Post a controversial music opinion

Yeah

Troye Sivan is a better guitarist than Jimmy Page.

LOL

there are more chords, key changes, and tempo changes in The Beths' "Future Hates Me" than there are in the Cardiacs' entire discography

king sucks

I don't want to think about this, fortunately I made a bot for it. let's see what it comes up with:

"Is This It is the sonic equivalent of ghosting."

There were, at minimum, a couple dozen albums released in '67 which are better than Sgt. Pepper.

That's not controversial.

R.E.M. is actually really boring

wow, thread finally delivers

I liked R.E.M. a lot in high school and they are all smart, nice guys with good taste but man, I just never want to listen to them anymore. Somewhere around Monster I lost all interest. the limited guitar playing and lack of sonic depth, the boring arrangements, the mewling vocals, the poor production choices and terrible mandolin playing and clunky videos, their catalog feels very inert to me.

like at best I can muster a "yeah that song's okay" for a number of tracks. but a whole album? ew, just never in the mood.

Most bands are boring tbh

all bands are excellent

^^^^

rt

not all bands

bandsplaining

All duos are terrible.

All bands except R.E.M. are excellent

more like blands amirite

Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS.

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

All duos are terrible.

All solo artists are cowards.

lol

All trios are Norwegian.

All ILM posters are liars

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

― strong deutan (rip van wanko), Friday, September 7, 2018 1:03 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have a constantly running loop of that lebowski clip in my head, but never more than last night when I was in a duane reade after hell commute that was playing take it easy

jmm otm

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

― strong deutan (rip van wanko), Friday, September 7, 2018 10:03 AM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"i can't tell you why" is an amazing song but i can't join you here just yet

the eagles are good

i can't tell you why is really good

other eagles songs i like: hotel california, new kid in town, try and love again, take it easy, peaceful easy feeling, witchy woman

The High Llamas were (are?) a million times better than their 'parents', the Beach Boys.

that's not controversial, it's just wrong

the only good Beach Boy was/is Mike Love.

High Llamas relationship to the Beach Boys was always tangential at best (and related to a very brief period/narrow slice of their catalog) and was way over-emphasized in their press materials.

I would take even the low points of M.I.U. over the High Llamas tbh

No artist at all has a "New Jersey" - a huge event album that ultimately feels a bit hollow & signals a career decline

You could say that about any band that has the opportunity to develop someone else's idea further, if it works for you.

xps

There are a bunch of good Eagles songs. Every one of them was released as a single, so a compilation is all you need. There's not one Eagles album worth listening to all the way through. The Long Run comes closest.

The Beach Boys have, like, two good songs ("Good Vibrations" and "Don't Worry Baby"), and I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing either one of them ever again.

Can't think of any.

Black metal sucks. Even the "good" stuff is bad enough that it's worth handing the whole genre over to the Nazis and walking away. Let 'em have it.

Does it have to be a controversial opinion that we actually hold or are we allowed to just say something we think might wind people up?

Saying a band or genre you don't like sucks isn't controversial or even a wind-up tbh.

that late-90s Brian Wilson worship was so tiresome

Counterpoint: at a Silver Jews show, D. Berman did a sneering routine of saying, "What's the big deal with Brian Wilson? He's so overrated," etc.; which was equally annoying.

It could have been John Prine who wrote "Margaritaville."

Here's an (actually held) controversial opinion: while I've been into the Silver Jews since I first ran across "The Arizona Record" (filed under Pavement on a rack), and I think they have some terrific records, I also think Berman is significantly overvalued as a lyricist by most fans. He has some good one-liners, but his lyrics tend to be strings of "clever" non-sequiturs that only sometimes land. He's seen as some kind of rock poet.

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

― strong deutan (rip van wanko), Friday, September 7, 2018 10:03 AM

We have a daily listening thread that'll prove you wrong.

you could make a dud list for most anybody

i can listen to endless hours of forgotten rockabilly and hillbilly country. i ended up with hundreds of CDrs someone made of cool doo wop/country/rockabilly comps and boxes and i play them at the store all the time. i just put them on and let them spin. i rarely know who is playing. i think it is more honking sax r&b and piano-bashing rockers who make me tired. i like older r&b with a big band feel more. jump jazz. that kinda thing. i like a lot of the stuff on Specialty that wasn't Little Richard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCos-v8oLdA

i wonder if nile rodgers would have done something cool with TP & the HB. something slinkier. they could do slinky. they knew how to create good grooves. might have just come out like mick solo though. ooh, bill laswell! instead of dave stewart. that would have been weird.

of all the music we could be shitting on and you guys are choosing Little Richard

honking sax r&b and piano-bashing rockers

lol more of this pls

oops that was for the tom petty thread. my last post.

Favourite Carl Perkins is "Dixie Fried." I've mentioned this before: I think certain iconic '50s songs--"Good Golly Miss Molly" and "Great Balls of Fire," "That'll Be the Day" too, not among my Holly favourites--were ruined for me by the barrage of K-Tel commercials in the early '70s when they started compiling that stuff during the revival craze. They became reduced to two-second snippets of their titles, heard hundreds of times. "Johnny B. Goode" may have been one of those songs, but that somehow escaped a similar fate with me--and all of Berry's other greatest songs were not part of that, and I don't remember Bo Diddley being part of that either.

Slippin' and Slidin' so great that might be my fav Lil Rich

Ooh yes Dixie Fried is good. Before finding Carl Perkins at the public library, my whole life I had been searching for music that sounded like the three little pigs band in that old cartoon about the big bad wolf and for me, Carl Perkins is IT

My fave Lil Richard is def Rip it Up and Jenny Jenny

Bo was more a minor player in the context of the 50s, I think. He was so ahead of his time, and such a thing for the Brit invasion, but I don't think he was as much in the mind of the K-Tel target audience.

The 80s Atlantic R&B 1947-1974 comps are great, confined to the Atlantic sound, but flow through the years in a satisfying way.

This was probably the biggest culprit among those albums (plus a second volume)--there were others, too.

https://www.discogs.com/release/3606514-Various-25-Rock-Revival-Greats

Surprised that Holly isn't on there at all--licensing, I guess--and Bo Diddley is (he must have been bypassed for the commercials). "One-two-three o-clock..." "Hello, baybee..." "Goodness gracious..." drilled into my brain forever. And yet, I still love "Mission Bell" and "Book of Love," and other songs on there weren't hurt too much. So arbitrary. (What in the world are the Dave Clark Five doing on there?)

Listen to Gene Vincent & the Blue Caps, especially with Cliff Gallup, that's all I'm here to say.

i love gene and eddie. even the ballads.

it has often been said that the world is made up of two kinds of people. tittyshaker mod dancers. and the other kind. i think i'm the other kind. i don't need this a lot. swanky as it is. some people can listen all day!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF1R2m4W_cI

i'm more northern popcorn garage.

The Hamburg '64 live set is the only Jerry Lewis I need though I quite like the country comeback records from the late 60s early 70s.

really really really hard to sell: ray charles records. one of those legends that is hard to sell. some legends are! i mean, ella fitzgerald and tony bennett are legends, right? barbra streisand? dollar bin legend. actually, free bin legend.

I wonder what it is about them, maybe a bit too mainstream showbiz in style or in reputation?

I mean I know there's not much that's underground or cool about any of them, in the senses of those terms that would translate to better sales.

I mean I think Ray and Ella are pretty cool but I can objectively understand why others might not think so based on various factors.

that whole era of ray charles always showing up on awards shows to sing georgia on my mind, the whole pepsi commercial thing then the movie made him an widely recognized icon but maybe obscured how important he was musically.

He was even on an episode of Who’s The Boss! Never forget “Always a Friend”

i just remembered the Ray Charles California Raisins commercials

xpost i don't remember that! wild

i own nice mono copies of Genius + Soul = Jazz and Ray Charles At Newport. they are hot stuff. all that early ray on atlantic stuff sounds so good on vinyl and its so cheap. i can't say i listen to the stuff on ABC. he put out a lot of records.

re: Ray, I get by with this one now:
https://www.discogs.com/release/2335584-Ray-Charles-A-25th-Anniversary-In-Show-Business-Salute-To-Ray-Charles

(one LP of Atlantic stuff, one of ABC)

A Christgau A+: "In a remarkable show of benevolent corporate cooperation..." Took me a few years to find a vinyl copy in the '80s.

there's definitely good stuff on the ABC records but you have to dig for them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5I9tn2jxGs

re Little Richard - he was the one artist that I had in common with my late mother-in-law. she'd grown up in the Glenn Miller era and didn't like much "modern" music, but she did like that Little Richard

that whole era of ray charles always showing up on awards shows to sing georgia on my mind, the whole pepsi commercial thing then the movie made him an widely recognized icon but maybe obscured how important he was musically.

similarly true of Little Richard, maybe Tony Bennett, too. Anyone who appeared in a tv commercial or as a guest star on a family sitcom in the 80s or 90s. That level of exposure hasn't seemed to hurt Dolly much, though

Dolly's a generation removed from them...Boomers take care of their own.

Richard still seemed strange to me as a kid, he was always so funny and bitchy and camp, he didn't seem respectable

like even to my cornfed little rube mind I could tell there was something going on with him

huh in nyc i translated not as un-respectable, but yeah campy and on-stage, but also hokey and corny like liberace.

i meant that in a good way, like he didn't seem like a chummy industry snooze kinda way

I grew up on a farm wtf did I know

I know I've posted this before but my old publisher used to work for a pretty music promoter here and when I asked her the worst experience she ever had dealing with a musician she instantly said Ray Charles, apparently he was cussing her out about something dumb and called her the "c word"

i mean even tho LR was obviously a queen, i think that the LGBTQ community’s absolute idolatry of Dolly has something to do with her longevity and popularity

Parton continuing to record and artists covering her songs helped too.

My acquaintance with Ray Charles began with the Jackson 5 cartoon where the pet mice were named "Ray" and "Charles." Then he sang his ass off in "We Are the World." Sang "America the Beautiful" for the uncomprehending Reagans. Did the "Right One Baby!" commercials for Pepsi. It took years, maybe the release of the better-than-you-think biopic Ray for me to start buying his stuff. Those early singles are feral. And well into the late '60s he'd send a song into the top 40 that flattened me with its concision and range of expression.

listening to the History of Rock Music in 500 songs this year has really given me a better appreciation of all the early R&B and rock n roll stuff

the reason so many people love dolly is because she plays all angles probably better than anyone else in music ever has or ever will

even if LR had wanted to do that he couldn't for obvious and maybe less obvious reasons

but I like fats way more than any other 50s rocker and it always seems like he gets faulted for being too nice or something? idgi

who faults him?

rock guys

the chapter on LR in John Waters's ROLE MODELS is one of my favorite tributes to him. definitely captures how he could've been perceived as dangerous and irreverent on sonics alone

I kind of think if LR had never released anything but Long Tall Sally he would still be one of the greatest 50s rockers.

Paul McCartney sang the hell out of "Long Tall Sally."

There’s a live McCartney performance of Long Tall Sally from 1986 with Prince Charles and Diana dancing in the audience and what appears to be about seven guitarists on stage, including Mark Knopfler doing a duck walk for some reason. Surprisingly it’s not terrible.

now that i am so terribly old i sit in my rocking chair and listen to bluesy stuff sometimes. it had to happen. i love chess records. they put out so many amazing singles. i love that blues/r&b hybrid of the 50s. it sounds so good to me. and its endless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvCzAhGb5r4

also all that awesome new orleans stuff i never listened to when i was younger. sorry, fats! the swampier the better. and the big names. ernie k. doe. clarence henry. lee dorsey. but cajun stuff too. and new orleans blues is the bomb. you know who doesn't get enough love anymore? lloyd price! he was so cool. nobody will buy a lloyd price album. sad!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYO263wui1w