every generation has its U2: a huge artist that’s Super Important to people and taken seriously by critics but is utterly ignored or reviled by subsequent generations

(In the spirit of “Every big band has its New Jersey”)

Was talking with the kids tonight about this. They (elder Gen Z) do not get the appeal of U2, will not brook any talk of their being at all worth even listening to 3 minutes of. And you see this everywhere — I don’t think they’re gonna get a critical revival. Once Gen X is packed off to the nursing home, our U2 records will be the Roger Whittaker albums of their day.

Somehow U2 are still out there, still a huge concert draw, yet anyone younger than about 45 will be hard pressed to give them even a grudging nod.

(For the record, I’m not a U2 stan or anything, but I was a teenager in the 80s and the run from War to Joshua Tree still sounds major to me. Despite them being bombastic and cringey at times, it sounds like there’s an essential animating force behind even the duds of their imperial phase, and the high points are pretty fuckin high.)

I think I’ve identified the U2 of a couple of previous generations, and the elder daughter put forth a good candidate for the millennial version. I have a speculative pick for Gen Z although of course it’s too early to tell whether that will pan out. I’ll share them in a bit, but for now I trad of poisoning the well I’ll just ask the question: Who are your picks for the U2 of other generations? Also free discussion of the premise of the thread.

probably discussed in the relevant threads about him, but i feel like millennials and after never caught onto bob dylan nearly as much as they did the beatles, which is crazy considering what a boomer icon he is. on a similar note, i remember me and my classic rock loving friends really digging jimi hendrix and there being a decent amount of revival of his catalog when i was younger, and i feel like he has so little cultural salience today.

as an elder millenial my generation never really cared about U2 either. all we got, basically, is that Bono is a joke.

Hendrix, Beatles, Bob Dylan... I mean there were always hippie/classic rock kids. Its my impression that that stuff has more fans among Gen Z/Alpha as teens/young adults than it did Millenials (when they were the same age).

actually, come to think of it, most Gen Z know u2 as the band that forced an album on everyones ipod.

weezer

(one hopes)

These guys are from England and who gives a shit?

there was a time when Elvis records were certain sellers at a market stall, now I would probably not even bother pricing them

i remember when Bowie died i felt you could put together a pretty good pop music cosmology that had him as year zero and consign the entire 1960s to prehistory status - macca has fought a pretty good rearguard actuon since then but i still broadly feel that way

yeah Elvis fits in here for sure

Is the Millennial version Arcade Fire?

i'm borderline gen z and love zooropa

never got into dylan though

Coldplay, surely?

xp

i'm elder gen z i guess and u2 despite everything are one of my favourite bands. admire dylan but rarely listen to him, same with a lot of people i suspect.

REM - when I was growing up in the 90s they seemed as big a deal as U2 but they're never spoken about now, at least not anywhere I hear or see

The Strokes lost a lot of fans on their last few tours, I think. It's more 'Seven Nations Army' / 'Mr Brightside' that everyone knows from that era.

I was born in the mid 80s and I think both U2 and REM had unusually long runs as 'current' bands, i.e. I remember the music press in the early 2000s still treating new their new albums and tours as big events, when most of their contemporaries were by that stage regarded as legacy acts or has-beens. Maybe they're less of a big deal for younger people because they never really went away long enough for people to rediscover them? (or because the memories of the mediocre late period albums still loom too large) (I remember when REM finally quit in 2011 people pointing out that if they'd split after New Adventures then we'd have just about reached the point where folks would be excited for a reunion, instead people seemed mostly indifferent about them retiring)

a lot of baby emos are into Weezer unfortunately. My Gen Z stepkid loves The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys still

It makes me sad that Madonna seems to be mostly a joke for younger folks these days, even when elder Gen Z/millennial popstars like Ariana Grande have paid tribute in their own music

Post Gen-X generations may not like U2 but why is so much of their anthemic campfire-stomp music indebted to it (via Coldplay and Arcade Fire)?

and I'd say the same about REM, they're not a cited influence but you can hear it filter down in modern indie/rock

Madonna might be experiencing a comeback. "Hung Up" has appeared in several viral posts, and last month this classic also got a reappraisal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3VSjkR9Pxw

when is "god control" going to be a tiktok hit

Post Gen-X generations may not like U2 but why is so much of their anthemic campfire-stomp music indebted to it (via Coldplay and Arcade Fire)?

Think that set of (mostly millennial) fans generally loves U2 as well

Tbh I feel that most of these artists' times could come round again yet. There are some major artists whose work and stature has been repeatedly revised (McCartney and the Doors come to mind).

U2 themselves see these mini-waves, for instance Zooropa (and maybe Pop, if the P4K 8.0 of late is anything to go by) feel relatively 'in' now, 'U2 for people who don't like U2' type attractions to non-fans, where once they were more generally spoken of as 'skip those until you'be heard these others' to newcomers. And I've noticed kinder notices for No Line on the Horizon as the actual "last interesting one".

hey i'm older than all of you and alfred is right: madonna has always been successful finding a stadium full of marks. gotta send that ill-gotten journo cash to the proper collection plate after all.

The fuck are you talking about now?

i think the word we might be looking for is curdling, when a good thing with the right ingredients cooks too long. elvis is a u2, the doors are more like guns n’ roses who had a brief run of hits and were a word critical outlier but didn’t overstay so they can periodically be rediscovered.

i’m wondering if the millennial u2 is jay-z. huge and critically acclaimed through mid 2000s but keeps putting out late period garbage trying to stay relevant and that style of rap has no relevance to gen z.

*the doors and gnr were weird critical outliers

stepping back i’m not sure i grok the premise. there was a viral article recently about how rem was the band that disappeared from cultural memory cos they won’t reunite and stipe retired. it seems like they’re in the same category as u2, shouldn’t there only be one per generation

Is Jay-Z actually still releasing music

i guess not since 2022, maybe he’ll finally stop

for REM's part I feel like they might be on a little upswing. the Michael Shannon/Jason Narducy cover band tours have been really successful.

also it's not like they do much to keep in the public eye. Stipe does an interview now and then and Buck has all his little low stakes power pop side project
projects

Does Grimes count for late millennials, or is she not important to anyone anymore?

grimes wasn’t big enough you need actual top 40 hits for years to be a u2

Not quite top 40 regulars but how are The Smiths perceived by the younglings, has Morrissey trashed any goodwill forever or do they have the cultural cache that, say, Jefferson Airplane did for people born in the 60s/70s?

I've known a few 20somethings into Morrissey/The Smiths.

The Smiths endure for sure

Grimes is way closer to Dan Deacon than U2

also at least with my daughter and her friends they just get stuff through streaming I don't even think they are aware of all the Morrissey stuff

can’t speak to uk gen zers but the smiths are outsize big for us gen z kids compared to their peers with mostly uk hits like pet shop boys, elvis costello, duran duran, depressed mode, even the cure by an inch. morrissey has a kexp/npr/kroq hit every few years too, only very far left americans have cancelled him really

Bands that retain critical credibility and popularity over 40 years have to be the exception rather than the rule, right?

ill-gotten journo cash

I think there's some confusion between Madonna and June Carter here

Do younger people rate Pearl Jam?

I don't even know anybody my own age who rates Pearl Jam all that much?

Coldplay is the only band I can think of who are as hated as U2, rather than just not carrying over (like most bands). Even Dave Matthews seems to have more esteem now than back in the 90s.

U2's 90s work still feels pretty fresh and i think it feels like the work of an entirely different band from their '80s and 2000-present period. i don't get the roger whittaker thing, just bc for a solid few years they were regarded as actually cool (with some caveats), vs being regarded as lame (with some exceptions). i do think they're having more of a moment lately, maybe partially due to the Vegas thing, but also i just think they sound pretty good compared to a lot of bands that came in their wake via their influence. the Coldplay and Arcade Fire comps aren't off the mark at all but overall to me they sound pretty tepid and strained compared to peak U2.

Grimes had her chance to be a genuinely iconic pop weirdo, but she threw it all away and based on everything I can see, most of her old school fans think she's a joke now (while obv a lot of terrible people still breathlessly follow and adore her every move.) I still like her music but had to sell all her albums, just can't listen to it anymore.

another thing i'm sure everyone knows now is Oasis won the war w/Blur for American supremacy but the kids really like Gorillaz even more than both.

my point there was actually Blur doesn't seem to have much carryover into the next gen over here at least beyond Song 2, which feels like it's been overplayed to the point of being annoying now.

Public Enemy doesn’t really seem to have left any impression on younger generations.

I wonder how Metallica are received by the youngs. They're undeniably huge, selling out stadiums across the planet, but where they were once a revolutionary force in metal, they feel like "dad metal" to me now. I often think they're the uncoolest band I love.

My son likes Master of Puppets because of Stranger Things.

Public Enemy is a weird one, they were definitely just about one of the biggest acts at the time, just truly essential, and i just don't get a sense they have much cultural impact at all these days.

Sleater-Kinney is another act i think about in terms of having had a huge decline culturally, their image took a pretty big hit when Janet Weiss left in the manner she did.

ELP.

I mean, most other proggers seem to have been rehabilitated to some extent.

My son likes Master of Puppets because of Stranger Things.

― 138,683 Serious, Earnest Americans Emphasize Demand for Prepar (President Keyes), Saturday, March 28, 2026 10:50 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

stranger things as vector for revival for the youths is a real big thing (i.e. kate bush)

honestly, genz and alpha are getting exposed to old songs mostly via trending social media sounds (see: fleetwood mac's "dreams" a few years ago) and hit shows on streaming series, so its interesting to see which elder statesmen catch and which ones don't in that format

radiohead has a much broader audience in younger listeners than they did when they were in their prime where it was more confined to alt/indie kids (in my experience). but i think the level of intensity of fandom is different, younger generation much more casual listeners who'll play a few singles they like ("let down" is a big social media presence, i've seen kids phones in my class with an in rainbows cover playing something off that) whereas the few i knew who were into radiohead growing up were INTO radiohead.

Public Enemy is a weird one, they were definitely just about one of the biggest acts at the time, just truly essential, and i just don't get a sense they have much cultural impact at all these days.

― omar little, Saturday, March 28, 2026 10:53 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, kids' knowledge of old rap aided by the hugely successful merchandizing of wu tang, the film careers/film of nwa and later affiliates, and the enduring cults of pac and biggie. but lots of big names just dont seem to have any oresence at all: pe, eric b and rakim, shit even nas. i think theyre just so far removed from the lineage of rappers they listen to now.

I agree with m bison that it's hard to compare the way music reached ears in 1986 to 2026.

Like, I first heard most "college rock" at literal college, from literal college radio. Pop songs came to me via Casey Kasem's weekly top 40. Oldies were in my parents' record collection or on oldies radio; classic rock was in yr stoner older cousin's van tape deck or the classic rock station. Predictable modes of transmission.

These days no one knows what TikTok will throw at people, or what will get resurrected by a tv show. I'm not sure there's a pattern. "Africa" or "Don't Stop Believin" get comebacks but not other equally compelling songs.

I have a few data points - my own teenagers have a very funhouse mirror of past music. The millennials I know love RHCP (oddly) and Sublime.

I had volunteered to accompany a 30-year-old singer recently and she asked if I knew "Love Grows Where my Rosemary Goes" and I said lol wut.

I think Oasis might be a U2, even though their eras overlap.

frame of reference for any old shit i say, caveat emptor: i teach mostly juniors and seniors (age 16-18) at a high school that is ~98% mexican american in a mostly working class, low-income part of south texas. i keep in touch with a decent number of my former students on social media (age range mostly 20-30). and i have a 13 year old son who loves stranger things, plays guitar and drums, and makes way better songs on fl studio than i did when i was well older than him.

Does Gen Z care about Eminem?

xpost ELP is pretty bad compared to all the other proggers tbh

Who is going to be this band for Gen Z? Geese? Billie Eilish?

Hip-hop is interesting because a bunch of us lived through its rise and assimilation into popular culture and as such have strong memories of who the trailblazers were; there were few templates for people to follow in terms of tone and presentation so lots of acts were able to carve out niches in this rapidly exploding scene, then pivot into other careers as they aged out of the young person’s game and/or leveraged their musical success as a springboard into multiplatform artistic careers to eh have now (specifically thinking of how LL, Ice Cube, Ice T, Will Smith, and Queen Latifah are all much better known as actors than musicians these days, or to bring it back to PE how Flavor Flav became a reality TV star and leveraged that into being an Olympic ambassador, and how Snoop Dogg has made a career out of being friends with Martha Stewart). In many ways it’s kind of fascinating to see all of these people coming out of a scene that was feared by the mainstream go through the same career beats as classic Hollywood from the first half of the 20th century, given how differently the originating artistic scenes were received.

This is all a long-winded diversion to my run-up of mentioning Diddy and Bad Boy Records as a whole as something that matches the original thread prompt.

few xps: ime yeah, em was super popular with their parents, had 8 mile, late career revival doing speed rappity rap stuff

I’ve gotten the sense that the pixies are unpopular with gen z. As an elder millennial, it felt like they were this Big Deal (no pun intended) handed down by gen x.

Eminem's following reminds me more of a legacy metal act than any other rapper, just this extremely loyal hardcore fanbase of white guys of a certain age plus younger kids who see him as this icon.

Public Enemy not being remembered makes me sad, truly one of the greatest groups ever in any genre and those records still sound thrilling to me.

Hip-hop is interesting because a bunch of us lived through its rise and assimilation into popular culture

I've had some really interesting discussions with jazz drummers about the impact of hip-hop on jazz, because drummers who are old enough (like me) to remember a time before hip-hop swing in a completely different way from drummers under 40, who have grown up in a world where hip-hop simply is the sound of pop music. No matter how many old jazz records they listen to and how much time they spend studying with the veterans who are still around, their rhythmic concept is influenced by hip-hop to a degree that's simply not true of older jazz cats.

The Bohemian Rhapsody effect was obv huge for gen z & Queen. There was a year or two after that where it seemed like every time i was in a record store there was a revolving door of kids coming in & asking where the Queen records were. Seems like Complete Unknown connected in a similar way, but the canonical Dylan records aren't filling $5 bins the same way as Queen LPs

think you mean $20 bins ;)

well now, yeah!

(tbf I do my best to retain as little information about Queen as possible)

i'm sometimes surprised that you can still find a number of crucial Dylan records pretty cheap even in this vinyl economy. Desire, New Morning, Blood on the Tracks, etc.

true, and after Chalamet did "If Dogs Run Free" on SNL maybe that one found its way into some zoomer collections

New Morning is a funny one, most people have never even heard of it, but most Dylan super fans consider it one of the greats

I wonder if Beck fits into this.

xpost ELP is pretty bad compared to all the other proggers tbh

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, March 28, 2026 11:31 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I love ELP but yeah their cultural footprint seems to be basically nil these days, as opposed to say Yes who still seem plenty relevant, their good 70s records don't tend to last long in the used bins. pretty sure they both sold roughly the same amount of albums too

Moody Blues got it worse though, I've seen stores with entire racks full of their LPs, not even the crappy ones like Octave but the ones that are actually very good. there's just nothing about their sound that held up

i do a 90s pop intros puzzle every day (90s heardle) and every time it's U2 I completely forget they ever existed. Xennial here.

I’m personally glad to see The Who gradually being relegated to the dustbin of history after decades of Boomer canonisation.

I wonder if Beck fits into this.

― Come On, (Eazy), Saturday, 28 March 2026 21:36 (twenty-three minutes ago)

I think he does. I remember mentioning him to some co-workers (about 5 or 7 years younger than me) 10 years ago and they had no clue who I was talking about.

And I've noticed kinder notices for No Line on the Horizon as the actual "last interesting one".

it's the last time they tried to be interesting but it's also a bizarre mess of an album and doesn't deserve anyone trying to pretend that it's good

I think Oasis might be a U2, even though their eras overlap.

no way, "wonderwall" is still inescapable

Who is going to be this band for Gen Z? Geese? Billie Eilish?

When I was thinking of the Gen Z equivalent, I started thinking of slightly older artists like Lorde or Tame Impala. Or ILM faves, The 1975. Or that brief period of time where a bunch of Zoomers seemed to be really into BROCKHAMPTON, but that's not really a U2.

The Zutons

Oasis definitely still has a cultural presence in the UK...what about Blur?

Yeah definitely. And they have a plenty of gen z fans too.

Crossover from the Lola thread but it feels like Moby is one of these.

did anyone ever really love moby in that sort of way though?

The guy who licensed his songs to tv shows probably did.

Re: Public Enemy, we had this convo maybe 10-15 years ago and I remember pointing out the all the big rappers still were interpolating and quoting their rhymes all over the place.

I don’t think the post-Thug southern rap, drill guys, sing-rap guys or rage guys are really too deep into quotes and nods and lyric-flips like the kind of more reverent era of TI/2 Chainz/Rick Ross guys

I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t find a few PE nods floating around Kendrick/Megan/Doechii, but that stuff is like 20% of the rap universe now

Everything is Wrong and Play are still classics in this house

Also I always say this, but if you asked me in 1993 who the biggest, most important classic rock band in the world is, I would have definitely answered Led Zeppelin and it’s kind of cool to see them unseated by Queen. Zep were obviously better musicians and rocked way harder, but Queen just has better songs. Even before Bohemian Rhapsody there was this can help chalk that up to post-2000 push of theater/Glee/American Idol kids with the added bonus of society being generally more accepting of gays and gay-coded art

Also cool to think thread about artists who always seem to have a place in the cultural imagination. Beatles and Beach Boys for sure. Bowie had a little clout drought in the late 80s/early 90s but got it back hugely.

by the time "We Are All Made of Stars" came out it seemed like everyone's reaction was "ughh enough of this guy", feel like you at least gotta have 2 big albums in a row to count

Blink 182 though maybe, I hear people say they're making a comeback but I ain't buying it

Nah, they’re too catchy, and on the radio all the time.

Still play Moby's debut and the Move EP.

Have had a similar thought to Whiney but with Zep unseated by Fleetwood Mac, who make an all-guy band feel like a choice instead of a default.

xps I think people became much less aware of PE pretty fast for a couple of reasons - after their run of platinum-selling albums, they began taking fairly long breaks between albums (and some people wondered if they were actually done as a group due to a variety of reasons), but they also went independent, and I think that did a lot to diminish their visibility because from that point on, everything they put out was under the radar. (A good chunk of those later albums are really uneven but I actually like most of them quite a bit.) Even if that wasn't the case, it would've been difficult to overcome the lack of interest in classic hip-hop by newer listeners. I've seen this firsthand - the acts from that era put on so many shows and events in NYC (many of which are free!) and it's usually an older crowd, not to mention a modest one. Anyway, it's really weird when a rap act with a gigantic selling album from the '80s or '90s gets outdrawn by someone like Patti Smith, who had a few genuine hits but nothing approaching the same scale.

U2 strongly resisted being a nostalgia act for a very long time, which tbf is commendable, but their efforts failed so miserably that I think it put off at least a generation of younger listeners, especially after the Apple fiasco.

Beck took a long break, at least when it came to putting out "proper" albums (he was making stuff, just not that), and it was long enough that it diminished awareness of him in general for at least one generation. Then he came back with a low-key (if commendable) album, but somehow that won AOTY over one of the most popular artists in the world, and I'm pretty sure the backlash hurt him. (otoh, Steely Dan turned out fine in the long run after beating Eminem, so who knows)

I think Prince is a good example of how to turn things around - when I got into Prince, NOBODY I knew was waving that flag. He was doing Rainbow Children and whatever else wasn't selling. I thought I was going to enjoy his music alone, like he was a cult act or something, and then he made a conscious effort to put himself back into the spotlight: a calculated "safe" album in Musicology (even got Sony to back it), opening the Grammy's with Beyoncé, then stealing the show at his HOF induction, then launching a huge tour that gave away said album, a sneaky way to push it to #1 so he could say he was back on top, etc. He was still pretty much a nostalgia act from what I can see (and I actually liked some of the new stuff), but at least he seemed big again.

There are a lot of artists who stay around too long with diminishing returns—you could say the same about Pet Shop Boys, for instance—but some are still beloved for their early work and others are sort of forgotten.

I’m on my phone so excuse the lack of search. Has Coldplay been mentioned?

I have found Spotify streams a useful if imperfect proxy for the older music that younger people are into.

See, for instance, these charts of all-time Spotify streams from various decades:

https://kworb.net/spotify/songs_1970.html
https://kworb.net/spotify/songs_1980.html
https://kworb.net/spotify/songs_1990.html

Interesting reading this thread and thinking about my own experiences working in a record store in Minnesota for the last ten years.

The Strokes were mentioned and I have to disagree with that one. I am shocked just how well they sell and often to kids who probably weren't even born when Is This Out came out. The New Abnormal came out when the pandemic first hit and it was one of our first big online sellers when we had to close along with Future Nostalgia. I figured a few people were just excited to have a more traditional Strokes album again after the weirder Angles and Comedown Machine, but six years on it keeps on selling almost as well as Is This It. On Rate Your Music it has a crazy amount or ratings and has the second highest score for them. It even seemed to get people picking up Comedown Machine in our store too. Their back catalogue in general is much consistent for us unlike Interpol where we only really sell the first two albums or Arctic Monkeys where AM constantly outsells all their other albums combined (by a lot).

Coldplay is a weird one. About a year ago we had a lot of much younger customers asking us about them and getting really excited to find we had Parachutes and A Rush Of Blood To The Head in stock. Nothing ever seems to sell after Viva La Vida though. I seem to remember their song Sparks from Parachutes had a moment on Tik Tok a while back so maybe that helped.

I could not agree more about Elvis and The Who. We have boxes and boxes of Elvis albums that we can't give away. The movie did nothing for him and the only album we bother to get in new is the S/T debut. Everything else is in the $3 to $5 range. Speaking to other record store guys here, it's the same for them. The Who are another one where have endless copies of their albums. Last one I was refreshing our recent arrivals and found six copies of Quadraphonia in there. I reduced them all instantly. All the mid 70s to early 80s are clogging up our $5 section. Even things like Tommy and Who's Next sit around for ages and it's usually older guys who pick them up. I'm surprised we don't have the same issue with The Doors. Kids seem to be way more into them around here though.

Public Enemy just don't sell in the same way other hip-hop classics do for us. We're always selling Illmatic, Enter The Wu-Tang, Liquid Swords, most of the big Outkast/Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul/Beastie Boys albums, again to people who definitely weren't alive then, but Public Enemy just don't for some reason.

My nomination is Paul Weller. At this point it's hard to imagine many people buying his new solo albums who weren't either Jam fans back in the day or maybe people who got into him during the Wild Wood/Stanley Road era at the latest. The Jam just don't seem to have the same appeal to young people as Talking Heads, Blondie or The Clash. I'm tempted to say Madness from the same era too. My almost five year old loves them, but I don't think that's something she's going to bond with other kids about any time soon.

elvis got hit with the ick bc he married a teenage priscilla

in country, im biased bc i live in tx, but george strait has held up with younger listeners but i feel like garth brooks fell off the map and he was huge

re: Elvis, Jeff Gold of Record Mecca sat down for an interview with Ray Padgett and they discussed what happens to artists when their core audience dies out:

Ray: I read an article a few years ago about how the market for Elvis memorabilia is collapsing. Essentially because, to put it bluntly, all the people who care are dying. Is that happening with Dylan, or is there any worry that will happen?

Jeff: That’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about, actually. And Elvis is the perfect paradigm. The audience for a particular artist gets old and dies. In the case of Benny Goodman, who we were discussing before [we got on], those were our grandparents.

That being said, Benny Goodman was an important historical figure because he was the first major artist to integrate his band. When he got pushback from promoters saying, “Hey, we can’t have an integrated band on stage,” Benny Goodman would say, “Great, I won’t play.” So if you came up with some Benny Goodman collectible telling that story—letters from him saying “Screw you” and the promoters caving, let’s say—that would still be a really valuable item in 2026 because it tells a really important story in popular culture. But failing having that, the market for Benny Goodman collectibles is difficult to nonexistent.

Elvis is instructive in that the people who collect Elvis are either, for the most part, getting old or have passed. He’s a generation or two before Bob. So if you have an “A+” collectible Elvis item, it’s worth more than it’s ever been worth, because it’s a trophy piece. If you have an “A” Elvis item, it’s worth what it’s always been worth. But the falloff is steep after that.

The Bob market is as good as it’s ever been. When you have '60s icons like Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, a few others, there are younger people who collect that stuff, because the music has lived on in a way that Elvis or Benny Goodman haven’t. Eventually the same thing will happen that happened with Elvis, though probably a lot slower, because these artists are so iconic and are more popular than they’ve ever been today. But, yeah, it’s something to think about.

I looked into Duke Ellington out of curiosity - for my money, the greatest and most important composer in popular music outside of rock - and to my surprise, a lot of memorabilia wasn't that pricey, if anything they were much cheaper than something you'd get from most rock acts that had hit records, and Ellington's been dead for over 50 years.

Also, the Who definitely overstayed their welcome - as someone who'll defend certain things they've done after Keith Moon died (like two albums decades apart that could have been good but are merely okay, the few years they had Zak Starkey and John Entwistle in the band), I have to concede they've been a pale shadow of their former selves for what's most of their existence now. I can't imagine that winning over new fans - if I hadn't become interested in older music in general, there's no way I would've gone to see them myself.

Not sure if this is comparable, but speaking as someone who was never on this planet at the same time as Elvis Presley, when I finally decided to check out his records as a teenager, it was a given that his career was really, really spotty, so for a very long time, the only Elvis I had was via compilations (including a Sun collection). The ratio of bad-to-good was always notoriously high. As for the Who, they had a similar problem where Who's Next was the only one that I took to immediately - I enjoy the rock operas now, but at the time, they seemed too bloated. So with the exception of Who's Next, I mostly listened to their music via tidy compilations. I actually have all of the Keith Moon-era albums now, but it was a long time before I warmed to them.

The Jam just don't seem to have the same appeal to young people as Talking Heads, Blondie or The Clash.

the jam definitely weren't canonised to anywhere near the same extent as those acts yeah. i guess part of it is probably how they never really had any success outside of the uk? i've never really given them a proper listen but there's some style council stuff i like a lot (though i've never really dug into them either)

I feel like all The Who haters are seeing a decline in the relevance of Quadrophenia and Tommy— early Who is untouchable and seems still popular, no?

It seems insane that Moby still gets play in 2026 but I must admit I play Animal Rights with some frequency, mostly just to stroke my chin and say “Flood is good”

Moby could plan to release an album “Everything Is Transphobic”, maybe, Moby

Jam fans in the US are always anglophiles

Elvis didn't get a boost from the Luhrmann pic and the IMAX In Concert? Mentioned elsewhere but only last year I picked up the 68 comeback special on DVD, used, out of curiosity because I've spent no time with his music. I was blown away, to put it mildly. I wonder if there will be a revival or if the "no tours only movies" misstep in the 60s took away the chance to stay current for younger audiences, and therefore Beatles/Stones evergreen status.

and with U2, it feels like a case of "how can I miss you when you won't go away?"

Speaking of Elvis, shouldn't Elvis Costello count here? I know nowhere near as popular as U2 but a critical darling. I ever think he's in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame? But never hear about him anymore.

in country, im biased bc i live in tx, but george strait has held up with younger listeners but i feel like garth brooks fell off the map and he was huge

― big boodith judith (m bison)

Garth Brooks aren't on Spotify.

*Garth Brook albums

Even growing up in the 90's/00's Elvis was already one for the music historians imo. Remember we had grown up into a culture where 50's rock had been defanged and cutesified for decades, difficult to get back to its original context when The Flinstones In Viva Rock Vegas was in cinemas. On a more basic level Elvis didn't resemble what "rock" music meant to us, i.e. a group of four or five people with electric guitars, drums and bass (for sure no godamn UPRIGHT BASS tho), the more pretentious/baby rockist kids would add "who write their own songs". Even with the corny suits and stuff the 60's bands were much closer to this than Elvis. Led Zeppelin and The Who were classic rock; Elvis was just oldies. Personally I did get into him quite a bit but it was a very academic venture, I read the Guralnick bios, bought the big box sets for each decade.

elvis got hit with the ick bc he married a teenage priscilla

― big boodith judith (m bison), Sunday, March 29, 2026 4:10 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think this is responsible for his decline but it for sure was a major factor in that Luhrmann film not reigniting any interest.

But failing having that, the market for Benny Goodman collectibles is difficult to nonexistent.

bad news for Sheryl Crow

it's interesting to compare this Elvis discussion to the version from ten years ago, starting here - shifts in popular opinion you have noticed ... many of the same points i think, but earlier in the decline, earlier in the demographic shift, and before the Luhrmann film (but also before Sofia Coppola's Priscilla). and i have my own version of Daniel_Rf's post re: Elvis's already faded status for elder millennials/90s Teens.

50s rock & roll just feels like a completely different world in a way that 60s rock music largely doesn't.

"can't help falling in love" is very much a standard at least though

Springsteen constantly lands with a thud for my kids. His operatic sincerity goes nowhere.

what about the operatic sincerity of The Killers?

Springsteen landing with a thud both makes sense (ultimate classic rock boomer vibes, despite being the most enlightened version of that) and is surprising (I always assumed Queen's revival was mostly about younger generations being less hostile towards musical theatre, and Springsteen sure has a boatload of that in his music).

operatic sincerity with denim = dud

operatic sincerity with feathers = classic

This is a weird thread for a Brit to read! (I'd unpack that further, but I'm on a deadline and that would be displacement activity.)

Re: The Who. For a long time whenever I saw the Who mentioned on social media someone would chime in about Townshend’s CSAM arrest. Whatever the facts are around that I could see a younger person not wanting to get involved with an artist with that stigma.

The Prodigy sold a ton of albums across Europe and were a touchstone for a lot of late Xers and early Millennials. Their star faded a long time ago though, and I don't have any sense that they're likely to achieve popularity among younger generations?

I could see a younger person not wanting to get involved with an artist with that stigma

Where does Michael Jackson fit into all this, is it just the older folks still listening to him / buying tickets for the musical etc?

it's also wild to me how Prince's grooming of Mayte gets completely ignored

Yeah I haven't been following this thread closely but I feel like Mike here. The Prodigy are another band with a big young following in Britain, mostly down to the live shows and a generous run of famous tracks (their last brace of hits came in 2009 which still feels like yesterday to me).

Rateyourmusic, though poor for a lot of things, can be a reasonable enough barometer on where artists stand with super online gen z music nerds. The Prodigy's reputation there has only gone up over the last ten years or so. MJ ditto probably.

Culture has seemingly decided to give MJ a pass. I still hear his music everywhere, even from DJs at kids events, etc.

where artists stand with super online gen z music nerds

What about the remaining 99% of the population? Maybe you're right, but none of the music-loving teenagers in my orbit have ever even heard of The Prodigy.

MJ is Beatles-level ubiquitous.

xp Well quite, hence my emphasis on nerds, sorta a peripheral point to the one above it. But sometimes, or often even, a signal to broadening trends. I have seen three guys in Fishmans shirts in the last few years.

someday people will correctly assess thriller as merely 'pretty good' (despite the later abuse) and at most the third best album a jackson put out in the 80s

The Prodigy is very popular with 20-something American ravers!

mj dying when he did probably did wonders for his legacy

I wonder if in 2009-2013 time the popularity of Prodigy tracks (mostly recent ones) in a whole host of YouTube videos made by preteens basically - animations, YTPs, video game stuff - laid the groundwork for a hidden new fanbase outside the UK. Most of my friends made videos like those and this being YouTube the appeal spread far and wide. The result as I can see is that a lot of people in their mid-20s have strong Invaders Must Die nostalgia and not just in Britain?

xps Thriller as only "pretty good" is crazy to me, even if I can see someone making the case to rank it after Triumph and Control (and maybe Rhythm Nation, but that seems more of a stretch)

16 year old kid is aware of Prodigy and likes it better after the Firestarter singer left. I have no Prodigy opinions except i’m happy they helped fund the Breedera. I was surprised the kid knew who they were.

xp it seemed like there was a brief moment after the Leaving Neverland documentary where people were taking steps to remove Michael Jackson and his music from circulation but the back catalogue was just too monumental for it to really take?

The music will remain popular but I don't think you can cast Michael Jackson as an epochal artist everyone should admire anymore. Kids listening to his music doesn't surprise me, if they're self-identifying as huge fans, wearing MJ t-shirts and such that would surprise me tho.

I know there's that musical but ppl going to that feel like dead enders the same way ppl who go see new Woody Allen films do, don't expect much of the audience to be under fourty.

uh the most fervent MJ listeners are younger than 30! I walked into the Chilis on campus two weeks ago when "The Way You Make Me Feel" was blasting and a couple of students at the bar were mouthing along to the lyrics.

That doesn't go against anything I said tho Alfred

Getting really hyped because a song you like is playing and attending a musical about said song's artist are two very different investments, financially if nothing else

After rereading your post and its emphasis on the dead enders, I can see your point. But MJ is like Queen and Fleetwood Mac/Stevie Nicks and the Beatles for the young in that they're not so much epochal as ubiquitous: Cool Old Music.

Abba is an interesting case too - for self-respecting boomers at the time it was terminally unhip music-for-squares & housewives, for gen X it was a haha-let's-dress-up-in-70s-clothes-from-thrift-stores ironic revival, but somehow they've ended up with a much more respected legacy than probably anyone would've predicted.

Watching Mamma Mia! on DVD as kids with their parents helped.

Yeah MJ's music has long since escaped the containment of his life and crimes.

As mentioned above, I think REM is kind of re-emerging. Not just Michael Shannon band, but there hype about their quasi-reunion in New York, and I just hear them more on the local Jack FM station than I think I did 5-10 years ago. A decade ago they seemed utterly eclipsed to me, but I think they're more present now. My high school son's girlfriend is a fan fwiw. I doubt she likes U2.

I wonder what's going to happen with millennial teen angst icons like Linkin Park, P!nk, Tokio Hotel and My Chemical Romance - this is stuff that to my Gen X ears always sounded very lightweight and hysterical, but maybe the appeal does carry over to Gen Z/etc?

I saw MCR last year and I was of course at the upper end of the age spectrum — in my 30s during their initial run, I was always at the outer demographics of their fan base — but I was impressed by how many people in their teens and 20s were there. People who maybe can remember their glory days, but certainly not too clearly, and were singing every word.

MCR are enormous among Gen Z, maybe the single biggest rock survivor of the last 30 years, and I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about them (never liked them - a bit of the 00s Green Day tribalism in me maybe?). Linkin Park are also huge.

for self-respecting boomers at the time it was terminally unhip music-for-squares & housewives, for gen X it was a haha-let's-dress-up-in-70s-clothes-from-thrift-stores ironic revival

Hmmm, I don't think you're wrong re: the general populace here but it's slightly complicated by the amount of boomer and gen x icons that became openly very respectful of the band - Pete Townshend, John Lydon, Elvis Costello. Lester Bangs was repping for them in the 70's even! So there was a secret handshake aspect ("THIS maligned pop act is actually good!") that I think by the 90's had turned into just conventional rockcrit wisdom - by the time I got into the music mags if you thought ABBA were lame it meant you weren't very hip.

Lots of OTMFM ITT; too much to single out or respond to.

I was thinking of Al Jolson, an artist whose music seemed to speak deeply to its generation but with little or no traction even one generation later, and at this point you listen and say “what on earth did anyone see in this dreck?” The fact he performed in blackface is almost incidental, because the art itself holds no appeal.

The general phenomenon of music fading away that has little influence on current styles isn’t that surprising — c.f. Goodman, Ellington — and I don’t know if they fit the bill. Elvis is in this camp too, and his sudden dropoff is notable, but I don’t think he’s a U2, as it took a good while for the fade to happen. He certainly had appeal at least through the elder millennials. (Lilo & Stitch bump?)

Moody Blues is a good call. Similarly I was thinking of Chicago, who were both commercially enormous and held in esteem by musos of the younger Boomer cohort, but with zero traction in Gen X and no revival since.

Kitchen person’s record store observations are instructive; not just what sells, but who it sells to tells a tale. (I reliably sold Chicago records in my little shop, but always to olds. The Who was hit and miss; most of the Moon-era albums would still trudge out the door, mostly to Gen X and older, but you couldn’t give the others away. The Gen X who fans were more often than not Modophiles).

The phenomenon of artists’ personal monstrosity affecting their artistic reputation and commercial afterlife seems like an entirely different phenomenon to me (and a good one for discussion, altho I’m sure there are 100 threads on it already).

What about Barbara Streisand?

The older gays can keep her.

The phenomenon of artists’ personal monstrosity affecting their artistic reputation and commercial afterlife seems like an entirely different phenomenon to me

It does tie in though, as different generations have different levels of tolerance for that kinda shit.

I think it can kinda go two directions: It either becomes the one thing anyone knows or remembers about them (e.g. Gary Glitter maybe), or the scandals subside with the passing of time. A lot of it has to do with the work itself, obviously — like in MJ's case, his songs are still so present that younger people are more likely to encounter the music before hearing about the sex abuse than vice versa. And I think if your music's still being played on the radio all the time, it sends a sort of tacit signal that whatever this guy did, the culture is OK with it, and that's how younger audiences will receive it.

Coldplay are for sure the millennial U2.

Kind of feel like Genesis slot in here somewhere although maybe their stock has gone up slightly in recent years

I'm puzzled about the Beatles talk here. I live in a UK city full of young people and I never ever hear anyone talk about them, let alone hear them out in the wild save for my own house. Might be different in, say, Liverpool where they're part of the tapestry. But no, I don't feel like the Beatles are in any way relevant to the current world from where I'm standing. Is it different in the US?

Chicago is a good one. Blood Sweat and Tears is a very similar act that also completely faded away. Jefferson Airplane probably fits here as well.

Watching Mamma Mia! on DVD as kids with their parents helped.

otm. when I DJ and get a request from a gen z, if its not a current pop hit, 75% of the time its either MJ or ABBA

sometimes I'll ask teenagers if they know about the Beatles...in my experience many of them can't even name all four of the members. that is pretty interesting to me because I grew up in an era where you knew all about the Beatles through osmosis. pop culture was just loaded with Beatles references and there were commercials for their compilation CDs that played all the time. not to mention my parents' generation talking about them nonstop. even a lot of 90s pop music seemed like it was ultimately influenced by them one way or the other. that all seems to have gone away now.

Michael Jackson on the other hand does still seem super relevant, I kinda get that he may actually be too big to cancel since his DNA is basically woven into modern pop music at this point. blockbuster albums haven't resembled Sgt. Pepper in decades, but they do still seem to be patterned off Thriller.

imo one of the big differences is due to video - in the 60's and 70's you didn't have music videos, people were obviously on screens much much less...but MJ was all about video, they seemed to be the main thing he was focused on for most of his career, and I think that's the stuff that's kept him relevant. my son is in 5th grade and his friends know about Michael primarily through videos that pop up on whatever they're on. idk if they even really know him as a musician but they do know that he could dance like a motherfucker.

feel like iconic videos have kept a lot of stuff in the pop culture conversation - obviously Rick Astley would've been totally forgotten by now if the video wasn't so unintentionally funny...have kinda wondered about this in respect to songs like "Take On Me", which are obviously very catchy, but I think a lot of its enduring success is that it has such a memorable video...feel like that matters a lot in an era where people are often 'streaming' stuff by pulling it up on YouTube

One thing that's interesting with grunge is how Nirvana and too a slightly lesser extent Alice in Chains are as present as ever with kids and Pearl Jam and especially Soundgarden barely exist.

Nevermind is definitely in that Dark Side of the Moon, Rumours, everpresent standard zone now

That's odd to me because I was 17 when Nevermind was released and I haven't listened to it in years.

in my experience many of them can't even name all four of the members

I don't think this is particularly a new thing. I remember a conversation I had with someone in the mid 00s and they didn't know who Ringo Starr was. This person would have been in their mid 20s at the time, so not even ten years younger than me.

Michael Jackson is also surely going to benefit from the biopic coming out next month

Not if they put the real stuff in

Narrator: They did not put the real stuff in.

But I dunno, the biopic could in some ways backfire because of that — I can see it becoming a big social media talking point that the movie leaves out the sex abuse, which has the potential to bring that all back up for people who might be only vaguely aware of it.

Actually fwiw supposedly the screenplay does deal with all of that somewhat. While still presenting him as a mostly sympathetic character. Which seems like a quite a trick.

I saw MCR last year and I was of course at the upper end of the age spectrum — in my 30s during their initial run, I was always at the outer demographics of their fan base — but I was impressed by how many people in their teens and 20s were there. People who maybe can remember their glory days, but certainly not too clearly, and were singing every word.

Saw the SF show of that tour and: seconded. The youth, particularly the disaffected and pissed off ones, are all in.

In the wake of Prince's death it seemed like there as a micro-moment where his abuses were tentatively recalled here & there, and just as quickly the vibe seemed to be "lets set that aside for now and grapple with it some other time", and there it continues to sit. If that suppressed Netflix doc stays in the vault I can see it staying that way with him.

Is it different in the US?

The US has always been different to the UK when it comes to the Beatles.

old rock shit my son likes: p much all 90s alternative (listens with his mom in the car), mcr, linkin park, metallica, green day...started to get into punk on the pop end of the spectrum, he did seem to dig some old clash stuff (theres that stranger things connection again). expressed affection for black flag at one point but seemed unmoved by minor threat.

my jams that he still does not fuck with: sonic youth, mbv, deerhoof, lightning bolt

Elton John too xpost

Re: The Beatles

Just saw Operation Hail Mary and Gosling had probes named John, Paul, George and Ringo. ‘Two of Us’ also used in the film.

Also, Youtube is full of music guys who are ready to tell you how great the Beatles are.

The Beatles song that I hear most often in the wild nowadays is "Here Comes the Sun". It would be nice to think that George is smiling wryly somewhere.

In my experience the Beatles are certainly big with young people in the UK, in the Queen/FMac manner illustrated above. The canon forever shifts though and songs like Here Comes the Sun and Blackbird take a very prominent role where I never remember that being the case when I was little.

"Here Comes the Sun" is Spotify's most streamed Beatles song.

Something to do with summer-themed playlists apparently or it could just be that people prefer it

I do think the idea of Lennon as the genius of the band has not been adopted by later generations.

I thought he was dismissed as a wife-beater by younger generations.

The canon forever shifts though and songs like Here Comes the Sun and Blackbird take a very prominent role where I never remember that being the case when I was little.

I have far too many jazz albums with versions of "Blackbird."

I don't ever remember hearing it on radio when I was little whereas probably a bunch of songs I did - let's say Day Tripper or I Feel Fine - I probably haven't in years now.

A lot of Beatles songs are standards in some way (e.g. the many bluegrass "I've Just Seen a Face"s, one of which I knew long before most Beatles albums)

The young people I work with know of the Beatles and some of their songs from commercials and short videos, or parents who played them a lot. They seem perfectly satisfied with that being the extent of the band's relevance. If I suggest checking out 'Beatles For Sale' or 'Rubber Soul,' they just remind me that they already know who the Beatles are.

Culture has seemingly decided to give MJ a pass. I still hear his music everywhere, even from DJs at kids events, etc.

― 138,683 Serious, Earnest Americans Emphasize Demand for Prepar (President Keyes)

Apologies if it gets annoying about me going on about where I work, but my co-worker and I spend ages talking about these kind of things and trying to work out the patterns of what sells. Like why on earth did Labi Siffre suddenly become huge with kids about a year ago after years of us selling absolutely nothing by him?

Anyway, I would say Michael Jackson's sales are as healthy as ever. That documentary a few years ago did nothing to slow down Thriller, Off The Wall and even Bad. He's been given a free pass for sure. See also Swans, Gnarls Barkley, Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Marylin Manson and Prince who have had no fall-out from any of their allegations when it comes to our sales.

The biggest mystery to me is despite him or his label upping the price of his records, we're selling more Kanye than ever. A lot of those are to younger people. Any press he gets seems to get his records moving. The Smiths still really popular too. Apparently my other co-worker was saying to a kid the other day, "oh, if you like The Smiths you gotta get Morrissey's solo albums too" which is the worst advice I've heard in a long time.

The closest cases I've seen of artists actually being cancelled are when Ariel Pink was at the capital riots five years ago his sales dropped off and suddenly people were bringing entire collections in to trade. Similar thing happened with Ryan Adams who was a consistent seller for us and then we had so many people saying they were done with him. Quite a few Rhye albums came in after those allegations too. Hard to say about Arcade Fire. Everything Now got sold back to us and nobody asked about the latest album, but that could just be the quality of the music. Those first three albums still do fine.

Moody Blues is a good call. Similarly I was thinking of Chicago, who were both commercially enormous and held in esteem by musos of the younger Boomer cohort, but with zero traction in Gen X and no revival since.

― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante),

The Moody Blues are up there with Dan Fogelberg, Pablo Cruise, that one Shawn Phillips album and Barry Manilow as one of the artists we have endless supplies of their albums and I don't remember selling a single one in the last ten years. At other record stores, it looks like they have the same issue as us.

I don't feel like the Beatles are in any way relevant to the current world from where I'm standing. Is it different in the US?

I mean there's not an American director currently making a four-film series dedicated to each of the Beatles, written by three Americans

love the record store sales stuff

I feel like Seventh Sojourn by Moody Blues is in every store

also the Kinks' One For the Road I swear to God every store has that

"Here Comes the Sun" is just a really great standalone Beatles song, though. That's the thing about the Beatles that I think makes John and Paul sort of trickier to get into from a today perspective - if you watch them evolve and hear their early songs in the context of what was on the radio at the time, and then their later songs as part of a progression of their writing, they're fascinating, and you can hear each song as a small part of a really weird and complicated whole. But if you just want to listen to one Beatles song that, like, sounds like the Beatles and is a great standalone pop hit but also has some maturity in the lyrics and relatable, universal themes and a lot of human warmth to balance out all the arty intellectualism, you can't really do better than "Here Comes the Sun." It's like an encapsulation of "The Beatles" as you picture them in your mind but in a way that you don't actually get from any one John or Paul song on its own. Like a painting of a well-known and well-loved place that looks exactly right to you precisely because it's painted from a composite perspective that lets you see different things together in the scene that you would never be able to see from those angles all at once in real life.

Excited to contribute my young person views and then remembering I'm 40 in a few months.

Lovely blurb, Lily. Couldn't you say the same about "Strawberry Fields Forever"? Or

I mean there's not an American director currently making a four-film series dedicated to each of the Beatles, written by three Americans

You can be sure American money is financing it though and that's the most important aspect.

Anyway is there really any doubt that the US has always been far more obsessed with the Beatles than the UK?

We love their loveable moptop ways and surely everyone over in England is like that still (and by England we mean everything on those two big islands you're all on, Scotland is just a suburb, right?).

If we’re going by used copies, The Fugees’ The Score, is, in my experience, the ubiquitous $5 used CD of the mid-00s through the 10s. Definitely counts as a widely loved and critically acclaimed album for gen-x, but also seems relatively ignored by younger generations

Apparently my other co-worker was saying to a kid the other day, "oh, if you like The Smiths you gotta get Morrissey's solo albums too" which is the worst advice I've heard in a long time.

Is it though? Smiths fans would definitely like Viva Hate and Vauxhall and I (and possibly a few others)

If I still bought records I probably wouldnt be buying any secondhand Moody Blues records either. Theres just something about them that seems really boring and Ive barely listened to any of their music.

Which once-canonical Sixties act has faded away more completely: the Moody Blues or the Jefferson Airplane?

kitchen person, thanks for all of the anecdotal info of what's selling and not in your store. Really interesting.

I can imagine MJ is sort of like Frank Sinatra, who we know was not a great guy, or Rick James, where somehow the entertainer overshadows that once the music comes on.

Last week a student in my film class, a young woman, wrote about....Vicki Christina Barcelona. I made a point of asking her in our group chat uhh why this film. She said she grew up watching Woody Allen films with her parents; she was aware of his history.

xp Moody Blues. The Jefferson Airplane is virtually synonymous with their era, so while they're more or less frozen in the past, they're also a stronger evocation of that place and time whenever a film or television show wishes to do so through music.

Re: Michael Jackson, it's not like I did a comprehensive survey, but I think it's more of a case where people aren't necessarily forgiving so much as "he made great music I can enjoy, but the man was a pedophile, and he's also dead, what more can be done?" I don't know how else to explain it, because I don't hear many people saying he was innocent or wrongfully accused, and yet I don't see much pushback against his records either.

Yes birdistheword that seems accurate to me.

I always have to remind myself my dad's taste does not translate to general boomer taste. He loved Jefferson Airplane but considered the Moody Blues (and Chicago!) absolute embarassments.

My dad was fond of comparing music to The Moody Blues whether or not it made any sense—the ones I remember are The Clientele (kinda makes sense I guess?) and Helado Negro (okay dad). (See also: the time he said Gang of Four sounded like AC/DC to him, a band regarded as being only for the dumbest of the dumb.)

The guitar sounds on Let There Be Rock are nastier than anything Andy Gill ever came up with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNfpkK5Uzqg

The Moody Blues are a weird case because they threw off two generations of fans: those from their original run, and all the younger people who got into their '80s comeback and then worked backwards. I can't prove it, but they had to have one of the bigger '80s back catalogue resurgences.

Paywalled now but I found this late 2025 interview with Justin Hayward a good read:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/justin-hayward-last-living-moody-blues-1235479197/

I would speculate that MJ is generally understood as victim as well as abuser, and that likely generates a more complex/sympathetic response

Yesterday I discover neither a 28 yr old nor a 21 yr old music fan could recognize "Johnny B Goode" while a bar band was playing a photocopy of the original; nor did the name "Chuck Berry" ring any bells

I taught a lesson on Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" to my high school English classes last month. One of my students already knew it, and another student knew about "Johnny B. Goode" being sent into space, both of which which surprised me.

Almost any of these figures are just a theoretical biopic away from being discovered anew by the youngsters.

The biopic effect is interesting, because e.g. I see WAY more Queen T-shirts on teenagers today than I did when I was a teenager and Queen was still having hits. One of my kids is not much of a music fan, but he has about five Queen songs on his Spotify mix alongside a bunch of anime soundtracks and Tyler the Creator.

connecting two bands that created perfect templates of strict minimalism and machine-like rhythmic energy (Gang of Four and AC/DC) is actually very insightful on your dad's part

also I'm just gonna say I'm so fucking sick of Queen

Crossing threads, Christgau's daughter Nina (born 1985) wears a Queen shirt throughout her interview in the new documentary. I assumed it was a family in-joke of some kind, and I looked on his website and see he belatedly gave a greatest hits comp an A-, and started it by writing, "It took me years with periodic pep talks from my daughter to admit with more delight than I would have figured that while I'd never warmed to the art-rock glitz of these international standouts, most of these 17 songs are good-humored rather than melodramatic--played not for laughs, but for ebullience and sprezzatura. "

I kind of get the impression Nina really wore him down with her taste in bands he used to hate - not that he loves them, but he's definitely okay with a lot of them now.

Anyway, I don't think Queen ever fell out of fashion. It's partly why I've never been a huge fan because they play the usual at EVERY damn sports game ("We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions" in particular), and growing up sports had a much bigger presence in my school than any other type of culture - to this day I associate them more with that than anything else, even Wayne's World.

Definitely licensing to sports, movies, TV, maybe commercials but those don't seem to matter anymore...all of those add to familiarity and longevity. Thinking that's why Paul Simon, as one example, isn't enduring as much -- his songs just aren't showing up in those Marvel or A24 trailers. (This is of course after Graceland and then Graceland-influenced Vampire Weekend made him ubiquitous for our generations.)

So basically, those who sold out won out financially in the short run, then culturally in the long run. USA! USA!

i'd watch Timothee in Angus, the AC/DC Story

or Josh O'Connor as Dan Fogelberg in "Longer Than"

(or as Bon Scott, that would rule too)

Apparently my other co-worker was saying to a kid the other day, "oh, if you like The Smiths you gotta get Morrissey's solo albums too" which is the worst advice I've heard in a long time.

Is it though? Smiths fans would definitely like Viva Hate and Vauxhall and I (and possibly a few others)

― Saxophone Of Futility (Michael B),

Yeah, I suppose that's fair, but what if they went in blind and picked up Low In High School which is the one we have cheap.

Which once-canonical Sixties act has faded away more completely: the Moody Blues or the Jefferson Airplane?

― wipes chooser (unperson)

The Moody Blues don't have a Surrealistic Pillow though. That album always sells unlike any of their others. Actually, that's another fascinating topic to me. Artists who have one album that's beloved whilst all the others get zero attention. Tapestry is the biggest example. That will always sell and is creeping up in value whereas every other album of hers sits unloved in the $3 section. Jagged Little Pill being the 90s equivalent.

There's probably a thread on it already.

Many xposts

There hasn’t been a single month since 1979 where Michael Jackson hasn’t been enormously popular.

Surrelistic Pillow is a listicle staple: Greatest Psych Albums; Greatest Women In Rock; 1967 etc. So no surprise that one still sells.

Something to consider also is that some of the big Starship singles are considered fun '80s kitsch by the youth today. I've seen multiple bar singalongs of "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now".

Looked it up out of curiosity but in terms of album sales, Jefferson Starship may have sold more records than either Jefferson Airplane or Starship.

Jefferson Airplane
Regular albums: 1 platinum, 4 gold
Compilations: 1 platinum, 1 gold

Jefferson Starship
Regular albums: 1 double platinum, 2 single platinum, 5 gold
Compilations: 2 gold

Starship
Regular albums: 1 platinum, 1 gold

They built this city

Yeah, those big Jefferson Starship albums were dollar-bin staples even after vinyl got cool again.

The two biggest Starship singles have hundreds of of millions more Spotify streams than the two biggest Jefferson Airplane singles btw.

NGSUN is approaching 1 billion.

as luck would have it i overheard two strangers talking about michael jackson today, two women 30s/40s, both agreed that they were excited for the upcoming movie, loved his music, and he was definitely framed

(also, absolutely dying at christgau's cranky insistence on asserting that, even though he reluctantly concedes that he can enjoy some Queen up to a point, he also knows what sprezzatura means)

one time, after a big Vikings playoff win, Dan "The Common Man" Cole played "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" for a whole 15 minute segment and he just kept patching in live caller after live caller to sing along with it

16 year old kid is aware of Prodigy and likes it better after the Firestarter singer left. I have no Prodigy opinions except i’m happy they helped fund the Breedera. I was surprised the kid knew who they were.

― Cow_Art, Monday, March 30, 2026 12:58 AM (yesterday)


...........are you thinking of a different band, or is your kid trolling you? the Firestarter singer killed himself 33 years later, between legs of a world tour promoting their new album, and they haven't released anything since afaik

the day MJackson died, the youngest person in my office arrived distraught, was confused as to why everyone else wasn't, and when she explained this confusion was completely stunned to discover that the 30-60yos were p universally disinterested in mourning a methodical child rapist.

on the other hand I never cared about Elvis as an insisted-upon phenomenon or musician, but the EPiC movie last month rocked my shit, I could take another one every year.

While we're here, is Elvis' pursuit of a 14 year old girl something that gets commented on much these days?

Regarding MJ/kids not being « fans » anymore, I remember like 5 years ago talking with a friend’s kids who were around 10yo then and being surprised to find out they were HUGE MJ fans like a was in 1984 at their age. They asked if I still had the posters of him I hung on my walls ! Actually where do kids get posters of their favourite artists nowadays when all is online ?

While we're here, is Elvis' pursuit of a 14 year old girl something that gets commented on much these days?

Yes, more than ever before in my lifetime. It's been mentioned upthread.

Sofia Coppola made a movie about it a couple of years ago

Yes but is it affecting his reputation?

I'd say he has a little less reputation

Incredibly dodgy lyrics in that one on reflection

OK just read the post about Elvis itt. I didn't know whether the Baz Luhrmann film had re-ignited interest in Elvis, I thought it had.

the Elvis live movie was stunning

In the last couple of years, two zoomer co-workers told me their favourite artist was Elvis (one wasnt even bothered to watch the movie as it looked a bit silly, she said). Maybe its an Irish thing?

Me and a friend met a huge Elvis fan in Swindon in 2019 or so, a few years younger than us. This was before the two of us (my friend especially) got really into exploring Elvis' catalogue ourselves so we couldn't ask him whether he agreed that Frankie and Johnny is a fine pastiche record, or that Crawfish is one of his best tracks.

Queen very definitely fell out of fashion in the US in the 1980s, as far as the basic-ass mainstream rock crowd was concerned. the band was enormous everywhere else in the world, but 10 years before Wayne's World came Hot Space, populated by sleazy DOR inspired by Freddie's visits to gay clubs. American rock fans said "nuh uh, no gay shit, leave us alone with our Journey and 38 Spayshull." I think Queen in fact stands in for Journey/Boston style corporate rock in the UK; those kinda bands had no foothold, and so Queen had the uncool, basic bitch pop-rock market all to themselves…

what had indisputably huge influence on how people learned about this or that classic rock act in the U.S., and which now blessedly has almost none, was rock radio/AOR/classic rock radio across the country. The Beatles were the no 1. recipient of that exposure. I don't think there was anything comparable in the UK, reinforcing the dopey unchanging rock canon year after year after year.

I think Queen in fact stands in for Journey/Boston style corporate rock in the UK; those kinda bands had no foothold, and so Queen had the uncool, basic bitch pop-rock market all to themselves…

Plus Bryan Adams, Meat Loaf and Bon Jovi. Queen are probably diverse enough to weather any fashion storm - stadium anthems, ballads, hard rockers, sorta prog, disco, Broadway, whatever Bicycle Race is, they cover it all!

I remember in the 80s there was a divide even amongst grades in school. Like the seniors at my high school who got into music before MTV dominance were into stuff like Boston, Dire Straits, Queen and Springsteen whereas the freshmen were all about Metallica, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue etc

as luck would have it i overheard two strangers talking about michael jackson today, two women 30s/40s, both agreed that they were excited for the upcoming movie, loved his music, and he was definitely framed

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Monday, March 30, 2026 3:16 AM (eleven hours ago)

Could have sworn I recently heard people talking about Prince being assassinated by the government for knowing too much

https://i.ibb.co/r2sGnwhC/prince.gif

Which once-canonical Sixties act has faded away more completely: the Moody Blues or the Jefferson Airplane?

― wipes chooser (unperson)

Jefferson Airplane had real stranglehold on my boomer dad, even though I don't recall him really ever listening to them, he considered them to the ur-San Francisco band

First album I ever purchased with my own money was Knee Deep in the Hoopla

Jefferson Airplane feels like it was a whole cultural thing that didn't really translate to younger generations outside "White Rabbit" showing up in films whenever someone does acid or meets hippies. Grateful Dead ended up being more important probably because they were so well documented and extended the Haight-Ashbery vibes well into the 80s and 90s.

Yes, also the Woodstock movie (and probably to a lesser extent Marty getting socked in Gimme Shelter)

don't have time to read the whole thread so i'm sure that someone has mentioned but many p4k-championed indie groups fall into this category: arcade fire, liars, grizzly bear, dirty projectors, the rapture, etc.

tapes n tapes

clap your hands say yeah

Arcade Fire is probably the only one of those that can be called a huge artist.

The consensus in my Gen X peer group was that there are two Elvis Presleys, one a young man in working man's clothes singing his heart out. The other, after "the suits" got to him, an overweight drugged-out embarrassment in spangled jumpsuits. I knew one contrarian guy who loved campy road-of-excess Elvis but he was an outlier.

An inversion of the Beatles, where the received opinion was that they started out as bubblegum in matchy outfits and the music got interesting when they did drugs and embraced sitars and started dressing like girls.

Weird, because 70s Elvis is obv superior to me.

yeah the consensus has now changed that Elvis was at the height of his powers for mist of the 70s, with a drop in quality only shortly before his death

I bought those two Elvis CDs that were advertised nonstop on TV from like 2002-2004 and my impression was that late Elvis was way better

i’d like to pat myself on the back for being ahead of the curve of the 70s reappraisal by reading Jimmy Guterman’s “Worst Rock and Roll Records” who asserted that all periods of Elvis (except maybe the quickie soundtracks ) were worth hearing for his powers of song interpretation.

sun era elvis is still punk as fuck

"on a similar note, i remember me and my classic rock loving friends really digging jimi hendrix and there being a decent amount of revival of his catalog when i was younger, and i feel like he has so little cultural salience today"

I may have said it before, and I'm not a musician, but I have the impression that there was a huge shift in the sound of popular music in the late 1970s. There's a certain kind of blues-based twelve-bar boogie rock that was popular up until the punk explosion, and then it completely died off and never came back. I'm not sure if it's because so much music in the 1980 was written on keyboards, or whether it's a cultural thing, but there's a fundamental difference between the underlying sound - the chords - of Thin Lizzy or Steely Dan and Depeche Mode or Metallica. The only blues-rock band I can think of that still remained relevant in the 1980s was ZZ Top and even then they had a spoofy, postmodern element. To an extent Steely Dan have been re-evaluated (they were mud when I was young), but I can't see the hip young kids of RateYourMusic ever embracing Thin Lizzy or T Rex.

I mention this because Hendrix was a guitar wizard, but he was fundamentally a blues-rock guitar wizard, and he sounds nothing like the guitar wizards that existed when I was young - Adrian Belew, Eddie Van Halen, Yingwie Malmsteen etc, all of whom drew as much from contemporary classical music as they did from rock music. 1980s heavy metal generally didn't have a bluesy sound. This always hits me when I read music criticism from the 1970s, particulary US music criticism. There's this underlying assumption that Janis Joplin and The Band are important musical figures in a way that's hard to appreciate nowadays.

I have the impression that Lou Reed was super-important in the 1970s albeit that he didn't sell any records. He was the hipster choice. Then he wavered throughout the 1980s and seemed to just fall off the radar in the 1990s and beyond. I'm old enough to remember Songs for Drella and the Velvet Underground reunion being big things but now the attitude seems to be that he existed, and so what. But then again he wasn't a huge artist even at his commercial peak (Sally Can't Dance scraped into the top ten in the US, and then of course he released Metal Machine Music).

An inversion of the Beatles, where the received opinion was that they started out as bubblegum in matchy outfits and the music got interesting when they did drugs and embraced sitars and started dressing like girls.

― a burrito, my gazebo (Ye Mad Puffin)

I remember the side eyes in the '90s when I asserted that A Hard Day's Night is their best album.

I have the impression that Lou Reed was super-important in the 1970s albeit that he didn't sell any records. He was the hipster choice. Then he wavered throughout the 1980s and seemed to just fall off the radar in the 1990s and beyond. I'm old enough to remember Songs for Drella and the Velvet Underground reunion being big things but now the attitude seems to be that he existed, and so what. But then again he wasn't a huge artist even at his commercial peak (Sally Can't Dance scraped into the top ten in the US, and then of course he released Metal Machine Music).

I've said this for years, but the fact that Lou Reed managed to bounce from major label to major label for 40 years without ever selling worth a shit is the single biggest argument for the idea that rock critics' opinions used to genuinely matter.

When we look at some of these artists who really personified their era for a bit but didn't carry over, part of what's happening is they were synthesizing some cultural traits and trends that didn't make it through the filter. Like Jefferson Airplane may have sworn like sailors and been really druggy, but there's also a lot of Mighty-Wind hootenany folk in there that undercuts the brazenness from our vantage point. Elvis carries a lot of 1940s sentimentality and sweetness that's hard to recover, especially if you've never had Greatest Gen folks in your life. Peak Public Enemy was incisive with such specific things, you really had to be there to get a lot of the insight, or put in the time to understand what they're talking about.

Also, bands like Beatles, Queen and Fleetwood Mac have all this "lore" with a real story arc that makes getting their context easier.

In my world Queen is only very popular with older middle-aged men, not necessarily from Essex but with certain Essex-y qualities.

Whereas everyone young and old seems to love Fleetwood Mac nowadays

The latinverse seems quite different from where the rest of us live. I wish Queen weren't popular with young people, but alas.

The only blues-rock band I can think of that still remained relevant in the 1980s was ZZ Top

Dire Straits would like a word. "Money for Nothing" retooled the sound for the '80s as much as "Sharp-Dressed Man" did. And speaking of bands that have disappeared! Although OK I do in fact still hear "Sultans of Swing" and "Money for Nothing" here and there. But Dire Straits filled arenas for several years.

Did Fleetwood Mac ever fall off? I guess in the '90s maybe. But they've always seemed like ... they wanna be with us everywhere.

Even though Public Enemy's song were mostly about still-relevant issues, they were sometimes so specific it might hard to get. Like, how many people remember who Evan Mecham was?

I was thinking about Dire Straits as a band that was very popular in the prime Gen X era but who Gen X people were not at all into.

Dire Straits would like a word. "Money for Nothing" retooled the sound for the '80s as much as "Sharp-Dressed Man" did. And speaking of bands that have disappeared! Although OK I do in fact still hear "Sultans of Swing" and "Money for Nothing" here and there. But Dire Straits filled arenas for several years.

Mark Knopfler was apparently a huge influence on many of the North African "desert blues" guitar players of the 1990s and 2000s.

Aha, that makes sense — the fingerstyle playing and all.

Fleetwood Mac were definitely at a low in the mid-'90s: Time from '95 didn't chart at all, and the subsequent tour found them playing small venues when they weren't opening for Boston (who-to be fair-had just launched a brief and successful comeback with the now forgotten Walk On album).

I was really into Tango in the Night but that's not something I would have admitted to anyone else my age.

With Public Enemy (and De La Soul), I don't know if that 50-layer Bomb Squad / Prince Paul production has anything to do with not gaining a younger audience, even if it's that all those samples might get in the way of commercial licensing.

For that matter, have the Beastie Boys expanded their fans, other than "Intergalactic" between innings?

xp And with Fleetwood Mac, I really do think that it not being an all-dude band makes a difference. Same way that The Cure, lyrically, isn't in an incel world. (Do younger folks know Joy Division's music much, or is it just the Unknown Pleasures album art?)

Fleetwood Mac were definitely at a low in the mid-'90s: Time from '95 didn't chart at all, and the subsequent tour found them playing small venues when they weren't opening for Boston (who-to be fair-had just launched a brief and successful comeback with the now forgotten Walk On album).

I remember reading Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics in high school and one critic's chapter was a fantasy about smuggling a sniper rifle into a Fleetwood Mac concert to assassinate them. The band seemed to be a stand-in for "everything we hate about Boomers" in the '90s.

And with Fleetwood Mac, I really do think that it not being an all-dude band makes a difference.

Yeah, I feel like their revival has a lot to do with Stevie Nicks as witchy icon.

And with Fleetwood Mac, I really do think that it not being an all-dude band makes a difference.

Yes, it's "classic rock" but it's also pop and it's not too blokey and house DJs can play-out fun remixes of "Dreams" and stuff. Absolutely makes sense that Mac split the difference between ABBA and the Rolling Stones so nicely.

I think in the 90's my main association w/ the Mac would be "Bill Clinton campaign song".

There was also this:

https://www.discogs.com/release/1956721-Various-Legacy-A-Tribute-To-Fleetwood-Macs-Rumours?srsltid=AfmBOooTnUt9s1Ea-WmnKfqRj8PFgb_JlVtI-ywuvyW60C7JQNJILepw

Stevie Nicks has been masterful about being Cool Old Witchy Woman to several generations of listeners. She has Harry Styles kissing the hem of her black dress.

My wife was a '90s teen and her defining Fleetwood Mac document was The Dance DVD, which I think her dad bought when she was 15 or so and she got obsessed with it.

I recently bought the Def Jam 10th anniversary box to brush up on some hip-hop touchstones that I missed the first time around. It’s a consistent listen except for when PE comes on and then it feels like that Maxell ad. It just blows everything else out of the water and sounds so good, even if you manage to not have a clue as to the lyrics. Definitely made an impression on the kid, she was asking to listen to them more after hearing them. It’s nothing like the current hip-hop productions, but it doesn’t sound dated or stale at all.

Alan Light's recent Don't Stop is useful in that it includes interviews with Gen Z subjects about their love for Rumours; what came up often was a band with two female singer-songwriters balancing out Lindsay Buckingham, whom they often said came across as an asshole lol

The Band.

Shawn Colvin–The Chain

This is terrifying.

XP Ha!

Man, that Rumours tribute lineup is frightening.

Hole's version of "Gold Dust Woman" came out a couple years before it, and later on Courtney Love famously interviewed Stevie for Spin.

Re: the Dire Straits discussion, I have two students in a 24-student high school class who - separately - really like Dire Straits, particularly Love Over Gold. I have no idea if this is representative of anything.

Rumours is also very popular with my students, and I think some of them like Tom Petty as well, or at least they like "Wildflowers."

The Band

This strikes me as otm

yeah

i heard a high school age bagboy at my grocer chatting with the cashier and declaring Depeche Mode was the best band ever

courtney love was def ahead of the curve in the fleetwood mac revival

I feel like The Band has always been an off-the-beaten-path obsession for a certain type of self-selecting person, rather than a generation-defining act

Yeah I think if you become enough of a Dylan nerd you have to check out the Band, but they don’t show up a lot in movie or CR radio.

The Band were another weird case in that they were really popular without being <really popular> (ie, albums and tours sold well without having a huge radio presence).

I have three Gen Alpha Kids (one 11-year-old girl, two 8-year-old boy-girl twins). Here is my unscientific assessment of what holds up with them (with the given that they all like contemporary pop with the exception of my 11-year-old thinking Taylor Swift is washed/uncool now):

-00s/10s Pitchfork-adjacent indie music: Vampire Weekend is the clear winner here by a 100 miles. They genuinely love them. Most of the other stuff doesn't register (though what 8-year old is going to like Interpol lol) other than a few Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs and some of the big crossover hits (Wolf Like Me, Seventh Nation Army, etc.)

-Classic rock/pop: they appreciate and enjoy some Beatles songs but don't actively seek it out. They love ABBA, mostly based on seeing a Mama Mia production at their local high school. No real reaction for other boomer stuff like Stones or Beach Boys other than they like Start me Up. Can't recall a lot of enthusiasm for any other classics other than they'll like songs that have been featured on Stranger Things. Michael Jackson has the same level of Beatles appreciation but they aren't super fans or anything.

-90s: it is true that Nirvana enjoys an elevated status with the kids that others don't. I never play Nirvana around the house yet my 11-year-old is into them.

Only other random observation I have is they like Jessie Ware a lot.

Xpost Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix is really a fascinating because he definitely had a revival and was cool in the 90s. He had a lot of prominent movie syncs (Point Break, Waynes World, Under Seige, Blue Chips) and when I entered college in 2000, nobody would bat an eye if you had a Hendrix poster no matter what genre you were into.

By 2004, however, having that poster would be seen as corny and cringe. I think (at least in America) the blues-derived classic rock had a steep falloff in the early 00s despite the popularity of bands like the White Stripes.

Personally I found that my love for the Rolling Stones came on a bit later. I did listen to them as a kid but was much more of a Beatles fan, and then the Stones became really important to me in my twenties.

Has Eric Clapton been mentioned yet in this thread?

Beastie Boys are a good callout, I've kinda wondered if their refusal to license any of their songs had ultimately had a negative effect on their legacy, as you just don't hear their music anywhere these days. but I also think we've evolved beyond the need for groups like that, where most of what they do musically and lyrically is reference things they thought were cool, which led to their fans discovering the same things...it's so much easier to find cool shit now

I think in the 90's my main association w/ the Mac would be "Bill Clinton campaign song".

Same. Coming after Reagan and Bush Sr., Clinton choosing a rock song made him seem cool *for a presidential candidate* ... but it paradoxically made Fleetwood Mac seem uncool to teens like me who had no prior association with the band and now thought of them as dorky Boomer music.

My wife was a '90s teen and her defining Fleetwood Mac document was The Dance DVD, which I think her dad bought when she was 15 or so and she got obsessed with it.

A friend of mine from college had that CD. I think it was a similar thing where her she picked up an interest in Fleetwood Mac from her parents. I remember her playing it at her apartment in the early 2000s, and it was probably the first time that I really paid attention to the band.

I think the Mac were at their low point just before the Dance happened and with that, and ever since, they have been ascendant. Which is something, considering that was 30 years ago.

I think Tavi Gevinson writing about Nicks for Rookie and adopting her as a ~style icon~ in the early 2010s helped a lot. Even though Rookie's audience wasn't huge, she was plugged into the fashion world which also gave the gypsy/witch Nicks aesthetic a foothold in Gen Z young women, unless the Rumours revival was already underway in those circles.

Re: Prince - he has had a bit of a revival now, post-Stranger Things. Monthly Spotify listeners more than doubled following the finale and have stayed over 20M since.

Spending the last 30+ years overseeing the music offerings for a US music retailer who tend to cater to "the young", cd sales are one of the best indicators at the moment for what "classic" stuff they enjoy.

Kanye is huge. Deftones and MCR too.
Previously marginal artists like Acid Bath are now massive for us, outselling any Led Zep or Beatles cds.
The Stones are much smaller than you'd imagine.
Dylan has had a bit of a resurgence post-Timothee.
Peter Gabriel sells nothing.
Bowie has a few cds that sell a little bit, but add all of his albums up and it wouldn't equal one MCR cd.
Nobody has cared about or bought Jefferson Airplane or Moody Blues cds from us in at least a decade or so.
At our stores, the current Prince revival is really only about Purple Rain.
The Strokes do ok, but down a bit from end of the last decade.
Elvis really only sells Xmas cds for us.

Everything is always in motion.

Vampire Weekend covering "Everywhere" in 2008 also seems like a key turning point in the Mac revival

Actually the Stones are worth talking about. Currently much more eclipsed than the Beatles imo, outside the Boomer/Gen X cohorts that grew up on them. Where does anyone hear the Stones these days? I mean, people may know them from Keith Richards memes, but that might be about it.

Some bands assist in their slide to obscurity by not shutting up.

Dying young, breaking up catastrophically, and retiring when you're on top are all generally good career moves imo.

I have to say that to characterize Hendrix as "blues-based" seems like a real misapprehension to me. Yes, he could play the blues as well as anyone - I have the Blues compilation and it's tremendous - but it didn't form the foundations of his compositional style. His first hit was an electrified folksong. "Purple Haze" and "Foxy Lady" and "Crosstown Traffic" are not blues-based. "Voodoo Child" plays with some of the conventions of the form, but transcends it. "Burning of the Midnight Lamp" owes about as much to the blues as "Penny Lane".

If Hendrix is fading from view, I'd argue it's because he is too eclectic, too indefinable, too uncompromising.

I think the Zeitgeist is just not that into guitars, loud distorted guitars, and especially guitar solos. There are exceptions, maybe even some big ones, but they just aren't the sounds/obsessions of today.

Rolling Stone just published an article called "Does Anybody Remember Laura Nyro?"

(xpost)

Agreed, which raises the question, does anybody care about Van Halen anymore, beyond "Jump"?

Is the Millennial version Arcade Fire?

― MarkoP, Saturday, March 28, 2026 3:05 AM (two days ago)

this one is pretty good. earnest, heart on sleeve, straight forward, non-experimental, non-emo indie rock is definitely something that i think falls squarely in the bucket of millennial cringe to both gen z and even a lot of milennials -- i'm thinking stuff like arcade fire for sure, also i.e. the hold steady, japandroids, the new pornographers, the war on drugs... i'd def put LCD soundsystem in there, they might be the closest thing, in terms of a live experience, to a millennial U2.

in my experience, stuff that is blown out, distorted, punk, gender fluid, distasteful, grimy etc is really what resonates w/ younger fans of indie music. death grips are an example of the reverse of this, a group that was divisive and meteoric to millennials but speaks more clearly to gen z's aesthetics & worldview. crystal castles are another group that was more footnote-y at the time compared to the bigger indie rock acts but which now has more purchase among younger people than they did even at their zeitgeist. animal collective feels like a group that splits the difference, they're as squarely millennial as any indie rock group but i think they are more well liked because of their sonic experimentation, tho i also wouldn't exactly call them influential. we don't hear much music from kids trying to recreate i.e. 'person pitch' but i don't think that they're seen in the same way as the hold steady. tame impala is maybe the best example of an act that bridges generations both in terms of timeline mapped across generations and the ability to serve millennials indie rock before transitioning to a kind of electronic experimentation that is more friendly to gen z taste

when you look at popular straight ahead indie rock musicians these days -- i.e. mj lenderman -- i feel like you get music that is quite reverential of tradition but the lyrics are pop culture heavy, referential, ironic, etc. the style of the hold steady's writing is referential but more in that bruce springsteen way of referencing small town figures, places etc ... japandroids sorta the same thing. that bruce style of rock writing and big emotive feeling has fallen by the wayside in our irony poisoned times, i think

i'm not enough of a heartland rock scholar to pull this apart but the kind of earnest indie rock that resonates w/ gen z now is midewest emo, to the point that "midwest emo" is now a genre tag used by kids who just mean, like, guitars of a certain tone. the more erudite jean jacket craig finn and win butler kinda earnest indie rock is just not a thing that resonates, it's like older brother music but not your cool older brother. the cool older brother was listening to american football, the uncool one was listening to arcade fire

xp I think the time is right for a Laura Nyro biopic starring a Haim sister.

Actually the Stones are worth talking about. Currently much more eclipsed than the Beatles imo, outside the Boomer/Gen X cohorts that grew up on them. Where does anyone hear the Stones these days? I mean, people may know them from Keith Richards memes, but that might be about it.

Even in the Seventies the Stones were not a huge deal. Many if not most of the bands of that era discussed in this thread outsold them by a lot. They were a live draw, sure, but they didn't become a money-making juggernaut until the early 80s, and they did it by basically becoming a nostalgia act. I feel like the last time they were actively trying to be culturally relevant — a group meeting the moment on its own terms, instead of insisting on their status in the face of ever-diminishing public interest — was Dirty Work.

i’m wondering if the millennial u2 is jay-z. huge and critically acclaimed through mid 2000s but keeps putting out late period garbage trying to stay relevant and that style of rap has no relevance to gen z.

― mig (guess that dreams always end), Saturday, March 28, 2026 9:59 AM (two days ago)

also this is extremely otm. very hard for rap fans to see jay z as anything except extremely corny music for old people. a few years ago i legit sat down some kids i worked with to play them stuff like "so ghetto" and "a million and one questions" bcuz to them jay z is NEWWWWW YOOOOOOOOORKKKK and i was like, no this guy made legit hard rap songs w/ crazy rhyming and they were like, i'm sorry but this is trash. and then they would ask me about j cole and i would be like, you would have to pay me a lot of money to listen to j cole music. big generational break there

very hard for young rap fans** (obv)

Re: the Stones, I don't think they count because it's not like people are going back and deciding that this or that canonical Stones album isn't really all that good after all. They have a spot in the canon, as does Dylan, and they may not be the band of the past that everyone's all into at the moment, in the way that they're into Fleetwood Mac, but they're also not being retroactively booted out of the canon. I'd say if anything Fleetwood Mac is the exception, not the rule.

Like, to put it in terms of literature, the average person you run into on the bus is not going to be reading Middlemarch or Bleak House, but George Eliot and Dickens still have established spots in the canon and someone is always reading them, even if it can be hard to figure out who. Kipling is more of a U2. The Count of Monte Cristo is the current Rumours.

Dostoevsky is the Fleetwood Mac of the era.

The Count of Monte Cristo is the current Rumours.

And Wuthering Heights!

Laura Nyro was always kind of a cult artist as opposed to generation defining huge, no?

Jay-Z is such a weird one. Even when he was "the best rapper alive" for like 10 years he put out a lot of terrible junk, and his hits aren't really his best work.

Jay-Z already seemed cornball to my students in 2015...yet J. Cole, as j0rdan said, was not. Hasn't changed.

Bowie has a few cds that sell a little bit, but add all of his albums up and it wouldn't equal one MCR cd.

Yeah I can see that. A touchstone more than anything else.

does anyone in the world of young people rate Ice Cube these days?

The kids he drives around in those movies

NWA probably had an interest bump after the biopic

And "No Vaseline" was brought up a lot during the Kendrick-Drake beef as the GOAT diss track.

Bob Marley was a major cultural touchstone for 80s/90s listeners, no idea if he is now outside of the trad reggae world

Has reggae in general fallen off in popularity/respect? Whenever I pick reggae songs for the high school teacher Music League they end up way down in the rankings, but also my colleagues and I have very different tastes.

is the 18-to-30 set buying more than one album per artist? I have doubts a 22-year-old smitten with Rumours is looking for Mirage on vinyl.

Bob Marley still has 28 million monthly Spotify listeners, a bit more than 2Pac has.

also more than the Rolling Stones

2 very odd things said in this thread:

"you would have to pay me a lot of money to listen to j cole music." is it somehow not pretty clear that everyone, no matter what generational cohort one belongs to, recognizes that this guy is about as serious a wordsmith/recording artist as you can be? the idea that anyone with much of a clue, which certainly includes jordan S., would consider Cole "cringe" or whatever Gen z is sposed to disdain is peculiar…

"Even in the Seventies the Stones were not a huge deal."

It is true that the Stones 70s records would not sell as much as Eagles or Saturday Night Fever or Tapestry or Dark Side. But the prestige that the band and everything it did emanated in the 1970s cannot be overstated. People who were in their teens and 20s in and around the mid to late 60s would venerate this band throughout the 70s and well into the 90s, due to its preeminence alongside the Beatles and Dylan. Those now 30somethings had spending power and their cultural capital was coming into its own: the late 70s SNL featuring the band was very nearly an all Stones episode: everyone watching would get the jokes and references. And for people slightly younger, the Rolling Stones were the benchmark rock band, whether or not their records sold better than Styx, or for that matter if those records were any good.

I met a young 18-20 something recently wearing a Bob Marley hoodie. Asked about it, they were "obsessed" but had never heard of Lee Perry or Bunny Wailer or Peter Tosh, which maybe during peak '90s Bob hagiography was also mostly the case? Anyway I think the truth is more that our online world has flattened a lot of hierarchies and people are just kind of eclectic and sample from a wide variety of touchstones. Perhaps for certain artists it's true that their "stock" has fallen, but maybe for a good deal of them the luster fades because there's so much readily available competition and also the younger ones seem less interested in canon building in general?

Some Girls is still the Stones biggest selling non-compilation album.

The best-selling Stones albums in the U.S., according to Soundscan: Some Girls, followed by Tattoo You.

a few days of catching up and I have some thoughts:

- I think the reason Rhye were so quickly rejected is that their music is all about love and sex and passion, so the Milosh allegations shape any potential enjoyment of the music. It's why R Kelly's music isn't just "embarassing to still be into" territory but actively unpleasant to listen to now there's no dispute over what an awful man he is - you can't listen to music that wants to seduce you when the reality of the artist's seduction is horrfying.

- my grandfather recently passed away. He loved Elvis and had multiple outfits for the Elvis impersonations. He even once went on TV with me when he was dressed as Elvis and won a national "Groovy Grandad Of The Day" competition. He had seven jukeboxes full of Elvis material. We could not sell his collection of Elvis records. The second-hand shops said it wasn't even worth the cost of driving through to collect them and then finding space to store them in the stockroom, and some of these records he owned he paid three and four figure sums for. We've donated them to care homes, because the age of Elvis fans is now people with dementia and similar conditions, and they take more comfort from the sounds than any person would want to pay to simply have these records.

- The Prodigy are big with late 20s/early 30s folk I know who were only really being born around The Fat Of The Land. I think the brostep continuum is part of this, as well as the romanticism of 90s rave culture, but I also notice that anything after that album isn't really as revered.

- Michael Jackson is something I'm ALWAYS asked for when I DJ in the pub. I think it's partly because the songs don't really have the same "baggage" - I don't think there's a single person who believes that the strange skin-changing monkey-bothering baby-dangling weirdo accused of child abuse would ever have got caught up in a love affair like the story of Billie Jean.

- ABBA in the UK never really went away. We had the Brit Awards in 1998 where the biggest homegrown stars did an ABBA medley and it hung around the charts for weeks, while Muriel's Wedding was the original Mamma Mia. Plus that kind of disco was the template for a lot of UK pop - Steps famously being marketed as "ABBA on speed" but also lots of disco stuff like "Who Do You Think You Are" and "Don't Stop Movin" around the turn of the millenium.

- I saw a poster for a line-up in Mexico recently that was Garbage, Cardigans, Alanis and Natalie Imbruglia. I can't imagine this appealing to anyone in 2026 other than a certain type of gay man who lived through the 90s.

I was thinking that about MJ, that to some extent he was protected even as the accusations rose because he had already been classified as a super-weirdo manchild with an obviously damaged childhood who a lot of people felt bad for to some extent. His skin-lightening, plastic surgery, Neverland, all that stuff made him seem strange and traumatized but also generated some sympathy for him. Not saying that people were able to fold the sex abuse into that entirely, but it did to some degree follow on from what we already thought we knew about him. So it didn't exactly challenge pre-existing ideas of who he was, just made them darker.

We've donated them to care homes, because the age of Elvis fans is now people with dementia and similar conditions, and they take more comfort from the sounds than any person would want to pay to simply have these records.

This is both unbearably sad and beautiful.

The second-hand shops said it wasn't even worth the cost of driving through to collect them and then finding space to store them in the stockroom, and some of these records he owned he paid three and four figure sums for.

Wow, what Elvis records did your grandfather pay $1000+ for that you couldn't even give away? I can't imagine you having, say, original Sun 45s and record stores saying they're not even worth the trouble to pick up

My wife has sirius radio in her car and when I drive it I always go to my two r&b/soul/light funk stations. I will stick with one until an MJ song comes on and then I switch to the other. Once in a blue moon I’ll hit Double Michaels and have to move over to the new wave station.

Double Michaels on the Dime

Why would you do that? xpost

bums me out too much to enjoy it.

who is Rhye and what did he do

oh I googled it and found the answer, which was not on wikipedia

FWIW I remember being shocked when someone suggested I buy Charlie Parker '78s from his prime years if I wanted the best sound because (at the time, the 2000s) they were CHEAP. Granted it's only two songs per disc so it adds up quick if you're trying to match a CD compilation, but it still felt weird for a famous record from the 1940s by one of the most important figures in music. In hindsight, the answer was obvious - everyone who heard him then was very old or dead and there was a seismic shift in pop music after him, meaning the market for his records wasn't that big and these weren't rare records, they pressed plenty since they followed WWII.

Regarding the Stones, here's a 2012 article from Record Collector on Rolled Gold that mentions this:

Alan Fitter, who became Decca Assistant Pop Marketing Manager circa 1973, reveals a little-known fact about the Stones: “The actual albums I don’t think sold fantastically well.” This compilation bucked the trend. “Rolled Gold was the biggest-selling Stones album for quite a while,” he says. “A bit later, I got introduced to Andrew Oldham and he said, ‘Thanks very much, it’s been paying my rent for the last however many years.’”

the rolling stones, much more than their canonized baby boomer peers, were 100 percent a singles band (who happened to make some good albums along the way, but still)

We've donated them to care homes, because the age of Elvis fans is now people with dementia and similar conditions, and they take more comfort from the sounds than any person would want to pay to simply have these records.

This is both unbearably sad and beautiful.

oh god yes i'm crying. subsequent generations may well ignore, but the original generation will quite literally take the music to the grave with them. in alzheimer's/dementia patients, music memory is one of the very last things to go, and may not go at all. thank you for that donation.

expected to see more Pink Floyd in this thread - is there any prog that's still hip?

Camel

Yes, Camel, Floyd, the stoner prog bands basically. Also more challenging stuff like Crimson and VdGG. Jethro Tull not really a hip name to drop these days other than on their thread here.

Which Camel albums are hip? I'm honestly surprised by this

As long as teenage boys smoke weed, there'll be an audience for Pink Floyd and The Doors.

Pink Floyd is even more popular than Zeppelin on streaming.

I think the real core of it is.....Pink Floyd Rules.

My exposure to Pink Floyd has gone down a lot in the decades since I was last a teenage boy (unlike say Fleetwood Mac which has gone wildly the other way) - but there may be multiple variables to unpack there.

another thing i'm sure everyone knows now is Oasis won the war w/Blur for American supremacy but the kids really like Gorillaz even more than both.

otm, I think a lot about Billie Eilish at Coachella a few years ago introducing Damon Albarn as "Damon Albarn from Gorillaz!"

Oasis was always way bigger here than Blur

Which Camel albums are hip? I'm honestly surprised by this

― sawdust lagoon, Monday, March 30, 2026 7:12 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mirage, Snow Goose, and Moonmadness all seem to regularly come up. I heard this was a thing in Discords and asked the record store guy and he said yeah, when we get used Camel records in young people buy them

I've puzzled over this for a while and I think maybe its because their music is hyper melodic like an RPG soundtrack. I mean VGM composers were definitely listening to Camel. Either that or King Gizzard name dropped them. One of life's little mysteries. I have definitely heard of people getting into Gentle Giant through Travis Scott sampling them, the hip-hop/prog crossover audience is very real

Blur's success over here was limited to three or four songs spread out over 9 years.

As with The White Stripes and "Intergalactic," between-innings music goes a long way.

(as in "Song 2")

Have we mentioned Stone Roses yet?

mentioned how their crappy second album annihilated their legacy?

actually not even one particular artist but the rise of jazz fusion should be studied

Like why on earth did Labi Siffre suddenly become huge with kids about a year ago after years of us selling absolutely nothing by him?

Lucy Dacus loves him, so maybe it's her fans lol

"crying, laughing, loving, lying" in "the holdovers" soundtrack was great, maybe that?

^ the answer is always "it was in a show/movie"

Sorry but I don't think Camel records will ever be hip? I'm willing to accept that tastes change within the niche prog community but let's not get carried away

grateful dead strike me as the opposite of this thread question. anything jam-band related to GD post Garcia's death i never touched. that i'm actually considering hearing a phish album in these years of life...

bloc party was the first thing i thought

actually not even one particular artist but the rise of jazz fusion should be studied

I'd say weebs are the predominant factor here.

Oasis was always way bigger here than Blur

Way bigger everywhere.

Like why on earth did Labi Siffre suddenly become huge with kids about a year ago after years of us selling absolutely nothing by him?

My guess here is that while younger people aren't completely uninterested in excavating the past beyond the 90s, they'd rather seek-out alternative history threads than the canonical classic rock hegemony their parents' generation was fed.

And that's not JUST because those 60s/70s rock bands tend to be seen as a bit pale/male/stale, but also because their brand of excess and wild counterculturalism would be seen as "cringe" and unrelatably Boomerish in a time when that sort of thing has been flipped round to bolster the Trumpian right.

There's a tight-lipped but soulful stoicism running through Labi's work. It's at once vulnerable, hopeful and quietly defiant - something I can see a lot of people relating to. Also I can see songs like "God Bless The Telephone" (which has been quite recently used in a prominent ad campaign for something or other in the UK) in their straight-talking, stripped-down naivete, really appealing to a generation who saw their heroes flourish via TikTok and Instagram reels.

Oasis was always way bigger here than Blur

Way bigger everywhere.

Apart from cheese lover Alex James.

……..is this really an attempt to say that being slightly fatter in his fifties than in his early twenties is the only thing to deride this person over, and that it makes him worse than any political, social, or minority-sexual opinions ever expressed by a member of the other cited band?*

*including homophobic death wishes

Like why on earth did Labi Siffre suddenly become huge with kids about a year ago after years of us selling absolutely nothing by him?

i'd never heard of him but it looks like it started when a song was licensed for a film soundtrack a few years ago? there might have been a particular licensing push by his agent or something because that seems to have been followed with quite a few more soundtrack appearances and a reissue campaign?

listening now and some of his stuff is quite pretty although i don't quite get the excitement that seems to exist around him?

Dunno if it made a dent in the US but "Something Inside So Strong" was a big anti-apartheid hit in the 80s over here

Eminem sampled "I Got The..." for "My Name Is". And Labi wrote "It Must Be Love" which Madness had a big hit with. He's not exactly unknown, but I think "God Bless The Telephone" has had a bit of a revival.

He was pretty well known in the early 70s in the UK but seems to have stopped recording in 1975. I almost feel like Joan Armatrading came along and stole his thunder... though that might be my imagination running away with me. He was the sort of guy who might turn up as a guest on The Two Ronnies, to give some context. More Radio 2 than Radio 1.

The Grateful Dead might be the band most resistant to this phenomenon. The jam band diaspora and that a large portion of their catalog are practically folk song canon at this point seem to give them a floor and avenues not available to more conventional artists.

also cant exclude the alternative queer canon appeal of a genre-hopping musician whose open sexuality derailed his commercial success! xp

Did it though?

RJD2 did a (terrible) cover of "Bless the Telephone" like 20 years ago, Kelis covered it 10 years after that, and Kanye sampled another Siffre song on Graduation so he never entirely went away

if anything he deserves a lot more recognition than he has

“Bless The Telephone” is all over algorithms, Instagram Reels, maybe TikTok (not on there enough to verify). Comes up anytime you stream a Mon Rovia song.

I heard it somewhere recently (forget where) and was amazed to discover that the RJD2 version was a cover, since it's the only version I've known for 20+ years.

oh wait it was in Season 4 of Hacks lol

It seems unlikely to me that any of the John Mellencamp stuff that critics took seriously (i.e. stuff recorded after he was calling himself John Cougar) is popular with younger listeners. "Jack and Diane" is still a radio monster though.

Yeah I first heard Bless the Telephone via Kelis (a very nice rendition)

Thanks for picking up the Labi Siffre part of this thread. I think even as recent as 18 months ago we didn't stock any of his albums, maybe one token compilation at the most. One younger couple asked if we had anything by him, so we got in a couple of his records. Since then he's become one of our most popular sellers and I would guess 90% of the people buying his records are people in their early 20s or younger. It's been one of the most fascinating resurgences as a lot of the other ones are easier to trace (like kids buying Souvlaki, Heaven Or Las Vegas, Reading, Writing & Arithmetic and Mazzy Star records en masse). Up until that point my knowledge of him was mainly Something Inside So Strong and him popping up at the end of the video for the Madness cover of It Must Be Love.

Once I checked out a couple of his albums, I had the exact same reaction as ufo. Very pleasant and pretty in places, but he still seems like a surprising artist for people to get that excited about. Especially when most of his albums are in the $40 range.

Oh and I had no idea that Kelis song was a cover.

xps And yes, the only Coug I still hear in reliable rotation is "Jack and Diane" and "Hurts So Good." More the former than the latter. Spotify streams show the same — J&D is at 507m, Hurts at 340m, then you get Smalltown at 154m, Pink Houses at 127m, nothing else over 100m.

You mean "Paper in Fire" isn't #1?

won't anyone rep for Hot Dogs and Hamburgers

or Rooty Toot Toot

is M.I.A. still relevant?

Do Casey and his Brother really speak to anyone under the age of 40?

I dunno if M.I.A. quite fits the bill because as far as most of the listening public knows she's just a one-hit wonder. "Paper Planes" is still very much present, I hear it a fair amount.

won't anyone rep for Hot Dogs and Hamburgers

― a (waterface), Tuesday, March 31, 2026 10:07 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

or Rooty Toot Toot

― a (waterface), Tuesday, March 31, 2026 10:07 AM

There was a late '90s moment when my '80s station played "Check It Out" a fair amount.

I had a period of about a week with “Jack & Dianne” stuck in my head and I would sing it incessantly but all nouns were replaced with “chili dog”

I only recently learned that the part where the music drops out (the "let the Bible belt come and save my soul" part) was all Mick Ronson's idea.

Mellencamp is a good one: of the 4 big '80s Heartland guys he was the most prolific and had the longest Pop chart run, but you really don't hear much about him anymore even though he still releases new stuff on the regular.

Probably doesn't help that he's seemed to entirely de-emphasize fun and entertainment in favor of being taken seriously as a miserable old folk guy the last 20 years or so. At some point, people are like "ok, gotcha. good luck with that. we're gonna go to the tom petty/bruce springsteen/etc. concert instead".

Kanye sampled another Siffre song on Graduation so he never entirely went away

― Number None, Tuesday, March 31, 2026 8:12 AM (three hours ago)

"i wonder" is weirdly one of the tracks off 'graduation' w/ the most staying power, i do think it's played some small but important role in the siffre resurgence. i'm not really sure why, i always found that song kind of annoying and it never registered to me as being anywhere close to the best songs on that album. but it's one 4 songs on 'graduation' to have streamed more than 1 billion times on spotify, and when you look at the others it's two singles (stronger, flashing lights) and the song w/ chris martin (homecoming), so there's something about "i wonder" that has almost transcended that album. it has more streams than "can't tell me nothing." again i don't really know why, but the sample is the most memorable part of the song and and i think kanye kinda unknowingly let the canary loose in the coal mine w/ that one

my household is not immune to siffre rediscovery btw -- my bf & i took some old vinyl home from his mom's in the UK after the holidays and one of the records he put aside was a siffre compilation. we put it on and it was a decent little listen on a weekend morning spent making brunch & tidying up the apartment but it felt a bit treacly to me after too long

am learning that siffre spent part of his life in a throuple, shoutout to him

Cow_Art, you're welcome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QX57aIDbDU

HE STOLE THAT FROM ME

lol was going to post the same thing

On a related note: I was introduced to "Paper in Fire" by a tipsy Boomer karaoke regular slurring his way through it circa 2004. Took a while to clock that the title was not "Favorite Bar." But nowadays I prefer singing it as "Pepperidge Farm."

Now I want a version of "Paper in Fire" that's mostly just "Stinkin' up the ashtrays."

Probably doesn't help that he's seemed to entirely de-emphasize fun and entertainment in favor of being taken seriously as a miserable old folk guy the last 20 years or so. At some point, people are like "ok, gotcha. good luck with that. we're gonna go to the tom petty/bruce springsteen/etc. concert instead".

Almost twenty years ago I saw him on that Dylan/Willie Nelson package tour and he was surprisingly good. Definitely held his own that night with a nice, tight and good-humored hit-filled set.

I guess he could hope that the revived interest in Tracy Chapman leads some people to check out late 80s major label folk/roots stuff.

Speaking of Tracy Chapman, I just realized listening to that chilidog clip that there's a little guitar figure in the song that sounds a lot like Fast Car...

Almost twenty years ago I saw him on that Dylan/Willie Nelson package tour and he was surprisingly good. Definitely held his own that night with a nice, tight and good-humored hit-filled set.

Good to hear! Perhaps he scared me away for no reason. Just remember seeing interviews where he was like "my songs were always folk songs and now I'm going to play them that way", like, devoid of any contemporary trappings, to prove that they were real and he wasn't just some 80s guy or something. Which always seems like a ticket to no-fun land to me.

xp Yeah, I've always noticed that in Fast Car. Jack and Diane came first fwiw. Not saying she lifted it or anything, it's not a complicated bit. But it is kinda similar.

Mellencamp had a handful of songs make inroads in his post-imperial era , obv there was “wild night” but I also recall “your life is now” from the s/t getting a decent amount of airplay, and then there was the briefly inescapable truck commercial song “our country”.

I mean, it doesn’t translate into hundreds of millions of streams, but The Lonesome Jubillee et al seem almost like the definitive predecessor to the more rocking Americana sound.

I've grown to like Mellencamp more than most. There's actually a lot of Mellencamp I enjoy, but percentage-wise, it's not much because he's released a TON of music. I think something like 25 albums of new recordings and then several compilations of "unreleased" or non-LP recordings, including a box set focused on that. He's got quite a few gems scattered about: mostly covers, quite a few done for soundtracks, and one of my favorites is an original actually given to the Blasters (a great track he even produced for them). Otherwise, the only proper albums I'll listen to from start-to-finish are Scarecrow and The Lonesome Jubilee, and even then I have to concede the arrangements and playing carry them through - he was never consistent when it came to lyrics and both albums have songs that could've used an entirely new set of them. He can still cut decent songs, but it's pretty much what you'd expect - well-arranged and topical, but also very familiar and breaking no new ground.

I’m not sure U2 really deserve to be the poster boys for this phenomenon. I still hear Where The Streets Have No Name and With Or Without You. Like many bands, they’ve been reduced to a few enduring songs. They definitely have a higher profile than Blood Sweat and Tears or Chicago.

Elvis is kind of like Sinatra, he will never disappear.

Van Morrison? Is that something the younger generations are still clamoring for?

I just realized listening to that chilidog clip that there's a little guitar figure in the song that sounds a lot like Fast Car...

common talking point among myself and other annoying people in the late 80's

a lotta 12-year-olds out there who think Frank Sinatra is a guy who wrote songs for pizza joints

surprised no mention of the police (breaking up at their peak (synchronicity)) -- the most recent "biggest band in the world" just prior to U2?

Those Police singles are still ubiquitous.

i think that's a pretty good one tho ... i feel like there are specific police pastiches that have gotten popular over the years -- i.e. bruno mars "locked out of heaven" or obv diddy -- but i'm not sure you could say that the police as a sound have been very influential on pop music of the 90s and beyond? maybe i'm wrong

i sorta feel the same way about like duran duran? i was at the sabrina carpenter show in hyde park where she brought them out to perform "hungry like the wolf" but her actual music is so influenced by disco and post-disco 80s boogie type pop that there are barely if any traces of that more goth-y kinda synth pop. maybe there's stuff i'm not thinking about but the fact that disco is still constantly being iterated on by modern pop songwriters feels noteworthy in this discussion to me

That Police reunion was genuinely huge, one of the highest grossing tours ever in fact, when I went I saw tons of young people going nuts for every song. granted that was nearly 20 years ago but their LPs do seem to move even today

important evidence from the field: the youths were talking about 10cc absolutely unprompted and i proceeded to play “i’m not in love” and there were kids singing along. apparently the song is popular in edits!

I know I bring this guy up a lot, but Frank Zappa seems to fit the bill.

xpost re Duran Duran: "Ordinary World" seems more of an enduring staple for Duran Duran now than any of their peak-popularity singles.

Zappa seems like another case of an act that hasn't had much (any?) licensing in film/TV/etc. to carry his popularity forward.

Was funny a month or two ago seeing a Tik Tok / Instagram viral template that used a "Bases are loaded and Casey's at bat" fragment from Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way."

Zappa had pretty much faded before I even started listening to music. No songs on Classic Rock radio probably didn’t help.

The Police's influence on Vampire Weekend is isn't talked about enough.

I hear The Police all over Turnstile's music.

I think the influence of The Police was very evident in the music of the mega-selling Mexican rock group Maná, especially in the vocals.

I hear The Police all over Turnstile's music.

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 1, 2026 1:37 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

definitely on the newest one esp

With the Police discussion especially, we seem to be drifting back toward
Least influential big bands , with a few dashes of shifts in popular opinion you have noticed

But I always enjoy threads along these lines. This time around, I'm noticing that the examples that really land with me are all significantly older than U2. I think to be really definitive about these things, it does take time to see what the landscape looks like once the original generation of fans is well into retirement, so that you've got a couple generations after them to assess.

Because it's almost inevitable that the "middle" generation won't be quite as attached - they're rebelling, they're doing their own thing - and it's almost inevitable that *any* once-huge band will get whittled down to a handful of greatest hits. What we're exploring here is whether those hits are still known or played at all by the time the third generation are well into adulthood.

It's a bit like the New Jersey phenomenon. What's fascinating is when a knowledgeable present-day music listener would need abundant evidence or firsthand accounts to convince them that, no, really, this thing they've never heard of (or only seen treated in passing and mockingly) was a HUGE HUGE DEAL at the time.

Any version of a Police greatest hits/playlist pops up at all times in public spaces -- as much as Rumours. I hear "Roxanne," "Message in a Bottle," "Ever Little Thing...," "Every Breath You Take," etc. at least twice a week in the wild.

I feel like U2's influence, that sort of grandiose uplift they specialized in, is everywhere across all genres now even if it's expressed in different styles and genres like even country or pop.

charlie puth just put out a whole 80s pastiche album leaning more into soft rock, yacht rock, clean pristine patrick bateman music & i feel like that stuff has over time won out over cooler/more critically acclaimed 80s pop of the time

I feel like U2's influence, that sort of grandiose uplift they specialized in, is everywhere across all genres now even if it's expressed in different styles and genres like even country or pop.

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, April 1, 2026 2:47 PM (four minutes ago)

kanye was explicitly influenced by opening for U2 circa 'graduation' -- he actually mentioned "i wonder" specifically as something he made after getting off tour w/ them. and obv so much of rap right now in the travis scott, playboi carti lane is heavily influenced by kanye's rock star type ambition, the way kanye may have been the first rapper to really harness and own the arena as a live space

Combine the influences of U2 and Terrence Malick and you’ve got most every pharmaceutical or car ad.

i'm a little less certain that there is a lot of grandiose uplift happening in rock and country unless you mean, like, teddy swims and alex warren

In the context of this thread, the Police are interesting, because yeah, their musical templates are well distributed through pop and rock. But they also had this smartypants appeal - Nabokov! Jung! Ryle! that got immediately cringy with Sting's solo career. Russians! Tantra! Jazz!

I wonder if REM stayed the murky and mysterious IRS band if they'd resonate like Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star

there's absolutely a scenario where they break up after reckoning and remain record collector nerd touchstones

...which also makes me recall that the trope of "the thinking man's ________" is a music crit trope that didn't make it out of the 80s.

i heard "shiny happy people" at the gym the other day and had a laugh

i doubt that it's a direct influence but i think you could trace the sound/production of 'out of time' to some newer indie stuff like soccer mommy - 'color theory' that revived that 90s alt rock jangle pop sound

Thought of this thread upon hearing REM several times over the last few days on the local community radio station.

...which also makes me recall that the trope of "the thinking man's ________" is a music crit trope that didn't make it out of the 80s.

I used to have a Hydra Head Records T-shirt (circa 2003 or so) that said "Thinking Man's Metal" on the back.

IDM was sort of "the thinking man's techno", as a term

Blue Oyster Cult was the first band dubbed "thinking man's metal" in an ad or article iirc

it's true, because I think about Blue Oyster Cult a lot

that sort of grandiose uplift

I suspect relatively few ilx0rz are hep to the megachurch scene but I gather current Christian worship music is drenched in U2.

There was, not long ago, a whole thing where churches would have a "U2charist" service based off the music of them four cheeky lads.

...which also makes me recall that the trope of "the thinking man's ________" is a music crit trope that didn't make it out of the 80s.

I do remember Nelly Furtado being referred to as "the thinking person's Christina Aguilera" when she released her first album.

thinking about her midriff

I like Nelly Furtado and I cannot imagine ANYONE calling her that

I fell for that (and still dig Whoa, Nelly!. Part of it was the Dreamworks artist-friendly thing.

is “thinking person” a weird way to say canadian

A weird way of saying, "A rockist's idea of"

The idea of Nelly Furtado being in the same vocal category as Christina Aguilera is just the funniest thing to me, it’s like calling Charlie Puth “the thinking man’s Phillip Bailey”

I mean, only one of th two opens with a looped Kronos Quartet sample…

"thinking man's" as an adjective just make me think of the singer from crash test dummies

i feel like u2 have been considered, at best, a guilty pleasure among millenials since the 2000s at least? might be just a hipster thing, tho, idk.

One thing that's interesting with grunge is how Nirvana and too a slightly lesser extent Alice in Chains are as present as ever with kids and Pearl Jam and especially Soundgarden barely exist.

i ctrl-fed "alice in chains" because a week ago i saw a 17 year old wearing a giant alice in chains t-shirt.

i don't think queens of the stone age are going anywhere generationally speaking. maybe kyuss though.

i honestly never would have thought i'd see nirvana everywhere as a 43-year-old man. i mean it's not like i ever think about these things. it makes sense that they're still relevant of course, the music is amazing, part of me still feels like they're too dangerous to be as popular as they are or something.

16 year old daughter went as the In Utero cover for Halloween.

I wonder how much Nirvana's extensive licensing of their images (by Courtney Love, I think?) has affected this. Whenever I'm in Target or Marshall's or such, there are still always Nirvana t-shirts (and of course no Pearl Jam ones).

nirvana logo is pretty iconic, it looks like the logo for a fragrance or something. pearl jam don't really f with logos, do they?

I love that Nirvana has (without any perceivable effort) become a brand on its own, embedded in the culture, while Gene Simmons has spent his whole life trying to manifest exactly that for Kiss and it never really happened except for a couple splashes here and there.

*non music-specific culture, I should say

I think they may have had that in the first few years - the Kiss Army, Kiss comic books, a Kiss pinball machine, etc. - but that was largely gone by 1980.

I think Nirvana is just a once-in-generation timeless band like the Beatles, which is why all the “Hole/MBV/Lauryn Hill is better actually” critical retconning rings so false to me

I don’t know the band Hole MBV Lauryn Hill but they sound pretty sweet

nirvana was a once-in-a-genertation timeless band like . . . the jimi hendrix experience

i do not constantly hear nivrana when i go for a frap

What about Moby? Play was inescapable in 1999. Now he's seen as kind of a punchline

Feel like time hasn't been especially kind to Queens Of The Stone Age, Fool Fighters etc

Fool Fighters, you say

I pity the Foo

I used to be a Fool Fighter but then I stopped commenting on Facebook.

ffs my autocorrect is super rogue

although i do like Fool Fighters. "This Is A Clown", "Hey Johnny Honk!"

I don’t know the band Hole MBV Lauryn Hill but they sound pretty sweet

they’d sound amazing if they could just release something more than once a quarter century

I still prefer Anderson Bruford Wakeman Hole.

Hole Asylum

Youngboy MBV

queens of the stone age seem to be as big as ever to me (I'm not a fan)

I went to see them on the last tour and there were definitely a ton of young people there.

also it was very strange I'm old so I think of them being out of Kyuss and Songs for the Deaf as the end of the really great period, but most of the kids there seemed to think of that as the beginning and really a lot of the stuff from Like Clockwork went over really big.

They were playing QOTSA in a record store I was in a couple of weeks ago.

nirvana logo is pretty iconic, it looks like the logo for a fragrance or something. pearl jam don't really f with logos, do they?

― brimstead, Wednesday, April 1, 2026 11:13 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

pearl jam had this logo which was popular back in the day, i used line cook with a dude that had it as a tattoo lol

https://i.postimg.cc/yNS7L2z5/Screenshot-2026-04-02-at-10-44-32-AM.png

I hate the Nirvana smiley face logo

A friend of mine got thrown out of a college classroom by a professor circa 1991 for wearing the Nirvana Sub Pop tee that said "Fudge packin crack smokin satan worshipin motherfuckers." I wonder if Sub Pop still has the license for that? Seems like they could make a mint with it.

jeez, I got kicked out of summer school for wearing a Curve t-shirt with baby dolls on it, that one would have gotten me shot by campus police in 1991

One thing that's interesting with grunge is how Nirvana and too a slightly lesser extent Alice in Chains are as present as ever with kids and Pearl Jam and especially Soundgarden barely exist.

I've mentioned this a couple of times in various threads but my 17 year old son mostly listens to 90s alternative rock and yes, Alice in Chains and Nirvana are both very important to him while Pearl Jam and Soundgarden are both bands he has listened to he doesn't put them at the same level. One thing that surprised me though was when he mentioned that the album he actually listens to the most is "Purple" by Stone Temple Pilots.

Will add to all this that Michael Hann's review of MBV at the Royal Albert Hall kinda dovetails with this thread:

https://spectator.com/article/its-time-to-redefine-what-we-mean-by-classic-rock/

All Bands Matter

I think the Zeitgeist is just not that into guitars, loud distorted guitars, and especially guitar solos. There are exceptions, maybe even some big ones, but they just aren't the sounds/obsessions of today.

― Mighty Morphin Is The Subject of My Sentence (Doctor Casino), Monday, March 30, 2026 11:50 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Catching up on this thread, the point about "guitar solo" music is definitely true. Bands where a huge point of the group is "look at this virtuoso guitarist" have way less standing, even as there's tons of old guitar music that remains beloved/popular to young people. The ones that remain hugely popular (Beatles, CCR, Fleetwood Mac) are often not "watch this guitar god rip" bands.

Maybe a case-in-point, maybe a little bit of a stretch, but AC/DC has 4 times the streaming numbers that Van Halen does. Obviously the Youngs are totally rated and respected, but I don't think of them like "guitar gods" in the same way people used to talk about, like, Hendrix or EVH.

The most GUITAR SOLO song that my kids have ever gotten excited about is "I Believe In A Thing Called Love."

there's a whole new generation of super chops guitar people who get big through YouTube, Tim Henson and Polyphia being a big example, so it hasn't died so much as evolved

yes and in a way it's even more distilled, i think with short form video it's like, hey you can skip all the fluff with the boring singing and get straight to the SHREDDING

someone pointed out (maybe here?) that Pink Pony Club was the first huge hit with a giant guitar solo in it in many years

My son’s friend plays a lot of Guitar Hero and he’s always singing Skynyrd.

completely baseless, half-baked, pre-coffee theory: cuts to school arts funding mean fewer kids discover a love for playing and mastering a musical instrument, which robs some key ingredient/constituency that would build the critical mass of youth excitement/support for someone attaining technical mastery in that particular way. like, obviously not all "guitar god" worshippers are band kids, but is/was it part of the mix???

the degree to which mainstream rock merged with country is probably a bigger factor in any case

My son’s friend plays a lot of Guitar Hero and he’s always singing Skynyrd.

The surprise to me here is not that there's kids out there still singing Skynyrd but that there are kids out there playing vintage game w/ elaborate peripherals Guitar Hero.

I got a kid who went to a city arts high school, did a year of guitar but it was too difficult to do remotely during the pandemic. Has picked it back up big time since he went off to college. Other friends in that program have started bands. Most of them also do the DAW and beats thing. I certainly wouldn't have made progress on guitar if it weren't for a high school music class where the teacher was a drunk who never showed up so we just taught each other riffs on Sears acoustics. I do think suffocating funding for the arts in the USA has had a big effect. I don't know if anyone has actually tried to quantify nepo-baby stuff in the arts vs 40 years ago, but it sure feels that way.

Doc, I hear you on arts education but I would counter that music adored by musicians has a high potential for sucking as music.

All the children say

We don't need another Yngwie

I should drink coffee before I type but— I’m curious about the original question. Do Zoomers REVILE U2? Do we have evidence of this? I feel like we’re one sync of “The Fly” away from a massive U2 resurgence. U2 have always been corny but good.

In contrast I think Peter Gabriel is the best example of an inescapable 80s musician who feels comparatively reviled in contemporary terms— Clapton could apply also but surely that’s in part related to his bad politics and the fact that the kids are more likely to have heard “Tears In Heaven” than Cream

Obv I’d argue that the next generation’s “U2” is/will be The Flaming Lips, if even they’re popular enough to occupy that position. Generation after that is Maroon 5. Wow is that band gonna have a crash and a sad third act.

Loving PG in America even in the early '90s was naff, more so as the years between albums lengthened.

He had a revival 2006-2015, no? Vampire Weekend helped. Consensus hardening around So as his best coincided with younger writers discovering and loving their parents' car vacation music.

As for shredding— I actually somewhat agree that there’s a link between kids learning instruments and the worship of guitar solos and drum solos. Nobody else listens to a guitar solo with any interest

I was thinking when the topic turned to guitar solos about how I see a gold top and feel about the same was as most people would feel if they saw a set of bagpipes. My guitar solo interest begins and ends with “Marquee Moon”, “Cowgirl In The Sand”, Marc Ribot and Prince. Otherwise it’s a crowded field with very few high points

He had a revival 2006-2015, no? Vampire Weekend helped

Did he tho? Because Ezra sings his name and PG’s response was to act like the word had declared Peter Gabriel Day and covered the song and hammily changed the lyric to, paraphrased, “I’M PETER GABRIEL”?

When a country artist decides to do a version of “Solsbury Hill” and bring him out at the Grammies I could imagine him getting a revival but (with apologies to Whiney I know how much you love “Sledgehammer”) it is a depressingly weak and shallow pool of material and “In Your Eyes” is sitting there at the end like the British equivalent of “Kokomo”

PG by all rights should have had a Stranger Things bump, not just because of the Kate Bush connection but because the show used his version of Heroes in several scenes. But his streaming numbers aren’t that big.

I remember when TV on the Radio first came out, people I worked with said the singer sounded like Peter Gabriel, which led to the Lamb Lies Down getting blasted often in the back room.

xp wow “depressingly weak and shallow pool”? sb!!!!

Oh wow I never made that connection but it’s uncanny, yeah

Generation after that is Maroon 5. Wow is that band gonna have a crash and a sad third act.

I dunno, they feel like they're exactly the right level of universally reviled to get a 80's AOR/Nu Metal style revisionist revival down the road.

Years ago, my other kid was playing me a rock song she liked that had a longish solo, and asked 'what am I supposed to do during this?"

Click suggest band all you want, it won’t make “Games Without Frontiers” a good song or that Kate Bush duet any less soggy

Flaming Lips is a good one. Or it seems that’s the direction they’re heading. Who knows, they’ve already kinda come back from the dead a couple of times. I assume most of their audience at this point is oldsters reliving concert experiences from the Yoshimi days and taking their kids. With Drozd out a lot of serious fans are skeptical of what comes next.

Generation after that is Maroon 5. Wow is that band gonna have a crash and a sad third act.

I dunno, they feel like they're exactly the right level of universally reviled to get a 80's AOR/Nu Metal style revisionist revival down the road.

Ya who knows. I definitely did not expect emo to be the most robust surviving genre of the 00s

Back in the day the Lips were an amazing heartfelt show, now it feels tired. It was better when everything was held together with duct tape and shoestrings.

Click suggest band all you want, it won’t make “Games Without Frontiers” a good song or that Kate Bush duet any less soggy

i want to speak to your manager

Maroon 5 / Train / Sugar Ray is a nostalgia tour for suburban moms

and here I thought that with his first post flamboyant goon was here to defend Gabriel.

I think that SB halftime show killed Maroon 5 for a lot of people, it was the Howard Dean yell of alternative pop rock music. i think obv they're nowhere in the same league as U2 and i don't necessarily think they're a comparison as far as perception either.

I don't know if anyone has actually tried to quantify nepo-baby stuff in the arts vs 40 years ago, but it sure feels that way.

i do get a sense that many more musicians who get pushed into to public eye come from families who are ably capable of supporting their dreams, is one way i might put it. how that all leads to different music creatively speaking in terms of certain qualities, idk how to assess that fairly.

completely baseless, half-baked, pre-coffee theory: cuts to school arts funding mean fewer kids discover a love for playing and mastering a musical instrument, which robs some key ingredient/constituency that would build the critical mass of youth excitement/support for someone attaining technical mastery in that particular way. like, obviously not all "guitar god" worshippers are band kids, but is/was it part of the mix???

― Mighty Morphin Is The Subject of My Sentence (Doctor Casino), Friday, April 3, 2026 8:15 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

the degree to which mainstream rock merged with country is probably a bigger factor in any case

― Mighty Morphin Is The Subject of My Sentence (Doctor Casino), Friday, April 3, 2026 8:18 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's always been this way, however it's become more skewed as time goes by thanks those Arts in Schools budget cuts, but a lot of kids get started learning music and playing instruments in Church and related off-shoots (day camps, after-school programs etc).

I’m having a rough few days, I’m generally positive about Gabriel I think I’m just needing to blow off some steam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt87bLX7m_o

^there should have been a British Batman movie with PG as The Joker.

guitar god solos were a trend in the 60s/70s due to people on weed/acid at festivals and giant darkened amphitheaters. there was a rated pg (peter gabriel) version for nerds without drugs called prog. all this got cringe by the scifi 80s.

not sure school arts funding is a big deal in this story as flashy instrumental music was really big in the 20th century with/by poor people who didn’t finish high school (jazz, bluegrass, surf). seems like something else bigger was happening to all the arts across the 2nd half of the 20th century to prioritize simplicity as media channels expanded. maybe hundreds of millions not going to church and absorbing harmonic concepts is a factor... there’s still tons of high school kids with jazz chops and their influence on music is very slight although they find their way into jam bands, indie bands, working jazz groups, etc

i don’t like the “rock merged with country” narrative. country did lose its characteristic two step rhythms gradually from the 50s on and by the 90s it occasionally had guitars a bit louder than before, but not often. basically country sounded like a mix of current pop styles which was this narrow spectrum of soft rock rock and light rnb, while keeping the lyrics focused on storytelling. rock didn’t really borrow from country since pedal steel stopped sounding weird in the 70s.

Years ago, my other kid was playing me a rock song she liked that had a longish solo, and asked 'what am I supposed to do during this?"

- worship
- play air guitar
- follow along to a note-for-note internet transcription
- other

Weed interferes with short-term memory; the listener forgets you're on your fourth minute of pentatonic doodling and, as a result, grades you on a curve.

Hence the popularity of jam band music with potheads (and vice versa).

What did the Deadhead say when the drugs wore off?

"Wow, this band sucks!"

You can vibe to a guitar solo by Santana in a way you can’t to one by an 80s hard rock dude.

it’s the reason we’ve had to put up with “Smooth” forever

I think that SB halftime show killed Maroon 5 for a lot of people, it was the Howard Dean yell of alternative pop rock music. i think obv they're nowhere in the same league as U2 and i don't necessarily think they're a comparison as far as perception either.

― omar little, 3. april 2026 16:22 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

See also: Black Eyed Peas

Maroon 5 is huge but they were never important

yeah "taken seriously by critics" seems like an issue there. dunno about the 80s hard-rock comparison either - Maroon 5 seem too boring and characterless, lacking the risk-taking ridiculousness that lets some rock arrive to "lol so bad it's good" followed often by a "no irony this shit is actually awesome" reappraisal.

fair critiques of my school-band hypothesis! like i said, half-baked, and not intended as sole explanation... just one ingredient in the cultural ecosystem that shapes what teens might get into (and in what ways).

maybe perhaps a better armchair theory would have to do not with school bands but with garage bands and bedroom noodling: we're looking at a vicious circle of guitar popularity. if fewer kids are into guitar music, fewer parents buy them guitars, and fewer of them are primed to be gobsmacked by the technique of whoever's being touted by guitar magazines which no longer exist anyway.

i'm probably also projecting from my experience as a non-music-playing 90s teen, responded to classic rock the way i responded to pop: i liked generally uptempo, catchy songs with clear singable hooks and riffs. i didn't vibe out, i sang along. instrumental passages were a tough sell for a long time. feel like if I'd been *playing* instrumental music from an early age, that would surely have been a little different.

I think that’s a lot of people’s experience, since you usually just encounter classic rock singles until you take a dive into album buying, where you might encounter 10 minute long jams—especially on live albums.

Maroon 5 seem too boring and characterless, lacking the risk-taking ridiculousness that lets some rock arrive to "lol so bad it's good" followed often by a "no irony this shit is actually awesome" reappraisal.

Contemporary critiques of 80's AOR (by which tbc I mean bands like Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon - whom I wouldn't call hard rock really, so maybe we're thinking of different bands) absolutely characterise these bands as boring and characterless!

Maroon 5 are the unthinking man’s Jamiroquai

maroon 5 are the single-digit matchbox 20

(Doors Down + Eye Blind) - Maroon = Pilots - Matchbox

lol

(though technically, eye blind consist of only one eye, not three. the first and second eyes have not, to my knowledge, ever performed with them.)

Also ending the guitar reign: GarageBand et al that let music-curious folks not even have to learn an instrument first.

yah i guess if we're talking Journey/Speedwagon, Maroon 5 are probably a pretty good comparison. i do think that their relentless rhythmic bopping kinda works against the operatic drama/build that i think is a big part of people coming back to, say, "Don't Stop Believin'." but that wasn't even that big a hit for Journey, so maybe there's some forgotten mid-tier M5 single that will turn out to fit the bill. i would certainly expect to hear them in dentists' offices for as long as I've got teeth.

along the lines of the 'after-school/church' hypothesis re: shredding, i think logistics is a big part too. related to general social/economic decline just as cuts to arts education are, it's simply harder to play with others if you don't have a car, access to rehearsal space, surroundings which can allow or tolerate high volumes, etc. i think folks' living situations are related to this, more roommates/apartments (or simply living with parents) but logistics stands out to me as less obvious but as important. i've taken my blues jr on the bus before, and even that is a pain in the ass

terrible amp by the way

the third eye is all eyes

Peter Gabriel is the best example of an inescapable 80s musician who feels comparatively reviled in contemporary terms

he holds up well enough (3, 4 and so are all very good) and kids still love the "sledgehammer" video whenever they discover it. harry styles covered "sledgehammer" a few years ago. i remember when i was on tumblr as a teen the video would go around fairly regularly and that was the first time i saw it

Obv I’d argue that the next generation’s “U2” is/will be The Flaming Lips, if even they’re popular enough to occupy that position

i don't think the flaming lips were ever a u2 but their critical reputation has rightfully been on the downswing for a long time i think, and that likely has flow-on effects. people used to talk about the soft bulletin as one of the best albums of the 90s and it's just really not that good

I don't think PG is reviled at all. His stock is a little farther down than it should be since his 21st century has been a little patchy. But i/o absolutely ripped and should have been on year end lists, plus everyone liked that "I Have the Touch" needle drop in Marty Supreme

He’s not really throwing himself in the spotlight and has done low key collaborations and has an audience, just not a broad worldwide audience.

I think that in the streaming era you’re defined by placement in pop culture media properties and the old way of just blasting out albums and touring, regardless of whether those albums are any good. He’s just not really done either.

Seems like Eno is filling a role these days that PG used to—organizing political fundraising concerts with mostly world musicians

i looked up pg’s chart placing to compare to talking heads, who feel fairly ubiquitous by comparison. gabriel had 5 us top forties including a number 1, to three for the heads topping out at number nine (in both cases, their dumb fun funk song). gabriel was just two years older than byrne but carries himself a generation older.

maybe it’s the playlists… gabriel has a bunch of conventional sounding material and bunch of weirder stuff and it doesn’t flow together. a pair of vinyl compilations separating things might help? and throw in a few genesis tracks?

PG isn't reviled so much as generally ignored commercially. His last album was well received; new one that is trickling out less so but people are happy enough he's still doing something? I'd say Phil Collins was reviled for a while there but younger people seem to be embracing even his schlockiest stuff.

talking heads have "this must be the place." pg doesn't have that.

pg’s weirdly affecting ballad getting rediscovered by tiktok/soundtrack editors is currently mercy street, but could become either lead a normal life or come talk to me. hard to compete with the ultimate nerd prom song though.

xpost Solsbury Hill has basically the same amount of plays on Spotify as This Must Be the Place

Click suggest band all you want, it won’t make “Games Without Frontiers” a good song or that Kate Bush duet any less soggy

this comment is a crime

anyway i've def found the 'new generation' (ie, gen z, alpha, whatever is younger than 28 now) seems to like whatever. they don't seem to hate shit with the passion we hated shit when we were their age (like how much we all hated the Eagles in our 20's/30's). this is probably a good development in some ways; it also means they have no standards w/r/t music though.

Four solo albums called Peter Gabriel in a row? Suggest band.

My knowledge of what the kids like these days is very skewed by the tastes of my 14-year old and his friends. Unsurprisingly their tastes seem to be range across lots of eras and styles, including the dated, obscure or just random, with no interest in critical estimation or what was considered cool or uncool by any prior generation, but probably influenced to a large extent by viral videos. For instance my mind boggles to hear my son and his friend debating whether or not Steely Dan are yacht rock and avowing their love for "Aja". That couldn't have been further from my tastes when I was his age.

otm akm & nate, regardless of what the youngs do or dont get into, overall there seems to be a lot less negativity in their music fandom compared to previous generations. the idea of 'bands you're not allowed to like' or 'if youre into X you cant also be into Y' seems to be more or less a thing of the past

I wonder if that is true for new music as well or just older stuff. Is there not still hatred for genres like Country?

people are still very weird about street-oriented rap

Definitely there are youngs who "hate country," but also country is probably the most popular in the teen-20s demo that it's ever been.