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    #76
    The 80s. Pretty much all of the decade was the nadir of 20th century music (I won't try to get any of the current century as it just doesn't belong to me). All the current 80s revival that seems to have taken over these days seems like nostalgia for something that was always shit but the passage of time has given it a golden glow, like Pre-EEC Britain or the Blitz. Only the edges of the decade had anything that I look back fondly on, the Two Tone that carried over from the end of the seventies and Hip Hop at the other end. I don't look back on The Smiths with any of the love that I used to have for them, partly because it just doesn't sound so clever anymore, partly because David Cameron said he liked them, and chiefly because Morrissey has become a racist cunt. To be quite honest if you just extract The Cure, the whole of the mid-eighties can just fuck off forever.

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      #77
      Originally posted by WOM View Post
      You're one of those people whose word I, respectfully, just have to take that there's something wonderful there and I just can't hear it.
      Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
      I actually do understand, I think, why people like Coldplay. I just don’t think most of it is really all that interesting. It all feels a bit obvious and therefore dull. Like a mediocre sitcom.
      Both of these statements are correct.

      As is the belief that Kendrick Lamar is a cut above most of his contemporaries.

      Originally posted by Simon G View Post
      You make a good point, I used Radio 1 as my example of not being down with the "yoof" so to speak.

      Whilst on practical gardening leave before my redundancy I started listening to some Youtube playlists sand heard some stuff I'd never heard before - I'd look it up and realise these songs are 10-15 years old which practically shows how out of touch I am.

      I also could never get on the Radiohead bandwagon and Lord knows I've tried. I've bought about 4 of their albums including OK Computer and The Bends after an old teacher (who was still young but my point is there) telling me that Muse were very similar to them and me loving Origin of Symmetry at the time, but I just couldn't get into them at all.
      See, I always found (early) Muse to be an irritating nod to what Radiohead had already done and left behind by then. Later Muse, I just find irritating per se. It's all so bloody overwrought. I mean, at least Radiohead maintained a little light and shade.

      'Practical gardening leave' sounds great. Hope I'm not being disrespectful by saying that.

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        #78
        I was in one day a week, but had no work so spent the day on the internet (hence listening to Youtube playlists).

        The staying at home over the summer was not as fun as I thought it would be - but I blame my kids for that.

        I loved the first two Muse albums, and have hated everything since. It's probably for another thread, but I've noticed that the bands I tend to enjoy always start off well with their first two albums, then trail off after they run out of ideas or suddenly get massively over-produced. I'm sure there are a million examples to prove me wrong, but it's just something I was discussing with a colleague this morning.

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          #79
          Fun fact - my mother-in-law used to be Radiohead's accountant.

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            #80
            Originally posted by Simon G View Post
            I'm sure there are a million examples to prove me wrong, but it's just something I was discussing with a colleague this morning.
            No, probably a million examples to prove you right. Bands should fold their tent after three, maybe four albums.

            Although I'm sure there are a million examples...etc.

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              #81
              Originally posted by andrew7610 View Post
              Fun fact - my mother-in-law used to be Radiohead's accountant.

              Until she embezzled their vibe and they called the....

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                #82
                Originally posted by andrew7610 View Post
                Fun fact - my mother-in-law used to be Radiohead's accountant.
                They clearly needed one:

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6GO7c-zO6E

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                  #83
                  I wonder what the public's response to that song was.

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                    #84
                    I bloody love that song. That whole album in fact.
                    Last edited by Kevin S; 16-10-2018, 15:30.

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                      #85
                      I'm listening to it now, just to prove some meaningless point to myself.

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                        #86
                        From what I understand, the numbers involved were somewhat larger than that...

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                          #87
                          Originally posted by WOM View Post
                          Until she embezzled their vibe and they called the....
                          I see what you did there.

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                            #88
                            Originally posted by Sean of the Shed View Post
                            The 80s. Pretty much all of the decade was the nadir of 20th century music (I won't try to get any of the current century as it just doesn't belong to me). All the current 80s revival that seems to have taken over these days seems like nostalgia for something that was always shit but the passage of time has given it a golden glow, like Pre-EEC Britain or the Blitz. Only the edges of the decade had anything that I look back fondly on, the Two Tone that carried over from the end of the seventies and Hip Hop at the other end. I don't look back on The Smiths with any of the love that I used to have for them, partly because it just doesn't sound so clever anymore, partly because David Cameron said he liked them, and chiefly because Morrissey has become a racist cunt. To be quite honest if you just extract The Cure, the whole of the mid-eighties can just fuck off forever.
                            This is Hobbesian wrongness. Well, maybe not that bad, but definitely overstating the problem.

                            Part of the issue may be that you start out calling out the whole decade when it seems pretty clear that it's mostly the middle part that you don't like.

                            As has been endlessly discussed on Chart Music, things definitely started to go sideways in the mid-eighties and mainstream radio was really bad from about 1985-1990, but there was some good stuff in new wave pre-Live Aid and a ton of great stuff among what was then called College Music. Yes, the Smiths are a bit problematic in retrospect but everyone can find something they like, can't they? http://www.slicingupeyeballs.com/201...lbums-of-1986/

                            And the hip-hop that you put at the end of the decade actually started a few years before the end of the decade. Run DMC, of course, started in 1981. PE's Yo, Bum Rush the Show was 1987. Def Jam was founded in 1984. Yo! MTV Raps, which was massively important in making hip-hop popular around the world, started in 1988. So the explosion of hip-hop was more of an 80s thing than you may remember. Of course, it also depends on where one lived and how one defines the late 80s vs the mid 80s.

                            In my experience, the 80's nostalgia mostly focuses on the stuff that was actually good and still holds up, at least in my view. A-Ha's "Take on Me" video, Depeche Mode, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Michael Jackson's Thriller, early sample-heavy hip-hop like Run DMC, The Cure, REM and a lot of other jangly college music that still sounds pretty good. And that's just the stuff that everyone seems to remember. There was a lot of good stuff that was more niche and/or regional.

                            Nobody does an 80's night focused on Phil Collins' performance at Live Aid or Bon Jovi or Ratt - even though that really was the dominant vibe at the time. At least, I hope they don't. I understand the revulsion to revisionist history especially when it's transparently nasty like "Make America Great Again" but I don't mind a bit of nostalgia if it's focused on stuff that was actually good. Like, I recently had a conversation with some teenagers where we asked them what era would they like to go back to if they could and one especially bright 17-year-old said she'd like to try the 70s because that was the last time, in her imagination at least, where kids just went outside and played with other kids. That wasn't quite they end of that time, and there were a lot of shitty things about the 70s, especially for non-white people living on quiet tree-lined streets like ours, but I love that she had the awareness of what has been lost and what could be restored with a bit of effort. There's nothing wrong with that. We have to live in reality but we don't have to just let history steamroll us and then drag us into the cyberpunk dystopia.
                            Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 16-10-2018, 16:36.

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                              #89
                              Indeed it is.

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                                #90
                                Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                Yeah, the “new” ideas stopped around 20 years ago, perhaps. It has been suggested that My Bloody Valentine marked the final frontier.
                                My Bloody Valentine being the final frontier of rock is an interesting one as, when I first saw them, it was when they had David Conway on vocals and struck me as a sort of more 60s based uptempo Jesus & Mary Chain. Of course, after he left, they changed but the impression was long-lasting. Similarly, when I heard Sonic Youth, I thought they were Mary Chain-esque (obviously, SY pre-dated J & MC but I wasn't aware of that at the time). Oddly, when I first heard Jesus & Mary Chain, they reminded me of Einsturzende Neubauten who really were the most original guitar-based band I had heard at the time and I hated them. Even the Fall - who influenced most of the bands at this end of the guitar rock spectrum - started off reasonably orthodoxly and the Velvet Underground, Stooges and MC5 had their more traditional rockist catalogues.

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                                  #91
                                  Originally posted by Kevin S View Post
                                  I bloody love that song. That whole album in fact.
                                  Despite my earlier protestations - I have to admit that I do love that song. I also like Myxomatosis off that same album (the only two songs I recall liking on it). With Paranoid Android, Karma Police and Pyramid Song being the only other Radiohead songs I have time for - though now I'm beginning to question whether I should give their albums another shot.

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                                    #92
                                    Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                    I don't get Radiohead. At all. Nothing. Nada. And this whole 'OK Computer' being one of the greatest albums of all time stuff....
                                    Oh, good gracious, no. "Creep" was fine in a teenage miserablist nihilistic way but, after that, just Pink Floyd really. I was at Glastonbury for their show that was supposed to be the best ever by anyone or whatever and I waked past trying to find something else and it just sounded terribly over-wrought but not in a good way.
                                    Last edited by Bored Of Education; 16-10-2018, 18:38.

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                                      #93
                                      Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                      Excellent stuff. Even Abba that didn't make the cut for Abba Gold is usually pretty good.
                                      I think that ABBA suffers from being around for ages and ubiquitous and, of course, links to the hen dos, bad karaoke/covers, the films and, yes, May now. Listen to them subjectively without all the baggage (if you can) however and they are astonishing especially when you bear in mind when they came out.

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                                        #94
                                        Originally posted by Bordeaux Education View Post
                                        My Bloody Valentine being the final frontier of rock is an interesting one as, when I first saw them, it was when they had David Conway on vocals and struck me as a sort of more 60s based uptempo Jesus & Mary Chain. Of course, after he left, they changed but the impression was long-lasting. Similarly, when I heard Sonic Youth, I thought they were Mary Chain-esque (obviously, SY pre-dated J & MC but I wasn't aware of that at the time). Oddly, when I first heard Jesus & Mary Chain, they reminded me of Einsturzende Neubauten who really were the most original guitar-based band I had heard at the time and I hated them. Even the Fall - who influenced most of the bands at this end of the guitar rock spectrum - started off reasonably orthodoxly and the Velvet Underground, Stooges and MC5 had their more traditional rockist catalogues.

                                        I think the idea is that once you start just plastering feedback and pure, unapologetic noise all over the place, that there's nowhere else to go that still counts as rock or, perhaps, music. But, as you say, they weren't even the first to try that.

                                        Of course, there is a thing called "post-rock" which is, as I understand it, using rock instruments to make make non-rock music (if that even makes sense). To me, it just sounds like heavily produced and slightly weird prog. But Simon Reynolds coined that term in 1994 and even that owes a lot to Velvet Underground and all that.

                                        So one could argue that rock - which just started as a mix of blues, R&B, and some bits of jazz - was already repeating itself by 1970, and then electronics got tossed in which made it seem new for a while but it wasn't really.

                                        I'm fine with that. There are only 12 notes in an octave and everything is derivative of something going all the way back to when people first started banging rocks and sticks together in rhythm. And even that guy probably got accused of just using new technology to rip-off the hand-clapping and head-smacking greats of yore.

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                                          #95
                                          Originally posted by Bordeaux Education View Post
                                          Oh, good gracious, no. "Creep" was fine in a teenage miserablist nihilistic way but, after that, just Pink Floyd really. I was at Glastonbury for their show that was supposed to be the best ever by anyone or whatever and I waked past trying to find something else and it just sounded terribly over-wrought but not in a good way.
                                          That sounds like my view, more or less, but I think there's a lot to be said for teenage miserablist nihilism as a theme worth exploring.

                                          I don't see "just Pink Floyd" as a withering put-down, as PF did some good songs, but Pink Floyd may still count as a "thing I don't get." It's not that I don't "get" them, so much as I can't find what so many other people can in them.

                                          Then again, if I'd ever been into drugs and/or been of a certain age and able to see The Wall in a theater when it was released, I might relate. As it is, I think MTV showed it at some point in the 80s. I loved the animation - it was proper 24-frames-per-second full animation, which was rare to see in those days - but I wasn't ready to take on that much darkness in high school. I was in college, but by then I'd started to get a lot more into punk, so anything that felt heavily produced and progy didn't sound right to me.

                                          It's only been fairly recently that I've been interested in revisiting prog and that "big idea" 70's stuff. But it will probably never be much more than an academic interest - the same way I feel about jazz and classical.

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                                            #96
                                            Originally posted by Bordeaux Education View Post
                                            I think that ABBA suffers from being around for ages and ubiquitous and, of course, links to the hen dos, bad karaoke/covers, the films and, yes, May now. Listen to them subjectively without all the baggage (if you can) however and they are astonishing especially when you bear in mind when they came out.
                                            I dunno. I still get an air of smug self-satisfaction from them that I can't shake.

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                                              #97
                                              Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                              No, probably a million examples to prove you right. Bands should fold their tent after three, maybe four albums.

                                              Although I'm sure there are a million examples...etc.
                                              Prince was only just getting started around that mark.

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                                                #98
                                                Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                                I dunno. I still get an air of smug self-satisfaction from them that I can't shake.
                                                I don't get that from them. To me they'll always be comfortable MOR Mum 'n' Dad pop. A bit professionally mechanical. Which was, and is, just fine if that's your thing.

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                                                  #99
                                                  Originally posted by Bordeaux Education View Post
                                                  Oh, good gracious, no. "Creep" was fine in a teenage miserablist nihilistic way but, after that, just Pink Floyd really. I was at Glastonbury for their show that was supposed to be the best ever by anyone or whatever and I waked past trying to find something else and it just sounded terribly over-wrought but not in a good way.
                                                  THAT'S the word I was looking for!

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                                                    Thing is, I don't think ABBA has ever been sold as something it's not. They're lovely, almost perfectly-crafted pop songs.

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