Well, no. Not early-on. Both The Beatles and Stones relied on R&B covers when they were first getting started. It's to their credit that they advanced beyond that and wrote such great songs themselves.Originally Posted by JJ88
Well, no. Not early-on. Both The Beatles and Stones relied on R&B covers when they were first getting started. It's to their credit that they advanced beyond that and wrote such great songs themselves.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Again, I don't agree. I don't think it has any bigger role than it ever has. David Cassidy (R.I.P.) and Leif Garrett were every bit as "standard" in their day as the Ariana Grandes of today are.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
I agree with you.
I remember when the onslaught of boy bands and Disney pop began, the late Tom Petty said "I haven't seen this much manufactured shit since the days of Frankie Avalon. And that's exactly what the record companies want."
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
We can agree to disagree and I will let you get in the last word after this tidbit--Cassidy and Garrett and their ilk were all flashes in the pan--one or two years of limelight then onto the next fashionable choice. Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, Pink, have been putting out music to a wide receptive audience for nearly 10 years. They have been shaping the music landscape enough to change its general direction from music-centric to personality-centric. You could argue it's always been personality centric, and to that you might have a point, but the long slow burn of the melding of R&B with disco with hip-hop and a smattering of other genres is what we are stuck with for the foreseeable future unkless you like country (or what passes for country).
"So it goes."
-Kurt Vonnegut
Music styles start out as revolutionary.
Then it becomes fashionable to like that style, and the style becomes a cult.
As the cult grows, it becomes a movement.
Once it's a movement, various industries move to cash in by marketing clothing, jewelry, accessories to the followers.
Eventually, once the movement is old and passé, the MUSIC industry moves in to create look-alike bands and manufactured bands to catch the wave.... which has now passed, on to something else. Also, you begin seeing the once-revolutionary style in commercials on TV. That's a sure sign it's now a 16-year old girl phenomenon.
Interesting discussion and many good points made.
Back to the notion of "overall cultural resonance" and the mainstream. In my view Rock obviously started out with a rebellious cultural resonance for the minority while presenting a threat and a challenge (perceived or otherwise) to the majority. It was then co-opted by commercial and corporate interests which for a brief time converged somewhat around 1965-1975. Then we had the next wave of rebellion in punk which was co-opted again. Always there is a minority that is not co-opted, that is not a player in the commercial mainstream, that indeed rebels against it - Rock in Opposition. This minority is inevitably less subject to group-think, authoritarianism, consumerism and cultural brain-washing and stands in sharp contrast to the corporate-feed, low information sheep that consume "art" as a commodity and elect brain-dead public officials to seal the deal by deregulating capital markets, degrading the educational system and attacking democratic and social institutions.
So what I conclude is that as soon as "Rock" became commercial it started dying BUT there will always be DIY/fringe/avant/political "Rock" that will rebel in the face of insipid commercialism and political malaise, ignorance, hate and unawareness. It MUST be unpopular and better yet incite hostility. It matters not that this "Rock" resembles a Bartok quartet more than Bill Halley - it is the spirit and struggle for individuality that matter. "Progressive Rock" at its best meets those criteria. Art is a hammer not a mirror.
It's been a long time since I've read it, but Chris Cutler gives this thought in his book "File Under Popular". (But don't bother if you think music should have nothing to do with politics).
https://www.amazon.com/File-Under-Po.../dp/0936756349
Not an optimistic picture. Rock -> Punk -> RIO shows a clear decline in amplitude and influence.
... “there’s a million ways to learn” (which there are, by the way), but ironically, there’s a million things to eat, I’m just not sure I want to eat them all. -- Jeff Berlin
RIO is by definition the antithesis of commercialisation.
And it is not getting any better for anyone except those picking over the bones:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-pr...th-muzak-pelly
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
Nostalgia, you know, ain't what it used to be. Furthermore, they tells me, it never was.
“A Man Who Does Not Read Has No Appreciable Advantage Over the Man Who Cannot Read” - Mark Twain
I shudder to think how dangerously close Rush got to becoming a movement with Geddy Lee wigs, Neil Peart earings, etc.
See, that is the kind of marketing genius the world needs!
... “there’s a million ways to learn” (which there are, by the way), but ironically, there’s a million things to eat, I’m just not sure I want to eat them all. -- Jeff Berlin
And Moose Knuckle Kimonos!
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
That's a fair point (though I wouldn't put P!nk in that group - she has serious talent). I think the "promotional machine" has just progressed and learned from its mistakes. And hopefully the "stars" have, too, as those teen idols from years past all seem to have had their issues after fame.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
"By reconfiguring existing styles and values, youth subcultures in 1970s Britain for example, resisted worsening socio-economic conditions by using these appropriated styles and values against their parents’ generation and the parent culture of which they were part. In other words, “subcultures cobble together (or hybridize) styles out of the images and material culture available to them in the effort to construct identities which will confer on them ‘relative autonomy’ within a social order fractured by class, generational differences, work etc…” (During, 441). Simply put, subcultures fight fire with fire. Other useful features of Hebdige’s study include his historical summary of postwar styles, fads, and fashions in Britain. As well, his assessment that expressive forms such as style are semiotically permeated with a plethora of cultural information are now generally accepted as a truism..."
I'm not lazy. I just work so fast I'm always done.
There will always be a subset that seeks out the old classics. I had a coworker whose teen sons started playing guitar. Mom thought she was going to get some nice acoustic music out of the two. About a year in they asked "does dad have any Black Sabbath albums?"
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
And now it is used in a car advertisement.
So everything old is new again, or to abuse a Flannery O'Connor title, Everything That Rises Must Converge.
I watched "Amadeus" the other night, and was amused to look back 30 years at Mozart being portrayed as a "punk." I was always an outsider, listening to Bartok and Stravinsky instead of either Mozart or the Beatles. I discovered prog as soon as I went to college (1970, when prog wasn't even called "prog" yet) and it fed my outsider ethos as well. Anything that was eccentric, eclectic, or esoteric got my attention. But there really hasn't been anything musically, or in any other arts or literature, that has pulled me in for many years now. It's all recycled, diluted, and diminished; the standards seem lower than ever.
So I'm back to classical again, studying piano for the first time in nearly 50 years. My piano teacher has me working on a Mozart sonata, and rather to my amazement, it's pulling me in. So for me, the lesson is that "new" doesn't have to be taken literally; as long as it's new to me, it can feed and nourish me as long as it is challenging and it rewards my effort and attention.
I think the subtext is rapidly becoming text.
^^A sure sign of obsolescence (TV commercials)
That would be a great name for a Rush tribute band.
bout time, I got 50 years worth of shit that needs a proper listen anyways.
i.ain't.dead.irock
If “rock and roll” had a (more or less) discernible beginning in the early/mid 50s, then perhaps it is not unreasonable to suggest that there is an endpoint, an “end of history”. I don't really think so, but it's interesting to ponder.
No music is created in an aesthetic vacuum; it emerges within a particular historical moment to fulfill social as well as musical needs within communities of musicians and audiences, and by the mid-70s the larger cultural circumstances that had given rise--and meaning--to rock music in the first place had passed. Rock culture was essentially exhausted, as was its music and the spirit that animated both; everything that had given 60s culture its passion, energy, and creativity had disappeared and been replaced by fatigue and exploitation. Hence, rock passed with the very circumstances that gave rise to it. The revolution, as it were, was over.
Something like rock followed--what I call “rock” [irony quotes intended]--a weak facsimile/simulacra of it, a derivative “pod music” bootlegged from the original and imposed on a different time and set of circumstances, an attenuated, self-referential (and self-parodic), music whose cultural moment had passed, a fading echo of a once vital music. (Think of, for example, the execrable U2, the quintessential "rock" band, a post-facto holographic projection of a rock band).
(This is not to suggest that there is no interesting and challenging "rock" music--as opposed to rock music--being made today, but rather that the music is following the same historical trajectory as that of jazz, i.e., it's becoming--like classical music--an autonomous “art” form reserved for the delectation of the few who can "appreciate" it, no longer relevant, no longer popular, no longer important).
What made rock what it was—-that effervescent FLASH!!! that made it a revolutionary force-—no longer exists. How could it? Current practitioners plunder long-exhausted musical styles so that something’s only significant in the way it comments on something that already happened at a different time, a different place, under different circumstances. I'm fairly certain that there is interesting (and maybe even progressive) music happening; I'm just not sure it's rock music.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
Rock ended with a screeching halt on August 1st, 2015 at a bit before midnight.
Amen!
Interestingly, the most far-flung "progressive" artists were also the ones to most consequentially leave the safezones of rock music behind them - in search for brand new terrains. I suppose I'm among the few to actually believe that some of them even succeeded.
"Improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness" - Fred Frith
"[...] things that we never dreamed of doing in Crimson or in any band that I've been in," - Tony Levin speaking of SGM
"It was possible during the late 1960s & early 1970s to talk of aspiration, the hope that we could change the world by playing music "
Fripp
Music that requires your (full) attention to 'get it', or just sufficient time, is under pressure. It competes with gaming, Internet, Facebook, movies, events, etc. even work, in a way it didn't before. - And its difficult to feel that its new, new bands have to 'compete' with all the old, and its difficult and rare to come up with something completely new. The musicians though are generally much better technicians, but so what...
It's not gonna change back.
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