shifts in popular opinion you have noticed

i wrote about Kenny and the First Edition in the Pitchfork Review and i'm more than happy to get the ball rolling.

and early commodores were a magnificent funk band

i remember when the beach boys were a joke to a lot of people around the time "kokomo" came out -- seems like mass (not just aficionado) worship of pet sounds became a thing some time after that?

― reggie (qualmsley), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 11:17 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea when i was a kid the beach boys were often guest stars on full house

yeah, Kokomo was pre-pet sounds/brian worship. it came out when i was listening to all those Can records i bought.

During the 20th anniversary celebrations for Sgt. Pepper (and there were many...it got annoying) in 1987, Pet Sounds was frequently mentioned as "the album that inspired Sgt. Pepper!" It placed high in RS' best-records-of-whenever issue that year, and in this book:

http://www.timepieces.nl/chart/10489/1987-critics-choice-top-100-rock-n-roll-albums-all-time

pre-INDIE rock pet sounds/brian worship.

plenty of parents still loved them.

That's why I said most students can identify "Every Breath You Take" but not that The Police performed it. When music is knitted into the fabric of your consumption habits – food, cars, sex, whatever – its creators are irrelevant.

I mean, I still have plenty of moments where I learn the name of a song/performer that I've heard a million times. Also (from what I can tell) radio stations don't really announce the names of artists & songs as often as they once did though.

i went on a really heavy beach boys bender around 1994 or 1995? when i had a basement shop in philly. listened to them all day. that's when i was selling lots of exotica records. can't give away martin denny records now.

the Lionel Richie revival begins and ends with Can't Slow Down, his only good solo album, and critics were praising it in 1983 too.

i had a boss at the restaurant i worked at in philly who LOVED "Kokomo" and that album. she always put it on during the day. drove us all nuts. before she got to work and before we were open we would play straight outta compton and the land of rape and honey a lot.

Again, in the UK I associate the Beach Boys w/ that 'hip pop' axis of groups - Big Star, The Byrds - championed by eg ZigZag mag in the 1970s, and Creation Records in the 1980s (as far as the Beach Boys go, this was probably kicked off by a long and legendary 1970s NME piece on Brian Wilson by Nick Kent). Not so sure that The Byrds in partic have anywhere near the same kind of hipster cachet today.

WHO DARES DIS KENNY ROGERS IN THIS THREAD

People don't seem to really give a fuck about ska these days, be it 1st, 2nd or third wave, do they?

that was kinda my last favorite year for music. sad to say. 1988. i don't know how it happened because i was not the hugest fan of 1985-1987. Lovesexy and I Am Kurious Oranj and Spirit of Eden and EPMD all day long. not to mention Mary Margaret O'Hara. and all my fave 12 inches. i still listen to it all.

ska just sneakily turned into "gypsy jazz" i think. the last refuge of a SKAoundrel.

For most people, and I don't know about today, the Beach Boys was a bunch of fat blokes in stripey shirts singing corny songs about surfing. It didn't feel, to me, like they were any different from other sixties pop groups until I properly discovered them in the late 90s.

Jazz seems to be really popular and hip at the moment but I get the feeling it wasn't always that way. The Mighty Boosh even made a point of having the saddo strait-laced guy be really into Coltrane and fusion back in the mid-00s.

jazz is popular and hip?!! that's cool.

What about Hall & Oates? It seems like I've never met a millennial who doesn't love them, whereas for me as a Gen Xer in the '80s they carried too much of a dad-rock/yuppie association to ever be completely cool, and even if some tracks were impressive, like "I Can't Go for That," they seemed year-to-year more like commercial whores or schlock peddlers. I'm not fully aware of which aspect of their music draws in younger people, whether it has to do with yacht rock cachet or if they just seem, out of context, like classic soul.. or something else.

is it just because of that one hip album? fads have started with less, i guess.

x-post

My real epiphany with the Beach Boys was this 1982 compilation: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/comp/the_beach_boys/sunshine_dream/

I already had Endless Summer, and I liked a lot of the older songs, but Sunshine Dream was a comp of mostly 1966-70 stuff that I had NEVER heard before. There was always a die hard cadre of fans who knew about this stuff -- I guess the 90s is when people actually started talking about it. Of course, Andy Partridge was talking about them in the 80s, have to imagine all that paisley underground scene were onto them. You have to think Tim Gane didn't just discover them in '92 when Stereolab started releasing records -- for my generation, and slightly before, it seems like a long, gradual underground swell until all of a sudden in the mid 90s, it seemed obvious that the Beach Boys Pet Sounds era stuff was cool.

(and yeah, in the UK, it seems like they never really stopped being "cool" like they did in the US -- where they still sold out huge shows, just to "uncool" people)

we are to blame in some small way. ILM is totally a place where people come in all innocent and waif-like and then end up liking Hall & Oates. we are ruiners.

i mean it's an internet thing, but ILM has a lot to answer for.

I think the first time I was aware of Pet Sounds as being canonical was when the gay character in Doonesbury died of AIDS to the tune of "Wouldn't It Be Nice". And then it showed up in "Roger and Me". Dukes did their BB pastiche (Pale and Precious) in '85, DLR cover is '85, there was plenty of BB fandom bubbling around in the 80s.

xp

Dukes did their BB pastiche (Pale and Precious) in '85

'87 -- it was on Psonic Psunspot.

oh right agh sorry

The Ramones were all about "Fun Fun Fun" era Beach Boys, right?

when was that Sunkist Good Vibrations commercial

That was in '80 - '81, iirc. I only knew it as an ad until I heard the Beach Boys' original a few years later.

i never got to write about Danny O'Keefe for that pitchfork magazine. makes me sad. :(

I still hate Hall & Oates.

in Minnesota at least they were even stocking local alt/indie band CDs

Weird, didn't see any local stuff in Chicagoland Best Buys at the time.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:01 AM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

corporate HQ is here so maybe they do small test balloon things here....for a minute a couple years ago they had big racks of vinyl too

maybe it was different being California, but there kind of isn't a time I can remember when I wasn't aware of the Beach Boys, they were just kind of always there somewhere. I think around '85 or '86 my dad got a greatest hits cassette that had Heroes and Villains and Let Him Run Wild on it and those totally blew my mind

xp

Bonnie Raitt got some cool points with the indie crowd when Bon Iver came out as a big fan.

I think the guitar thing can be misleading, because anywhere you look, you'll find young bands with guitars, in pretty much every genre. The main place you don't see it much is in the top 40.
Yeah, I mean, my perspective is obv slanted, but I come across plenty of young people into guitars. What I do find is that they have less of a bias against synth/electronic music than they might have 10-15 years ago.

― Hi! I'm twice-coloured! (Sund4r), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 4:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you know i know ILM hates to give Radiohead credit for anything but I really do think Kid A/Amnesiac really did break a lot of barriers wrt to rock and indie and mixing electronic stuff (and i mean more for mass market ppl, because Radiohead is much more mainstream and almost fits that nu-Pink Floyd type thing in society)

radiohead was my intro to good music and opened a lot of doors for me (bona fide millenial here)

the beach boys always existed to me but they were doing 'Wipe Out' and getting featured in Tetley tea adverts

Radiohead is much more mainstream and almost fits that nu-Pink Floyd type thing in society)

how do younger people view radiohead these days? like people who were children when kid a/amnesiac came out?

like is their nu-floyd "serious rock" legendary status cemented among college kids and younger twenty-somethings?

What about Hall & Oates? It seems like I've never met a millennial who doesn't love them, whereas for me as a Gen Xer in the '80s they carried too much of a dad-rock/yuppie association to ever be completely cool, and even if some tracks were impressive, like "I Can't Go for That," they seemed year-to-year more like commercial whores or schlock peddlers. I'm not fully aware of which aspect of their music draws in younger people, whether it has to do with yacht rock cachet or if they just seem, out of context, like classic soul.. or something else.

Yeah, "I Can't Go For That" is totally ubiquitous at a certain type of party and has been for years. I think that younger music fans are definitely aware of some of the context, it's not like they've mistakenly heard Hall & Oates and lumped it in with a load of more "credible" music without understanding its less than revered place in music history.

There's definitely a certain glee taken in that kind of reclamation I think, particularly if you grew up with parents who were especially well-versed in the canonical stuff, the classic rock canon most of all. Can't do as they did and outrage your parents' sensibilities by playing your unintelligible punk rock at full volume but we can upset them by playing Lionel Ritchie or whoever. For this reason my dad was always down with my teenage obsession with the drug-addled insanity of The Libertines and Babyshambles but he couldn't handle it at all when I started getting into "bad" 80s synth-pop.

xpost - amongst acquaintances my own age (9/10 years old when Kid A came out) Radiohead had that god-like genius status as a general thing from when we were 15 until we were maybe 18 or so, at which point some people seemed to go off it entirely, while others progressed to like Aphex Twin and Autechre and started digging deeper into Warp Records and similar. I still know a few guys who rate Radiohead at that genius level, but I think for a lot of people they are simply very good and rather over-rated.

Hall & Oates are kind of like Fleetwood Mac, in that there's a long career that's all over the place, and people who don't know that won't really understand the band.

Like it's really fun to play this for people who think H&O are schlock, and watch their heads explode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6MVlSeaWEE

Hall & Oates are kind of like Fleetwood Mac, in that there's a long career that's all over the place, and people who don't know that won't really understand the band.

not sure that any effort is made to gain that kind of understanding by most people though. and i don't know if that's a recent thing or not. I know loaaaads of people my own age, girls in particular it seems, who very vocally worship certain parts of Fleetwood Mac (Rumours, 'Rhiannon' and 'Everywhere' primarily) but couldn't name more than Stevie Nicks and maybe at a push, Lindsay Buckingham, have never listened to Tusk and would probably be amazed to learn where the name came from or that there was ever such a thing as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. in spite of that, some of those songs really do have an extraordinary amount of cachet right now

Anyone who's seen a live NY Dolls video will appreciate the similarities. So a lot of this generational thing possibly just has to do with the way people are introduced to various bands. FWIW, I think B.A.D. are much better than Clash too, and I'm old. I felt that way at the time too...

If that video was the H&O I'd heard on the radio all the time, instead of their bloodless and pointless cover of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling", I'd dig them. I like "Out of Touch" and "Family Man" ok, but "Maneater" and "Private Eyes" were just excruciating(ly inescapable).

Also, holy hell is that drummer a dead ringer for Keith Moon (visually, not musically).

lol yeah I thought that was Keith for a second too!

I think the lack of looking into bands' history is a constant. Nobody (when I was growing up) who liked The Wall knew Syd Barrett from applesauce.

Radiohead is much more mainstream and almost fits that nu-Pink Floyd type thing in society)

how do younger people view radiohead these days? like people who were children when kid a/amnesiac came out?

― marcos, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 12:17 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like is their nu-floyd "serious rock" legendary status cemented among college kids and younger twenty-somethings?

― marcos, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 12:18 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes I believe it still is. Source: pretty much just things I've seen on reddit. Also when I worked at a record store 4 years ago if that isn't too long ago.

college student here - radiohead absolutely have that sort of legendary status, or at least did for a while when i was a teenager. i think people generally recognise the hyperbole around them now though.

You guys are invited to watch my H&O panel at EMP Conference, where we'll show the depth of their careers.

I heard a weird electronic song once at a venue and I was like "hmm this is interesting" then Thom Yorke's voice came in and I felt unclean