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

I don’t know this stuff well enough but I think I’m right in the broad outlines

lol i spent most of my ilx career shitting on this tendency ... but if there's a place for it surely its the thread literally asking for ppl to posit on the abstract cachet of artists across long periods of history

There is so much dull early house revivalism right now - I'm not even talking about records from the 80s or early 90s here I just mean a slavish, over-cautious recreation of the sounds.

Oh yeah I'm not terribly interested in hearing new tracks that sound like old house tracks.

But if DJs want to play, like, the Bar Dub of Barbara Tucker's "I Get Lifted" then that is fine with me.

And I have no problem if people are engaging in house/disco as a living tradition (even if it's not my preferred dance music), but it bothers me when it feels walled off as this retro museum piece. At least when those are the only nights around, aside from top 40.

i see some posters for house nights that have the "strictly for the grown and sexy" "no hats no jerseys" thing that seemed to aimed at black people of a certain age

A few years ago I saw the Unknown Pleasures poster next to Bob at the campus poster sale and it felt like a changing of the guards

guessing "a few" is standing for "31" here

― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Wednesday, July 17, 2019 6:21 PM (yesterday)

This was probably around 2011 at a very boring land grant university in a remote rural location, so adjust your level of hipness accordingly.

x-allposts:

Bands at 10- or approaching 15-years-old are near the nadir of their music being out of time. The best quality stuff from the Meet Me In The Bathroom-era NYC bands have passed their furthest apogee and will slowly begin to come into vision again in a few years time when teenagers start chowing down on Fever To Tell and Is This It.

You’d think that but half this thread was us discussing a nu metal reassessment

I spent a lot of the 00s listening to punk bands that added Casios and the general skinny-tie, plasticy feel. The Minds, Epoxies, Jett Rink, Lost Sounds, Capricorns, Ima Robot, Coachwhips, and many others on In The Red and Dirtnap. Elena-era Fall kinda fits. Blood Visions was the apogee. Hardly a major thing, but the impulse is gone from garage rock at the moment. Had Jay Reatard lived, I expect he'd be in the doldrums now.

I’m always looking out for an unknown pleasures shirt without the damn text

There is so much dull early house revivalism right now - I'm not even talking about records from the 80s or early 90s here I just mean a slavish, over-cautious recreation of the sounds.

xxp what about Ty Segall? he always struck me as comparatively squeaky clean Jay Reatard

There is so much dull early house revivalism right now - I'm not even talking about records from the 80s or early 90s here I just mean a slavish, over-cautious recreation of the sounds.

Strong agree

― brimstead, Thursday, July 18, 2019 2:24 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Examples? Not challenging the notion sincerely curious who/what comes to mind

I don’t have any examples of tracks that make no impression upon me, sorry. Just seems like 3 out of every 5 house 12s I hear are str8 “soul fire/daptone” for house fans and it just goes straight through me. Im an idiot, btw

I’m not asking for “house taken to a whole nother level” either

xxp Ty Segall - he certainly took over Jay's crown. He hasn't revisited that cheap-keyboard-through-guitar-amp sound of his early band Epsilions (which completely fit what I was talking about). Seems like he veers between twee psych and stoner rock influences.

Stoner rock is a legacy that's hardly budged up or down since the early 90s started dusting it off after *its* fifteen-year doldrums.

I feel like garage punk is always there, it just gets covered sometimes and sometimes it doesn't

Where's the proof that Elliott Smith's legacy has gone down? Definitely not true among my IRL people

I don’t know what it was like when he was alive or in the years immediately after his death but the fan base just seems way smaller now. I thought the documentary would be more popular and widely seen than it was. I don’t think his legacy has been effected tho, so maybe not a good example.

Just thinking about the fact that when I was in college in the early 90s it was a given that "Tempted" was one of the all-time great pop songs and the Squeeze comp "45s and under" was owned by everybody who cared about music at all -- does anybody now think about Squeeze EVER?

i saw them at Coachella and still have my copy of 45s and under

elliott smith has 1.36 mil monthly listeners on spotify. 300k or therebouts more than pavement.

on a similar note Elvis Costello seems to be much less talked about these days. 10 years ago I heard his name dropped all the time.

I think that whole wave of 1979-1983 bands that were punk-adjacent-but-ultimately-mersh is on a huge downswing, compared to the 90s/00s: Squeeze, Joe Jackson, Boomtown Rats, the Knack, the Tubes, Nick Lowe even Elvis Costello (ha, frogbs)

elliott smith has 1.36 mil monthly listeners on spotify. 300k or therebouts more than pavement.

“mersh”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mersh

strictly commercial

I didn't hear those artists talked about much even in the '90s/'00s (with the exception of Costello, and maybe Squeeze a little).

speaking of

I wonder about Zappa's legacy these days - when I got into him back in '04 or whatever he was described as a "genius with a potty mouth" and "funny" whereas now it's more about what an incredible asshole he was and how much garbage he put out in his career, despite being actually brilliant

costello was great and is great. the next generation of critics isn't as breathless in their praise of him as the last, but they should be. guess i'll report back from the costello/blondie show i'm seeing next week about how cool the crowd is.

nothing lost by consigning Zappa to the dustbin imo

yeah zappa is way down. i think the closest he's come to making headlines in recent years is the "fuck you captain tom" anecdote that went around when bowie died: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/david-bowie-frank-zappa-adrian-belew/

which is a great story, granted

Zappa is a great example, tho he was already going down in the 00s. totally forgot about a great documentary about him I saw maybe 4 years ago that was exclusively archival interviews. he did give a good interview. never found a way into his music.

there are some pretty obvious reasons for it of course, he never licensed his music out (with one exception) and none of his 'hits' would make any goddamn sense in the current era ("Valley Girl"!?) so Today's Modern Teenager would never hear of Zappa unless they'd fallen into a prog wormhole, only to be quickly intimidated by the size and inconsistency of his discography...even his GOOD albums have those "are you kidding me with this" moments. I don't see people putting in the effort these days. That said I'm a little surprised he's not some sort of figurehead for the Joe Rogan/libertarian crowd since he very much seems to slot in there. Maybe if he'd lived a little longer.

I don't think Zappa's legacy has improved or worsened tbh, if you're into him, you're into him, nobody else gives a shit, I don't think that's changed at all.

Zappa will always have name (and maybe face) recognition.

helps to have distinctive facial hair

yah I feel like Zappa has always had a very unique position in pop culture

I think that whole wave of 1979-1983 bands that were punk-adjacent-but-ultimately-mersh is on a huge downswing, compared to the 90s/00s: Squeeze, Joe Jackson, Boomtown Rats, the Knack, the Tubes, Nick Lowe even Elvis Costello (ha, frogbs)

― Hannah GAPDY (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, July 18, 2019 4:02 PM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

And based on the "who the hell is Graham Parker?" conversation that happened in a recent thread, I'm gonna say Graham Parker's legacy has worsened...though started in the mid/late '90s.

lol I've been baffled by the Rolling Stone Record Guide's 5-star review of Squeezing Out Sparks for almost 40 years

A few of his records got 5-star reviews in that book! I think Howlin' Wind and at least one other album did.

Squeezing isn't bad, but it seems run-of-the-mill compared to what Costello or even Joe Jackson were doing at the time.

yah totally... 16-year-old me was like "this is OK I guess, but it's no Blank Generation"

I amazed at how common Parker records are in the $1-3 bins as of late.

i love squeezing out sparks as much as any costello record

but yeah it's probably the most irrelevant of anything that's been mentioned in this thread

Zappa will always have name (and maybe face) recognition.

Way back when, when I was a kid, I remember reading a piece about the minimum information needed on an envelope to could get a letter to its recipient. Iirc, the two people whose faces alone could get a letter to its destination (at the time) were Reagan and Zappa.

Graham Parker played a huge role (literally) in that one Judd Apatow movie, but then, Judd Apatow's legacy has definitely worsened.

How is Van Halen looking these days? The problem with Spotify or whatever as a metric is that I can totally imagine no one under the age of, say, 40 listening to much Van Halen, but plenty of people over the age of 40 listening extensively to Van Halen (give or take some hyperbole). That is, monthly listens don't break down who is listening and how much, right? Just the total? Which makes it harder to measure current cultural impact/import. And there is no 19

Ha, I think I was going to write "there is no 1984 or even early 2000s version of Spotify to compare the numbers to."

xp The Wire is supposed to have a themed issue next month, Excess All Areas!, with a feature on Zappa