Which artists legacies have improved/worsened during the 2010s?

Geir....otm

omg Geir returns!

The best example I can think of is Timbaland, whose legacy/influence seems to have taken a nosedive.

their fans have an annoying habit of going on about them somewhat xps

xp Pharrell as well, to a degree

stock up: '80s rnb, mixtape rap, new age, sophisti-pop
stock down: turn of the decade indie, freak-folk, arcade fire, college rock

― mott the hoopleheads (voodoo chili), Tuesday, July 9, 2019 10:33 AM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i guess the thread question was more about artists, so i'll explain myself a bit

'80s rnb: sade, whitney houston, anita baker, luther vandross, etc. are definitely held in higher regard by the cool kids today.
mixtape rap: mostly thinking of gucci mane, but as the children of the late '00s come of age, things like kush & oj by wiz khalifa have gotten some late-breaking praise. still waiting on the long-deserved young dro canonization.
new age: can't think of many specific examples, maybe kaitlin aurelia smith--either way, new age isn't just considered a travel shop curiosity anymore
sophisti-pop: tears for fears, steely dan, prefab sprout--"cool" in alternative music is defined less and less by the punk kids, so these smooth-sounding gentlemen earned a bump in reputation

turn-of-the-decade indie: enjoying some retrospectives this year, but nearly every band (except VW and The National) have seen massive decreases in sales and critical attention. we don't live in a gapdy world anymore.
freak-folk: does anybody remember devendra banhart? that dude dated natalie portman
arcade fire: self-explanatory
college rock: idk if its reputation has suffered so much, but other concurrent genres (sophisti-pop, rnb, etc.) have increased in esteem--rem and company aren't put on a pedestal above their contemporaries anymore

I mean, people even started to really ride for Soundgarden after Chris Cornell passed.

― triggercut, Tuesday, July 9, 2019 8:37 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

ah yes, "started"

i'm not sure if the critical view on late-90s/early 00s work of pharrell and timbo have taken a nosedive, just that they've been making music for over a decade that hasn't approached those heights

Yacht Rock/Sophistipop has definitely been rehabilitated

Is nu-metal cool again? I definitely feel like it isnt (and I also hope not).

Has REM's stock fallen? I'm not sure it has

stock down: interesting melodies
stock up: diaphanous floaty moodz

stock way up: things that have both of those

I mean, people even started to really ride for Soundgarden STP after Chris Cornell Scott Weiland passed.

Fixed.

i don't think grimes can singlehandedly rehabilitate nu-metal

related: i put on the slipknot s/t the other day. good record

i think w/any artist who dies cf. Chris Cornell their legacy is almost always positively reassessed though i do think for someone like Bowie leaving on top did in fact make his death more of an event and boosted his legacy a bit more.

w/Cornell for me i guess it made me revisit some of his work and it brought me back to my torn jeans small town era, driving around blasting Temple of the Dog and singing "i'm goin hungray" w/o any irony whatsoever. and i mean I've subsequently heard cuts from the first Audioslave and my appreciation for his skills and that LP grew.

I don't know if nu-metal is cool or critically acceptable, but I've definitely noticed more fond nostalgia for it among younger people who were kids/in middle school when it was around. Same for mallpunk emo (which is basically how you end up with Lil Peep etc).

i am def one of those people but the relentless juvenilia of nu-metal is hard to critically reevaluate. i'd say everyone's been right to focus on deftones and system of a down to the exclusion of everything else. korn is a fascinating band to me in that they have like five "return to our roots" albums at this point, always after they do something nakedly commercial (the record they did with the matrix, the dubstep korn record), none of them good

except for the one coming out maybe. the single is great

Classic or Dud: Korn - Y'All Want a Single

one thing that was conveniently dismissed/forgotten after Bowie died was that he had been a bit shit for almost 2 decades (Blackstar is one of his best, granted)

that's an overstatement but i get it. feel like there's at least one successful bowie project each decade that kept him culturally relevant (the let's dance singles, earthling, heathen)

i'd include outside there but no one understood outside at the time

I wonder what Pomplamoose are doing, right now.

Pomplamoose just did an "Old Town Road"/"Pony" mash-up, so they're probably at an even keel.

hair metal seems to have risen and fallen - revivalist stuff like Steel Panther, Big Cock, Wig Wam and Crashdiet peaked around 2009. Also: stoner rock.

Between Rock of Ages and current Classic Rock playlists, I'd reckon original Hair Metal acts are in a decent place rn.

Prog rock has risen steadily over the last ten years, to the point now where very, very minor bands from the late-seventies to mid-eighties can reform and get a little love on the internet and in PROG magazine.

Yes (and a few others) are definitely cool to like now. Always felt like it was just Floyd and King Crimson that were the only Prog bands it was ok to like before

This probably goes without saying, but groups like the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs seem almost totally forgotten.

At my last job, I had a framed poster of the Strokes on an NYC rooftop at sunset, signed by all five band members. Everyone who came into my office would glance at it, and then blankly look away. I think one person asked, "Who's that?"

Swans? (No idea on whether or not it's a decline or an improvement)

XXXP - The situation also seems to have inspired lots of guys called Simon, Colin or Clive who made solo portastudio Prog in the eighties to put a band together and try their hand again.

L.A. pop/yacht rock has probably seen the biggest reputation upswing at least according to the increasingly old-man birthday parties I've been attending lately.

xpost I think a lot of the peppy guitar bands these days (Fontaines DC, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever) have a little bit of the Strokes to them

the strokes are still headlining festivals

Yeah Yeah Yeahs just sold out an anniversary tour for Fever To Tell.

I think George Michael is a good example of someone who was written off as a complete joke in the 80s

this is not true at all? Especially on black radio and R&B writers.

Basically, I agree with voodoo chili's assessments in full.

I have no idea who these people are who wrote off George Michael's music a complete joke. Maybe in the US?

Tom Waits stock at all time low iirc

LOL Cardiacs.

Nick Cave's stock has risen again

w/Tom Waits i think it's bc he's only released the one LP in the past 15 years (it was very good but i feel like it was a pretty low-key release), but if he drops some kind of ambitious heavily promoted opus it'll put him back up.

xxxp Bands like Shinedown and Godsmack are still headlining festivals, that doesn't mean their cultural stock is high!

Re:Pharrell, I don’t know it seems he’s still making songs for most of the biggest pop stars out there (Beyonce, Ariana Grande...).
Timbo : yeah, totally lost it since 2006 or something (after being inescapable right before that).

shinedown headlines rocklahoma, the strokes headline all points east and governors' ball

No one really gives a shit about U2 these days, right?

I feel like I see more talk about industrial now than a few years ago

rolling stone does!!

xp

The Grateful Dead/jam in general

And re: M. Jackson, I’m not sure his fans/popularity have worsened with the « issue ». Actually I’ve read he’s bigger on Spotify etc than before the documentary and I have friends’ kids who are as obsessed with him as I was as a kid.

Timbaland outpaces Pharrell in twitter gif appearances though

xp

The idea of being reflexively skeptical at the corporate mechanics behind enormous pop acts has fallen out of favour.

good, IMO

The idea of being reflexively skeptical at the corporate mechanics behind enormous pop acts has fallen out of favour.

it absolutely has not, in fact the pendulum has swung all the way back to "if you like pop music you're a corporate shill"

Is it? What about the very next sentence in that post? It’s kind of like a bunch of discerning foodies suddenly head over heels for Burger King and McDonald’s or reading and believing the romance copy on the side of a Triscuit box without an ounce of skepticism.

Xp

What’s there to be “skeptical” about? If the performer and their music is good, then it’s good... that’s all that matters.

It’s some teenager bullsh**, to be all — “This pop star is so manufactured, man...”

Well, to come back to the romance copy part of the analogy, I guess it depends on how invested one is in the story or identity of the performer that they’re putting forward, which obviously varies too.

I can understand fans wanting to “buy into the myth” to a degree, not sure what harm it does. I definitely don’t think it’s the critic’s role to deconstruct the image, or whatever; just review the album.

it absolutely has not, in fact the pendulum has swung all the way back to "if you like pop music you're a corporate shill"

I'm open to this idea, but it'd be great to see some recent articles that back this up.

I'm not sure if not questioning a narrative or idea handed down to you by a huge corporation that aims to make profit for its enormously wealthy owners and shareholders is entirely harmless. I get the sense that people in music media are getting better at being skeptical about the motives and mechanics behind other parts of corporate America (news media, tech companies and private health insurers, for example). But it seems like huge record companies/music PR firms and the artists that front for them don't face the same kind of scrutiny. I concede that these conditions don't necessarily lead to bad art, but I'd at least like to see more of an exploration of the kind of impacts that record-label-backed-celebrity-image-building are having on honest artistic expression, and on how we end up judging the quality or worth of that artistic expression.

“honest artistic expression”?

If you’re judging quality or worth of music via anything but your ears, you’re doing it wrong, IMO

(If what you’re saying is — “Critics should be interrogating why some pop acts are signed & promoted instead of others” — sure, I guess. But you seem to be heavily weighting the scales by describing pop artists as merely “fronting” for the dreaded enterprises of labels & (*shudder*) PR firms.)

This line of inquiry also tends to quickly turn demeaning to pop artists — some of whom are enormously talented (and many of whom are female) — as well as their fans. “Can’t you see that you’re, like, falling victim to marketing??”

Meanwhile, there are also righteous counter-examples held up — either non-pop acts, or a pop act the writer likes who’s somehow “real” and “does it right.” F that noise!

this is not really a yes/no proposition: mostly what has changed is that people no longer draw a sharp distinction between “faceless” mainstream major label music and its alternatives, but by the same token artists whether mainstream or not are typically held to higher standards of both personal and public conduct.

In 1999 it would not make sense to demand a big young pop star to publicly come out against Republicans, because the idea that the political leanings of a big young pop star actually mattered would not have been widely accepted.

As for sincerity, I think this probably matters as much as it ever has, but it’s judged on a case by case basis rather than by reference to what mechanism you use to distribute your music. I’m not exactly sure how successful that is (I’m not particularly keen on sincerity, in the hard sense rather than in the sense of being a sensation that is evoked by good performance, as a critical barometer), but one arguable benefit is that the reflexive scepticism of major labels had a major side-beneficiary in the form of the white male artists who held onto cred-points by being independent no matter how shitty they were. One thing that is definitely the case in 2019 is that clinging to mid-90s notions of worthiness will not protect you from cancel culture.

I think it's definitely worthwhile to investigate what constraints are in there, some kind of constraints exist for most musicians but some can be changed for the better. If stadium rock bands suffered from certain demands (not sure that fans and critics ever questioned these demands much though) then pop acts probably will.

I'm open to this idea, but it'd be great to see some recent articles that back this up.

it's more of a twitter/Discourse thing but it absolutely is there, and is the unstated axiom behind most articles about streaming/THE BIG BAD ALGORITHMS these days

(for a non-music example, there's that medium article about "nerds taking over the world in the 2010s" -- as opposed to them doing so in the 2000s, or in the 1990s, or any of the other decades nerds have taken over and ruined the world according to thinkpieces)

What podcasts would Genghis Khan, Elagabalus, Socrates, Ching Shih, Helena Blavatsky and Henry 8th be on if they just stuck around a tad longer?
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, August 16, 2019 8:08 PM (six months ago)

Ching Shih would be a good chapo ep
― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Friday, August 16, 2019 8:47 PM (six months ago)

Joan Of Arc will be appearing on Joe Rogan after being cancelled for still being buddies with Gilles de Rais.

ebtg