Are there epic songs anymore? What are they?

...like "Stairway to Heaven" or "American Pie" or "Hotel California"? Epic in a way that would allow the song to weave its way into the fabric of an entire culture in the same way as those songs?

Part of the subtext of the question, I realize, is that the loss of musical monoculture would make this more difficult nowadays, but still-- can you name some songs you know from recent years that might stand up to the epicness of the aforementioned songs?

"Gangnam Style"

LOCK THREAD

i forgot he yells for 9 minutes at a butt

"Trapped in the Closet"

http://www.rotary3270.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/end-polio-now-englishandurdu.jpg

Jim Steinman to thread

That song about being glad it's Friday?

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

"entire culture"

was hoping to have a semi-serious discussion about this... anyone interested in discussing the spirit of what I'm talking about without being a jerk, joker, or pedant? I know I'm asking for a lot here, but someone please indulge me.

Search Moonsorrow "Huuto" (on youtube/etc) which is one of the finest examples of really effective 'epic' songwriting in the Stairway to Heaven/Child In Time tradition anno now. The flow of buildups and releases, the constant variation on the three recurring motifs, the dynamics, etc there's a lot to dig into.

Was Paranoid Android the last big hit multi-movement epic song? I guess this kind of tapestryal approach to songwriting is considered a bit cheesy or a cop-out these days? I love Bo-Rhap and Paranoid Android but it's clear they're both to some extent just made up of little scraps of songs rather than composed "as a piece".

I mean there are loads of songs that are constructed as 'epics' by pure repetition (building up to one big release) or just stringing lots of segments together, but those are IMO not the most interesting examples.

Xpost Paranoid Android's indeed the latter.

I don't know that a song needs to be multi-segmented to become the kind of pervasive epic that the OG is talking about. American Pie isn't multi-segmented - it just has LOTS of verses that all follow the same pattern

If anyone's supplied a song that's pervaded cultural life to a similar extent, it's probably Coldplay. But while they often do 'grand' they don't really deal in 'epic', where that includes a song being very long and grand and trying to say something.

Run by Snow Patrol almost got there, but it feels like it only ticks about half of the boxes.

As Siegbran will tell you there's a lot of epics in metal.

Oasis used to go in for them too. I'm sure Muse might? But I assume you would prefer good examples..

And then there's always Trance.

The epic thing is tricky because it was such a seventies thing - the cited examples and also "Music" by John Miles and that sort of thing. After punk, it all seemed to stop, song structures became simpler and more condensed, and making epics was left to either prog types still dinosauring on (have I just invented a new verb?) or bands who leaned in that direction anyway ("Grendel" by Marillion, a 20 minute b-side). So the chances of it happening are rare now. Yes, "Paranoid android" could count, and there's probably examples by Muse but in terms of multi-part epics, it's just not popular so won't happen again. There will be 'grand' songs (Coldplay as mentioned, I'll throw in "One day like this" by Elbow), but not 'epic'. The charts and the markets are too ordered, too formulaic for that,

it's sad punk turned every music in the world into 3-chord riffarama

"Pyramids" by Frank Ocean ? Long, multiple parts, from ancient egypt to a stripclub ? epic !

maybe guitar solos will come back into fashion on chart songs again one day after punk killed them off

Used to get great guitar solos in pop,disco,funk songs until that damn punk came along spoiling it.

I'm not sure it won't happen again. These trends come and go.

Actually that Elbow song is a great shout as far as how pervasive it is; it was bloody everywhere.

regarding guitar solos post punk : "november rain" anyone ? 3 guitar solos !

20+ years old, though! Hair metal definitely gave guitar solos an extra lease of life between 87 and 91, but grunge seemed to fill in the grave that punk dug. I can't think of a guitar solo on a mainstream hit in the last decade at least.

Muse surely ?

I'm not sure that, despite how absolutely massive they are, anything they've released as a single has been a huge individual hit with that kind of pervasiveness.

Yeah, only three top 10 hits, and biggest by far is Supermassive Black Hole (#4) which pointedly didn't have a ludicrous guitar solo.

yeah, I don't know much about them, actually. I think I know 2 songs.
but then most of the big mainstream acts of the last ten years are quite foreign to me (I don't think I've ever heard a lady gaga song, for instance !) so I'm not really a good judge!

Every song on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy?

Except that none of them seem to have pervaded the culture individually?

even when there were 'epic' hit songs in the '70s, they were usually AOR hits and not pop hits. and on US rock radio over the past decade, I can only think of a few hits of any size that had something of an AOR epic feel to them -- Muse's "Knights of Cydonia," My Chemical Romance's "Welcome To The Black Parade," and Green Day's "Jesus of Suburbia" charted in a few countries.

on R&B radio, there have been some hits that often get played in a 6+ minute version, like "Far Away" by Marsha Ambrosius and "Get Me Bodied" by Beyonce, but those kind of ride the same groove for the whole song, whereas part of requirement of 'epic' seems to be that there's a tempo change or some kind of mid-song shift. "Just Can't Get Enough" by The Black Eyed Peas probably has the most marked tempo change in a big hit the last few years, but it's less than 4 minutes long. i would actually submit R. Kelly's "Ignition" as an epic -- the original version and the more famous remix run together as a continuous 6 minute piece with distinct sections, and R&B stations often played the whole thing back when it first came out.

on the Kanye tip, "Mercy" is over 5 minutes long and has a big showoffy shift in the backing track

I can't think of a guitar solo on a mainstream hit in the last decade at least.

cos I'm bored and I've got the flu I thought I'd test this by watching uk number ones on youtube going backwards from Gangnam Style. first video is this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk48xRzuNvA.
, and LISTEN! it's got a guitar solo* over the outro!

* sort of.

Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" was the last big top 5 US hit i can remember with a guitar solo, but that was over a decade ago.

I'm really tempted to say Hoppipolla by Sigur Ros. And if you don't think it was pervasive, Wikipedia says:

"Hoppípolla" was used in 2006 advertisements for the BBC's Planet Earth TV series, giving the band one of its rare exposures to a mainstream audience. When Sir David Attenborough received his National Television lifetime achievement award, the piece was used for the moving anthology of his work, made especially for the occasion. Following this, there has been a high demand for the single, which has led to a re-publishing of the commercial version in May 2006, distributed by EMI. The re-release of the single brought critical acclaim for the band in the mainstream music media, including being named Jungalist Single of the Week on 1 May 2006. The song was used in the closing credits of the BBC's coverage of the 2006 FA Cup final, and BBC News 24 also used it to promote their coverage of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The BBC also used it as background music to a rousing montage of England games during the World Cup and as a trailer for live BBC coverage of further England games. The song was also featured in the Doctor Who Confidential episode "End of an Era". It is also used as the pre match music at football club, Dagenham & Redbridge FC, just before the teams walk out.

Besides its repeated use by the BBC, the song was used in the Children of Men and Slumdog Millionaire trailers, the film Penelope, and an Oxfam and Viasat advertisement. The song was also used as background music during a Sky Sports interview with F.C. Copenhagen's manager Ståle Solbakken before F.C. Copenhagen played Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League on 1 November 2006. It was also used as background music to interviews with contestants in shows such as The X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent, and I'd Do Anything. In New Zealand, the intro part of the song was used as the soundtrack for a promotional TV advertisement for the All Blacks before the 2006 Bledisloe Cup. The song was covered by We Are Scientists on their B-sides album Crap Attack in 2006. It was also used in Smith's Hill High School's (Australia) Rock Eisteddfod performance in 2006.

In April 2008, a film trailer was released advertising Disneynature's film Earth, with "Hoppípolla" as the background music.

"Hoppípolla" was used as the music when Sir Bobby Charlton received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2008, for helping England win the 1966 FIFA World Cup and helping Manchester United win the European Cup in 1968. The song was also used for when Sir Bobby Robson won the same award the previous year. The song was also used in an informational video on Marks & Spencer p.l.c on their corporate website. In the Slumdog Millionaire trailer, the background music is "Hoppípolla" starting from 1:12 to the end.

The song was used extensively in the BBC documentaries James May on the Moon and James May at the Edge of Space.

The song was also used as the background music to a video entitled "I Am A Craft Brewer," made by the Stone Brewing Company and also a popular video on the video sharing site Vimeo called A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION

Hoppípolla made an appearance as the background music of a video congratulating tennis star Roger Federer soon after he gained his 15th Grand Slam title at Wimbledon in late June 2009. The video was posted by the ATP committee.

The song is also added to Discovery Channel's commercial: "Live Life Large".

There have been accusations that the song was plagiarised in the opening music "composed" for the popular Italian song contest held in Sanremo (Festival della canzone Italiana - Feb 2010) and referred to as "Sabiu n.7" during the programme, from the name of Marco Sabiu, director of the RAI orchestra linked with the event. Marco Sabiu has however allegedly declared that the piece of music referred to as Sabiu N.7 by presenter Antonella Clerici was not a plagiarism at all but a cover version of Hoppípolla itself.

The song was used on BBC news for a video compilation of the euphoric rescue of the 33 trapped Chilean Miners at the San Jose Mine on October 13, 2010.

In 2010, it was used in one episode of the popular German RTL-Series "Ich bin ein Star - Holt mich hier raus!"

In 2011 Preston North End started playing the song at the beginning of matches when the teams walked out of the tunnel. Preston North End manager Phil Brown described it as "Absolute Euphoria".

The film We Bought a Zoo features Hoppípolla during the climax scene and end credits, as well as other music by Jónsi.

The 2012 trailer for the Earth Hour features Hoppípolla as well.

without being a jerk, joker, or pedant?

I wasn't, at all, fwiw. "Trapped in the Closet", serious answer. Last epic song that weaved its way into the fabric of an entire culture. Or came closest from my point of view, anyway.

if a song is primarily heard in 30-second snippets in ads then it doesn't really matter how long the album version is, does it? xpost

Weren't those 70s epics a product of a particular moment? AOR radio was practically invented so guys could play Stairway to Heaven and Hotel California and American Pie catered to that audience. It was a time when it was acceptable to be very very serious about rock and What It Means For The Culture In The Aftermath Of The Shattered 60s Dream.

Also, as Poliopolice says, the death of monoculture means that there are very few culture-dominating rock hits at all. In the UK charts the only recent rock singles that keep selling year after year are One Day Like This, Chasing Cars, Sex on Fire and Viva La Vida. Hip hop and R&B are more likely to successfully pull off an even remotely radio-friendly epic now. That's why critics love MBDTF - it allows them to be very very serious about hip hop and What It Means For America Today.

When was the last time you heard more than a snippet of Bohemian Rhbapsody? xpost

Another thought: Green Day's epics on American Idiot were transparently homaging the (self-)importance of that 70s rock mindset.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is still played on the radio every day. the Sigur Ros song never was.

some of the hits off Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds wove together songs with the interludes before or after them on the album for kind of an epic thing. "What Goes Around.../...Comes Around" hit #1 and was 7+ minutes long.

Sigur Ros is played every day on Six Music, I'd hazard a guess.

ah, Muse's Cydonia was the one I had in mind !
but was it really a big hit ? (I suppose it was in a way otherwise I wouldn't know the song...).
kanye's "runaway" was epic, I guess.

Timberlake works as well, for me (also "My love" with the intro).

also kanye's "all of the lights" with the string/piano intro then the blarring horns.

Still rambling on: the kind of epics that demand to be played on the radio in their entirety are those that seem (a) VERY IMPORTANT and (b) are structured so that they peak towards the end instead of having a fade-friendly coda. If you're going to play Stairway at all you can't just stop after three minutes.

Cydonia is a massive live song for Muse but not so much on radio.

ah, Muse's Cydonia was the one I had in mind !
but was it really a big hit ? (I suppose it was in a way otherwise I wouldn't know the song...).

in the US it was a top 10 alt-rock hit, at a point when they'd only had a couple so far. it was also the lead single for that album in the US, where i know it wasn't for most other countries.

I didn't know that. Interesting choice considering how much more obviously commercial the other two singles were.

So far, I think Cydonia (long, multiple parts, solo guitar !) is the best answer with "what goes around" (long, two parts, biggest popstar of the world at that time !).

Can't believe I've forgotten this, but surely The-Dream: Yamaha-Nikki pt 2-Abyss? Yeah, it wasn't a massive hit (or just a hit...), but it's by far the most epic pop-thing made this century.

only thing about "What Goes Around" and most of these songs is that there were readily available shorter radio edits that were often what people heard. there was never any under-5 minute version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "Like A Rolling Stone" because the size of the thing was part of the point. there was a shorter edit of "November Rain" i heard on the radio now and then in the '90s but it was just an impossibly mangled trainwreck of an edit.

yeah, I thought about the dream too but I suppose these weren't big enough to qualify.

"Stan" (6:21) was an omnipresent epic, for a while at least.

xpost

really ? there were edits of "what goes around" without the final ? tss...

LCD Soundsystem has a bunch of them.

iirc the "What Goes Around" edit incorporated the end of the song, it just shorted the whole thing down to about 5 minutes

The first thing that comes to mind is some of the songs on Ys, but I'm not sure that's what you mean.

Godspeed! You Black Emperor just released an album, didn't they?

you just cant escape gybe on the radio or tv can you?

i think "stan" is a good answer.....

Surprised "We Are Young" by Fun. hasn't been mentioned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Il3whipgw

Also Drake's Forever fits as far as hip-hop pop 5:50 epic: Kanye, Eminem, L'il Wayne, all in one long song.

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

what is so 'epic' about hotel california?

I know it's less than 5 minutes, but Lady Gaga's Bad Romance always struck me as being particularly epic.

Also under 5 minutes but I think "Somebody That I Used To Know" and "We Are Young" are going for the epic thing.

("Hotel California" is my second most hated song of all time, so I'm going to defend its epicness with my tongue in my cheek)

"Hotel California" isn't exactly a multi part epic, but its length makes it so, the whole song builds on that limp reggae beat up to Henley's damning critique of mid 70s California culture - ie the last verse. Then the superb guitar solos and closing interplay sending the listener into a drugged out stupor, or whatever.

It's got a lot of verses and a long solo, as does "Sultans of Swing." Epics.

It's not epic in length, but the one I think got out and known is The White Stripes "Seven Nation Army".

i'm not sure this thread can work without constantly tripping over people's differing notions of 'epic', though i am glad you are trying, i.e. i'm not being dismissive

Surprised "We Are Young" by Fun. hasn't been mentioned.

good point -- "We Are Young" and "Some Nights" are both big hits that, while only 4 minutes long, have tempo/mood changes and feel kind of epic. or at least they feel endless, which is why i try to forget they exist, and didn't think to mention them itt.

if "we are young" is epic then what's "Bad romance"?

I'd say Queen has a bunch of epic songs clocking in under 4 minutes...

xp someone already said "bad romance," i didn't notice.
kanye west "runaway" makes just as much sense for this as "hotel california" IMO.

"What Would I Want Sky?"
"Wulfstan II" ??
"Young Hearts Spark Fire" ??
"Nothing Ever Happened" ??
"Kim & Jessie" ?

Fun sounds like just as much as an epic as "Kids" or "Electric Feel" IMO.

Not quite sure why 'Welcome To The Black Parade' doesn't count here, I was under the impression it was huge when it came out. It hasn't really "woven its way into the fabric of an entire culture" but then again neither did 'Paranoid Android'.

Otherwise, this thread seems weirdly grandaddish.

The Roots' "Water" (on Phrenology).

Not quite sure why 'Welcome To The Black Parade' doesn't count here,

I'm not that clear on how we're defining "epic" here, especially since "Stairway to Heaven" is very different compositionally from the other two examples in the OP, both of which are more like regular verse-chorus songs that are extended by repetition (with more lyrics). Still, at only 5:11, "Welcome..." is shorter than even "Hotel California" and much shorter than "Stairway" or "American Pie".

Big statement and/or long journey +
Sonic ambition and/or structural ambition
Epic Song

Big Statement
Hotel California
American Pie
Sign O' The Times

Long Journey
Hotel California
Taxi
Stairway to Heaven
The Road Goes On Forever

Sonic Ambition (aka Ready for Wembley)
We are Young
The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys
D'Ya Know What I Mean?

Structural Ambition
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
Bohemian Rhapsody
A Day In The Life

good post!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/Eazy-E_Eazy-Duz-It.jpg

plus i gotta love "We Are Young" and "D'Ya Know What I Mean?" being placed in the same basket

"Stairway" = structural ambition, surely?

literal epic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2GLucHdgCI

I'm not gonna read this thread because watching people lazily misuse the word "epic" is one of my all-time least-favorite things, so throw me a bone here: did y'all eventually decide it just means "more than 5 minutes long"?

kinda, kinda not. length has been used as a criteria, but not the only one or even a necessary one.

I like Auerbach(?)'s stuff on epic form: lots of digressions, action slowing to a crawl while the narrator makes hyper-detailed observations about the eight previous owners of this one spear or w/e, slow-moving but unstoppable.

By the broad definitions people are coming up with, there are probably many epic songs in the present day. "21 Guns" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends" are Big Statement songs, for example, and the former is longer than "Welcome to the Black Parade". I'm not saying this because I think these songs should be considered epic songs but because I think these definitions are too broad.

Does "sonic ambition" just mean "sounds bombastic"?

More a wide range of dynamics or orchestration--and then there's "Freebird."

No one mentioned Bay of Pigs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVmqO4pw-w

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3CnfFQENkw

Siberian Breaks?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJUiOLfnqD0

motorpsycho's "ratchatcher" is beyond epic