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

there is no such thing as mainstream pop (youth) culture

everything is just a niche now, capable of being completely cordoned off from other niches. some niches are larger than others, but none has a claim to being monolithic.

^not a youth

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/drake.jpg?quality=100&w=650

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/post-malone-2.jpg?quality=100&w=650

I am around a lot of youths

world of young ppl etc

lol fair enough

if there's a gap in my youth knowledge it's the 18-21 demo, but I can claim a fair amount of exposure to teens/tweens and fresh-out-of-college folks

i got in a car for the first time w/a 24-25 yr old guy i worked with and he was listening to....the Doobie Brothers! but he was home schooled in Indiana so

henlo i teach HS seniors, drake and postie are v v popular

as those Spotify figures posted hours ago show, the top twenty would not shock a record company dude 20 years ago The Big Ones (Beatles, Eagles, Phil Collins, Stones, etc) remain big, deserved Big Ones have caught up (Queen), a few young turks, etc

it's prob a topic for another thread, but my feeling is that there's much less of a monolithic youth culture now than throughout the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th century but it still exists to some degree.

the only monolith is that the fucking Beatles remain a touchstone

I work at a university,most of the youngs are normie and listen to the big acts you'd expect drake etc. Compared go when I was at university there's also less specific subcultural ways of dressing

just going from my own experience, there's a lot MORE monolithicosity between races/ethnicities/cliques. EVERYONE listens to hiphop now. Everyone listens to rnb. Everyone listens to pop. And nobody listens to rock lol. Maybe I need to hang around the few kids I see who dress like goths.

the 20 yr old I really liked who was in town for drug rehab had on a Nirvana shirt and that was 1st time I saw a younging wearing something like that. But when there was the goofy in-car sing along to Adele, he joined in too!

the the post malone/swae lee song from spiderverse is really good

there's also less specific subcultural ways of dressing

agree this is very striking. youth subcultures no longer subdivide along aesthetic lines, to a large extent, which is really weird to someone who grew up being able to tell what people were into based on how they dressed.

the hegemony of streetwear

^^ my memoir title

Oh yeah, musically the Beastie Boys have less influence/relevance than ever, for sure. But I think there are other aspects that have aged well (their style, woke Yauch, their videos, etc), and they're generally beloved elder statesmen in their retirement.

There's really nowhere to go but down for REM if you think about it-their correction seems almost inevitable.

the beastie boys were specifically their own thing and didn't have much influence yeah but i think they really do remain a group people have never lost their love for. the last couple albums weren't exactly iconic but i suspect at some point they'll get revisited and HSCP2 is especially pretty damn good imo.

REM is boring

I see yr controversial opinion hasn’t changed!

why change when you're correct

why ask why? try bud dry

The midwestern emo revival in non-US places (China/Japan, Aus/NZ etc) has been fairly pronounced; sometimes mixing it with shoegaze/post-rock or with Sarah Records/cuddlecore vibes.

Nice to see some love for My Way by Limp Bizkit upthread, agree that it's a brilliant tune. nu-metal kind of peaked when I was first starting to listen to music and was listening to it mainly via rock radio. It hasn't happened just yet, but I the post-grunge/pre-9/11 radio rock stuff from that era is due for a re-assesment as well. I can't tell whether I love it due to its nostalgia factor and if other people could ever consider it good, but like, I listen to Matchbox 20, Fastball, Sugar Ray and Live singles a lot.

And on that tangent, I feel like Everclear are in a better place in 2019 compared to 2009?

Also, Killers gave gone from That Band That Had Half A Great Album back in 04 to a genuine touchstone for a generation due to Mr. Brightside's enduring popularity this decade. It seemed to me the end of last decade that they'd go the way of Keane and Kaiser Chiefs and Razorlight and all the other buzzy-NME-adjacent bands.

"somewhere only we know" is still v v popular, point for keane

I work at a university also and yeah aesthetically my students all seem to really blend together and I am unable to discern any prominent subcultures. I did actually hear someone in student land cranking Nirvana the other day.

My 4.5 year old got really into the Beastie Boys and wants to hear "Gratitude" and "Lighten Up" off Check Your Head all the time, but he'll hear a few other tracks and say "all these Beastie Boys songs sure sound the same, don't they?".

As for Talking Heads, the thing I've noticed is that "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" somehow became THE Talking Heads song at some point. I saw the videos for Burning Down the House, Wild Wild Life, Once In A Lifetime, and And She Was hundreds of times when I was a kid but didn't even know there was a video for this one, but I hear it all the time now from passing cars and in bars and restaurants and coffee shops. It's their number two streamed song on Spotify, after Psycho Killer and before any of those others, and as far as I know it hasn't been used in any particular move or TV episode.

^see discussion here

judging from conversations i've had w/ a few ppl lately online and off, i think elvis presley's reputation has dropped quite a bit over the last 10 years, in a way that i find sad and frustrating -- few things feel quite as absurd as having to defend the greatness of fuckin' elvis, for crying out loud

Yeah, I've definitely noticed the declining interest in Elvis - and Chuck Berry too, btw. Even when he died, there was a "let me explain who this old dude was and why he mattered" tone to a lot of the coverage that I found astonishing.

feel like bob dylan and jimi hendrix kinda fall in that category, too. other than the beatles, any artist whose heydey was the 60s or before seems like theyve declined bc theyre grandpa music now

well, it's easier to like Grandma's music than your parents'.

xxp Chuck Berry is a case where I think his being a legit creep may have tarnished his glow somewhat.

also feel like more ppl finally gave credit to marvin berry as the true originator

nu metal still sounds awful to me

I like The Breeders but they were not better than Pixies imo

Bob Dylan still seems like a thing, Hendrix I agree seems
to have lost some of his cultural cachet. I think w/ Elvis and Chuck Berry they are amazing but they’re also a bit too close to oldies music, their innovations and skills are absurd but the genre is one without a home these days. They seem a little quaint to a lot of ppl maybe. I feel like the same fate hasn’t befallen Sinatra, which is weird since those dudes supplanted him as a more modern and dangerous kind of cool.

Huge uptick for Nina Simone this decade

feel like fat jumpsuit Elvis is the enduring image that most people have these days. there are thousands of Elvis impersonators and it seems like they *only* do that version of Elvis

when I was 17 I bought up those megaselling comps of Elvis & The Beatles, plus the classic Floyd CDs...Beatles & Floyd still sound kinda relevant, there's a tie to modern pop music...but Elvis just sounded old. I mean I loved the CD but everything about felt like an antique. at least up to "Burning Love" or so. feel like "Suspicious Minds" is gonna wind up his best known song someday

Sixties girl-group music had a big revival in interest in the mid-2000s (probably spurred by Rhino’s excellent One Kiss Can Lead to Another box set, and a few other things) — seems like this has faded into the background again.

I see the Rhino box is now apparently OOP and sells for mucho dinero online, btw.

The last big national Elvis concern was the #1s set, which sold crazy numbers in 2002

elvis's legacy has to deal with the one-two punch of "vegas elvis" having eclipsed classic cool elvis in the public mind (which is unfair since he was still frequently making excellent music in the 70s -- the first time i heard that huge elvis hits compilation i was blown away when "way down" came on) and the lingering effects of the old "elvis was just a racist who ripped off more deserving artists" take which i still see pop up now and then.

I feel like I’m not encountering Elvis’s songs & indicia in random movies, TV shoes, etc. the way I did in past decades... as if his estate isn’t pimping that stuff the way they used to. Not sure if this “foot off the gas” (if it’s real) reflects a lesser degree of cultural interest in Elvis, or is actually driving it to some degree... may be a chicken-and-egg thing.

Some of this may just reflect the fact that Boomers are aging out of producing “content,” and Gen X / Millennial nostalgia has come to the foreground, due to the ages of the folks making most the movies and series now.

Even when he died, there was a "let me explain who this old dude was and why he mattered" tone to a lot of the coverage that I found astonishing

lester bangs's essay on this subject is kind of this, but also a kind of meta-exploration of what it means to have to "rehabilitate" elvis for those who only remember fat vegas elvis and i'm assuming everyone hear has read that but if not it's well worth reading