Help me explain to my friend why the Foo Fighters don't matter.

Poor Nash, I don't think the Hollies are going to make it. I bet C, S, and Y heckle him on the tour bus.

(1) Some argument for social significance. It doesn't even matter if the argument is true or not, or constructed after the fact -- there just needs to be some sense that the band is emblematic of some notable social movement or development. This is not true of the Foo Fighters; they're just a band some people like in a genre that was pretty well-formed before they got to it.

(2) Some time-capturing nostalgia. This is kind of related to everybody-loves-it universality. Whether you're a pop act or not, you can get to this point where people cannot look back on your time period without thinking of your act -- where you represent the moment as much as fashions and presidential administrations might. (This might actually be a form of "social significance," actually.) Foo Fighters will not ever have that, for one thing because they're not popular enough. They've never captured any spirit of the times, really, and the times in which they've been operating aren't ones in which it's easy to come up with cultural developments they might stand in for.

(3) You can have either of those same symbolic purposes fit, except in pure musical terms -- you can be metonym for a genre. Foo Fighters aren't. People who like them don't even see them as having some particular canonical role; they just think they're a really good, solid band. The problem is that being just good/solid/worthy doesn't seem to work much for canonizing recent bands; I think there are instances in which older roots-of-rock-and-soul acts have gotten in based on that kind of "worthy" reverence, but I don't see how that would happen for Foo Fighters.

Possibly a shorter way of encapsulating all that is this: nobody cares about Foo Fighters except people who really like Foo Fighters. That's a problem, when it comes to canonization. For it to happen, you kind of need -- in addition to fans -- a sense that there's a reason other people, not-fans, should have to deal with what you're doing. Foo Fighters don't; they're this average rock band that some people dig and other people just ignore.

i like the first two foo fighters records quite a bit.

http://www.rockhall.com/hof/allinductees.asp

So Billy Joel may be mediocre, but if you leave him out you might be leaving out something important, something critical part of the context of the whole thing. Whereas a history without Foo Fighters doesn't seem like it would have lost much. Nothing would seem to be missing without them. They could not-exist and the world would be much the same, which is actually not something you can really say about Billy Joel.

jackson browne is a douche.

I don't hate ZZ Top, I just don't think they're all that fabulous or influential.

well, mostly cuz aerosmith is more popular, that's sort of the deal. fuck it though, they should get in for rocks and toys in the attic.

zz top was influential on shellac! and they are totes fabulous! check out the beards! they toured with a barnyard full of live animals onstage!

xpost

Although I dunno, I might be ignorant of or underestimating the role his early stuff played for teenagers, or whatever; I suppose maybe there was a point in there where being a serious long-haul Billy Joel fan made sense. Thing is, I don't think the people who bought and liked his later records were some kind of audience that had necessarily grown up with him. It's kind of a weird trick on his part, see, selling the kind of pop that usually doesn't come with brand-attachment, but giving it enough of a sense of something ("something" = that sense he used to force that there was actually something really arty and serious and meaningful in his songs, which I suppose he really did provide for a short while) that people would really sign on with him as an artist, rather than a friendly pop guy.

That doesn't explain the Velvet Underground, which got in because of how influential they were. I know the Stooges didn't have the same impact, but still....

That doesn't explain the Velvet Underground, which got in because of how influential they were. I know the Stooges didn't have the same impact, but still....

velvets being a little bit more from the 60s and probably more well regarded w/the boomer crits that seem to run the thing i'd guess. no doubt the stooges should be in.

Attila, duh.

Nabisco, you are one smart mofo -- no lie -- but I think you might be overestimating Billy Joel's significance. In my opinion, the canon and the history of ROCK 'N' ROLL can easily be explained w/o Billy Joel's existence.

-- SQUARECOATS (plsmit...), June 23rd, 2006.

otm, it's like a totally different band

that's bullshit! total fucking elistist bullshit! i had friends that fucking loved scenes from italian restaurant...people play these songs at weddings, dance to them, just because these people aren't hip or you think billy joel is shit doesn't mean that these songs don't mean something to a lot of people....people fucking love singing along to piano man, etc etc....i mean he's pretty mawkish and whatever, but pretending that people don't "really" like his stuff, they're mindless sheep or something is total crap.

Like without Billy Joel I think you'd have a giant gap in there; there would be so many people who didn't quite make sense. I'm not saying this alone means anything, but in this case it might: this is a guy who wrote several songs that "everyone" knows practically all the words to. Good or bad, he's occupied a ton of space that way, on this really fundamental level of practically writing standards, and so I don't know if you could just write him out of history without leaving kind of a hole behind.

Plus, Billy Joel had "Captain Jack." So I think he was maybe initially viewed as being a bit weirder than he really was. I agree that he's a bit of an anomaly over the long-term, though, either way. I heard the abysmal "Movin' Out" last weekend (which is also sorta weird, isn't it?) and had a long conversation trying to explain how exactly he became/remained popular enough to, like, have his own musical and stuff.

a Joel-hole

But doesn't that open up a whole other can of worms--who gets to decide which groups of people are important enough to carry a mediocre artist into the Hall? Why are suburban middle-class white people important enough (sheer numbers aside, although I suppose that's a compelling argument) that what they listened to in the 70s and 80s deserves to get put in the canon?

I prefer Taster's Choice to Folger's Crystals.

i don't even know why i'm in this thread! billy joel sucks! but he's important, kind of!

But doesn't that open up a whole other can of worms--who gets to decide which groups of people are important enough to carry a mediocre artist into the Hall?

Well, see, here's where we get into why it's the rock and roll Hall of Fame. One of the things I was saying is odd about Billy Joel is that he managed to do songs that could received on the level of pop standards, like Manilow (or better yet Neil Diamond) -- but at the same time, he took on the reputation, in his early work, as, like, a poet, man. Like a "meaningful" auteur, like the Dylan of musical theater, or something. (I don't know his mid-70s stuff well enough to entirely understand why, so I shouldn't make fun.) So the difference there would be that his fits the category of "rock and roll" better than someone like Diamond would, and he would, reputation-wise, even if the two were musicologically identical.

So when we ask "who defines importance," well -- above and beyond the fact that we live in a country where middle-class white people are always perceived as representing the neutral mainstream core of society -- I think the "rock and roll" answers that question, maybe. It's the audience that goes with that perception of what ("meaningful") "rock and roll" is in America, and that necessarily spotlights certain audiences (male, often youngish, "serious," interested in the "classic") and pushes out other ones ("pop," middle-aged, "not serious/meaningful," tweeny/teenybopper, female, etc.).

They get all worked up over it, and it sounds meaningful, but it just doesn't hold any meaning except to them. The Elvis Costello effect. As soon as I stopped plugging my current beloved into the song I was listening to (as Elvis' "you"), the songs became trite and meaningless to me.

xpost - Kinda true, Matt, but the flip side of a "standard" isn't just that other artists cover it, it's that it's the kind of song where the sheet music is sitting inside people's piano benches at home -- and Joel has gotten that far with a few of them, not to mention karaoke as the new form of that same thing. Certain Joel songs are as close as the modern age gets to (oh irony) the popular 1940s musical number that's just a routine part of music and life, quite apart from any central recording of it.

This, I believe, can be partially explained by his upbringing Bronx/Long Island background and his early tenure as a Tin Pan Alley kinda session dude. Y'know he's got that jive/sexy sax/Manhattan nights/B'way/Bright Lights Big City vibe which was then flitered through the Beatles and Dylan. Springsteen really isn't that far off, as a NJ denizen. All those East Coast cats were mixing the doo-wop and B'way and Dylan. Dion!

-- nabisco (--...), June 23rd, 2006.

The answer to all your questions is Supertramp.

:p

whos the middle dude?

Full disclosure--I have never owned (or wanted to) any artifacts created by Billy Joel or Neil Diamond. But the people I grew up with and worked with in the 70s & 80s had both, sung along with both, turned up the radio when they came on. These are people for whom music is a secondary matter--they have maybe 100 albums & for them Joel & Springsteen and Neil Diamond and the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac are the soundtrack of their lives.

Trust me. I have argued with these folks that they would enjoy music more if they widened their horizons. But they are exactly the people who will go to Cleveland, buy the fucking shirt, drink the kool-aid, and go home happy. They, like the Foo Fighters, get into the HoF by paying the admission charge.

if they have personal/business ties with whatever iteration of that council exists, then they will. if they don't, they won't, vis-a-vis virtually any big-selling artist/act (Boston, Kiss) or influential act (Stooges, MC5, Dolls) that isn't.

nu-wings

They'll glide into the RRHOF on longevity, like Don Sutton.

they singlehandedly killed rock & roll. or it feels like anyway when i hear them.

Everlong is the best song ever

They're the world's longest-running and best-funded Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp. Dave Grohl got to play with Queen! Taylor Hawkins got to play with Rush!

It's like what Quincy Jones said about Wynton Marsalis: "no trumpeter in America wants to play like Wynton in his style. Every great trumpeter - Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Miles - borrows from someone before him and adds his own thing. But nobody wants to play like Wynton."

Jesus, I feel like we're in 2001 ilm

We are talking about a band who debuted 18 years ago

Wonder why new bands wouldn't want sound like them

They are great radio rock like Styx or foreigner and if you hate those groups then whatever vet

preach

styx and foreigner are both like fifty times better than the foos!

proven by science!

boston>>>>>foo fighters
styx and foreigner are both like fifty times better than the foos!

fuck that