shifts in popular opinion you have noticed

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.

okay, fine, it's just neal and greg from journey. still an underrated record! carlos santana and herbie hancock, what more do you need out of life? jose areas too.

love the bass!

[the George Benson record Whiney mocked on the Pitchfork list is in the realm of Jones' work on Thriller aesthetically...]

written by the man rod temperton

i really do want a shift in popular opinion where evelyn king is given her due notice as a classic artist

A lot of people really fucking hate Prince...justsayin

fwiw although I hate Steve Perry, I have a soft spot for this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFxGtIqqwT4&nohtml5=False

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")

I don't think his followers matter as much as the fact that he's not in the news for being crazy / everyone isn't talking about him being a pedophile etc.

if he were still alive and doing weirdo things all the time his reputation would probably be were it was in the late 90s

The eccentric/possibly sinister latter years added to his mystique in the end though, I think, now that we have some distance. No matter what he can't be see. as just another pop star.

where evelyn king is given her due notice as a classic artist

otm

this is a great thread, good job

I'm still genuinely surprised at the reassessment of ELO.

I don't think it's bad, but I'm surprised. I keep expecting the Moody Blues to be next.

with country it gets back to being able to divide music as an aesthetic experience from music as a cultural force. since country music is (at least nominally) an extremely strong, and growing stronger, cultural force in america today, people are going to be less amenable to listening to, say, conway twitty, because listening to country says something about your identity in a way that listening to hall & oates these days doesn't.

while a lot of good music gets buried under these associations, i can't say i'm opposed to the notion of music as a social/cultural force.

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...

― scott seward, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 11:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, this is the only Journey song I can tolerate/actively enjoy. Always hated everything else, and I still despise "Open Arms" and "Don't Stop Believin'" as much now as I did in 1981-82. Time has not dimmed their clunky crapulence, nor the ham-fisted/ham-footed drumwork of Steve Smith.

elvis was very popular in the 80s lots of bands dressed in his style. Beatles revival thanks to britpop relegated him here though.

I wont be surprised if elvis comes around again as fashionable.

I'd be amazed if Madonna ever got forgotten

"Who's Crying Now" is my favorite xxp

The Clash is only forgotten by folks who only took a passive interest in them to begin with (i.e. idiots). Those invested in the music (and its accompanying minutia, depending how committed/fanatical one is) don't care that the sheep have moved on. Yes, this sounds like an arguably typical brand of flared-nostril bluster, but it's true. Most people don't care about X artist anymore? Big deal. Most people are morons.

Well sure but I think the point is that the number of young people getting invested in the music and the minutiae in the first place is dropping? Which isnt simply a case of young people being morons, it's got way more to do with how the clash are perceived by younger listeners. Which may or may not be related to the amount of trash that was foisted on the general public in the previous decade that claimed to be directly inspired by the clash

one general impression i get is that the big canonical acts have become much less important even for music nerds - i've met young ppl who have seem to have deep record collector knowledge and make mixes featuring private press turkish psych tracks or whatever but yet haven't heard e.g. the velvet underground

I think the pejorative term "corporate rock" has kind of lost its sting. The music industry is not the cultural juggernaut it once was. Rock is not the cultural juggernaut it once was either. Tastes in music in the young tend to be a reaction against what their parents like, or for some, a reaction against what's currently popular. Liking arena rock kind of fits the bill nicely. I also agree kids these days are more likely to encounter music out of context and without the critical narrative that conditioned them on how to approach it. In the old days, if you were interested in music, you probably read about things a lot before you actually got to hear them, so that context shaped your reaction a lot more. This has to do both with appreciating the "seminal" acts and knowing to disdain the "sellouts".

I don't know if claiming only diehard for-life fans are the only people who are "real" music fans is useful unless it's about deciding which group you're going to stand around and smoke cigs with while admiring patches on each others' jackets

this is maybe a trite observation, but I get the impression that one reason that the Clash were important to a lot of people is that they were a gateway for punk-rock kids into other kinds of music, into reggae and funk and hip hop and so forth, and maybe that role is not so important now that all kinds of music are so easily accessible?

i like "rock the casbah"

imo they were one of those bands that encapsulated a lot of things, from a cross-section of musical styles, political opinions, good music, and the sense to break up before doing anything that'd negatively affect their perceived legacy xp

also "rock the casbah" is fun

The Jam were a way in for me when i was a kid. They were "punk" but they liked the beatles and the who and they led me to punker stuff. i was a 70's hard rock and pop radio fan who wanted to see what the punk fuss was about. and they looked cool in a punk book i had. and i could actually find their records at the local record store.

(the sex pistols sounded like noise to me when i heard them in the late 70's. which is funny now. the jam were kinda perfect for me cuz i loved the kinks when i was a kid.)

i mentioned this on another thread recently but the younger people who come into my store tend to be looking for VERY specific records/sounds. not a lot of browsing or random buys. they've done their online homework. and, no, i do not have an "african psych" section.

It was hard to find fellow Jam fans in the mid-'80s in the US; even the punks didn't seem to be into them. This one punk guy in my high school English class had a Jam t-shirt and I was like, "Hey, cool, you like the Jam?" He said sheepishly, "Um...no, I just like the shirt."

xp I think that's kind of a thing across the board, people are very focused in buying and browsing or recommendations have kind of disappeared when people do all kinds of online research and then go to a store to buy a specific thing? a bunch of retail places have reconfigured to match that

kind of miss just going to a bookstore or record store and flipping through whatever's new, even if i'm really guilty of this focused shopping

When I was buying records/cds en masse, probably only like 10% of the time was my shopping targeted to a particular release. The rest of this time it was "oh, here's an album by [artist] that I haven't heard yet! got to feed my completist jones." or "cool cover, and it's only $3. sold!"

the "cool cover! what the heck, i'll take a chance." people are obviously my favorite kind of people. they are a dying breed for sure.

this is anecdotal but i've always found the clash really dull, like this band i know is important i'm supposed to like, and who were genuinely important to people i knew who were in the leftie DIY punk band circuit, but where i really struggled to listen to their records and be like "oh yeah this is great." i've been able to get into parts of london calling but i struggle to listen to it the whole way through, and i ditched the copy of combat rock i excitedly grabbed at a yard sale in college because it just was really blah and samey to me. and that's just me obv, but i wonder if that might be a broader experience in a world where they're not a new band whose records are currently coming out, where people are talking about them and responding to them and they represent a thing/movement/impulse, or even where they'd be getting namechecked a lot by newer but very big crossover bands.

like, i suspect (can't confirm this) that the clash would have had a "press presence" or canonization factor well into the 90s alt-rock era, that they would not be getting now. i can imagine green day talking about the clash in rolling stone (no idea if this ever happened) but who would do so today? (setting aside the whole "people learn about music without needing to read rolling stone today" angle.) you need gateways to artists a lot of times; not as an individual but for it to be something in "popular opinion" there's going to be some kind of vector whereby an act is canonized (or canonized in a particular way, filling a certain slot, esp. with acts that have a long career or varied sound, like what aspects are the obvious important ones when seen at different moments?) or vilified. basically i think the "how" of this thread is as interesting as the "what."

but here's a fairly narrow "what," spawned by the recent Ram thread revival: Ram, not Band on the Run, is the one McCartney 'solo' album to check out if you check out nothing else. although obviously McCartney II has this other 'it's nothing like his stuff, totally crazy!" rep, but just in terms of what's gonna make a countdown of the 70s or whatever.

"temporary secretary" is the best mccartney song, don't @ me

I have so many albums I bought on the strength of the covers/bandname/song titles, what have you. Some of them turned out to be good. Some less so. I bought the first Panda Bear album on CD purely cos I liked the fact the label was called Soccer Star. Shame about the album. It's the brown cover version, and to this day I've never seen the brown cover for sale anywhere so I have no idea what if anything it is worth.

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

― dinnerboat, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― scott seward, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― ulysses, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree w/ all this, elvis sun sessions are incredible

man I love the Clash, such a crazy discography. kids are missing out.

feel like Elvie Memphis Sessions are p hard to fuck w/as well

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpost to alfred:

i know some millenials, even one in a indie "buzz band" who are SUPER into Future Games/Bare Trees Fleetwood Mac, and I think MGMT covered the song "Future Games"

Is the original 45 version of elvis's blue moon the one on the self-titled album?