently dug into some Elvis at Sun: holy hell is Blue Moon a monster. Sounds almost psychedelic.

I'd agree that the Beatles' "arc" (and Zep, too) will make their legacies harder to shake.

blue moon is totally amazing. the original 45 sounds unholy.

all sun session elvis is basically untouchable. after that, you are allowed personal opinions.

Elvis's music will always sell, I'm sure--steadily, if not spectacularly anymore. I was thinking more of his Elvis-is-Everywhere/Dead Elvis ubiquitousness into the '80s, at least.

Grade 6 students are always interested when I talk about him and play old clips.