shifts in popular opinion you have noticed

well, "Blue Collar Man"

everyone otm with Hall & Oates and Yacht Rock in general. it was always soft corporate radio crap and then one year the ironic porn stache got big and they've been hip ever since.

strange relief to get old and realize, as all of these things cycle in and out of perceived coolness, that all is meaningless

everyone otm with Hall & Oates and Yacht Rock in general. it was always soft corporate radio crap and then one year the ironic porn stache got big and they've been hip ever since.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 2:34 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can explain this all fairly easily in my case, and i feel it's maybe pretty typical for people around my age (im 31). i know the music of hall and oates from my early childhood. im sufficiently distant from any kind of punk or rock'n'roll rockist ethos - probably helps that my sexagenarian mum and mother-in-law think like this - of thinking of pop music as "corporate crap" vis-à-vis some imagined purer, cooler music so when i was in my late teens around the turn of the millennium i started listening to hall and oates albums, along with a lot of other people of my generation.

strange relief to get old and realize, as all of these things cycle in and out of perceived coolness, that all is meaningless

cosign except i don't think this is actually strange

this is weird, because I just associate Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, the Eagles, and most Southern/dad/yacht rock with horrible tailgates/cookouts one wants to get away from fast

the girls don't seem to care

But it's as if there's a weird reversal that often happens where music that's comparatively bloodless (to use someone else's word from upthread) or edgeless in its time sometimes turns those flaws around and they become assets for future listeners

i watched a Ween live DVD, must've been recorded right before they broke up, but i was really suprised at how many women were in the audience, which is probably just dumb assumptions on my part but they seem like such a dude band...but i guess the biggest ween fan i know irl is a woman as well

― rockpalast '82 (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 10:16 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when pichfork did that survey of readers favourite albums a few years ago, with a breakdown of what people voted for by demographics, didn't Ween come out as the artist with the highest ratio of male to female voters? I think Spektor was highest female to male ratio. idk if that was statistically significant, or how representative of Ween fans in general etc

Regina Spektor, that should say

But it's as if there's a weird reversal that often happens where music that's comparatively bloodless (to use someone else's word from upthread) or edgeless in its time sometimes turns those flaws around and they become assets for future listeners

― Josefa, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 6:06 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i think about this a lot. like in the 80s there was all this 60s revivalism of new psychedelic bands and Live Aid and people aping The Velvet Underground. then in the 90s the 60s revivalism was about all the corny exotic/easy listening records that were probably considered lame when people were looking back to VU.

do young people dig Robert Palmer? I dig Robert Palmer, but I am 30, so not really 'young' anymore

i think kids can re-discover classic punk rock and find out what it means to them now without green day spoiling it all. sex pistols, clash etc. i've seen a few sex pistols shirts lately and not on mohawked heads.

the convo has long moved on but my boyfriend still listens to a lot of patti smith and always has. also kristin hersh. is kristin hersh / throwing muses more or less relevant now? maybe a flat line? i think alt rock made by women is registering on trend-o-meters to some degree right now though.

Sade to thread

Heh, one of my recording students submitted a recording of her friend playing "Doll Parts" for an assignment this term. Apparently, they have a band together and they cover that song. Hole is one of their favourite bands.
xp

so much of that mid-90s Lilith Fair stuff sounds incredible viewed through the prism of nu-balearica, I'm amazed it wasn't reclaimed a few years ago... and I think there's too many depressingly obvious reasons why it won't happen now

Sade has been and always will be cool.

wait weren't you just bla-blaing about corporate crap rock? sade has definitely not always been cool.

yeah, when I was a kid, Sade was like the last thing I ever would have wanted to hear, and seemed to be the essence of lame grown up music. And today... well, she still is, but Pfork covers her.

but Sade was't rock. she existed in the realm of adult contemporary/quiet storm.

that is entirely different from The Eagles or Toto's smooth crap in the middle of an AC/DC-Zeppelin Rock Block.

the convo has long moved on but my boyfriend still listens to a lot of patti smith and always has. also kristin hersh. is kristin hersh / throwing muses more or less relevant now? maybe a flat line? i think alt rock made by women is registering on trend-o-meters to some degree right now though.

― map, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 6:19 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am the least objective person to comment on throwing muses but alt rock made by women is way too broad a category. riot grrrl, sure. actual alt rock, pretty much just hole and maybe the breeders. everything else? lol no nobody even remembers or rates this stuff despite it being perhaps the single greatest form of music in existence. (an interview with one songwriter, I forget who, said the biggest market for it these days is children's TV themes, which is something I'd love to research and write an article about if I knew who would be even remotely interested in it or me)

i'm still waiting for people to get around to accepting Yoko Ono

well, I'm talking like when I was 10 years old, so it's not like I was a rock hipster looking for Zeppelin. It was like, if she comes on Friday Night videos, turn the channel and wait for Duran Duran or "Safety Dance" to come on.

By people, you mean Paul McCartney (xp)

veryone otm with Hall & Oates and Yacht Rock in general. it was always soft corporate radio crap and then one year the ironic porn stache got big and they've been hip ever since.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 2:34 PM

yes this is precisely what happened, congratulations

it's like posters can't accept that other people grew up without these hangups and preconceptions. H&O have never sounded bloodless to me.

Yoko seems like a good example of someone who's rep has improved over time actually

xp

whose

Her music was hard to find before Onobox tbh

it's like posters can't accept that other people grew up without these hangups and preconceptions. H&O have never sounded bloodless to me.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 6:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can accept it and i do! i am just stating my own personal take on the matter. everyone grows up w some kind of musical hangups. i'm not pretending to speak for other people because i have only my own experience to draw from.

bunch of disconnected thoughts here but it's already a long (and interesting) thread. not sure how much this adds to the understanding of popular shifts but things have triggered some memories. context: i've been putting a lot of time into scanning film from college and trying to kind of put my digital archive of my life to date in order. which is stupid and navel-gazey and a classic kinda mid-life-crisis-y thing to be doing at age 34 but it's helping me deal with life in whatever way so hey.

re: the Police - The first two records still sound pretty unique, and could probably find fresh fans, especially if Sting fades more. yeah those were my gateway, now shockingly a long time ago. but circa junior year (2003) my roommate and i were totally digging outlandos, it sounded very hot, very live. very 'punk,' i guess, which jibed with the kinds of shows i was actually going to at the time. we probably were very close to trying to cover "truth hits everybody" until my roommate realized he was not saying "she hates everybody!" anyway, i could see people continuing to rep for and promote that album in lists and so on, than i could a rehabilitation of their whole career. "they have this one great record, the early new wave stuff, it's great" - basically how it was pitched to me and that's always a clear enough narrative to win over a sketpic. but i could be totally wrong and in fact the later records, with the much bigger and less raw "rock guitar" sound, might actually sound more like where hip music is at now!

around the same time, i knew a house of women who all REALLLY liked "young turks." i don't know if they identified with it as a rod stewart song or as an anthem in its own right but i think the idea of young hearts being free etc is a good sell for college kids. this is of course within a sort of college town indie rock hipster bubble, the kind of place where you could indeed find people who would want to talk about Can and Neu!, who were both becoming fashionable to an extent - - - but let's not kid ourselves, almost NOBODY in the united states has EVER heard of either of those bands. and even compared to them, electroclash-y stuff was certainly a bigger deal, if we're counting le tigre and the faint in that. everybody had those records or at least everybody who hosted parties and put on records. but none of the local bands yet SOUNDED like them, it was all still post-elephant 6 stuff, some post-rock acts, and a lot of what is now probably very unfashionable straight up "indie rock" mixed in with the much-hyped "rock revival" that was happening at large. dudes with chin-length hair playing guitars and (in the stereotype) one woman, playing bass, as old ILM threads long ago discussed, debunked, unpacked, etc.

but the electro stuff didn't translate into functioning bands, except weird 'electronic music night' one-off acts with deliberately unlistenable, un-song-like noise and warbles, and nerdy backpacker dudes in dorm rooms who fancied themselves the makers of 'beats' exclusively. i think there was a real missing facility with electronics in what was primarily a guitar-band town. that's very different now; when i was in town in december i caught a couple of local acts and it was allll samples, electronic drums and keyboards going through pedals and stuff. so that's some kind of shift in popular opinion, though i didn't think to ask what records those kids like the most. i was in college too early tbh, i had a lot of tinkering electronic song things but never really got off the gruond. other than that i think woof's point about metal and especially 'black metal' having this huge huge youth cachet replacing nuggets (or beefheart, or indeed neu! or...) is totally otm.

a lot of this, then and probably now, is hard to separate from college students kinda still just liking what they grew up with and what was in their houses growing up. i knew a woman who was real into robert palmer. would have made a good comic strip about myself as an insecure hipster, with thought bubbles: wait, does that mean robert palmer is cooler than i think he is? or that this person is less hip than i think she is? (like the people who really only still listen to disney soundtracks or whatever...) but the people who actually start bands kinda get to determine how these things shake out. obviously when vampire weekend came out it was apparent that their being children in houses where 'graceland' was played all the time played a role in establishing this particular sonic palette. lionel richie is probably a slightly different phenomenon from this but maybe not? hall & oates probably did benefit from their music never really going AWAY for anybody who's ever been to the dentist, but their negatives kind of fading with time, as others have pointed out. the "yacht rock" video series (2005!) was a really key turning point for a lot of related acts imho. turned more people onto that stuff than one might realize, and maybe also just acts as a landmark of a trend that was already happening.

meanwhile scott's comment about exotica records makes me wonder if the bottom has at some point finally fallen out from under the whole "sending up the smiling sunny postwar sincerity" thing that runs more or less from the b-52s through soooo much 90s 'alternative' culture. as late as 2002 i dropped a sample from some hokey PSA film from the 50s into a song, but it already felt a little forced or 'obvious,' and i remember a friend kinda rolling his eyes at it... surely nobody still gives a shit about tweaking "50s suburbia" or whatever right?

a while ago a guy i know was saying "i've got this idea for a band, we're gonna play music people like." and i had just discovered "chuck e's in love," probably thanks to ILM, and was like "you mean like rickie lee jones?" and he was like, "fuck no." so maybe she's not quite there yet.

biggest surprise in this thread: ilx has actual new young posters! college students, 25-year-olds! there's hope for us yet. welcome, y'all. it feels like just yesterday when i showed up here a decade ago i was just starting to discover hall & oates! the funny thing is that for all the hype i've never quite taken to 'sacred songs' and i don't think its weirdness or frippery would actually get it very far with the crowd that's embraced 'you make my dreams.' doesn't deliver the same goods.

ACTUAL CONTRIBUTION TO CURRENT PART OF THREAD: i think "90s alt rock" might be on the upswing. to the extent that i hear young guitar bands they sound a fuck of a lot more like Hole or Bush than would have EVER been acceptable when i was in college, when basically the initiation experience was to realize that what you thought was 'alternative' was the inauthentic corporate shitty stuff you hated. i guess i'm thinking here of waxahatchee - there are some 'current' production flourishes with sorta dreamy echoey drums coming in but the space created by minor-key moaning guitar of a certain timbre is soooooo grunge. not radio hit grunge but the album track stuff. i don't know if college kids are actually passing around "sixteen stone" as a secret classic that you gotta here or whatever, but...

omg that's even longer than i thought, sorry y'all

multiple x-post to katherine: I think about your comments in the Belly reunion thread about their (and Lush) doing comebacks because nobody actually bothered to care about their work in the interim, how Tanya Donelly could do self-released EPs and nobody pays attention - the trend is ambivalance

for me it's definitely all that middling alternative rock from the nineties that used to make me groan as a child born in '92 listening to the radio in my dads cars but now i'm youtubing soul asylum and goo doo dolls tracks, like, every other day.

it just sounds like the replacements now (except suitable for a dentists office)

he funny thing is that for all the hype i've never quite taken to 'sacred songs'

yeah I realized after a few listens this weekend for the sake of a long piece of writing that it's more "interesting" than "good."

a while ago a guy i know was saying "i've got this idea for a band, we're gonna play music people like." and i had just discovered "chuck e's in love," probably thanks to ILM, and was like "you mean like rickie lee jones?" and he was like, "fuck no." so maybe she's not quite there yet.

lol

Hall & Oates were just kind of wallpaper to me growing up. I never really paid attention to them, but when all the yacht rock stuff happened (10 years ago?), it did seem funny they were brought back as something cool somehow. I mean, they do actually have some nice chord progressions, and the production is always great (if dated, but I think that's part of what people like about them now). My context for them was definitely not a "cool" one, and I guess that's really the thing that changes wrt the band over time. Old people context doesn't change that much.

the references to lounge in the 90s in this thread are a great example for this thread IMO -- that's stuff my mom thought was totally uncool, like the kind of thing *her* parents might buy for their dinner parties. To me, it was just great, cool productions, easy to listen to at any given moment.

sorry for sniping, Adam.

Robert Palmer was cool, he wrote and sang many good songs, including "Addicted to Love."

haha also not cool to me as a kid, but probably cooler than Hall & Oates

i had no use for palmer at all until i discovered "simply irresistible" in my mid-to-late-20s, and then a few years later got into clues again via ILM iirc and i've been tentatively exploring some of the surrounding albums. he really didn't have much of a cool presence at all in the early 2000s. halloween 2003 i saw a group of friends dressed up as the 'addicted to love' video but i think that was an isolated incident.

Addicted to Love is pretty awesome! i had to learn the keys on that a few years ago and was really into it. made me think of T-Rex for some reason.

no harm, Alfred! sorry for calling H&O corporate crap, they have a lot of really good music. using that dumb phrase is a bad habit of mine.

Didn't he work with Gary Numan too? That was pretty cool.

the bad thing about Robert Palmer, even slightly apparent to me as a kid, was that he tried so hard to be cool. Getting the Duran Duran guys and Tony Thompson for Power Station (who did cover T Rex), using those models in the videos (which is an admittedly iconic image). When I got older, and realized he was just a workaday classic rock guy who wanted to update his act for the go go 80s, he seemed even lamer. The actual songs are pretty time capsule mid-late 80s tho.

re: sade, "smooth operator" was the first song i ever loved, and possibly the last song i ever fully committed to performing, at the age of 3.

isn't the standard line that the band's uncool rep in the 90s had to do with the grunge era: the fact that their music was unabashedly successful and sellable, they had a vibe you could place in a hollywood film, the production was smooth and sophisticated, they were "multicultural", sort of a code for 80s excess when viewed from the vantage point of grunge and indie, which had some truth to it even though it was really misguided and threw the baby out with the bathwater and didn't offer much in return. of course now it's clear that sade made perfect music. thank someone with an ironic mustache. or any fan of music who is black.

to me he was the definition of a dilettante in the best way: he tried a style, often approximated it, moved on.

Sade's relaxed release schedule helped her rep. She only released one album in the '90s!

i heard "every kinda people" for the first time this year. really good tom moulton production on that one. anybody that good at selling out is okay in my book.

he had an exceptional ear for R&B too