Post a controversial music opinion

LOL

there are more chords, key changes, and tempo changes in The Beths' "Future Hates Me" than there are in the Cardiacs' entire discography

king sucks

I don't want to think about this, fortunately I made a bot for it. let's see what it comes up with:

"Is This It is the sonic equivalent of ghosting."

There were, at minimum, a couple dozen albums released in '67 which are better than Sgt. Pepper.

That's not controversial.

R.E.M. is actually really boring

wow, thread finally delivers

I liked R.E.M. a lot in high school and they are all smart, nice guys with good taste but man, I just never want to listen to them anymore. Somewhere around Monster I lost all interest. the limited guitar playing and lack of sonic depth, the boring arrangements, the mewling vocals, the poor production choices and terrible mandolin playing and clunky videos, their catalog feels very inert to me.

like at best I can muster a "yeah that song's okay" for a number of tracks. but a whole album? ew, just never in the mood.

Most bands are boring tbh

all bands are excellent

^^^^

rt

not all bands

bandsplaining

All duos are terrible.

All bands except R.E.M. are excellent

more like blands amirite

Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS.

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

All duos are terrible.

All solo artists are cowards.

lol

All trios are Norwegian.

All ILM posters are liars

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

― strong deutan (rip van wanko), Friday, September 7, 2018 1:03 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have a constantly running loop of that lebowski clip in my head, but never more than last night when I was in a duane reade after hell commute that was playing take it easy

jmm otm

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

― strong deutan (rip van wanko), Friday, September 7, 2018 10:03 AM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"i can't tell you why" is an amazing song but i can't join you here just yet

the eagles are good

i can't tell you why is really good

other eagles songs i like: hotel california, new kid in town, try and love again, take it easy, peaceful easy feeling, witchy woman

The High Llamas were (are?) a million times better than their 'parents', the Beach Boys.

that's not controversial, it's just wrong

the only good Beach Boy was/is Mike Love.

High Llamas relationship to the Beach Boys was always tangential at best (and related to a very brief period/narrow slice of their catalog) and was way over-emphasized in their press materials.

I would take even the low points of M.I.U. over the High Llamas tbh

No artist at all has a "New Jersey" - a huge event album that ultimately feels a bit hollow & signals a career decline

You could say that about any band that has the opportunity to develop someone else's idea further, if it works for you.

xps

There are a bunch of good Eagles songs. Every one of them was released as a single, so a compilation is all you need. There's not one Eagles album worth listening to all the way through. The Long Run comes closest.

The Beach Boys have, like, two good songs ("Good Vibrations" and "Don't Worry Baby"), and I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing either one of them ever again.

Can't think of any.

Black metal sucks. Even the "good" stuff is bad enough that it's worth handing the whole genre over to the Nazis and walking away. Let 'em have it.

Does it have to be a controversial opinion that we actually hold or are we allowed to just say something we think might wind people up?

Saying a band or genre you don't like sucks isn't controversial or even a wind-up tbh.

that late-90s Brian Wilson worship was so tiresome

Counterpoint: at a Silver Jews show, D. Berman did a sneering routine of saying, "What's the big deal with Brian Wilson? He's so overrated," etc.; which was equally annoying.

It could have been John Prine who wrote "Margaritaville."

Here's an (actually held) controversial opinion: while I've been into the Silver Jews since I first ran across "The Arizona Record" (filed under Pavement on a rack), and I think they have some terrific records, I also think Berman is significantly overvalued as a lyricist by most fans. He has some good one-liners, but his lyrics tend to be strings of "clever" non-sequiturs that only sometimes land. He's seen as some kind of rock poet.

I feel like the Eagles worm has been turning for years now, but still no one is ready to say the Eagles are good. Until now folks. The Eagles are Pretty Good

― strong deutan (rip van wanko), Friday, September 7, 2018 10:03 AM

We have a daily listening thread that'll prove you wrong.

you could make a dud list for most anybody

i remember Howard Stern once had a guy on who claimed it was ok to drink your own urine and he did it daily, so they had the guy pee in a cup and drink it to prove it. it was pretty clear he was not very used to drinking his own urine.

music is a fine hobbie for kids and teenagers but should be outgrown (outside of casual interest) early in adulthood

Neko Case will have a wonderful Best Of, but she has a Morrissey-ish sense of melody (which is to say not a great one, based more on intervals relentlessly seeking the root note than on an actual line) so her albums get monotonous. I prefer her singing covers, or songs that other people have written — such as Andy by Mike O’Neill from Canadian Amp, or the Newps’ stuff. (O’Neill has the opposite problem: he’s a wonderful writer but a reedy singer. I wish they had just formed a partnership long ago. They would have been unstoppable.)

Neko put out a digital Best Of... in 2022! It's idiosyncratic!

https://open.spotify.com/album/0KGcCenSL9QAN9mhonWfx5?si=o9IQzmtmRkiqxXlk-yzJeQ&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A0KGcCenSL9QAN9mhonWfx5

No "Margaret v. Pauline", no credibility

i really have to stop this horrifying discussion. okay i got one:

The Beastie Boys were the Sha Na Na of rap.

i thought of this because i heard some 90s song of theirs the other day and i thought: wait, rappers weren't allowed to sound like 1985 in the 90s! how come the beastie boys got to? and heck into the 21st century even. regular older rappers would have been laughed out of town. they either adapted or perished. but i guess the beastie boys were special. and by the 90s not considered a part of the regular rap game anyway if they ever were. so they became more like indie rock with 1985-style gen x rapping on top and "hip" production. sui generis novelty rap. also, they invented rap metal. but we won't blame them for that. also, they were the sha na na of rap. except not really because they didn't come after the fact like sha na na. okay they were the weird al of rap. because even polka musicians had to progress over time but weird al didn't have to because he was so funny! okay, you're right, funny trumps everything. (and i'm not saying that the beastie boys weren't technically proficient rhymers just saying that they still used those old cliches that marked them as 80s rappers and they never felt the need to do boom bap collabs with onyx in an attempt to look/sound current. yesyesyallandyadon'tstop...they WERE funny. they still make me laugh.)

i suppose if you start out as "goofy white skater kids pretending to be run dmc" you can go anywhere you want from there. i think i'm gonna listen to nothing but 80s gone 90s for the rest of the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3ZbxQR4SYA

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

so good...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw_FbHGMM08

Fat Boys did a good Ice Cube in the 90s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ06EDSa7pk

I've probably mentioned this before, but none of the dyed-in-the-wool rap fans I knew growing up - which would have been the majority of my friends at the time - had any love for the Beasties. They weren't actively hated or anything, they just simply weren't part of the conversation. To the heads trading Funkmaster Flex tapes and watching Rap City, the Beastie Boys may as well have been the Gin Blossoms. I liked them and I still do, but then, I was more into Nirvana and Sonic Youth than Mobb Deep and Biggie, which probably underscores scott's point

yea I don't think Beastie Boys were really part of the hip-hop scene as it were but I wouldn't say they were novelty, at least not past the first album. they did a lot of real interesting things musically and developed their own instantly recognizable style which was imitated in its own way (mostly poorly). they were way more Beck than Weird Al.

Early Beasties were absolutely part of the rap scene, "Boyz N tha Hood" was directly inspired by the Beasties, and NWA used to rap over Beastie Boys music in the early days

Chuck D and PE were huge fans, Ad Rock got LL Cool J signed by giving Rubin his demo tape

another important thing that I think is underrated in terms of BB in the core hip hop market is their falling out with Def Jam and eventual signing with Capitol really cost them a lot of momentum. Hip hop years were like dog years back then, and the difference between dropping their second album in '89 vs it coming out in '87 or '88 was a big deal.

i agree about their early def jam days and turning rick on to LL and all that. they definitely had some 80s cred.

but it is really more about hearing their later stuff occasionally and thinking: oh man i can't believe they were still rapping like that! its funny. i mean into the 2000s! the beats and music could sound cool though for sure. i still wish their was an instrumental version of paul's boutique that i could buy on CD.

yeah I'm only referring to the 90s when I became familiar with them, back in the 80s they were definitely part of a scene which was way more novelty as a whole

Hip hop years were like dog years back then, and the difference between dropping their second album in '89 vs it coming out in '87 or '88 was a big deal.

makes me think of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, they were so ahead of the curve in 1982 but three years later seemed to be a decade behind somehow

the one dude probably did some good for Tibet but I have no use for them

the best beastie boys album is the instrumental one that copied the perry+kingsley album cover.

(mean that genuinely, btw. this groove is rather infectious, there's a song with "bobo" in the title, + oh hey another killer beat.)

I used to have that album. It was nice of Money Mark to make an album for the Beastie Boys and let them take all of the credit. I looked him up on Wikipedia and it seems like he has had a pretty interesting career since. I didn't realize he'd played keyboards in Cypress Hill's Tiny Desk last year (which I really enjoyed watching). I'm glad he's still around.

I was a huge fan of them up through Check Your Head, which was made by the Money Mark instrumentals. Even by then their rap style was starting to sound like how your dorky boss thinks people rap. After that they just paid a bunch of A-list producers to prop up the same old shit. They could have been worse as aging celebrities go, though. I respect that they just retired after MCA died and have stayed pretty quiet since.

Ad-Rock and Kathleen Hanna appear to be still married? maybe he is a retired house husband.

nah Hello Nasty is their best, I think it's wildly creative album, hard to even tag it as 'hip hop' really

not really a fan of the ones after that - when that anthology came out it was strongly implied they were retiring. their live shows at least still ruled.

I think the Beastie Boys did update their rap style after Paul's Boutique. Their first two albums have a lot of the group-focused approach where they trade single lines back and forth, one guy setting up a rhyme and another finishing it. On Check Your Head and Ill Communication, they did a lot less of that, and lot more taking turns reciting sets of their own lines. Four bars of just MCA, then four of just Mike D, etc. CYH and IC also have a lot less of the move where everybody shouts the word at the end of a line. I suspect both shifts were influenced by the way rap had changed in general by that point.

It's not that the first two albums have no songs where one guy raps a bunch of lines in a row, or that the next two have none of the old school group-focused approach. But there's a clear trend. Compare "Brass Monkey" and "Shadrach" with "So Watcha Want" and "Sure Shot".

Then they shifted back on Hello Nasty, which is interesting. It seems more self-consciously retro at that point.

After that they just paid a bunch of A-list producers to prop up the same old shit

I don't think the Beastie Boys ever used an A-list producer after Rick Rubin, outside of a remix here and there. Unless you count the Dust Brothers because of their stuff with Tone Loc.

yeah I think they are largely self produced after Pauls

You're right. I should have looked that up before posting. I don't know why I thought that was the case. I think I also overstated Money Mark's involvement on "In Sound".

i think that constant self-improvement as musicians (NOT rappers lol) is part of what helped their enduring goodwill among fans+colleagues. also, personal opinions about some of its topics aside, they mostly made really positive vibe music. same kinda energy as people like biz markie.

(note to self: de la soul collabed with both the beasties+biz.)

"dance away" is annoying, bry stop whining challenge

barry white sang it better

My mum loved that song - and Bryan Ferry, frankly - so I must disagree.

out of reach is out of touch

he shd have stuck to doxxing her car's numberplate imo

It goes over well at karaoke, despite American audiences not having a clue what it is; and I like the weird dissonant bass pokes in the verses.

real hedz kno that best roxy-karaoke practice is to screw up yr eyes as u bellow-emote "GROWING POTATOES BY THE SCORE"

The version on the Babylon Berlin soundtrack is so good.

Money Mark? I chatted with his kid at a coffeshop here in Ams a couple of summers ago.

(maybe that belonged in the name-dropping thread)

"Lean On Me" is the single most overrated song of the 1970s

Maybe not most, but def vastly overrated. Always flip the station when that comes on, and that goes for the Timex Social Club version too.

its just overplayed.

my dad has an al jarreau cd that he plays at night and i can hear al's version from my dad's bedroom sometime and i kinda always wonder why al jarreau felt he had to cover a massive 70s hit IN the 70s. its not that different. he did a whole album of bill withers in the late 70s. but my dad just has it on a best-of.

practically alone among early 90s pop rave hits i don't think i get bassomatic's fascinating rhythm

should "Lean On Me" replace "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the US national anthem?

should “lean back” replace “the star spangled banner” as the US national anthem?

practically alone among early 90s pop rave hits i don't think i get bassomatic's fascinating rhythm

appropriately sampled by real lies for 'one club town'

I buy and enjoy about 75% of International Anthem's releases but I can't believe people take Carlos Niño seriously

dying at the CPAC rendition upthread which I somehow missed. holy shit.

oops wrong thread