shifts in popular opinion you have noticed

I love blue eyed and Philly soul but Hall and Oates are just dull shit. Billy Joel is the worst, no questions about it.

xxxp Yeah, I'm 25 but I've been on ilm for ten years too and feel ancient with regards to taste and (to be honest) enthusiasm.

shout-out to ILM for turning me on to that Double album years ago. had no idea how good is was. never would have listened to it.

Curious where Elvis Presley lands in all this.

that brimstead post is epic

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.

― Dominique, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 5:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

insane

^^^

xxxpost

I don't know that I have an answer for this, other than to say that I have known two types of Elvis fans in my life: the ones who acknowledge the brilliance (according to them; I have only really heard the hits) of the early work and think he became a cartoon afterwards, and the Graceland-vacationing types who love all of it--the crap movies and the Vegas stuff very much included. I find that I encounter far more of the latter than the former, and I kind of think that a lot of people make assumptions about Elvis based on these fans (and the aspects of his career they celebrate).

I've said this a few time: I've felt for the last few years that Elvis is fading away in the public consciousness, as unfortunate as that may be. In a way the Beatles aren't yet, although it'll happen at some point.

one of the big things, obviously, and a way in which women did receive a reappraisal, is '80s R&B in general. In the last ~8 or so years (?) where people moved on from disco revival & started "rediscovering" '80s R&B with the rise of Dam Funk and record collectors getting into jam & lewis etc. It's seeped into musicians' toolkits as well...I think in part, people looking back undervalued R&B a lot but when you listen to, like ABC or Madonna's "Lucky Star" and realize how incredibly similar it sounds to the R&B which essentially invented it (cf the work of Kashif—what is 'Lucky Star' but a Kashif record—of Jam & Lewis, of Quincy Jones [the George Benson record Whiney mocked on the Pitchfork list is in the realm of Jones' work on Thriller aesthetically...], of Leon Sylvers ("And the Beat Goes On"). With time, it becomes a lot easier to see how artists like Anita Baker and Whitney Houston (the latter of whom has had songs which transcended their era and remain floor-fillers today even among white audiences despite negligible attention from critics). It is not surprising to me that there has been a rebalancing where people "rediscovered" songs that have basically remained in rotation on R&B radio because the music was innovative and brilliant

of course in hip-hop '80s R&B was always cool, so we're speaking about a particular demographic's idea of 'cool'...Puffy was revisiting '80s R&B as far back as '96-'97

xpost

Reminds me of a convo I had with my old boss years ago about whether or not people will still listen to Frank Sinatra 50 (or whatever) years from now. Like, I'm sure there will always be an interest, however niche it may become, but once no one who has any memory of him is around any more, what will happen to his status?

in my estimation, madonna's stuff from the '80s in particular has settled a little further down in the canon and something like "love come down" has risen...without the cultural context of madonna as a superstar, and hearing her music w/ her persona flattened by the distance of history, it's hard not to hear how aesthetic lines travelled and think, well, this song is cool, but so is this R&B record that arrived before it (which tbf some better singing...)

i mean, i don't think you can discount someone's icon status entirely, or something, and im not trying to rewrite history, more just thinking about what i'd want to listen to

going off the other post... this is something i'd deplore at twelve. but now i'm like "oh that's sincere" and it was on rock radio. i can listen to it and kinda enjoy the nineties vibe that is completely frozen in time. it's not earth shattering, but it sounds so good compaitively that the snob factor has been erased.

and then when then you find out soul asylum or the goo goo dolls were actually sorta "punk" before their mainstream breakthrough it gives the whole thing more credibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQOBUrRaPU0

(xposts) Yeah, I don't know if the Beatles vs. Elvis is mostly a case of first-generation Elvis fans dying off a little quicker, or if it has more to do with McCartney and Ringo still being alive. (Or if, as I'm sometimes accused of around here, it's more Boomer myopia in general.)

Speaking as a casual-at-best Elvis fan, I think his fading away is a terrible thing. His importance is just ingrained in me.

fuck him & john wayne

i'm sure someone will disagree, but the beatles largely went from strength to strength before stopping, unlike elvis

pretty sure zep would be less of a thing now had they gone on into the 80s

Elvis had some downtime, yes.

imo elvis's "decline" is overstated, elvis made awesome records (and bad ones) at every stage of his career

elvis is at sinatra level by now right

thinking of hall & oates over-saturation in the 80's and it did actually take me years before i could hear some journey/styx/loverboy without wincing because the memory of radio and MTV playing the crap out of them was so strong. but i got over it. now i can hear them and enjoy them for what they are.

stuff that was hugely popular (like hall & oates) coming back never surprises me. cuz obviously if millions of people liked it back then...

i mean if i have to hear about one friggin' stone roses album for the rest of my life i can handle phil collins and lionel richie. (though again like with the above groups, MTV collins/richie carpet bombing took some time to recover from...)

H&O sounded great to me in the early 2000s and by the time i felt more comfortable with '80s R&B in general they seemed a little overrated

like, rene and angela's production sounds leagues better than theres just for example

*theirs

There's a conscious effort underway right now to draw attention to Elvis again, though, and I think (I hope, 'cause I'm a huge fan) it's having an effect. In particular, the 3CD Elvis At Stax compilation from a couple of years ago puts a spotlight on some really incredible, overlooked (because at the time they were split up into three fairly mixed-bag albums) songs from 1973. He actually did a lot of really great stuff between 1969 and 1975 that deserves to be heard by people who think nothing he did after he started making movies was worth a shit.

(xpost) I'm not enough of a fan to speak to the music he made during his soundtrack era, JD, but isn't fair to at least say he had little connection to changes going on around him?

I know the comeback stuff (and reawakened interest in the '50s in general) brought him back after '69.

people will always listen to elvis and sinatra. they've been gone a long time and their fans have been dropping like flies for decades and people still listen to them. i totally sell elvis and sinatra records to kids!

the madonna thing definitely makes sense though. as her icon status/stardom fades and she is left with the fans she has had for years her old songs become divorced from that glitter. and its definitely not a given that people will be playing them 20 years from now.

shits in poopular opinion

elvis's decline is real, but has been happening slowly but steadily for, like, my entire lifetime. the man had literally dozens of number one singles and a lot more hits besides, but i could maybe name ten elvis songs if you gave me a minute. probably if i'd been born a little bit earlier, i might have caught more - just the inexorable roll of oldies radio moving forward, and a very very big gulf between his sound and subject matter and what's now current... so that it's very hard to imagine a current teenager hearing one of his songs and being dumbstruck, omg i've got to hear that again... whereas i think this still could be true of most things from the beatles/dylan forward (to name two 60s acts that i had that experience of circa 1995).

meanwhile more generally i think elvis jokes, elvis impressions, etc., are definitely on the wane, with 'without me' maybe marking the end of an era in this sense. if you never really see elvis on TV - especially the vegas-era version that sort of spawns the classic impression - then there's no need for an elvis impersonator. and his films haven't been go-to late-night TV filler for a long long time (in fact i don't know if they ever were but i'm kinda just guessing?). i don't imagine he'll 100% disappear and it's maybe still possible he'll become someone like sinatra where even if they're not like "popular," they do attract a subset of contemporary listeners either for their style or what they evoke.

fuck it, maybe i should just put an elvis comp on spotify and educate myself. i've been digging this double-disc lee dorsey for a minute, probably time to switch it up.

"like, rene and angela's production sounds leagues better than theres just for example"

i'd just like you to know how alone i felt listening to rene and angela records in the 90's...

like, rene and angela's production sounds leagues better than theres just for example

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:26 PM

Well, this goes back to your point about Kashif, Evelyn King, Alexander O'Neal (and, I'd add, Stephanie Mills) serving as ur-texts for the white MTV saturation of their innovations. Street Called Desire and Hearsay are two of my favorite records ever released, but unless you listened to R&B radio you had no exposure. I know what you mean about liking Madonna but loving King (and in my case Mills).

I only recently dug into some Elvis at Sun: holy hell is Blue Moon a monster. Sounds almost psychedelic.

I'd agree that the Beatles' "arc" (and Zep, too) will make their legacies harder to shake.

blue moon is totally amazing. the original 45 sounds unholy.

all sun session elvis is basically untouchable. after that, you are allowed personal opinions.

Elvis's music will always sell, I'm sure--steadily, if not spectacularly anymore. I was thinking more of his Elvis-is-Everywhere/Dead Elvis ubiquitousness into the '80s, at least.

Grade 6 students are always interested when I talk about him and play old clips.

I feel like grade 6 students may have additional reasons to be interested in old elvis clips

fwiw i liked elvis as a kid, heard his 20 greatest hits a million times, never gave him a second thought when i got into what i assumed was "real" music as a teen (beatles, stones, bowie, punk). then i picked up a used copy of the sun sessions on cassette on a whim when i was in my early 20s, listened to the opening of "blue moon of kentucky" and went "wtf was that?" it had literally nothing to do with the "elvis" that i'd been carrying around in my head. eventually i dug into the rest of his catalog and found that there was great stuff basically everywhere (along with a lot of dross). he wasn't "relevant" post-1960 in the sense that he was responding to or engaging with the rest of '60s culture; his career is just this huge messy phenomenon that can't really be compared with anyone else's. i think in a way the gradual disappearance of elvis as a weird cultural icon may actually help his reputation in the long run, maybe making it easier for ppl to hear his best music without instantly associating it with vegas and bad movies.

I've said this a few time: I've felt for the last few years that Elvis is fading away in the public consciousness, as unfortunate as that may be. In a way the Beatles aren't yet, although it'll happen at some point.

fade of the Beatles can't happen soon enough. they need to die completely for a while before they become cool again. I hate the fucking boomers too, so yeah your self-diagnosis seems accurate. myopia to the max.

totally cool with Elvis, lots left to discover.

Elvis sounds like he is transmitting "Blue Moon" from the surface of a blue moon

someone better qualified than me could maybe address shifts in popular opinions about country music; they seem especially frequent and severe, especially considering that they've occurred while lyrical content and playing/songwriting practices have maintained quite a bit of consistency

Country repels people because:

(a) The accents
(b) The lingering suspicion that it reminds listeners of Bush-lovin' Uncle Al, tolerated at Thanksgiving
(c) Much male country emphasizes beer and girls and trucks but set to loud riffs and walloping arrangements, despite gradations.

VH1 did a "100 greatest artists of all time" list in 1998, and then they revised it in 2010. I did threads about the differences between the two lists:

artists on VH1's 2010 "Greatest Artists of All Time" list that weren't on the 1998 list
artists that were on VH1's 1998 "Greatest Artists of All Time" list but not the 2010 list

some of the older acts who only showed up on the later list:
Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, Rush, Journey, Hall & Oates, Sade, Genesis, ABBA, AC/DC, Judas Priest

some of the older acts who were on the earlier list but dropped off the later list:
Eric Clapton, The Eagles, the Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart, Diana Ross, The Jackson 5, Devo, Miles Davis

Michael Jackson was number 40 in 1998, but number 2 in 2010. Presumably because of all the amazing recordings he made in the intervening years.

obviously death was good for MJ's stock (which was probably at its lowest in the late '90s) but i think the rise of Beyonces and Ushers and Kanyes and other black superstars who follow in MJs footsteps has really helped cement his rep as "one of the greatest of all time" (as opposed to merely "one of the biggest of all time")

yeah honestly i know prince is considered untouchable now but i feel like for a long time he was not taken nearly as seriously, especially in the '90s...seen as a bit lightweight

diana ross dropping off is pretty wild though

ive read multiple accounts that content diana ross was mj's much more direct influence as a performer, over commonly cited ppl like james brown etc.

Hall & Oates were very good singers and songwriters -- they have a lot of material, and it's uneven, but their best songs of the 80s are some of the best songs of the 80s period imo, and occasionally their 70s soul stuff hit incredible highs.

Whereas someone like Journey, I just don't think they were very good. So with Hall & Oates, there's great craft underneath the funny look and campy album covers, but with Journey it's schlock all the way down.

i think journey were really good at their thing. and were talented musicians. it was not the same thing as hall & oates' thing. i am more of a fan of pre-perry journey when they sounded like the mahavishnu santana orchestra, but my fave journey to this day is the one-two punch of feeling that way/anytime which does indeed feature steve perry. but i don't listen to journey much...

i think Journey rising on that list had a lot to do with the 2000s canonization of "Don't Stop Believin'" as an American icon and the larger shift of a jiggy corporate rock band like that being destigmatized and appreciated for what they excelled at. like people were saying "you don't need a perfect album to be on this list," not "Escape is a perfect album."

best Journey album for hepcats by the way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07uF1yp1Vvo&nohtml5=False

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBvGYM8q_zY&nohtml5=False

greg errico on drums...hotness.