The spike in one-hit-wonders during the 90s wasn't surprising to me. I had the unenviable position of working as a line cook and construction worker during the 90s and listened to the radio 6+ hours a day. It's actually fun to listen to those hits these days. There are so many songs that I've forgotten about that I would listen to over and over again before they were overtaken by a new hit. Superman, burning beds, seether (whatever that was), bands named after boxes and chairs, ten different Eddie Vedders with arms wide open...listening to them now brings back a lot of memories so it's hard to hate them today as much as I did then. I remember exactly where I was (sitting in the parking lot of a Shoney's in Charlottesville, VA) when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. Typical FM radio before that was hair metal and classic rock.
My favorite, though, was Seven Mary Three. I saw them in Virginia Beach in a bar with no air conditioning, it was miserable but they had some seriously catchy tunes. Less then a year later I was painting a high school in Orlando and the song Cumbersome came on the radio with the announcer stating "can you believe these guys are unsigned???". Not too long after they were all over MTV. Second place goes to seeing No Doubt open for a forgotten band in '91. They were incredible. When I heard I'm Just a Girl for the first time on the radio I knew who it was before being told.
Primus, faith no more, Dee lite all in heavy rotation on mtv.
Umass spring concerts included phish, beastie boys, bostones one year, Dylan and the Wailers (without Bob Marley) the previous.
I worked security for Perl Jam playing the student union ballroom.
Lots of that music holds up really well. Eve6 if my underrated band of choice.
Phish had some fun weekend camp out with fish concerts/fests in Maine and Upstate NY.
It ended kind of badly with riots at the Woodstock 99 concert.
In a similar vein: I had a new coworker named "Jason" join a team once, and for the life of me I couldn't help but type "JSON" first when writing emails/messages with his name. It took weeks before I could reliably get it right first try. Some habits (muscle memory? sub-vocalizations?) die hard.
Everyone here is talking about rock music, but electronic music was also just on fire during the 90s. No decade since has come close to the perfection of the 90s across so many genres of electronic music. House, gabber, jungle, so many electronic genres are still just trying to reach the peaks they hit in the 90s.
I say this as someone who was 5 years old at the turn of the millennium, so this isn’t some sort of nostalgia filter.
I agree, the lack of social media, secrecy in production techniques, dawn of digital technology, big names in synthesis pouring millions into r&d was an amazing combo, and most importantly production heavily sampling and dubplate culture....hard to replicate that!
I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and am always looking for new recommendations myself. My taste for 90s stuff has typically run more toward Eurodance/Eurobeat and House and J-pop for more recent things.
Here are some random recommendations:
Daft Punk
Anything on the "Blade" soundtrack
Pretty much any Eurobeat featured in the anime Initial D. e.g. Dave Rodgers, Manuel, Fastway, Go2, m.o.v.e.
2 Unlimited - Get Ready, Twilight Zone, Tribal Dance, No Limit
Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
Le Click - Tonight is the Night
La Bouche - Be My Lover
Mr Vain - Culture Beat
Black Box - Ride on Time, Strike it Up, I Don't Know Anybody Else (technically 80s, early house music)
The Shamen - Move Any Mountain
Livin' Joy - Don't Stop Movin'
Bonus, more recent: Destination Calabria (Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters)
Future Sound of London - Dead Cities, was my first exposure to electronic, as an American. They are hard to describe, but are labeled as more psychedelic ambient with bits of techno, trip hop, and progressive house music thrown in. Each album is fairly different from the others, and there is a lot of experimentation that feels unique even in 2025 (at least to myself). I'm a big progressive music fan, or any genre, so they scratch an itch for me when it comes to electronic music.
I am biased as a Londoner but it UK Garage is/was a wonderful subgenre of house from the 90s, a uniquely London blend of genres including Chicago house. Infectious stuff. It was a precursor to later genres like Dubstep and Grime which are so popular today.
Spotify has some good playlists. Rosie Gaines 'Closer than Close' and Artful Dodger 'Movin too Fast' or 'Woman Trouble' are good starting points.
We have been enjoying Massive Attack. The same culture that hatched Banksy is my kind of folks and the music has a good edge, IMO.
For modern stuff, I've enjoyed SomaFM's Groove Salad out of San Francisco. They have net streams directly accessible in VLC, so the processor burning Web app is utterly unnecessary.
That same culture also hatched Portishead (just down the road from Bristol), which was pretty much the apotheosis of trip-hop. It's also the second home of reggae in the UK (after London), which has quite a bit to do with its musical vibe.
Be sure to go back and forth between Groove Salad and Groove Salad Classic, which is the more 90s-2000s version. There's not a lot of people putting out stuff with the "classic" feel anymore, which is partly why Rusty renamed it, and started a newer, modern channel.
SomaFM was incredible, I probably used more bandwidth on their streams than almost anything else for a good year at home. And iirc, this was during dial-up days!
Compared to say the 70s, the 90s was pretty bleak. A bit of good grunge, a bit of good hiphop, and then it all sort of fizzled out. At least in europe/uk you had the explosion of electronic music and mdma and everyone having an amazing time. American kids growing up in the late 90s were robbed.
As an American, that was a lot more going on that you didn't really hear about, but I also agree with you about electronic music. I randomly grabbed a Future Sound of London CD in the mid to late 90s, and couldn't believe what I had been missing. I have been exposed to bands like Kraftwerk, but nothing like what was going on in the UK and Europe. From there I discovered Trance music, then progressive House, and started to experiment with sequencing software like FruityLoops (now FL Studio) in the later 90s. Trip-hop then started to become popular, and it became easier to get my friends into electronic, who prior only were into 90s hip-hop (arguably some of the best ever produced).
As a 90s American teen this is completely absurd. It is literally the peak of the music industry as a whole.
The American 90s rave scene was also absolutely amazing. Big enough to have parties every Friday and Saturday but not too big to attract much undesirable people and law enforcement.
Trance originated in the 90s though it only matured after. But it was a great time for me. I'm in Europe, yes, but I heard about trance events in the US too
It's crazy, I heard Mmm Bop the other day and didn't even hate it a little bit. It was probably the most annoying song of the 90s and yet the nostalgia kept me du bopping right along.
Back in high school, my buddies and I snuck in to a few Saron Gas (their pre-Seether name) shows at Roxy's in Johannesburg. We were under age, and couldn't afford the R20 cover. They were really talented, and put on a great show (one of the top club shows I can remember).
> The band originally performed under the name Saron Gas until 2002, when they moved to the United States and changed it to Seether to avoid confusion with the deadly chemical known as sarin gas.
One of their guitarists came out of my local scene. I shared a stage with the guy a number of times. After a few years and albums, he left the band and became a teacher. It was one of the events that started taking the air out of the rockstar dream.
Thank you for reminding be of the band's name. Hearing that one four times a day was painful. It's stuck in my head now again and I haven't listened to it in twenty years.
I think about highly productive artists who, at some point, keep making records but can't make hit records anymore. I'd include David Bowie, Neil Young, Billy Joel, Duran Duran, Yes, KRS-ONE, just for a few. Sometimes I listen to a late discography and enjoy it consistently, such as Neil Young [1], other times it seems like an artist really loses their way, like Frank Zappa did once he got his Synclavier. Other artists wander in the dark for years and come out with something better than they ever did [2] Despite all this, some artists put on an amazing live act despite no new hits, such as Public Enemy and the 38 Special/Foghat show my son won tickets to last year. [3]
I used to have reductivist explanations such as "struggles with music technology" or "too old to rock and roll" but after hearing a lot of late music that I like, despite being unpopular, I think every artist follows a different trajectory.
[3] Answering problems in so many ways: members who passed away were replaced with other illustrious rock and rollers -- I wasn't expecting to hear "Play that funky music white boy" or an instrumental from the Heavy Metal soundtrack but these were great, Foghat even paid a songwriter to make a new song that fit in perfectly with their set.
> highly productive artists who, at some point, keep making records but can't make hit records anymore
Then there is Cher, who has had 52 charting singles (Billboard Hot 100) so far, from 1965 to 2023.
The Rolling Stones have charted singles from 1963 (UK) to 2023, so their hits also span 7 decades.
On the songwriting and production side, there is Max Martin, who has written or co-written 27 #1 hits (Billboard Hot 100) so far. The first one was for Britney Spears in 1998, and the most recent two (!) were for Ariana Grande in 2024.
Ah yeah but that's always the case. Was mostly just surprised my response to 27 number ones was "really, only 27?!"
Looks like the hot 100 is more confusing than I thought; I see I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys only peaked at 6 because it somehow only came out after its peak in popularity, whatever that means (maybe it was only a music video for a few weeks or something or not physically available or something?)
Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) was pushing 80 when I saw him perform a few years ago (he’s 81 now) and his show was absolutely incredible. He played one new song which I’ve totally forgotten, and of course all of the old songs, but wow that show is refined to a perfected science. Pigs literally flying, a literal wall coming up, laser lights, projectors, fake machine guns. Comfortably Numb was a standout, but he’s been doing this songs for over 40 years now to arenas. It’s astonishing. So many moving parts (literally and figuratively) and I’ll fondly remember it for the rest of my life.
Right, there was a time that many older rockers seemed "too old to rock and roll" but as you say, they have learned from all their successes and mistakes so they have it down to a science. My wife had an amazing time at a Bruce Springsteen concert similarly.
From vague memory, I'm not sure Frank Zappa lost his way, but actually found what he'd been looking for the whole time. Prior to the Synclavier he was forced to use humans to bring his compositions to life, and therefore his compositions were written with this in mind; a forced compromise of sorts.
Can't be too upset though given his prolific album releases prior to his Synclavier moment.
You're right, he was such a misanthrope that he didn't enjoy working with musicians, yet, he worked with so many brilliant musicians that made his work great.
I think of his albums where he heavily overdubbed concert footage, probably peaking in The Man From Utopia which just sounds like the greatest concert you never went to.
Also worth remembering that his most synclavier-heavy work came as he was dying of cancer. And also that the "synclavier phase" is like 4-5 albums out of over 60.
I've never heard that one. Thanks for pointing it out. They remind me a little of The Connells...check out Scotty's Lament and Stone Cold Yesterday with my favorite being Fun & Games[1]. I think they were five years too early...I was obsessed with them in high school.
Another early one-hit-wonder is from Deee-Lite, "Groove is in the Heart" (1990). I still watch the video from time to time...the woman can dance like no other.
An interesting thought to think about is how sense of Smell is related to memory (from an evolutionary perspective the sense of smell-mem link was to ensure we Humans knew when something was not OK to ingest)
But in modern times, now you can have smells link or lock memories in...
So for you as a line cook - you have a bunch of experiences with these songs linked to whatever you were smelling at the time which then locked the 'nostalgia' into memory - so now in the Reverse RAG situation, you hear a song and your memories of those times are really strong.
And to quote the magnanimous Steven Wright:
"Memories... they're really the only thing you have to think back on"
I have a weird second-hand memory by this. Back in the 90s, when I was still in school, we were having a bit of a relaxed period. My teacher had the radio on and was marking some stuff, while we kids were doing whatever.
At one point, while I was talking to him, Stairway to Heaven started playing, and he told me that every time he hears that song he remembers the taste and smell of a cheeseburger he had when he visited the US years before.
Now, every time I hear that song, I think of cheeseburgers.
I wish everyone who read the above comment would report back to confirm or deny that they also think of cheeseburgers now when Stairway to Heaven comes on.
My brother has an exceptional sense of smell... and he had a wonderful memory.
I personally, have a compltely retarded_sense of smell, and a poor mem.
I was extremely involved in martial arts (pre-olympic, blah blah) and got hit in the nose a lot)
--
I had a photographic mem until I was about ~14 which I originally thought of as the first time I smoked pot -- but really it was when I started Martial arts...
((I used to take tests in Biology whereby rather than doing the test, I would re-draw the entirety of the chalkboard of the class for that test - and not answer a thing)
(I have memories from 6 months old... where a girl named Wednesday attempted to smother me in my crib with a pillow) ((hippy commune, 1970s, Sanf Francisco -- yes my mom was friends with Jim Jones -- I have incredible memories))
but I relegated my mem loss to various things -- but I have a REALLY poor sense of smell currently. and a poor mem as such.
(However, I can tell you every single passwd Ive ever typed into a machine. The first ISP passwd I was given in the early 90s by netcom auto gen was "FblQ00Ho" in ~96-ish... ((part of my frustration in IT when someone says they cant recall they passwd))
We should have a device that provides a scent when someone selects a secret - and then have them select the passwd induced by the scent.
(I dont give a heck about how nuts the above sounds... its real. thats why its called NOSE-To-LOGIA nostalgia. (I love dissecting etymology)
--
I wrote the following joke eons ago about photographic mems as such:
"I have a photogenic memory... Whenever I think back on myself - I look fantastic"
I have memories of being in my crib, and have confirmed that they are real with my parents. I was into psychedelics at the same time I got into martial arts. I still remember my phone number from living at home as a kid. I can't prove it, but I have a theory that the type of mind that fully enjoys martial arts (assuming you are in this category), is able to "let things go" more easily than other people. I still have some olfactory "memories" that are more current, but I feel like the type of mind that would be into pot or other hallucinogens as well as martial arts, probably has changed their brain to create memories in a different way. I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I find this type of thinking tends to focus on more integration of multiple things going on all at once, rather than a specific event tied to a specific smell, for example.
While I may be completely full of myself, I enjoyed reading your comment, and it struck me how people with totally different experiences in life may have more of a human connection than you'd think once you start looking at finer details. I appreciate it!
Too early maybe.
Your comment is profound, and loved and received.
You must watch the Telepathy series on JRE and such,
Your wording is well sorted. We are finding ourselves - ive been open on HN with resistance,
But the entiretity of tech build in Silicon Valley has been built on som dark shit.. (but its all around mind manip and Sex Magikx if you want to discuss that) ( Morehouse university and such)
regardless I appreciate you
(Ill freely give you all my creds if need... I know a lot)
They are trying to be sarcastic, and focus on HN and the way people generally use the site. That's how I understood it, anyways. You didn't say anything wrong.
Music is the only way I can remember any points in my life at all. Where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, what I was feeling, etc. Otherwise completely impossible. I can remember the exact moment I heard every song I heard (that I liked).
A famous linkage of smell/taste with memory is near the beginning of Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu" (Remebrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time). Involuntary memory is a theme in it.
Any discussion of charts after about 2000, and certainly today, seems irrelevant. Music delivery is so segregated into niches (with charts catering to each) that "pop" charts don't reflect a generation's tastes the way they used to.
It's sad that we no longer have soundtracks for eras the way we did. Look at movies set during various decades; you know the time period from the songs being played.
After 2000 or so... that's over. Even if you play period-correct music, it will not evoke memories across anywhere near as much of the audience as it would have for previous generations.
Back in the day, on a road trip with friends, you could have an assorted-music tape where people would know and rock out to every song. Today not so much. Or... you'd be playing the same tape from the '80s to 20-somethings now and they'd still know the songs.
There's a reason '80s music enjoyed such a resurgence among young people: Much of today's popular music sucks ass. It sucks both from a creative standpoint (lacking even legitimate song structure, like melody, chorus, & bridge) and from a technical standpoint (being dynamically compressed into a wall of noise).
There's actually a much wider variety of music now than in the eighties/nineties. I was born in 1974, grew up on eighties music. Got into alternative music in the nineties. And so on. What was on the radio in the eighties was pretty bland mostly but with some notable exceptions. But there was nothing else on so you listened to it anyway.
These days I listen to both old and new music. And also some music that is older than me. My motto is that if it was worth listening to fifty years ago it probably still is. And if it was crap then, it probably still is.
There are a lot of new/young artists making music in the style of pretty much any style you can name happened in the past 60 years or so. I need to get over the "these kids are less than half my age" thing of course. But some of that stuff is pretty good. There's an enormous long tail of relatively obscure artists that simply did not exist in the eighties/nineties. Worth exploring.
Pop charts stopped mattering a long time ago. People don't buy lps, cds or singles. And those don't get played on the radio based on sales statistics. There's still some artists that get played on the radio obviously. But radio is for old people. Most kids have headphones connected to their phones, not a radio. They'll listen to whatever they want, whenever they want.
I went to see Kneecap yesterday (Irish mockumentary about a real band doing Irish
Rap). Pretty decent music and fantastic movie. Obviously inspired by eighties/nineties hip hop.
That's pretty much what I mean. Everybody can micro-curate his musical consumption and stay within one niche if that's what he wants, which I think can be bad for music discovery because you aren't exposed to stuff you might unexpectedly like. You have to make an effort to get broad exposure.
Listening to the radio occasionally today, it seems like it is primed entirely for gen x. I’m not sure how many times they play Sublime a day now but its at least three time with three different songs on a few stations in LA county.
Seriously. 98.7 is playing the same music that dominated airplay 20 years ago. Their rotation now sounds the same as JackFM.
One week years ago I decided to listen to a hip-hop/pop station every day on my way to work. I like all kinds of music, including dance or pop or catchy rap. I wanted to discover some new high-energy music.
But after a week I wasn't disappointed; I was pissed off. Pissed off for all of the talented people who are obviously NOT getting heard, while airplay is wasted on craven trash. I discovered one catchy, clever song in that whole week: "Nothin' on You," by Bruno Mars & B.o.B.
Topping my shitlist from the week was Drake, with a discordant, no-rhythm, no-rhyme, no-talent mess that played mostly unrelated instrument noises over each other while Drake mumbled
Baby you da best
Baby you da best
Baby you da best...
Your comment is interesting in various ways, but I want to focus on the idea that
Legitimate song structure = melody + chorus + bridge
Is there something about such a song structure that is somewhat universal or is it just so established in our culture that any song that doesn't have those elements sounds... impoverished? Are there other, alternative song structures that tend to produce satisfying music?
I'm not being dismissive; I'm legitimately interested in exploring this idea.
Totally valid question, and I think that yes... there is a reason that our (or Western) song structure has evolved the way it has.
For some reason it is very appealing to the listener, and I think it's a combination of sonic qualities but also relief from repetition. And this is what's lacking from a lot of today's music.
Today we have what amounts to a loop where someone presses Play, mumbles over it for a period of time, and then presses Stop. There's no payoff.
I think one of first times I thought about this was listening to "Crazy in Love" by Beyonce. It has this big build-up that you think is going to go into a satisfying chorus... but it goes nowhere. Nowhere, for the whole song.
And that song is fairly dynamic by today's standards.
I disagree. This song structure is cheap and mostly used for pop songs meant to be a catchy background. Many (most?) music pieces that could be called masterpieces don't follow such simplistic structure.
I'm not trying to be pretentious. I'm not a hardcore music fan, and most of the music I listen to nowadays has the classic verse/chorus structure (because it's catchy and ready to vibe on). But pretending it's the one correct way to make music is not right.
The equivalent charts from the 30s and 40s were often not verse/chorus/verse. Think “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” or “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”. There are repeated sections like choruses but the bones are often a 32 bar form with an AABA structure.
> It has this big build-up that you think is going to go into a satisfying chorus... but it goes nowhere.
I don't disagree in general, but that particular song is likely just due to the use of that rising horn sample from the original 1970 Chi-Lites song:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hm2YjDENPPU
Any music theorist would tell you there’s no such thing as “legitimate song structure”. Verse/chorus/bridge is at most _common_ (though in no way legitimizing) at a very specific time in a very specific culture, there are plenty of counterexamples from the last 50 years.
If you’re interested in stuff like this, YouTube has approachable music theorists making good content. 12Tone is quite good.
I'm sure that's true, but I specifically referred to Western music found on music charts. Obviously I knew the assertion is wide open for attack on the "legitimacy" idea, but I think an objective analysis of hit-song structure would reveal trends that support the idea of optimal "catchiness."
> The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism.[5]
Right... which means that it offers up numerous dramatically different sections that defy the the "press Play... mumble a while... press Stop" trend that I'm complaining about.
The expansion of ways that we consume media plays a role, but I don't think we've lost the sounds of an era, it's just that the hooks are now coming from a variety of sources.
"Badger Badger Badger" (and their kin) is likely to evoke a particular era in your memory.
In a similar way "Uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh" may possibly evoke a more recent era.
"Here comes the Hammer!" Wasn't sure if that was your last example, but that sprung to my mind immediately. If it wasn't, I'd be curious what song you were referencing.
I feel like as I get older, it takes me more time to find new music I enjoy. Perhaps it's oversaturation, or the way that apps and media are set to display those who pay the most money, rather than those most talented or unique. I mostly listen to heavier music, but enjoy quite a few different genres. I tend towards music that is "progressive", or brings something uncommon or new to the style. I don't think there's anything wrong with people liking current pop music, but I think people are missing out if they restrict themselves to it.
In the 90s a lot of movies had accompanying songs that would go into the charts. I remember Titanic, Bond movies, Godzilla, gangsters paradise, some Bryan Adam’s and Aerosmith songs.
I don’t know if that is still the case today as I listen mostly listen my own Spotify playlists or ”classic” radio stations (meaning 90s/00s music nowadays).
I can imagine it was an effect of the commercial music industry at the time and these songs were heavily subsidized by the movie’s marketing budget to get into the charts.
That was pre-siloed internet era. Those were still golden days of internet, because everyone was seeing the same “trends” and there was some alignment. Think of ice bucket challenge, planking, and etc.
The stuff I see nowadays is very different from what you see, despite using the same platforms. It’s sad, because it’s not even just internet, it’s all types of media. No more Game of Thrones discussions at work on Mondays, because almost everyone watching it. No more songs that almost everyone knows. And the list keeps going on.
Basically algorithms catering to every taste, rather than some humans being the curators. I understand the negative sides of it as well, but talking to my nephews… things don’t look that fun even for them.
Nailed it. I used to gather with friends for Game of Thrones every Sunday, but now there's really nothing with that kind of widespread appeal.
People used to do this with Friends, Melrose Place, Sex and the City...
It really doesn't look very fun now. Everyone is face-down in their phones even when they're together and "out." I'm so glad to have grown up at the time where we developed mastery of technology but are not enslaved by it. Childhood, or at least adolescence, looks pretty uninteresting and shitty now across all kinds of demographics.
If you're lucky, you keep searching and finding unique forms of media, but it definitely takes effort. If you can find a group of people that are interested in the not-so-popular, but deeper meaning media, it can be extremely rewarding. I usually tend towards heavier music, but also enjoy strange electronic that breaks out of genres, as well as strange and more psychedelic or interesting media on YouTube. I have a group of friends that I recommend these to, and we have some great conversations about it. Some art even really "friends", but just people with the same interests that I've never met before, yet I find it fun to explain what drew me to the media, and then hearing what they think about it and if they feel similar.
Meanwhile, my son is going back in time and discovering the same bands that eventually burned me out on more popular heavy music. I try not to push him towards any one thing, I will give him band or album suggestions, but let him decide whether he wants to listen or not. With friends I try to push a little harder, but I want my son to have the same type of free thinking and discovery when it comes to music that I had in the early 90s.
It’s not about “quality, deep, meaningful” media. It’s about not having a common topic of discussion with a passerby other than politics. But there’s definitely good stuff out there. One of the problems is, too much good stuff actually!
The years that are most consequential to my taste are '77 to '82, where there seemed to be an explosion of high quality output across so many genres - disco/uptempo R&B, funk music, hard rock, progressive jazz, punk rock, reggae, synth pop and electronic music -- some of these being emergent genres. But '76 was a pretty full year for music across genres too, as was '83. And '75, and '74, and '84, and '85 ...
There's literally no year that isn't a rabbit hole of very interesting hits, progressions where one thing is going out of fashion while another thing gains attention as it moves from edge to center, marginalia, you name it when it comes to music.
I suppose there are examples of like late '92 when grunge blew up beyond reasonable proportions where one could point to a specific time range and place for a sea change like Nirvana and fellow indy rockers triggering Glam Rock/Hair Metal's decline. But those kinds of events are less frequent or at least less consequential and that probably has to do with the average josephine liking a wide range of musical genres, which was very much not the case until maybe the mid to late 90s.
Seriously, folks' musical tastes were monosyllabic af
Shouts to giving Franky Valli his props. One of my favorites of his songs is a disco groover called "Who Loves You".
Interestingly there was a bit of a resurgence in 50's style and culture during the mid '70s, probably due to the movie Grease's and lead Travolta's success
I agree about late 70s - early 80s being so good across a wide variety of genres. Especially if you're willing to narrow 78-83.
Such a variety of sounds which somehow all seemed somewhat original.
You had the new wave thing in pop music while the hard rock had resurged with Van Halen/Boston/AC-DC/ZZ Top/etc. Early metal (Metallica). Early hip-hop (Sugar Hill Gang/Houdini). Bands which had emerged in the late 60s like the Rolling Stones/The Who/Pink Floyd still putting out quality.
The 50s resurgence actually started in 1969 with the creation of Sha Na Na (who even played at Woodstock, weirdly enough). Grease was more of a result than a cause of the trend (and Sha Na Na actually performed in the movie of the musical as the fictional band "Johnny Casino and the Gamblers")
I got turned on to Spiritualized later in the 90s. What a band. I get _somewhat_ similar but different but similar vibes from Lost Under Heaven
I remember also being blown away by Bucketheadland so much that every other album I put on sounded simple and linear. And we're only a couple of years away from the whole Bristol-led Downbeat sound (Portishead, etc) and Notorious B.I.G's debut.
I'm there with you on age. It gets harder to catch my attention because the differences between what I hear now vs what I heard then are so slight. So new stuff I like, eg. Lost Under Heaven, is a few measures of familar combined exactly correctly with a few measures of tastily strange; perhaps not "brand-new" strange but strange in stylistic juxtaposition(s) I suppose?
I agree completely something really good started in the '77. That time period is still in heavy rotation for me now even while I discover new to me music.
That first Boston album is butter.
Van Halen is a huge band that comes up when I think about that period
Id put The Cars and even Cheap Trick in there as an example of rock plus varying levels of New Wave - higher with former, a bit lower for the latter
OMG Talking Heads had mindshare among hipsters by the mid to late 80s; the weirdest punks in America
I see that studio belonged to the MIT grad in the band.
I think Eddie Van Halen's activities probably gave makers among musicians a boost as well. Can't think of a harder tinkerer. Maybe Robert Fripp?
Robert Fripp is brilliant, and is hugely present on social media. King Crimson inspired so many of the more experimental bands of the 90s, and into current day (especially harder music).
Robert Fripp also had a large hand in ambient electronic music, as well as Brian Eno, as far as ambient that reached American audiences. In regards to Talking Heads, I was born in 1979, and I can remember my dad listening to them often (along with all their videos on the brand new MTV). There are still bands with punk influences that are heavily inspired by Talking Heads.
A more modern experimental band is Melted Bodies, who incorporate punk, metal, and electronic with lyrics about current times (being popular, authoritarian control over people, insurance companies, generational trauma). They really remind me of a Talking Heads resurgence, with a grittier, more psychedelic feel (as far as psychedelia being fun and thinking differently, but also nightmarish and bad-trip territory).
Good points
Eno's Music For Airports is another butter album.
Speaking of 'Heads, if you haven't already, check out the David Byrne/Eno collab My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts ('81). It's something like a snapshot of what what was emergent and most interesting sounds from that time from what I think are American vs European persepectives; some funky drum machines and samples (Byrne/US), some funky northwest African and Middle Eastern vibes (Eno/UK). There's a nice jam called Regiment that I can imagine Khruangbin playing
Like Valli in the article it’s perhaps more amazing who has had multiple decade success. In the UK Cliff Richard has topped the charts in every decade since the 1950’s
> He holds the record, with Presley, as the only act to make the UK singles charts in all of its first six decades (1950s–2000s). He has achieved 14 UK No. 1 singles, and is the only singer to have had a No. 1 single in the UK in each of five consecutive decades
1964 and The Beatles didn't just mark a change in music. It marked a change in entertainment in general. An episode of This American Life shows this beautifully: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/281/transcript, look for "Act One, Take My Break Please."
This tells the story of a vaudeville comedy act, a husband and wife team, booked on the Ed Sullivan show, on the day that The Beatles made their American debut. They were completely blindsided. They didn't have any comprehension of what was happening until they were in the middle of it. They didn't really get it until later. The story includes an encounter with John, surreal for the juxtaposition of the ordinariness of the interaction, and the symbolism -- these two completely different eras encountering one another without any awareness of what was represented.
To push the point too far maybe, what was changing was the very sound of life in the US. You hear these old timey comedians, and they have the rapid fire delivery, the tone of voice, the corny jokes, the style that characterized vaudeville and TV sitcoms. And then you have The Beatles, ushering in something brand new (to the vast majority of Americans). I think it's the same sort of difference you see in movies: Before the mid or late 60s you had this very stylized and artificial way of speaking, often with this weird and phony "mid-Atlantic" accent. And then you had much more realistic movies and ways of speaking, e.g. anything from that era with Jack Nicholson.
By 65 the neighborhood teens were all atwitter with the Beatles. Its one of my earliest memories. The girls laying claim to one Beatle or another. “I like Paul” “I like George!” I hadn’t heard any of the Beatles songs. My limited musical exposure was from church and The Wonderful World of Disney. By the late 60’s I listened to WPGC and Kasey Kasims countdown. Growing older this all became so annoying. The overt loudness. The repetition. Seeking solace in alternatives I embraced punk and new wave. The thing that cracks me up is hearing the clash sing about Supermarkets while in the supermarket. Oh man oh man the 2020s are a great time to be alive
The mid-Atlantic accent wasn't phony, it was actually quite a common accent at the time amongst a certain class of person. It was, at least, no more fake than the "BBC English" sort of accent - largely developed/taught in expensive fee-paying schools, but nevertheless not 'phony' as such, because it was the genuine accent of the people that spoke that way. They didn't speak differently at home.
Also, the general style of speaking in those movies wasn't any more artificial than the older style, it was just differently artificial. The older style was focused on portraying characters' motivations and feelings very clearly. The newer style is called realism, but still isn't actually how people speak, because the dialogue is still just dialogue (purely functional plot-progressing conversation), not realistic conversation. That's part of why Tarantino's movies were so revolutionary: much of the dialogue was much closer to how people actually speak, and that this was 40 years after 'realism' seems to have escaped the notice of many people. In reality, I think 'realism' has mostly been interpreted by actors as 'mumbling' to such an extent that I have to turn the volume up or put subtitles on to understand what the characters are even saying.
I'm not discounting at all that it was a revolutionary time, but the idea that the old style was basically fake and the new style was basically real is quite wrong. They're both quite fake. The new style is so ingrained that it has actually trained people into talking like that, though. The way Americans speak in real life sounds to me like they've been brought up watching movies - and I mean almost all of them. In older recordings they do not sound like this, they sound 'normal' enough (although still with strong accents).
I think this kind of change is maybe more common than we think. I mean, when Nirvana showed up and was juxtaposed next to the hair metal kind of vibe of the day you had the same weird juxtaposition. Or think how weird that 90s vibe of movies like the Goonies or Raiders of the Lost Ark feels compared to Marvel (so much so that Stranger Things was able to feel nostalgic).
I think of it like fashion. Outfits get slim/tight then the next generation comes and fits get roomy/baggy, then then next generation comes and they'll get slim/tight. There is a swaying back and forth from formal to relaxed, even in politics. Like a Boris Johnson in the UK.
I think it can just feel like "the big change" when our own generational cohort makes the break. And baby boomers have been dominating the conversation for so long, that the particular change that happened in the 60s is banged on about so much. In fact, in the article the author themselves tries to downplay the change that happened in the 90s as a change in how billboard ranked artists. I think that is actually partially just a desire to see the 60s as exceptional or legendary in a way that plays into boomer nostalgia.
I am a boomer, and I think that these two things are true:
1) The stuff that happens in your teens is special because of your age. That may well explain why I think The Beatles (and the music of that era) was so special.
2) The music from the 60s really was special. There was certainly rock and roll well before The Beatles, and it grew out of black music, and blues, and can be viewed as nothing really new. And yet: it really was a significant break from the past in the global adulation for their music and the quantum change in tastes that they ushered in.
Not to minimize Nirvana (whose music I love) or metal, or anything else, but the musical examples that you cite were simply not as globally shattering as The Beatles. They just weren't. They were variations within the world of rock and roll. The only comparable change I can think of is the rise of rap music. Which I cannot stand, but I recognize how it changed the world in the same way that The Beatles did.
Checking in from Europe. The rise of electronic music was a big deal here, it happened in the late 70s to 90s with "techno" taking off in the late 80s / early 90s. Electronic music in the US has had its ups and downs and has been over-commercialized as dubstep and "EDM" in the last 10-15 years - it will probably be over again at some point. It's been a thing constantly for decades on this side of the pond. Some people say Kraftwerk was as important as (or more so regarding influence on current music) the Beatles.
Electronic music also started in the US: Disco, Chicago house, Detroit techno - these just didn't take off as much or not permanently (Disco).
I love the Beatles and recognize their impact. But to say there was rock and roll before the Beatles as if Elvis wasn't a massive international thing is downplaying it, as if it was this underground phenomenon. The members of the Beatles themselves (or the Rolling Stones) all talk about what influence Chuck Berry and Elvis were. In fact, from the view of "rock'n'roll" I don't think the Beatles influence matches Elvis. Their real influence was bigger later with their experimentation and studio wizardry.
I was even thinking about the Rat Pack, you know Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc. and their antics. The Beatles were very much in that lineage. So this idea that they showed up on Ed Sullivan and wowed the world with their new nonchalance that had never been seen before is not an accurate view of the situation.
As you say, two things can be true. The Beatles were important and influential and were a defining sound in the 60s. And the kind of changes (and relative impact) that happened in the 60s have happened many times in the past and many times since. It isn't some singular moment in the cultural history of humanity.
My favorite band of all time is Led Zeppelin. A large number of their songs especially in the early albums were heavily influence by black blues artists or so close that they later had to give songwriting credits to the original black artist.
Elvis also sang lots of blues songs originally created by black Americans.
Not just influenced, Led Zeppelin stole tracks from black musicians.
Even worse (in my opinion), is Eric Clapton, who stole so much music from black musicians, and then went on to disparage them and go on racist rants about who he wants in his country. Even worse when you see how he gave and received praise from artists like Jimi Hendrix.
Part of the Beatles growth was also the growth of the home television. The next generational equivalent was probably MTV and Michael Jackson, that spawned the unfathomably large, entertainment icon level of pop star. After that it was anyone who has used Youtube to get billions of viewers without a media companies support.
It's important to consider that rap/hip-hop lyrics are deeply tied to social issues. For a middle-class white kid, it's not super important, but for the audience that was also making the music, this is why it took off. The music was new with a message, and even if you didn't understand the message, you could feel the power behind the music. Then you had producers like Rick Rubin, and labels like Def Jam, that knew they could market the music to white kids in the suburbs. I was one of those white kids in the suburbs, and my friends and I would listen to more "underground" hip-hop/rap radio stations in the very late 80s/early 90s to find music that had a message behind it and was honest (even if we weren't the target).
> The only comparable change I can think of is the rise of rap music. Which I cannot stand, but I recognize how it changed the world in the same way that The Beatles did.
Yea, I can't stand rap and hiphop either, but nobody can deny that its jump into the mainstream in the 90s disrupted and permanently changed the character and trajectory of popular music.
I agree with both of your points, and I was born in 1979. My dad was into the music of the 60s, like Jethro Tull, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. My mom was huge into the Beatles. I love all of the above mentioned bands, and while I listen to more metal than anything, the metal I love definitely take elements from all of the above, along with Black Sabbath. Now you need to really dig to find what you enjoy, it usually won't show up on radio, or even on a related Spotify playlist unless you make sure to constantly interact with and like music you are into.
Hip-hop and rap seem to be more divisive for boomers (not using the term as an insult, my parents are both boomers, who I respect), and I think it's more because the message was more in your face and violent (as far as what was publicized). There is a lot of hip-hop and rap that is much more socially conscious and aware from the 90s up to today, that aligns more with the messages from the 60s. I enjoy both, but I have gotten my dad into groups like the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill/Wu-Tang Clan, while skipping over the tracks that I don't think he'd enjoy. I think it's fine to not like certain styles of music.
I don't enjoy modern country at all, but I like Bluegrass and Americana type music, with my favorite Grateful Dead album being Workingman's Dead (arguably quite a bit different from the rest of their catalog). You just have to search more for what you like now than in the past where you really could find good music on public radio.
I think what puts off a lot of boomers to rap are two things: a lack of a melody in the lyrics and unfamiliarity with samples music, and irreverent lyrics. When my parents complained about rap music in the 90s it was not about the social commentary aspect, it was specifically about lyrics about women and glorification of gang violence. Which to be honest listening to a lot of these songs again as an adult comes off as highly cringe usually. Ice cube’s “good day” for example did not age well from a lyricism standpoint, feels so juvenile like it was written by a horny teenager when you actually listen to what he says. Even Kendrick has some dumb lyrics like that.
I can appreciate the poetry of the Beatles, I feel a connection as Irish diaspora, but as music, it does nothing for me, and my friends who really loved them picked that up from their parents, reinforcing #1!
The Beatles and the 60s really were special. You may not like their music and that's fine, but that period and that band has not been replicated in later decades by later generations. What the Beatles achieved in particular is arguably unparalleled. If it was mostly #1 as you say then there'd be a Beatles perhaps every decade, but there's not been. There's not even yet been another Beatles since the Beatles.
That is a good point. But there is something else going on in addition. Music is a much smaller cultural force than it was in the 60s and 70s. Then it was arguably the core of all the social changes. That hasn’t been true since then. Instead there are PCs, cell phones, video games, apps. Music matters far less than it used to.
I asked my daughters what music, from their teen years, (aughts and tens) would be listened to fifty years later, similar to the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, etc. They said none of their music would be remembered, it’s all disposable.
I agree in and I think the Beatles can never happen again for reasons that are completely independent of the music itself. There was huge change happening at that time, you had this huge youth culture, that for demographic reasons the West has not seen the likes of since, and arguably never again can because of fragmentation due to the internet, and then finally you throw in the best band and some of the best songwriters in history. That's what made the Beatles special, it was also everything else that had nothing to do with them at all.
We used to have to buy music in stores on physical media. We had to pay money for that album so I think that helped develop an emotional connection to the artist because we were literally giving them our money. Unless you were rich you couldn't own every album that you wanted so you had to think more about whether you really wanted to buy it.
Today most people pay a monthly subscription to a streaming music service and get unlimited access to millions of songs. I think this decreases the personal connection to music.
There are still devoted fans to musicians that will pay a thousand dollars to see them in concert and younger fans buying music on vinyl records that want a more tangible physical experience but that's the minority.
As Kevin Kelly noted decades ago, "change changes change". There cannot be another Beatles, because several aspects of what made the Beatles special were because they were the first <something>. In particular they were the first music act to go "global" thanks to television, and the first music act to go "global" in an area of relatively affordable flight.
Like technological and social disruptions, I think usually the difference is that the new thing has a different agenda than the old - different goals. As a result, the old can't make sense of it - by their goals the new thing is obviously worthless. To the market-dominating Blackberry phone maker, obviously their phone was far superior for email, so why would someone in business buy an iPhone?
My working theory is that the new thing 60s rock'n'roll aimed for was personal expression. Vaudeville acts weren't expressing things about themselves (very much - it's always a matter of degree). There was no 'Let It Be' moment, or expressions of aggression or deeply felt love. Vaudeville and a lot of the pre-Beatles pop music was (very generally) entertainment, not so much art. Look at jazz too, going from Ellington to Coltrane. Look at the rise of folk music. 50's crooners mocked the singing voices of rockers because that was their goal - an aesthetically beautiful voice; they perhaps didn't see the point of rockers was personal expression.
Again, that's speaking very generally. There were many beautiful voices post-Beatles, and there was self-expression before them, and the dividing line isn't perfect.
Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression. If true, I think partly it's an outcome of culture wars: it's associated with liberalism, so many reject it; and real personal expression can be uncomfortable and non-conformist, and that's divisive and provocative to many. But I am building speculation on speculation.
What personal would there be left to express in a world reduced to a market of bespoke customers—not only their tastes, but their very spectra of conceivable interior experiences preemptively curated by adaptive recommender systems?
Pop music was always the instrument of creating such consumers; the inevitable replacement of subsistance farmers by sub-subsistence factory workers; the media industry as a core tool in the toolbox of the infinite growth death cult, robbing people of certain things previously considered essential human, by channeling their personal experiences through the designated—the Japanese have a great word for it—idols.
You can't have global power projection without an unidirectional informational channel to common working folk, you see, to make sure they know which way the wind is blowing, and to keep them unable to imagine an alternative to what they're trapped in. We're just on a new level of that, one where the expression of that reality which any of us personally experiences is left perpetually in the rear view mirror; all that remains in the here and now is "content production", and its layers upon layers upon layers of technical facilitators in cutthroat competition for the largest crumb of the donut hole.
It's the reification of post-post-post-so-far-post-that-it's-kind-of-meta-modernism: it's all about how it's about nothing at all! And yet it's massive. The kids, those ultimate judges of practicing vs preaching, have spoken: can't sell out of your "authenticity" if you were authentically in it for the money and fame in the first place. There's still room in all that for originality, even creativity, but it's explicitly just business, never anything personal because that'd be bad taste; drawing a line between the interior world and the social game—or worse, trafficking in those goods which can only be found in the former—has completed its transformation into a social taboo.
Hence, the exquisitely crude, the blatantly false, the unapologetically predatory, has won the battle for the hearts and minds, and is now officially in control of the planet. If you think anything else is going on, you just don't know it yet, and we wish the best of luck to you and yours.
Much of this is because there is not much of a recorded music industry before 1950.
Miles Davis Kind of Blue was one of the best selling albums of the 50s. The #1 best seller though of the decade is the Elvis Christmas album.
By the 60s, Sinatra and the Rat pack were considered lame. That was your dad's music. The Beatles are the Beatles because of the size of the baby boomer generation and that someone had to be the stars of the new generation. As great as the Beatles are, the marketing of the Beatles albums was just as great.
In fact it was notable for not being anyone's native accent! Although it was supposed to capture some of the perceived "classiness" of some British accents.
> According to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".
You could think of it as an effort to unify the way people speak English in the US. Not a bad idea I think, if it works. Less "otherness". I read somewhere that many people with Brooklyn accents were taking lessons to get rid of their accent.
I had som much fun when I met this girl who spoke like the girl in "My Cousin Vinny". It was so "authentic". The cool thing about US is that there are so many immigrants who speak English but they speak it in their own accent. But I think it is only natural that eventually they will all speak more like each other.
Certainly there were people who spoke similarly to movies and radio, like my grandmother. However, the full truth is rather sad: Anglo-American speech at the time comprised many beautiful and very diverse accents. As media became ubiquitous, these began to die off and most seem extinct today.
This article is asking whether a new kind of pop star ends the pop careers of existing pop stars. Seems unclear clear from the top 40 hits data used, but I enjoyed the exploration and would enjoy reading more in depth exploration of the question with more data.
I guess a simplistic relevance survival rate change analysis akin to top 40 hits before/after a shock must've been done for companies or individual careers where the shock is say a new general purpose technology or shift including the one happening now around LLMs. I'm having deja vu while commenting, there is a non-superficial literature on just this focused on adaptation and adoption as important factors if I recall correctly; I'd need to ask a LLM for specifics or rack my brain for longer, the piece that immediately comes to mind is at a different looking at a different scale, Jeff Ding's writing on such shocks and geopolitical power. Anyway, I guess such a literature focused on entertainer survival given shocks must exist, and might help explore which ones matter; the Beatles or any specific megastar might just be the froth; I presume that's the case.
Based on the title I was expecting a different question (entirely due to my presumptions such as mentioned above, nothing wrong with the title or article), namely how many star careers does a megastar career end or preclude, and on down to the impact of stars (mega to small) on amateurs. It's possible that stars are positive sum when considering consumers or even that they are positive sum for smaller producers (increasing overall demand, including demand to create as an amateur) though I'm skeptical of the latter given attention is finite.
I'm way more sanguine about the positive sumness of megastars where demand is insatiable (e.g., not limited by attention) such as for non-attention-based (e.g., media/entertainment) technology, but I'd love to read serious analysis of this either way.
I would definitely watch a film about a quartet of highly trained musical hitmen taking out competing acts. Somehow the idea of John acting as a spotter with a pair of binoculars sat on a rooftop next to Ringo with a sniper rifle and giving him a range estimation in a Scouse accent seems… utterly delightful.
The article posits that the beatles and the nineties were BAD for artists, ruining careers and making them one-hit-wonders (where presumably they would have had more than one hit?).
I would argue that it was GREAT for artists and the reason there are so many one hit wonders is that those times opened up and created public appetite for new music. Those artists (who he argues would have had more than one hit) I argue would not have had ANY hits as they never would have gotten airplay to begin with.
How many artists did the Beatles kill? Maybe a better question is – How many artists did the Beatles help produce?
Even more, googling, I get about 100k working musicians currently in the US. It should be obvious that most of those aren't hit-producers for major labels and things likely weren't that different back in the 1960s. Back in the day, they were live performers, teachers and performers in radio-orchestras. Presently they are live performers, teachers, session musicians , and composers-of-themes for movie, TV-shows, commercials, video games and so-forth.
Listened to "the song that some claim made Dylan go electric and pushed rock music into a completely new direction." I always liked it.
It's profoundly odd that "The Brits," mostly working class youngsters had this impact on american culture, by introducing and merging american themes and styles to americans... by mixing them with other american art memes.
Infusing rock n roll with smokey blues vibes. Putting Beat Generation themes into pop. Three years in and you have american musicians mimicking Liverpool lads doing impressions of an american singers' accent.
...and somehow it's not cheesy. That song sounds like authentic americana... at least to me.
You can't leave out Bob Dylan's influence with introducing the band to marijuana, as well as Jimi Hendrix not making it big in the US, and being "shipped" to the UK to start the Jimi Hendrix Experience. That didn't just have a big effect on The Beatles, but acid rock/psychedelia as a whole. You also had Black Sabbath taking blues music and downtuning it, and playing it slower, all due to Tony Iommi's work accident where he lost his finger tips. Modern metal music owes a TON to Black Sabbath, especially styles that play slower, like doom metal and all its various sub-genres. There was a lot of sharing between countries, and I think that is why the music is so closely tied together (along with the entire psychedelic movement).
Brits singing re-packaged "race music" for Americans. Americans did try (see Pat Boone etc) but while the Beatles/Stones/Hermans Hermits dominated it was the rise of Motown that is most intriguing. Black Americans moving north for industrial jobs and having good wages finally put their music on the map. That it was playable on the radio for everybody (unlike the blues) was a masterstroke.
If you listen to the Beatles back catalog today it's pretty bad. Motown still sounds fresh.
Rubber Soul onwards are all masterpieces (except maybe Let it Be) and feature among the greatest music written by anyone, ever. You are seriously underrating them just by virtue of the fact that you don't personally enjoy listening to them, which seems silly to me.
People who don't listen to the Beatles usually don't even realise it when they're listening to the Beatles anyway, the younger you are the truer it is.
Each to their own but there are plenty of Beatles songs that stand the test of time IMO.
Yes, there's plenty of dross, particularly on the early albums, but, say, "Strawberry Fields Forever", or "We Can Work It Out", or "Yesterday"? Superb.
I don't like the Beatles either. There's just something about their sound that really grates on my nerves, IDK what it is. They were obviously historically significant, but I very much dislike listening to them.
100%. Weirdly derivative without any real insight into what they cribbed. Paul McCartney and his twee later stage gobshite, Maxwells silver hammer etc just no
I mean it's fine to not like the Beatles but they weren't derivative (literally the opposite), and not liking the song that is considered by many to be their worst or most controversial isn't saying much (and actually it's a perfectly serviceable song really, it's just the mythology that has built up around it that has really caused it to take flak).
I've always liked it. I think the only reason you would think it was their 'worst' is if you got all your opinions from a sort of musical 'hive mind' - someone that compulsively reads Rolling Stone or whatever. People need to do their OWN thinking.
I have actually been listening to the Beatles back catalog, and its incredible. The musical invention and diversity is unlike any individual group I've ever heard. I love Motown, but honestly, if you've heard one 4 Tops song, you've heard them all, they even parody themselve with "The Same old song". But then you listen to the Beatles at the start of their hits with I want to hold your hand and then compare it to the end with the Symphonic Medley on Abbey Road, and you cant believe they're the same group, and all in a period of 6 years.The only other artist I can compare them to for so much evolution in such a short period of time is David Bowie.
The beatles back catalog feels so generic. Especially when you start hearing contemporary to that period music (the animals etc). All short sweet songs, using generic pop music chord structures and lyrical themes for the most part. Not to do them any discredit, they did come up with those lyrics but they did not come up with the chord structures or lyrical themes. They picked them because they knew they would be popular. They went up and did literally what elvis did to get his fame: rehash known good pop music with a pretty boy (or four) marketed to young girls ensuring capture of the youth market for a generation. And boy were the beatles marketed moreso than a lot of artist at the time and a long time afterward.
The movie "Echo in the Canyon" is a little too worshipful and has a little too much Jakob Dylan, but it really highlights how all of the artists of that time including the Beatles were listening to each other and pushing their own art further to match or top what they heard from other artists.
The fact that Valli topped the charts again in 1978 with “Grease” still boggles my mind.
Not if you were living through the 1950s nostalgia revival which was going strong at the time and lingered through the early 80s. It was on TV (Happy Days and Sha Na Na), the movies (American Graffiti, Porky's) and a bunch of retro musical acts (The Stray Cats) or retro projects by established artists returning to the music they grew up with (Robert Plant's The Honeydrippers).
The sound of rock music undoubtedly changed between the beginning and middle of the 1960s. But by looking at the Billboard Hot 100, we can see if that change in sound was being made by a fleet of new groups or a bunch of older acts adapting.
This methodology leaves out a lot of bands, and not just the long tail that never cracked the top 100. There are MANY locally popular bands that never broke out nationally and therefore never made it to the Billboard Hot 100. There were also bands doing types of music that never charted particularly well yet were influential in their own way. For a sampling of this, go to the MIT/WMBR archives (https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/arch) and listen to "Lost and Found" which highlights a lot of these types of music. Or search for things like "60s garage bands" "60s funk" etc. on YouTube.
The author also mentions the 1991 change to the Billboard methodology which really calls into doubt a some of the "hits" that came before. In a nutshell, music charts in the United States were based on a sample of self-reported sales from record store managers. You can imagine the bias and BS that went on with those numbers.
Then there was manipulation further up the funnel. Record companies weren't supposed to give outright cash payments to DJs (wink wink) but there were many other ways of exerting influence on influential media gatekeepers.
Some of the influence was obvious. Picking artists that had the "right" look. Promoting "safe" artists. Forcing hitmaker producers on new and established artists. Selective access and backroom benefits for powerful DJs and music journalists and other influencers. Ignoring, sidelining, or co-opting trends bubbling up from the underground, from proto-metal in the late 60s to punk in the 70s to rap in the 80s.
As soon as Soundscan was implemented, there was an immediate realignment, with rap and grunge and techno and country storming the pop charts.
I think the graph showing the pct of artists who never had a hit again is interesting given that it peaks in the early 90s. I've heard the grunge era described by record industry folks as a freight train that no one saw coming.
I've come to appreciate when artists hang it up in their prime, though. It's very hard to be consistently good forever (I'm not sure I can name anyone who was), and I would much rather think back on an artist's work and say "man I wish he did more of that" than "man he should've gave it up ages ago". For example, Calvin and Hobbes vs Garfield in the world of comics. I would love to have more C&H of the same quality, but I'm grateful it never became boring and forgettable like Garfield did.
Nevermind was among 7 albums released within 44 days:
Metallica, Metallica
Pearl Jam, Ten
Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion I
Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion II
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger
Nirvana, Nevermind
Nirvana were influenced by some large bands that are still around to this day, like The Melvins. Nirvana just happened to have tweaked their sound and been in the right place at the right time. I do enjoy Nirvana, but bands like The Melvins have a far large catalog, and there were quite a few other bands that influenced Nirvana that kept going. Nirvana did often shout out these other bands, but people were too hooked on MTV back then, and weren't as willing to look up the bands they would mention.
I am quite a Nirvana fan but I just think this is totally absurd.
Nirvana's impact on the actual sound of music I would say is really not that much.
It is really Sonic Youth that had a much bigger impact on the 90s sound than anyone. Including taking Nirvana on tour as an opener when they were complete nobodies.
Even punk music barely felt the influence of Nirvana. I think you are confusing sound with MTV marketing.
It is actually curious how much Nirvana and The Beatles are not reflected sound wise in modern music.
Nothing close to say the way Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has influenced modern rap.
It’s not a referendum on their music at all, which I generally liked in the 90s and am generally tired of now. It’s about the economic success and the knock on effect that had on music production.
>I’d argue nothing successful in rock came out over the next 20 years without somehow relating to nevermind.
You'll have to define what constitutes "rock", and what you mean by "came out" - just any "rock" album, or only new "rock" bands. You also have to define what "successful" means, to have this argument.
Let's also not forget that in the late 1990's the world of music changed with Napster and music sharing, so "successful" in the 20 years after Nevermind came out may not be the same kind of "successful" in 1990 since people were often downloading music.
I personally had no interest in Nirvana, but enjoyed "rock" music from many other bands. Cobain just came off as too depressing a figure, even when he was alive - and so I just didn't connect with their music at all.
The spike in one-hit-wonders during the 90s wasn't surprising to me. I had the unenviable position of working as a line cook and construction worker during the 90s and listened to the radio 6+ hours a day. It's actually fun to listen to those hits these days. There are so many songs that I've forgotten about that I would listen to over and over again before they were overtaken by a new hit. Superman, burning beds, seether (whatever that was), bands named after boxes and chairs, ten different Eddie Vedders with arms wide open...listening to them now brings back a lot of memories so it's hard to hate them today as much as I did then. I remember exactly where I was (sitting in the parking lot of a Shoney's in Charlottesville, VA) when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. Typical FM radio before that was hair metal and classic rock.
My favorite, though, was Seven Mary Three. I saw them in Virginia Beach in a bar with no air conditioning, it was miserable but they had some seriously catchy tunes. Less then a year later I was painting a high school in Orlando and the song Cumbersome came on the radio with the announcer stating "can you believe these guys are unsigned???". Not too long after they were all over MTV. Second place goes to seeing No Doubt open for a forgotten band in '91. They were incredible. When I heard I'm Just a Girl for the first time on the radio I knew who it was before being told.
The 90s were a bit crazy.
Primus, faith no more, Dee lite all in heavy rotation on mtv.
Umass spring concerts included phish, beastie boys, bostones one year, Dylan and the Wailers (without Bob Marley) the previous.
I worked security for Perl Jam playing the student union ballroom.
Lots of that music holds up really well. Eve6 if my underrated band of choice. Phish had some fun weekend camp out with fish concerts/fests in Maine and Upstate NY.
It ended kind of badly with riots at the Woodstock 99 concert.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_%2799
Perl Jam might be the most "hacker news" typo I've ever seen.
Each song had 39 ways of being played, but when you read the lyrics it looked like random letters splayed on the page.
In a similar vein: I had a new coworker named "Jason" join a team once, and for the life of me I couldn't help but type "JSON" first when writing emails/messages with his name. It took weeks before I could reliably get it right first try. Some habits (muscle memory? sub-vocalizations?) die hard.
That is hysterical. lol
Can confirm that autocorrect still mentioned my coworker JSON in 2025. (don't remember where though)
jam.pl
Everyone here is talking about rock music, but electronic music was also just on fire during the 90s. No decade since has come close to the perfection of the 90s across so many genres of electronic music. House, gabber, jungle, so many electronic genres are still just trying to reach the peaks they hit in the 90s.
I say this as someone who was 5 years old at the turn of the millennium, so this isn’t some sort of nostalgia filter.
I agree, the lack of social media, secrecy in production techniques, dawn of digital technology, big names in synthesis pouring millions into r&d was an amazing combo, and most importantly production heavily sampling and dubplate culture....hard to replicate that!
Any recommendations?
I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and am always looking for new recommendations myself. My taste for 90s stuff has typically run more toward Eurodance/Eurobeat and House and J-pop for more recent things.
Here are some random recommendations:
Daft Punk
Anything on the "Blade" soundtrack
Pretty much any Eurobeat featured in the anime Initial D. e.g. Dave Rodgers, Manuel, Fastway, Go2, m.o.v.e.
2 Unlimited - Get Ready, Twilight Zone, Tribal Dance, No Limit
Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
Le Click - Tonight is the Night
La Bouche - Be My Lover
Mr Vain - Culture Beat
Black Box - Ride on Time, Strike it Up, I Don't Know Anybody Else (technically 80s, early house music)
The Shamen - Move Any Mountain
Livin' Joy - Don't Stop Movin'
Bonus, more recent: Destination Calabria (Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters)
Bonus, 1979: Kraftwerk's album "The Man Machine"
Based on Daft Punk/Blade/(80s & 90s electro) [but not eurodance/j-pop]:
WBBL: https://soundcloud.com/wbbl
A.Skillz: https://soundcloud.com/a-skillz
Last Cat Knight: https://soundcloud.com/lastcatknight
Freddy J: https://soundcloud.com/freddy-j
+1 for Initial D Eurobeat. (RIP Manuel)
Speaking of Move Any Mountain:
'Songs For Acid Edward' by Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer Seven Rave classics. In five minutes. On the Banjolele.
Awesome, this is great stuff! Thanks!
Future Sound of London - Dead Cities, was my first exposure to electronic, as an American. They are hard to describe, but are labeled as more psychedelic ambient with bits of techno, trip hop, and progressive house music thrown in. Each album is fairly different from the others, and there is a lot of experimentation that feels unique even in 2025 (at least to myself). I'm a big progressive music fan, or any genre, so they scratch an itch for me when it comes to electronic music.
I am biased as a Londoner but it UK Garage is/was a wonderful subgenre of house from the 90s, a uniquely London blend of genres including Chicago house. Infectious stuff. It was a precursor to later genres like Dubstep and Grime which are so popular today.
Spotify has some good playlists. Rosie Gaines 'Closer than Close' and Artful Dodger 'Movin too Fast' or 'Woman Trouble' are good starting points.
We have been enjoying Massive Attack. The same culture that hatched Banksy is my kind of folks and the music has a good edge, IMO.
For modern stuff, I've enjoyed SomaFM's Groove Salad out of San Francisco. They have net streams directly accessible in VLC, so the processor burning Web app is utterly unnecessary.
That same culture also hatched Portishead (just down the road from Bristol), which was pretty much the apotheosis of trip-hop. It's also the second home of reggae in the UK (after London), which has quite a bit to do with its musical vibe.
Be sure to go back and forth between Groove Salad and Groove Salad Classic, which is the more 90s-2000s version. There's not a lot of people putting out stuff with the "classic" feel anymore, which is partly why Rusty renamed it, and started a newer, modern channel.
SomaFM was incredible, I probably used more bandwidth on their streams than almost anything else for a good year at home. And iirc, this was during dial-up days!
Darude - Sandstorm
Compared to say the 70s, the 90s was pretty bleak. A bit of good grunge, a bit of good hiphop, and then it all sort of fizzled out. At least in europe/uk you had the explosion of electronic music and mdma and everyone having an amazing time. American kids growing up in the late 90s were robbed.
As an American, that was a lot more going on that you didn't really hear about, but I also agree with you about electronic music. I randomly grabbed a Future Sound of London CD in the mid to late 90s, and couldn't believe what I had been missing. I have been exposed to bands like Kraftwerk, but nothing like what was going on in the UK and Europe. From there I discovered Trance music, then progressive House, and started to experiment with sequencing software like FruityLoops (now FL Studio) in the later 90s. Trip-hop then started to become popular, and it became easier to get my friends into electronic, who prior only were into 90s hip-hop (arguably some of the best ever produced).
We had the perfect size electronic music events in America. After a certain size, a party is not better, it is worse.
By 1996 even MTV had Amp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amp_(TV_series)
Maybe in the US, but Britpop reached it's peak in the 90s. Oasis, Stone Roses, Blur, Happy Mondays and many others
As a 90s American teen this is completely absurd. It is literally the peak of the music industry as a whole.
The American 90s rave scene was also absolutely amazing. Big enough to have parties every Friday and Saturday but not too big to attract much undesirable people and law enforcement.
A whole lot of handwaving and lack of exposure are implied in your comment I hope you know.
Trance originated in the 90s though it only matured after. But it was a great time for me. I'm in Europe, yes, but I heard about trance events in the US too
It's crazy, I heard Mmm Bop the other day and didn't even hate it a little bit. It was probably the most annoying song of the 90s and yet the nostalgia kept me du bopping right along.
Mmm Bop was brought to you by the Dust Brothers, responsible for the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique.
the lyrics hit _very_ different when you're old enough to understand them too
That’s a funny thing to say given the band were literal children!
You've got fame-- and then in an MMMbob it's gone.
| seether (whatever that was)
I was about to jump to Veruca Salt's defense, but apparently there was a band called Seether? I must have missed that.
aahhh Seether... loved their song "Remedy", it was on the radio a lot when I was in high school. Saw them live in Portland in 2006, great show.
Back in high school, my buddies and I snuck in to a few Saron Gas (their pre-Seether name) shows at Roxy's in Johannesburg. We were under age, and couldn't afford the R20 cover. They were really talented, and put on a great show (one of the top club shows I can remember).
> The band originally performed under the name Saron Gas until 2002, when they moved to the United States and changed it to Seether to avoid confusion with the deadly chemical known as sarin gas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seether
As of now Seether has > 1B plays on Spotify - can’t be that obscure or forgotten…
No I just don't remember ever hearing them.
Their first hits were in 2002 and I wasn't listening to the radio by then.
They were named after the Veruca Salt song though.
One of their guitarists came out of my local scene. I shared a stage with the guy a number of times. After a few years and albums, he left the band and became a teacher. It was one of the events that started taking the air out of the rockstar dream.
Thank you for reminding be of the band's name. Hearing that one four times a day was painful. It's stuck in my head now again and I haven't listened to it in twenty years.
I think about highly productive artists who, at some point, keep making records but can't make hit records anymore. I'd include David Bowie, Neil Young, Billy Joel, Duran Duran, Yes, KRS-ONE, just for a few. Sometimes I listen to a late discography and enjoy it consistently, such as Neil Young [1], other times it seems like an artist really loses their way, like Frank Zappa did once he got his Synclavier. Other artists wander in the dark for years and come out with something better than they ever did [2] Despite all this, some artists put on an amazing live act despite no new hits, such as Public Enemy and the 38 Special/Foghat show my son won tickets to last year. [3]
I used to have reductivist explanations such as "struggles with music technology" or "too old to rock and roll" but after hearing a lot of late music that I like, despite being unpopular, I think every artist follows a different trajectory.
[1] Except for the polemical Monsanto Years
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer_(album) was one of the few things my evil twin found me that I won't disavow
[3] Answering problems in so many ways: members who passed away were replaced with other illustrious rock and rollers -- I wasn't expecting to hear "Play that funky music white boy" or an instrumental from the Heavy Metal soundtrack but these were great, Foghat even paid a songwriter to make a new song that fit in perfectly with their set.
> highly productive artists who, at some point, keep making records but can't make hit records anymore
Then there is Cher, who has had 52 charting singles (Billboard Hot 100) so far, from 1965 to 2023.
The Rolling Stones have charted singles from 1963 (UK) to 2023, so their hits also span 7 decades.
On the songwriting and production side, there is Max Martin, who has written or co-written 27 #1 hits (Billboard Hot 100) so far. The first one was for Britney Spears in 1998, and the most recent two (!) were for Ariana Grande in 2024.
To me the most impressive statistic is the second-most number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, behind Paul McCartney (32).
Really puts it into perspective if you’re already familiar with McCartney’s work.
surprised Max Martin only has 27, looking through his list there's a lot of songs I assumed must have been #1s that weren't
Probably more if you look across multiple charts and countries. 80 top 10 hits on the (US) Billboard Hot 100 from 1997 to 2024 is still impressive.
Ah yeah but that's always the case. Was mostly just surprised my response to 27 number ones was "really, only 27?!"
Looks like the hot 100 is more confusing than I thought; I see I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys only peaked at 6 because it somehow only came out after its peak in popularity, whatever that means (maybe it was only a music video for a few weeks or something or not physically available or something?)
Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) was pushing 80 when I saw him perform a few years ago (he’s 81 now) and his show was absolutely incredible. He played one new song which I’ve totally forgotten, and of course all of the old songs, but wow that show is refined to a perfected science. Pigs literally flying, a literal wall coming up, laser lights, projectors, fake machine guns. Comfortably Numb was a standout, but he’s been doing this songs for over 40 years now to arenas. It’s astonishing. So many moving parts (literally and figuratively) and I’ll fondly remember it for the rest of my life.
Right, there was a time that many older rockers seemed "too old to rock and roll" but as you say, they have learned from all their successes and mistakes so they have it down to a science. My wife had an amazing time at a Bruce Springsteen concert similarly.
Same thing with Bob Weir. Dude must be on tour for 60 straight years now.
From vague memory, I'm not sure Frank Zappa lost his way, but actually found what he'd been looking for the whole time. Prior to the Synclavier he was forced to use humans to bring his compositions to life, and therefore his compositions were written with this in mind; a forced compromise of sorts.
Can't be too upset though given his prolific album releases prior to his Synclavier moment.
You're right, he was such a misanthrope that he didn't enjoy working with musicians, yet, he worked with so many brilliant musicians that made his work great.
I think of his albums where he heavily overdubbed concert footage, probably peaking in The Man From Utopia which just sounds like the greatest concert you never went to.
Also worth remembering that his most synclavier-heavy work came as he was dying of cancer. And also that the "synclavier phase" is like 4-5 albums out of over 60.
His escalating political ambitions were a significant distraction from music as well.
> Ten different Eddie Vedders with arms wide open
That line needs to go in a song
"If I was Eddie Vedder Would you like me any better? That's it, I quit, I don't Give a shit"
Local H, "Eddie Vedder", 1996
highly underrated band
(not associated with them, although I do share a name with their frontman)
Ha, awesome name and username.
> can you believe these guys are unsigned???
I prefer unsigned for guys that don't go negative on me.
That’s OK until you’re counting down to something and instead of telling you you should stop, they just get really positive.
Oh don’t be too quick to dismiss the absolute value of some of the more negatively viewed bands of the time.
Exactly, that's the most significant bit about them.
NICE
My favorite one hit wonder was The Insiders, "Ghost On the Beach". That was 1987, so just before the 90s.
I've never heard that one. Thanks for pointing it out. They remind me a little of The Connells...check out Scotty's Lament and Stone Cold Yesterday with my favorite being Fun & Games[1]. I think they were five years too early...I was obsessed with them in high school.
Another early one-hit-wonder is from Deee-Lite, "Groove is in the Heart" (1990). I still watch the video from time to time...the woman can dance like no other.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHFvG0KGcWc
Deee-Lite brings to mind
"Doin' the Do" - Betty Boo
"Hippychick" - Soho
"I'm Free" - the Soupdragons
"Unbelievable" - EMF
An interesting thought to think about is how sense of Smell is related to memory (from an evolutionary perspective the sense of smell-mem link was to ensure we Humans knew when something was not OK to ingest)
But in modern times, now you can have smells link or lock memories in...
So for you as a line cook - you have a bunch of experiences with these songs linked to whatever you were smelling at the time which then locked the 'nostalgia' into memory - so now in the Reverse RAG situation, you hear a song and your memories of those times are really strong.
And to quote the magnanimous Steven Wright:
"Memories... they're really the only thing you have to think back on"
I have a weird second-hand memory by this. Back in the 90s, when I was still in school, we were having a bit of a relaxed period. My teacher had the radio on and was marking some stuff, while we kids were doing whatever.
At one point, while I was talking to him, Stairway to Heaven started playing, and he told me that every time he hears that song he remembers the taste and smell of a cheeseburger he had when he visited the US years before.
Now, every time I hear that song, I think of cheeseburgers.
I wish everyone who read the above comment would report back to confirm or deny that they also think of cheeseburgers now when Stairway to Heaven comes on.
I didn't think of cheeseburgers when I heard Stairway to Heaven. (Past, because I haven't heard it in a while.)
Ive noticed in my life;
My brother has an exceptional sense of smell... and he had a wonderful memory.
I personally, have a compltely retarded_sense of smell, and a poor mem.
I was extremely involved in martial arts (pre-olympic, blah blah) and got hit in the nose a lot)
--
I had a photographic mem until I was about ~14 which I originally thought of as the first time I smoked pot -- but really it was when I started Martial arts...
((I used to take tests in Biology whereby rather than doing the test, I would re-draw the entirety of the chalkboard of the class for that test - and not answer a thing)
(I have memories from 6 months old... where a girl named Wednesday attempted to smother me in my crib with a pillow) ((hippy commune, 1970s, Sanf Francisco -- yes my mom was friends with Jim Jones -- I have incredible memories))
but I relegated my mem loss to various things -- but I have a REALLY poor sense of smell currently. and a poor mem as such.
(However, I can tell you every single passwd Ive ever typed into a machine. The first ISP passwd I was given in the early 90s by netcom auto gen was "FblQ00Ho" in ~96-ish... ((part of my frustration in IT when someone says they cant recall they passwd))
We should have a device that provides a scent when someone selects a secret - and then have them select the passwd induced by the scent.
(I dont give a heck about how nuts the above sounds... its real. thats why its called NOSE-To-LOGIA nostalgia. (I love dissecting etymology)
--
I wrote the following joke eons ago about photographic mems as such:
"I have a photogenic memory... Whenever I think back on myself - I look fantastic"
I have memories of being in my crib, and have confirmed that they are real with my parents. I was into psychedelics at the same time I got into martial arts. I still remember my phone number from living at home as a kid. I can't prove it, but I have a theory that the type of mind that fully enjoys martial arts (assuming you are in this category), is able to "let things go" more easily than other people. I still have some olfactory "memories" that are more current, but I feel like the type of mind that would be into pot or other hallucinogens as well as martial arts, probably has changed their brain to create memories in a different way. I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I find this type of thinking tends to focus on more integration of multiple things going on all at once, rather than a specific event tied to a specific smell, for example.
While I may be completely full of myself, I enjoyed reading your comment, and it struck me how people with totally different experiences in life may have more of a human connection than you'd think once you start looking at finer details. I appreciate it!
+1
I found the mode.
Too early maybe. Your comment is profound, and loved and received.
You must watch the Telepathy series on JRE and such,
Your wording is well sorted. We are finding ourselves - ive been open on HN with resistance,
But the entiretity of tech build in Silicon Valley has been built on som dark shit.. (but its all around mind manip and Sex Magikx if you want to discuss that) ( Morehouse university and such)
regardless I appreciate you
(Ill freely give you all my creds if need... I know a lot)
I enjoyed this wild and trippy post.
Please try to enjoy each post equally.
explain
They are trying to be sarcastic, and focus on HN and the way people generally use the site. That's how I understood it, anyways. You didn't say anything wrong.
it's a reference to Severance
"Thanks, sir, that was really... But actually, I just... I just need to know if you want pick up or delivery"
[flagged]
Music is the only way I can remember any points in my life at all. Where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, what I was feeling, etc. Otherwise completely impossible. I can remember the exact moment I heard every song I heard (that I liked).
That is BEAUTIFUL.
So I applied a long time ago to YX with an idea of "Jot_PLOT"
Take this idea;
An app which maps a song to an interaction. The idea is that you have an interaction with a friend - and give it a soundtrack.
and then you can tie them together,
and you can hear a soundtrack of how you interacted with that friend or with group in a playlist etx
every time you rcv txt a song is assoc
--Better yet song emogid - a link to a song to express something, or feeling.
but dont make it monolithic - make it loving anf un with samples and refereences,....
(you understand, but I love your commment.. - lmk if you need help - nut this can be massive - imagine this thought on youth and dialougues on such...
Your ide has legs BUILD IT
A famous linkage of smell/taste with memory is near the beginning of Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu" (Remebrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time). Involuntary memory is a theme in it.
Any discussion of charts after about 2000, and certainly today, seems irrelevant. Music delivery is so segregated into niches (with charts catering to each) that "pop" charts don't reflect a generation's tastes the way they used to.
It's sad that we no longer have soundtracks for eras the way we did. Look at movies set during various decades; you know the time period from the songs being played.
After 2000 or so... that's over. Even if you play period-correct music, it will not evoke memories across anywhere near as much of the audience as it would have for previous generations.
Back in the day, on a road trip with friends, you could have an assorted-music tape where people would know and rock out to every song. Today not so much. Or... you'd be playing the same tape from the '80s to 20-somethings now and they'd still know the songs.
There's a reason '80s music enjoyed such a resurgence among young people: Much of today's popular music sucks ass. It sucks both from a creative standpoint (lacking even legitimate song structure, like melody, chorus, & bridge) and from a technical standpoint (being dynamically compressed into a wall of noise).
There's actually a much wider variety of music now than in the eighties/nineties. I was born in 1974, grew up on eighties music. Got into alternative music in the nineties. And so on. What was on the radio in the eighties was pretty bland mostly but with some notable exceptions. But there was nothing else on so you listened to it anyway.
These days I listen to both old and new music. And also some music that is older than me. My motto is that if it was worth listening to fifty years ago it probably still is. And if it was crap then, it probably still is.
There are a lot of new/young artists making music in the style of pretty much any style you can name happened in the past 60 years or so. I need to get over the "these kids are less than half my age" thing of course. But some of that stuff is pretty good. There's an enormous long tail of relatively obscure artists that simply did not exist in the eighties/nineties. Worth exploring.
Pop charts stopped mattering a long time ago. People don't buy lps, cds or singles. And those don't get played on the radio based on sales statistics. There's still some artists that get played on the radio obviously. But radio is for old people. Most kids have headphones connected to their phones, not a radio. They'll listen to whatever they want, whenever they want.
I went to see Kneecap yesterday (Irish mockumentary about a real band doing Irish Rap). Pretty decent music and fantastic movie. Obviously inspired by eighties/nineties hip hop.
That's pretty much what I mean. Everybody can micro-curate his musical consumption and stay within one niche if that's what he wants, which I think can be bad for music discovery because you aren't exposed to stuff you might unexpectedly like. You have to make an effort to get broad exposure.
Listening to the radio occasionally today, it seems like it is primed entirely for gen x. I’m not sure how many times they play Sublime a day now but its at least three time with three different songs on a few stations in LA county.
Seriously. 98.7 is playing the same music that dominated airplay 20 years ago. Their rotation now sounds the same as JackFM.
One week years ago I decided to listen to a hip-hop/pop station every day on my way to work. I like all kinds of music, including dance or pop or catchy rap. I wanted to discover some new high-energy music.
But after a week I wasn't disappointed; I was pissed off. Pissed off for all of the talented people who are obviously NOT getting heard, while airplay is wasted on craven trash. I discovered one catchy, clever song in that whole week: "Nothin' on You," by Bruno Mars & B.o.B.
Topping my shitlist from the week was Drake, with a discordant, no-rhythm, no-rhyme, no-talent mess that played mostly unrelated instrument noises over each other while Drake mumbled
Depressing. Just depressing.Your comment is interesting in various ways, but I want to focus on the idea that
Legitimate song structure = melody + chorus + bridge
Is there something about such a song structure that is somewhat universal or is it just so established in our culture that any song that doesn't have those elements sounds... impoverished? Are there other, alternative song structures that tend to produce satisfying music?
I'm not being dismissive; I'm legitimately interested in exploring this idea.
Totally valid question, and I think that yes... there is a reason that our (or Western) song structure has evolved the way it has.
For some reason it is very appealing to the listener, and I think it's a combination of sonic qualities but also relief from repetition. And this is what's lacking from a lot of today's music.
Today we have what amounts to a loop where someone presses Play, mumbles over it for a period of time, and then presses Stop. There's no payoff.
I think one of first times I thought about this was listening to "Crazy in Love" by Beyonce. It has this big build-up that you think is going to go into a satisfying chorus... but it goes nowhere. Nowhere, for the whole song.
And that song is fairly dynamic by today's standards.
I disagree. This song structure is cheap and mostly used for pop songs meant to be a catchy background. Many (most?) music pieces that could be called masterpieces don't follow such simplistic structure.
I'm not trying to be pretentious. I'm not a hardcore music fan, and most of the music I listen to nowadays has the classic verse/chorus structure (because it's catchy and ready to vibe on). But pretending it's the one correct way to make music is not right.
I'm only talking about pop music; that's what charts typically cover.
The equivalent charts from the 30s and 40s were often not verse/chorus/verse. Think “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” or “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”. There are repeated sections like choruses but the bones are often a 32 bar form with an AABA structure.
At least they had that. And a melody.
> It has this big build-up that you think is going to go into a satisfying chorus... but it goes nowhere.
I don't disagree in general, but that particular song is likely just due to the use of that rising horn sample from the original 1970 Chi-Lites song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hm2YjDENPPU
That is indeed what I mean... but I don't think the source of the sample makes any difference.
Any music theorist would tell you there’s no such thing as “legitimate song structure”. Verse/chorus/bridge is at most _common_ (though in no way legitimizing) at a very specific time in a very specific culture, there are plenty of counterexamples from the last 50 years.
If you’re interested in stuff like this, YouTube has approachable music theorists making good content. 12Tone is quite good.
I'm sure that's true, but I specifically referred to Western music found on music charts. Obviously I knew the assertion is wide open for attack on the "legitimacy" idea, but I think an objective analysis of hit-song structure would reveal trends that support the idea of optimal "catchiness."
Making songs out of shorter different parts so they could be remembered easier is caused by attention span window, not a cultural thing.
Bohemian Rhapsody springs to mind. Most of Pink Floyd's The Wall. Yeah lots of famous rock stuff now I think of it. AC/DC Led Zeppelin.
Is it cheating to not use pop in the examples?
Takes a lot of effort to break the mold though!
You can find plenty of examples just from The Beatles
Springs to mind as what? A counter-example? If so, I would not agree.
Wikipedia:
> The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism.[5]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Rhapsody
Right... which means that it offers up numerous dramatically different sections that defy the the "press Play... mumble a while... press Stop" trend that I'm complaining about.
The expansion of ways that we consume media plays a role, but I don't think we've lost the sounds of an era, it's just that the hooks are now coming from a variety of sources.
"Badger Badger Badger" (and their kin) is likely to evoke a particular era in your memory.
In a similar way "Uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh" may possibly evoke a more recent era.
"Here comes the Hammer!" Wasn't sure if that was your last example, but that sprung to my mind immediately. If it wasn't, I'd be curious what song you were referencing.
I feel like as I get older, it takes me more time to find new music I enjoy. Perhaps it's oversaturation, or the way that apps and media are set to display those who pay the most money, rather than those most talented or unique. I mostly listen to heavier music, but enjoy quite a few different genres. I tend towards music that is "progressive", or brings something uncommon or new to the style. I don't think there's anything wrong with people liking current pop music, but I think people are missing out if they restrict themselves to it.
Yes you're right, I actually miswrote the lyrics. I intended to write "oh-no oh-no oh-no"...
> Look at movies set during various decades;
In the 90s a lot of movies had accompanying songs that would go into the charts. I remember Titanic, Bond movies, Godzilla, gangsters paradise, some Bryan Adam’s and Aerosmith songs.
I don’t know if that is still the case today as I listen mostly listen my own Spotify playlists or ”classic” radio stations (meaning 90s/00s music nowadays).
I can imagine it was an effect of the commercial music industry at the time and these songs were heavily subsidized by the movie’s marketing budget to get into the charts.
I remember "The wild wild west" as one long ad for its title track. Can't remember many examples after that.
Occasionally a song will bubble up to be known by many people. For example Gangnam style. But I can’t think of anything else.
That was pre-siloed internet era. Those were still golden days of internet, because everyone was seeing the same “trends” and there was some alignment. Think of ice bucket challenge, planking, and etc.
The stuff I see nowadays is very different from what you see, despite using the same platforms. It’s sad, because it’s not even just internet, it’s all types of media. No more Game of Thrones discussions at work on Mondays, because almost everyone watching it. No more songs that almost everyone knows. And the list keeps going on.
Basically algorithms catering to every taste, rather than some humans being the curators. I understand the negative sides of it as well, but talking to my nephews… things don’t look that fun even for them.
Nailed it. I used to gather with friends for Game of Thrones every Sunday, but now there's really nothing with that kind of widespread appeal.
People used to do this with Friends, Melrose Place, Sex and the City...
It really doesn't look very fun now. Everyone is face-down in their phones even when they're together and "out." I'm so glad to have grown up at the time where we developed mastery of technology but are not enslaved by it. Childhood, or at least adolescence, looks pretty uninteresting and shitty now across all kinds of demographics.
If you're lucky, you keep searching and finding unique forms of media, but it definitely takes effort. If you can find a group of people that are interested in the not-so-popular, but deeper meaning media, it can be extremely rewarding. I usually tend towards heavier music, but also enjoy strange electronic that breaks out of genres, as well as strange and more psychedelic or interesting media on YouTube. I have a group of friends that I recommend these to, and we have some great conversations about it. Some art even really "friends", but just people with the same interests that I've never met before, yet I find it fun to explain what drew me to the media, and then hearing what they think about it and if they feel similar.
Meanwhile, my son is going back in time and discovering the same bands that eventually burned me out on more popular heavy music. I try not to push him towards any one thing, I will give him band or album suggestions, but let him decide whether he wants to listen or not. With friends I try to push a little harder, but I want my son to have the same type of free thinking and discovery when it comes to music that I had in the early 90s.
It’s not about “quality, deep, meaningful” media. It’s about not having a common topic of discussion with a passerby other than politics. But there’s definitely good stuff out there. One of the problems is, too much good stuff actually!
That's pretty funny (and on the money), because I almost mentioned Gangnam Style as an increasingly rare example of a generationally-known hit.
And even that was what, 10 years ago?
13, actually.
Lil Nas X
This hit me when looking at sci-fi shows that focused in music in the pre-2000 period (like stark trek)
Before, it looked very off why people in the future only hear that music. Now it look perfectly accurate!
(Also, the joke in my home is that not good music was ever created after 2010-ish so that is why everyone in the future is like that :) )
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The years that are most consequential to my taste are '77 to '82, where there seemed to be an explosion of high quality output across so many genres - disco/uptempo R&B, funk music, hard rock, progressive jazz, punk rock, reggae, synth pop and electronic music -- some of these being emergent genres. But '76 was a pretty full year for music across genres too, as was '83. And '75, and '74, and '84, and '85 ...
There's literally no year that isn't a rabbit hole of very interesting hits, progressions where one thing is going out of fashion while another thing gains attention as it moves from edge to center, marginalia, you name it when it comes to music.
I suppose there are examples of like late '92 when grunge blew up beyond reasonable proportions where one could point to a specific time range and place for a sea change like Nirvana and fellow indy rockers triggering Glam Rock/Hair Metal's decline. But those kinds of events are less frequent or at least less consequential and that probably has to do with the average josephine liking a wide range of musical genres, which was very much not the case until maybe the mid to late 90s.
Seriously, folks' musical tastes were monosyllabic af
Shouts to giving Franky Valli his props. One of my favorites of his songs is a disco groover called "Who Loves You".
Interestingly there was a bit of a resurgence in 50's style and culture during the mid '70s, probably due to the movie Grease's and lead Travolta's success
I agree about late 70s - early 80s being so good across a wide variety of genres. Especially if you're willing to narrow 78-83.
Such a variety of sounds which somehow all seemed somewhat original.
You had the new wave thing in pop music while the hard rock had resurged with Van Halen/Boston/AC-DC/ZZ Top/etc. Early metal (Metallica). Early hip-hop (Sugar Hill Gang/Houdini). Bands which had emerged in the late 60s like the Rolling Stones/The Who/Pink Floyd still putting out quality.
^^ Factual ^^
The 50s resurgence actually started in 1969 with the creation of Sha Na Na (who even played at Woodstock, weirdly enough). Grease was more of a result than a cause of the trend (and Sha Na Na actually performed in the movie of the musical as the fictional band "Johnny Casino and the Gamblers")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha_Na_Na
This is the correct answer. It was Sha Na Na not Grease
>> I suppose there are examples of like late '92
Loveless, 4 November 1991
Lazer Guided Melodies, 30 March 1992
Nothing like them since, my ears are open, I'm still waiting. Getting old here.
I got turned on to Spiritualized later in the 90s. What a band. I get _somewhat_ similar but different but similar vibes from Lost Under Heaven
I remember also being blown away by Bucketheadland so much that every other album I put on sounded simple and linear. And we're only a couple of years away from the whole Bristol-led Downbeat sound (Portishead, etc) and Notorious B.I.G's debut.
I'm there with you on age. It gets harder to catch my attention because the differences between what I hear now vs what I heard then are so slight. So new stuff I like, eg. Lost Under Heaven, is a few measures of familar combined exactly correctly with a few measures of tastily strange; perhaps not "brand-new" strange but strange in stylistic juxtaposition(s) I suppose?
I agree completely something really good started in the '77. That time period is still in heavy rotation for me now even while I discover new to me music.
76 was Boston's debut album. Van Halen debut in 78.
But it was a fairly slow burn .. rock didn't really resurge into the national consciousness until about 79 ... airwaves were dominated by disco.
I think Disco Demolition Night (summer of 79) had something to do with it.
That first Boston album is butter. Van Halen is a huge band that comes up when I think about that period Id put The Cars and even Cheap Trick in there as an example of rock plus varying levels of New Wave - higher with former, a bit lower for the latter
I was thinking about bands like Talking Heads and the Clash.
I think the first Boston album was produced in a home studio. Home studios also developed during this time.
OMG Talking Heads had mindshare among hipsters by the mid to late 80s; the weirdest punks in America
I see that studio belonged to the MIT grad in the band. I think Eddie Van Halen's activities probably gave makers among musicians a boost as well. Can't think of a harder tinkerer. Maybe Robert Fripp?
Robert Fripp is brilliant, and is hugely present on social media. King Crimson inspired so many of the more experimental bands of the 90s, and into current day (especially harder music).
Robert Fripp also had a large hand in ambient electronic music, as well as Brian Eno, as far as ambient that reached American audiences. In regards to Talking Heads, I was born in 1979, and I can remember my dad listening to them often (along with all their videos on the brand new MTV). There are still bands with punk influences that are heavily inspired by Talking Heads.
A more modern experimental band is Melted Bodies, who incorporate punk, metal, and electronic with lyrics about current times (being popular, authoritarian control over people, insurance companies, generational trauma). They really remind me of a Talking Heads resurgence, with a grittier, more psychedelic feel (as far as psychedelia being fun and thinking differently, but also nightmarish and bad-trip territory).
Good points Eno's Music For Airports is another butter album.
Speaking of 'Heads, if you haven't already, check out the David Byrne/Eno collab My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts ('81). It's something like a snapshot of what what was emergent and most interesting sounds from that time from what I think are American vs European persepectives; some funky drum machines and samples (Byrne/US), some funky northwest African and Middle Eastern vibes (Eno/UK). There's a nice jam called Regiment that I can imagine Khruangbin playing
Adrian Belew played on one of the better Talking Heads album and in King Crimson.
Like Valli in the article it’s perhaps more amazing who has had multiple decade success. In the UK Cliff Richard has topped the charts in every decade since the 1950’s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard
> He holds the record, with Presley, as the only act to make the UK singles charts in all of its first six decades (1950s–2000s). He has achieved 14 UK No. 1 singles, and is the only singer to have had a No. 1 single in the UK in each of five consecutive decades
1964 and The Beatles didn't just mark a change in music. It marked a change in entertainment in general. An episode of This American Life shows this beautifully: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/281/transcript, look for "Act One, Take My Break Please."
This tells the story of a vaudeville comedy act, a husband and wife team, booked on the Ed Sullivan show, on the day that The Beatles made their American debut. They were completely blindsided. They didn't have any comprehension of what was happening until they were in the middle of it. They didn't really get it until later. The story includes an encounter with John, surreal for the juxtaposition of the ordinariness of the interaction, and the symbolism -- these two completely different eras encountering one another without any awareness of what was represented.
To push the point too far maybe, what was changing was the very sound of life in the US. You hear these old timey comedians, and they have the rapid fire delivery, the tone of voice, the corny jokes, the style that characterized vaudeville and TV sitcoms. And then you have The Beatles, ushering in something brand new (to the vast majority of Americans). I think it's the same sort of difference you see in movies: Before the mid or late 60s you had this very stylized and artificial way of speaking, often with this weird and phony "mid-Atlantic" accent. And then you had much more realistic movies and ways of speaking, e.g. anything from that era with Jack Nicholson.
By 65 the neighborhood teens were all atwitter with the Beatles. Its one of my earliest memories. The girls laying claim to one Beatle or another. “I like Paul” “I like George!” I hadn’t heard any of the Beatles songs. My limited musical exposure was from church and The Wonderful World of Disney. By the late 60’s I listened to WPGC and Kasey Kasims countdown. Growing older this all became so annoying. The overt loudness. The repetition. Seeking solace in alternatives I embraced punk and new wave. The thing that cracks me up is hearing the clash sing about Supermarkets while in the supermarket. Oh man oh man the 2020s are a great time to be alive
The mid-Atlantic accent wasn't phony, it was actually quite a common accent at the time amongst a certain class of person. It was, at least, no more fake than the "BBC English" sort of accent - largely developed/taught in expensive fee-paying schools, but nevertheless not 'phony' as such, because it was the genuine accent of the people that spoke that way. They didn't speak differently at home.
Also, the general style of speaking in those movies wasn't any more artificial than the older style, it was just differently artificial. The older style was focused on portraying characters' motivations and feelings very clearly. The newer style is called realism, but still isn't actually how people speak, because the dialogue is still just dialogue (purely functional plot-progressing conversation), not realistic conversation. That's part of why Tarantino's movies were so revolutionary: much of the dialogue was much closer to how people actually speak, and that this was 40 years after 'realism' seems to have escaped the notice of many people. In reality, I think 'realism' has mostly been interpreted by actors as 'mumbling' to such an extent that I have to turn the volume up or put subtitles on to understand what the characters are even saying.
I'm not discounting at all that it was a revolutionary time, but the idea that the old style was basically fake and the new style was basically real is quite wrong. They're both quite fake. The new style is so ingrained that it has actually trained people into talking like that, though. The way Americans speak in real life sounds to me like they've been brought up watching movies - and I mean almost all of them. In older recordings they do not sound like this, they sound 'normal' enough (although still with strong accents).
I think this kind of change is maybe more common than we think. I mean, when Nirvana showed up and was juxtaposed next to the hair metal kind of vibe of the day you had the same weird juxtaposition. Or think how weird that 90s vibe of movies like the Goonies or Raiders of the Lost Ark feels compared to Marvel (so much so that Stranger Things was able to feel nostalgic).
I think of it like fashion. Outfits get slim/tight then the next generation comes and fits get roomy/baggy, then then next generation comes and they'll get slim/tight. There is a swaying back and forth from formal to relaxed, even in politics. Like a Boris Johnson in the UK.
I think it can just feel like "the big change" when our own generational cohort makes the break. And baby boomers have been dominating the conversation for so long, that the particular change that happened in the 60s is banged on about so much. In fact, in the article the author themselves tries to downplay the change that happened in the 90s as a change in how billboard ranked artists. I think that is actually partially just a desire to see the 60s as exceptional or legendary in a way that plays into boomer nostalgia.
I am a boomer, and I think that these two things are true:
1) The stuff that happens in your teens is special because of your age. That may well explain why I think The Beatles (and the music of that era) was so special.
2) The music from the 60s really was special. There was certainly rock and roll well before The Beatles, and it grew out of black music, and blues, and can be viewed as nothing really new. And yet: it really was a significant break from the past in the global adulation for their music and the quantum change in tastes that they ushered in.
Not to minimize Nirvana (whose music I love) or metal, or anything else, but the musical examples that you cite were simply not as globally shattering as The Beatles. They just weren't. They were variations within the world of rock and roll. The only comparable change I can think of is the rise of rap music. Which I cannot stand, but I recognize how it changed the world in the same way that The Beatles did.
Checking in from Europe. The rise of electronic music was a big deal here, it happened in the late 70s to 90s with "techno" taking off in the late 80s / early 90s. Electronic music in the US has had its ups and downs and has been over-commercialized as dubstep and "EDM" in the last 10-15 years - it will probably be over again at some point. It's been a thing constantly for decades on this side of the pond. Some people say Kraftwerk was as important as (or more so regarding influence on current music) the Beatles.
Electronic music also started in the US: Disco, Chicago house, Detroit techno - these just didn't take off as much or not permanently (Disco).
I love the Beatles and recognize their impact. But to say there was rock and roll before the Beatles as if Elvis wasn't a massive international thing is downplaying it, as if it was this underground phenomenon. The members of the Beatles themselves (or the Rolling Stones) all talk about what influence Chuck Berry and Elvis were. In fact, from the view of "rock'n'roll" I don't think the Beatles influence matches Elvis. Their real influence was bigger later with their experimentation and studio wizardry.
I was even thinking about the Rat Pack, you know Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc. and their antics. The Beatles were very much in that lineage. So this idea that they showed up on Ed Sullivan and wowed the world with their new nonchalance that had never been seen before is not an accurate view of the situation.
As you say, two things can be true. The Beatles were important and influential and were a defining sound in the 60s. And the kind of changes (and relative impact) that happened in the 60s have happened many times in the past and many times since. It isn't some singular moment in the cultural history of humanity.
"Before Elvis, there was nothing" - John Lennon
There was Black music.
My favorite band of all time is Led Zeppelin. A large number of their songs especially in the early albums were heavily influence by black blues artists or so close that they later had to give songwriting credits to the original black artist.
Elvis also sang lots of blues songs originally created by black Americans.
https://msbluestrail.org/blues-trail-markers/elvis-presley
Not just influenced, Led Zeppelin stole tracks from black musicians.
Even worse (in my opinion), is Eric Clapton, who stole so much music from black musicians, and then went on to disparage them and go on racist rants about who he wants in his country. Even worse when you see how he gave and received praise from artists like Jimi Hendrix.
Part of the Beatles growth was also the growth of the home television. The next generational equivalent was probably MTV and Michael Jackson, that spawned the unfathomably large, entertainment icon level of pop star. After that it was anyone who has used Youtube to get billions of viewers without a media companies support.
I guess I’ve never really considered it before but that’s so true. If you observe mainstream music the influence of rap has been absolutely colossal.
It's important to consider that rap/hip-hop lyrics are deeply tied to social issues. For a middle-class white kid, it's not super important, but for the audience that was also making the music, this is why it took off. The music was new with a message, and even if you didn't understand the message, you could feel the power behind the music. Then you had producers like Rick Rubin, and labels like Def Jam, that knew they could market the music to white kids in the suburbs. I was one of those white kids in the suburbs, and my friends and I would listen to more "underground" hip-hop/rap radio stations in the very late 80s/early 90s to find music that had a message behind it and was honest (even if we weren't the target).
> The only comparable change I can think of is the rise of rap music. Which I cannot stand, but I recognize how it changed the world in the same way that The Beatles did.
Yea, I can't stand rap and hiphop either, but nobody can deny that its jump into the mainstream in the 90s disrupted and permanently changed the character and trajectory of popular music.
I agree with both of your points, and I was born in 1979. My dad was into the music of the 60s, like Jethro Tull, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. My mom was huge into the Beatles. I love all of the above mentioned bands, and while I listen to more metal than anything, the metal I love definitely take elements from all of the above, along with Black Sabbath. Now you need to really dig to find what you enjoy, it usually won't show up on radio, or even on a related Spotify playlist unless you make sure to constantly interact with and like music you are into.
Hip-hop and rap seem to be more divisive for boomers (not using the term as an insult, my parents are both boomers, who I respect), and I think it's more because the message was more in your face and violent (as far as what was publicized). There is a lot of hip-hop and rap that is much more socially conscious and aware from the 90s up to today, that aligns more with the messages from the 60s. I enjoy both, but I have gotten my dad into groups like the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill/Wu-Tang Clan, while skipping over the tracks that I don't think he'd enjoy. I think it's fine to not like certain styles of music.
I don't enjoy modern country at all, but I like Bluegrass and Americana type music, with my favorite Grateful Dead album being Workingman's Dead (arguably quite a bit different from the rest of their catalog). You just have to search more for what you like now than in the past where you really could find good music on public radio.
I think what puts off a lot of boomers to rap are two things: a lack of a melody in the lyrics and unfamiliarity with samples music, and irreverent lyrics. When my parents complained about rap music in the 90s it was not about the social commentary aspect, it was specifically about lyrics about women and glorification of gang violence. Which to be honest listening to a lot of these songs again as an adult comes off as highly cringe usually. Ice cube’s “good day” for example did not age well from a lyricism standpoint, feels so juvenile like it was written by a horny teenager when you actually listen to what he says. Even Kendrick has some dumb lyrics like that.
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It’s more #1.
I can appreciate the poetry of the Beatles, I feel a connection as Irish diaspora, but as music, it does nothing for me, and my friends who really loved them picked that up from their parents, reinforcing #1!
The Beatles and the 60s really were special. You may not like their music and that's fine, but that period and that band has not been replicated in later decades by later generations. What the Beatles achieved in particular is arguably unparalleled. If it was mostly #1 as you say then there'd be a Beatles perhaps every decade, but there's not been. There's not even yet been another Beatles since the Beatles.
That is a good point. But there is something else going on in addition. Music is a much smaller cultural force than it was in the 60s and 70s. Then it was arguably the core of all the social changes. That hasn’t been true since then. Instead there are PCs, cell phones, video games, apps. Music matters far less than it used to.
I asked my daughters what music, from their teen years, (aughts and tens) would be listened to fifty years later, similar to the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, etc. They said none of their music would be remembered, it’s all disposable.
I agree in and I think the Beatles can never happen again for reasons that are completely independent of the music itself. There was huge change happening at that time, you had this huge youth culture, that for demographic reasons the West has not seen the likes of since, and arguably never again can because of fragmentation due to the internet, and then finally you throw in the best band and some of the best songwriters in history. That's what made the Beatles special, it was also everything else that had nothing to do with them at all.
We used to have to buy music in stores on physical media. We had to pay money for that album so I think that helped develop an emotional connection to the artist because we were literally giving them our money. Unless you were rich you couldn't own every album that you wanted so you had to think more about whether you really wanted to buy it.
Today most people pay a monthly subscription to a streaming music service and get unlimited access to millions of songs. I think this decreases the personal connection to music.
There are still devoted fans to musicians that will pay a thousand dollars to see them in concert and younger fans buying music on vinyl records that want a more tangible physical experience but that's the minority.
As Kevin Kelly noted decades ago, "change changes change". There cannot be another Beatles, because several aspects of what made the Beatles special were because they were the first <something>. In particular they were the first music act to go "global" thanks to television, and the first music act to go "global" in an area of relatively affordable flight.
Interesting bit of trivia: The husband later appeared in a couple of episodes of "Star Trek", both the original and DS9:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Charlie_Brill
How do we define the difference?
Like technological and social disruptions, I think usually the difference is that the new thing has a different agenda than the old - different goals. As a result, the old can't make sense of it - by their goals the new thing is obviously worthless. To the market-dominating Blackberry phone maker, obviously their phone was far superior for email, so why would someone in business buy an iPhone?
My working theory is that the new thing 60s rock'n'roll aimed for was personal expression. Vaudeville acts weren't expressing things about themselves (very much - it's always a matter of degree). There was no 'Let It Be' moment, or expressions of aggression or deeply felt love. Vaudeville and a lot of the pre-Beatles pop music was (very generally) entertainment, not so much art. Look at jazz too, going from Ellington to Coltrane. Look at the rise of folk music. 50's crooners mocked the singing voices of rockers because that was their goal - an aesthetically beautiful voice; they perhaps didn't see the point of rockers was personal expression.
Again, that's speaking very generally. There were many beautiful voices post-Beatles, and there was self-expression before them, and the dividing line isn't perfect.
Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression. If true, I think partly it's an outcome of culture wars: it's associated with liberalism, so many reject it; and real personal expression can be uncomfortable and non-conformist, and that's divisive and provocative to many. But I am building speculation on speculation.
> Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression.
Are we? Can you expand on that?
What personal would there be left to express in a world reduced to a market of bespoke customers—not only their tastes, but their very spectra of conceivable interior experiences preemptively curated by adaptive recommender systems?
Pop music was always the instrument of creating such consumers; the inevitable replacement of subsistance farmers by sub-subsistence factory workers; the media industry as a core tool in the toolbox of the infinite growth death cult, robbing people of certain things previously considered essential human, by channeling their personal experiences through the designated—the Japanese have a great word for it—idols.
You can't have global power projection without an unidirectional informational channel to common working folk, you see, to make sure they know which way the wind is blowing, and to keep them unable to imagine an alternative to what they're trapped in. We're just on a new level of that, one where the expression of that reality which any of us personally experiences is left perpetually in the rear view mirror; all that remains in the here and now is "content production", and its layers upon layers upon layers of technical facilitators in cutthroat competition for the largest crumb of the donut hole.
It's the reification of post-post-post-so-far-post-that-it's-kind-of-meta-modernism: it's all about how it's about nothing at all! And yet it's massive. The kids, those ultimate judges of practicing vs preaching, have spoken: can't sell out of your "authenticity" if you were authentically in it for the money and fame in the first place. There's still room in all that for originality, even creativity, but it's explicitly just business, never anything personal because that'd be bad taste; drawing a line between the interior world and the social game—or worse, trafficking in those goods which can only be found in the former—has completed its transformation into a social taboo.
Hence, the exquisitely crude, the blatantly false, the unapologetically predatory, has won the battle for the hearts and minds, and is now officially in control of the planet. If you think anything else is going on, you just don't know it yet, and we wish the best of luck to you and yours.
https://youtu.be/0FcDXL5Aw0o?feature=shared&t=273
Much of this is because there is not much of a recorded music industry before 1950.
Miles Davis Kind of Blue was one of the best selling albums of the 50s. The #1 best seller though of the decade is the Elvis Christmas album.
By the 60s, Sinatra and the Rat pack were considered lame. That was your dad's music. The Beatles are the Beatles because of the size of the baby boomer generation and that someone had to be the stars of the new generation. As great as the Beatles are, the marketing of the Beatles albums was just as great.
I had the same observation about old movies from 50s and 40s.
But I just assumed that's the way people spoke in older times, just like they dressed differently.
In fact it was notable for not being anyone's native accent! Although it was supposed to capture some of the perceived "classiness" of some British accents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
> According to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".
Linguistics expert Dr. Geoff Lindsey on mid-atlantic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoDsZFwF-c
Summary: Dudley Knight (and most other people commenting on M-A) are full of shit.
You could think of it as an effort to unify the way people speak English in the US. Not a bad idea I think, if it works. Less "otherness". I read somewhere that many people with Brooklyn accents were taking lessons to get rid of their accent.
I had som much fun when I met this girl who spoke like the girl in "My Cousin Vinny". It was so "authentic". The cool thing about US is that there are so many immigrants who speak English but they speak it in their own accent. But I think it is only natural that eventually they will all speak more like each other.
In film, I think Breathless by Godard may be seen as a dividing line, though of course it's never that simple.
Certainly there were people who spoke similarly to movies and radio, like my grandmother. However, the full truth is rather sad: Anglo-American speech at the time comprised many beautiful and very diverse accents. As media became ubiquitous, these began to die off and most seem extinct today.
This article is asking whether a new kind of pop star ends the pop careers of existing pop stars. Seems unclear clear from the top 40 hits data used, but I enjoyed the exploration and would enjoy reading more in depth exploration of the question with more data.
I guess a simplistic relevance survival rate change analysis akin to top 40 hits before/after a shock must've been done for companies or individual careers where the shock is say a new general purpose technology or shift including the one happening now around LLMs. I'm having deja vu while commenting, there is a non-superficial literature on just this focused on adaptation and adoption as important factors if I recall correctly; I'd need to ask a LLM for specifics or rack my brain for longer, the piece that immediately comes to mind is at a different looking at a different scale, Jeff Ding's writing on such shocks and geopolitical power. Anyway, I guess such a literature focused on entertainer survival given shocks must exist, and might help explore which ones matter; the Beatles or any specific megastar might just be the froth; I presume that's the case.
Based on the title I was expecting a different question (entirely due to my presumptions such as mentioned above, nothing wrong with the title or article), namely how many star careers does a megastar career end or preclude, and on down to the impact of stars (mega to small) on amateurs. It's possible that stars are positive sum when considering consumers or even that they are positive sum for smaller producers (increasing overall demand, including demand to create as an amateur) though I'm skeptical of the latter given attention is finite.
I'm way more sanguine about the positive sumness of megastars where demand is insatiable (e.g., not limited by attention) such as for non-attention-based (e.g., media/entertainment) technology, but I'd love to read serious analysis of this either way.
Missing "not" in front of "media/entertainment" in last sentence.
I would definitely watch a film about a quartet of highly trained musical hitmen taking out competing acts. Somehow the idea of John acting as a spotter with a pair of binoculars sat on a rooftop next to Ringo with a sniper rifle and giving him a range estimation in a Scouse accent seems… utterly delightful.
The article posits that the beatles and the nineties were BAD for artists, ruining careers and making them one-hit-wonders (where presumably they would have had more than one hit?).
I would argue that it was GREAT for artists and the reason there are so many one hit wonders is that those times opened up and created public appetite for new music. Those artists (who he argues would have had more than one hit) I argue would not have had ANY hits as they never would have gotten airplay to begin with.
How many artists did the Beatles kill? Maybe a better question is – How many artists did the Beatles help produce?
Absolutely,
Even more, googling, I get about 100k working musicians currently in the US. It should be obvious that most of those aren't hit-producers for major labels and things likely weren't that different back in the 1960s. Back in the day, they were live performers, teachers and performers in radio-orchestras. Presently they are live performers, teachers, session musicians , and composers-of-themes for movie, TV-shows, commercials, video games and so-forth.
Apocryphal story time:
Had a family friend who was in a kicking oompah bad in the early 60s.
They thought there was going to be a surge in this market, and were getting some pretty big gigs.
The saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show and promptly quit for different careers.
Slight tangent:
Listened to "the song that some claim made Dylan go electric and pushed rock music into a completely new direction." I always liked it.
It's profoundly odd that "The Brits," mostly working class youngsters had this impact on american culture, by introducing and merging american themes and styles to americans... by mixing them with other american art memes.
Infusing rock n roll with smokey blues vibes. Putting Beat Generation themes into pop. Three years in and you have american musicians mimicking Liverpool lads doing impressions of an american singers' accent.
...and somehow it's not cheesy. That song sounds like authentic americana... at least to me.
You can't leave out Bob Dylan's influence with introducing the band to marijuana, as well as Jimi Hendrix not making it big in the US, and being "shipped" to the UK to start the Jimi Hendrix Experience. That didn't just have a big effect on The Beatles, but acid rock/psychedelia as a whole. You also had Black Sabbath taking blues music and downtuning it, and playing it slower, all due to Tony Iommi's work accident where he lost his finger tips. Modern metal music owes a TON to Black Sabbath, especially styles that play slower, like doom metal and all its various sub-genres. There was a lot of sharing between countries, and I think that is why the music is so closely tied together (along with the entire psychedelic movement).
Brits singing re-packaged "race music" for Americans. Americans did try (see Pat Boone etc) but while the Beatles/Stones/Hermans Hermits dominated it was the rise of Motown that is most intriguing. Black Americans moving north for industrial jobs and having good wages finally put their music on the map. That it was playable on the radio for everybody (unlike the blues) was a masterstroke.
If you listen to the Beatles back catalog today it's pretty bad. Motown still sounds fresh.
Rubber Soul onwards are all masterpieces (except maybe Let it Be) and feature among the greatest music written by anyone, ever. You are seriously underrating them just by virtue of the fact that you don't personally enjoy listening to them, which seems silly to me.
Overexposure will do that
People who don't listen to the Beatles usually don't even realise it when they're listening to the Beatles anyway, the younger you are the truer it is.
Each to their own but there are plenty of Beatles songs that stand the test of time IMO.
Yes, there's plenty of dross, particularly on the early albums, but, say, "Strawberry Fields Forever", or "We Can Work It Out", or "Yesterday"? Superb.
If you don’t like the Beatles catalog, I consider you to be sort of musically disabled.
I don't like the Beatles either. There's just something about their sound that really grates on my nerves, IDK what it is. They were obviously historically significant, but I very much dislike listening to them.
100%. Weirdly derivative without any real insight into what they cribbed. Paul McCartney and his twee later stage gobshite, Maxwells silver hammer etc just no
I mean it's fine to not like the Beatles but they weren't derivative (literally the opposite), and not liking the song that is considered by many to be their worst or most controversial isn't saying much (and actually it's a perfectly serviceable song really, it's just the mythology that has built up around it that has really caused it to take flak).
I've always liked it. I think the only reason you would think it was their 'worst' is if you got all your opinions from a sort of musical 'hive mind' - someone that compulsively reads Rolling Stone or whatever. People need to do their OWN thinking.
The feeling is mutual.
If you exult a pop group like that I consider you to be immature
I have actually been listening to the Beatles back catalog, and its incredible. The musical invention and diversity is unlike any individual group I've ever heard. I love Motown, but honestly, if you've heard one 4 Tops song, you've heard them all, they even parody themselve with "The Same old song". But then you listen to the Beatles at the start of their hits with I want to hold your hand and then compare it to the end with the Symphonic Medley on Abbey Road, and you cant believe they're the same group, and all in a period of 6 years.The only other artist I can compare them to for so much evolution in such a short period of time is David Bowie.
The beatles back catalog feels so generic. Especially when you start hearing contemporary to that period music (the animals etc). All short sweet songs, using generic pop music chord structures and lyrical themes for the most part. Not to do them any discredit, they did come up with those lyrics but they did not come up with the chord structures or lyrical themes. They picked them because they knew they would be popular. They went up and did literally what elvis did to get his fame: rehash known good pop music with a pretty boy (or four) marketed to young girls ensuring capture of the youth market for a generation. And boy were the beatles marketed moreso than a lot of artist at the time and a long time afterward.
Are you saying Tomorrow never knows or Strawberry Fields Forever are generic?
I’m talking earlier work like the first six albums or so that got them famous in the first place to sell sgt. peppers albums.
The movie "Echo in the Canyon" is a little too worshipful and has a little too much Jakob Dylan, but it really highlights how all of the artists of that time including the Beatles were listening to each other and pushing their own art further to match or top what they heard from other artists.
They didn't write the song, theirs is the most popular version of an older folk song
The fact that Valli topped the charts again in 1978 with “Grease” still boggles my mind.
Not if you were living through the 1950s nostalgia revival which was going strong at the time and lingered through the early 80s. It was on TV (Happy Days and Sha Na Na), the movies (American Graffiti, Porky's) and a bunch of retro musical acts (The Stray Cats) or retro projects by established artists returning to the music they grew up with (Robert Plant's The Honeydrippers).
The sound of rock music undoubtedly changed between the beginning and middle of the 1960s. But by looking at the Billboard Hot 100, we can see if that change in sound was being made by a fleet of new groups or a bunch of older acts adapting.
This methodology leaves out a lot of bands, and not just the long tail that never cracked the top 100. There are MANY locally popular bands that never broke out nationally and therefore never made it to the Billboard Hot 100. There were also bands doing types of music that never charted particularly well yet were influential in their own way. For a sampling of this, go to the MIT/WMBR archives (https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/arch) and listen to "Lost and Found" which highlights a lot of these types of music. Or search for things like "60s garage bands" "60s funk" etc. on YouTube.
The author also mentions the 1991 change to the Billboard methodology which really calls into doubt a some of the "hits" that came before. In a nutshell, music charts in the United States were based on a sample of self-reported sales from record store managers. You can imagine the bias and BS that went on with those numbers.
Then there was manipulation further up the funnel. Record companies weren't supposed to give outright cash payments to DJs (wink wink) but there were many other ways of exerting influence on influential media gatekeepers.
Some of the influence was obvious. Picking artists that had the "right" look. Promoting "safe" artists. Forcing hitmaker producers on new and established artists. Selective access and backroom benefits for powerful DJs and music journalists and other influencers. Ignoring, sidelining, or co-opting trends bubbling up from the underground, from proto-metal in the late 60s to punk in the 70s to rap in the 80s.
As soon as Soundscan was implemented, there was an immediate realignment, with rap and grunge and techno and country storming the pop charts.
Background on the 1991 Soundscan change is here, if anyone is interested: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/billboard-soundscan/
90s were harder on popular artists than the 60s
The OP offers a hypothesis: Billboard changed its ratings method significantly, and many formerly 'popular' artists weren't.
And now, all we have is dance-groups on stage
If you only listen to mainstream music I guess. Whatever you’re looking for is pretty much out there but you won’t find it on the radio.
Have a look at something like bandcamp, or a new music podcast. There’s lots of great stuff out there.
Sure, I'm just saying the good stuff USED TO be mainstream.
But I'm also getting old I used to get excited about new music I could find but now I'm a bit more "jaded". :-)
And The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney and The Who…
I think the graph showing the pct of artists who never had a hit again is interesting given that it peaks in the early 90s. I've heard the grunge era described by record industry folks as a freight train that no one saw coming.
The careers they really affected were artists who signed to Apple.
George Harrison tried his best at producing, but he just didn’t have it. Doris Troy’s album under Apple has very little soul.
Too bad John and Paul didn’t care enough to consistently produce other artists.
I still love the Beatles, but I still lament the breakup. Of course it was their lives to live, but all that talent together was other worldly.
I've come to appreciate when artists hang it up in their prime, though. It's very hard to be consistently good forever (I'm not sure I can name anyone who was), and I would much rather think back on an artist's work and say "man I wish he did more of that" than "man he should've gave it up ages ago". For example, Calvin and Hobbes vs Garfield in the world of comics. I would love to have more C&H of the same quality, but I'm grateful it never became boring and forgettable like Garfield did.
You can’t talk about kill rates in the 90s without talking about Nevermind. Well you can but it’s irresponsible.
I’d argue nothing successful in rock came out over the next 20 years without somehow relating to nevermind.
Nevermind was among 7 albums released within 44 days:
Metallica, Metallica Pearl Jam, Ten Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion I Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion II Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger Nirvana, Nevermind
Nirvana were influenced by some large bands that are still around to this day, like The Melvins. Nirvana just happened to have tweaked their sound and been in the right place at the right time. I do enjoy Nirvana, but bands like The Melvins have a far large catalog, and there were quite a few other bands that influenced Nirvana that kept going. Nirvana did often shout out these other bands, but people were too hooked on MTV back then, and weren't as willing to look up the bands they would mention.
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I am quite a Nirvana fan but I just think this is totally absurd.
Nirvana's impact on the actual sound of music I would say is really not that much.
It is really Sonic Youth that had a much bigger impact on the 90s sound than anyone. Including taking Nirvana on tour as an opener when they were complete nobodies.
Even punk music barely felt the influence of Nirvana. I think you are confusing sound with MTV marketing.
It is actually curious how much Nirvana and The Beatles are not reflected sound wise in modern music.
Nothing close to say the way Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has influenced modern rap.
This essay says it pretty well I think: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/never...
It’s not a referendum on their music at all, which I generally liked in the 90s and am generally tired of now. It’s about the economic success and the knock on effect that had on music production.
>I’d argue nothing successful in rock came out over the next 20 years without somehow relating to nevermind.
You'll have to define what constitutes "rock", and what you mean by "came out" - just any "rock" album, or only new "rock" bands. You also have to define what "successful" means, to have this argument.
Let's also not forget that in the late 1990's the world of music changed with Napster and music sharing, so "successful" in the 20 years after Nevermind came out may not be the same kind of "successful" in 1990 since people were often downloading music.
I personally had no interest in Nirvana, but enjoyed "rock" music from many other bands. Cobain just came off as too depressing a figure, even when he was alive - and so I just didn't connect with their music at all.
The article mentions Smells Like Teen Spirit and grunge.
Only Paul.
;-)
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