Artists/bands that were once quite popular, yet nowadays are mostly ignored in canonical history books

feel like this is where I should come in and say, controversially, that I quite like a lot of Queen songs

-Colonel Poo In The Ear

Note: I don't really like any of these bands that have been mentioned recently, being on this thread right now is like being at a Superbowl party, just to get out of the house.

queen rules. queen haters are fuckin weird.

i started hating brian may's haircut a lot less when i realised it was basically an isaac newton tribute act

omg

I think my block with Queen might be that I don't really understand camp aesthetics. I feel like there's some kind of ironic distance with all of their stuff that leaves me cold more often than it makes me smile.

Entirely with you on that. It's fun for a spell or two when you're hanging out with friends but as a solitary listening experience, which is how I engage with music 99% of the time, I fail to hear the appeal.

lol trying to imagine putting on headphones and listening to "We Will Rock You"

from the "reception" section on the wiki entry for Don't Stop Me Now, featuring a former-ilxor:

Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote that the "astonishing" song "may be Queen’s greatest song of all." He felt it was "a direct product of [Mercury's] hedonism and promiscuity: an unrepentant, joyous, utterly irresistible paean to gay pleasure-seeking. You find yourself wondering if its title might not have been aimed at his censorious bandmates."[14] Mike Orme of Stylus Magazine ranked it the 7th greatest penultimate track on an album, calling it Queen's "most flamboyant and energetic single" and commenting: "Essentially three and a half minutes of Freddie Mercury jacking the mike from the rest of the world, the song offers him a chance to let us know just how much fun he’s having in the spotlight."[15] Billboard Magazine praised Brian May's guitar solo and also stated that "less gimmick laden" than Queen's previous single from Jazz, "Bicycle Race"/"Fat Bottomed Girls," "while still retaining the brazen braggadocio of Freddie Mercury's lead vocals."[16]
Despite its popularity, Brian May was not a fan of the song as he felt it was celebrating the hedonistic and risky lifestyle of Mercury.[17] He added that he struggled with the lyrics at the time, because it was about a difficult period in Freddie's life when the singer was "taking lots of drugs and having sex with lots of men."[18][19]

Mike Orme of Stylus Magazine ranked it the 7th greatest penultimate track on an album

Did he then hang himself upon realizing this was what he did for a living?

lol trying to imagine putting on headphones and listening to "We Will Rock You"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlxE0SjnctM

Put on headphones and listen to “It’s Late”!

That Youtube is p impressive tbf.

Foreigner > REO Speedwagon > Styx > Journey > Kansas > Queen

― vitreous humorist (Ye Mad Puffin)

QUEEN > JOURNEY > FOREIGNER > REO > STYX > KANSAS

Fixed that for you

STYX, REO and KANSAS I would rate about the same level tbh.

I'd definitely listen to Kansas before any of those others

where does Camel fit into this

I don’t think any of those bands are terrible, but placing Queen underneath them is quite the subjective opinion.

And I don’t even like Queen that much.

I have never heard a Camel song in my life. Maybe they are a good answer to this thread, they seemed pretty canonical if you were into prog rock three or four decades ago.

where does Camel fit into this

At first I thought you meant fit in the hierarchy of Queen, Kansas, and a bunch of AOR bands and I was genuinely confused! I love Camel.

I don't think Camel had any charting singles and the highest an album of theirs reached in the US was #118. They did better in Europe. They're probably still in about the same position.

now that I'm looking at their catalogue the band I was thinking of was in fact Kansas. oops!!!

Just chiming in to say that divorced of its obvious overexposure, "We Will Rock You" is a fucking amazing song in every regard

see also like 30 other queen songs

Pom, you've never heard "Dust in the Wind" or "Carry On Wayward Son"?xps

And I always though it was cool that Bill & Ted referenced a Todd Rundgren track :(

don't you cry noo more

maybe disqualified because his heyday was so long ago, but Ricky Nelson def fits the bill of this thread

Answering the original question, the Moody Blues were huge and have basically been written out of history.

Oh yeah there are literally dozens of posts about them upthread.

Looked up the Moody Blues’ US chart placings; surprised to see they had two #1 albums here, shocked and baffled that they had a top 10 album in 1986.

not in my house they're not

"Wildest Dreams" was a big boomer hit, Steve Winwood-big.

Are The Moody Blues any good?

Oh, I remember hearing that on the radio a lot, even seeing the deeply lame video a few times (“Did I ever tell you kids about the ‘60s?”). But I didn’t realize it was a huge enough to push the album into the top 10.

xp

*a huge enough hit

What's really nuts is that Long Distance Voyager was a #1...in 1981.

That actually made sense to me. I dunno, I guess in 1981, boomer bands having hits (as the Stones and Who did that year) didn’t seem as weird as it would a couple years later.

Moodys still seemed pretty big in the mid-00's...I saw them at a fairly large venue in Green Bay and they nearly sold out the place. later that year I was a meter reader and I went inside a guy's house who had like, entire rooms full of Moody Blues memorabilia (you can pretty much guess exactly what this dude looked like). but since then I've heard them mentioned virtually never. one co-worker who mentioned he liked 'em because of his dad but was way more into that War of the Worlds album that Heyward was on. I don't think I've heard any of their songs on the radio except for the occasional "Nights in White Satin". even in prog/psych discussion groups on Facebook or whatever they're practically nonexistent.

xpost to Tarfumes --- it's funny how big the gulf of the Long 1970s seems --- like in contrast it wouldn't be at all noteworthy for the Foo Fighters or RHCP to have a song chart in 2021, a full *thirty* years after the protagonists made it big. i guess it'd be pretty weird if, say, Filter or Silkk the Shocker suddenly made a big splash with a contemporary-style radio-ready comeback. tho i wish more 90s acts would try that tbh - we as a generation basically missed out on our version of "Touch of Grey," "Wasted on the Way," "Higher Love," "Got My Mind Set On You," um... "Every Step of the Way"...

re: moody blues, i think "tuesday afternoon" is still a huge AOR / classic rock radio tune and karaoke favorite.

i actually think "in search of the lost chord" is an okay record, maybe reminiscent of early gong and the more lighthearted / throwaway pre-DOTM floyd, sort of whimsical and wispy with occasional excursions into sitar drone territory, kind of a fun, stoney, low key (and lo stakes) psych journey.

Thanks, I think I'd enjoy that. Added it to my list.

i do like that record.. "ride my see saw" is sick.

there's literally a song where the chorus is just them singing "timothy leary" over and over again lol, but it's fun if you don't take them as seriously as they seem to take themselves

re:Long Distance Voyager i think "the voice" got a lot of airplay?

"The Voice" and the other single both went Top 20; just didn't think that could push the LP (their second reunion effort) to #1.

moodys had one of the best cameos in simpsons history.

CAN THE POETRY IT'S ASS WHOOPING TIME

yeah In Search of the Lost Chord is a pretty good one, loads of mellotron if you're into that sort of thing. also has "Voices in the Sky" which is just unbearably pretty. and yeah "Ride Me See Saw" is really great, idk what exactly sounds like that. I love the Moodys in fast rockin' mode..."Peak Hour", "To Share Our Love", some others I'm forgetting...

on the flip side there's "So Deep Within You" which I'd swear was one of those gross hard rock parodies that Zappa used to love filling his mid 70s albums with

i like the moodys early stuff. . . even the super schmaltzy pompousness of 'knights in white satin' and similar material. those first three or four albums are solid. seems like they're a band that isn't as played as they were in the past, but they still retain some notoriety somehow.