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

Who was made fun of or forgotten in the previous decade that's more respected now? Who was critically beloved but is now kind of a joke? Why?

For me, I've noticed that the sophistipop re-appraisal has been kind to the legacies of artists like Prefab Sprout and Sade. And also, weirdly, I kinda feel like KoRn/nu-metal in general is in a better place now critically than it was 2009? Dunno if this is Grimes' doing alone, I also think that a lot of late decade rappers being influenced by it has helped too.

Worsened: R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, Morrissey and also by proxy, The Smiths. For obvious reasons.

Who was critically beloved but is now kind of a joke?

Eminem

Nah, Eminem was pretty much a joke in 2009 as well.

This was when he had released Relapse after all.

Yacht rock and other yuppie genres have influenced a ton of indie musicians of the past decade + culminated in popularity in Guardians of the Galaxy and now everybody seems to love Soft Rock/dadrock when it was seen as a joke in previous decades.

I don’t think numetal is being reconsidered yet, and hope it never does.

I think George Michael is a good example of someone who was written off as a complete joke in the 80s but whose reputation has steadily grown to the point where there's hardly any detractors left today.

She was never made fun of the way you describe but Beyoncé has definitely improved.

Worsened: Mark Kozelek

Smash Mouth

...and Toto!

Yacht rock and other yuppie genres have influenced a ton of indie musicians of the past decade + culminated in popularity in Guardians of the Galaxy and now everybody seems to love Soft Rock/dadrock when it was seen as a joke in previous decades.

Also, the Mac DeMarco effect.

Dire Straits' stock has risen.

Fishmans
The entire genre of City Pop.

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

Foster and Allen - still going strong and all outstanding debts to revenue.ie have been paid up, venues sold out everywhere from Kerry to Glasgow to Australia! 2020 will be a big year for them.

I think George Michael is a good example of someone who was written off as a complete joke in the 80s but whose reputation has steadily grown to the point where there's hardly any detractors left today.

Good one. I think there's something unique in this decade in regards to artists legacies in relation to their death. In that, due to being in the midst of the streaming/social media, everyone's legacy immediately improves after their death. The public nature of the grieving, the sharing of stories about the artists personal influence on someone, easily shareable articles on their wider importance, and their entire catalogue being able to be streamed at the click of a button. I even feel like this is the case with Bowie, where, y'know, his legacy was probably in a DECENT place in 2009 despite it being a quiet decade for him, but Blackstar and the appraisal of his impact/work that has continued since his death has only strengthened his legacy.

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

But I think GMs stock was already at an all time high even before his death.

btw electro and italo disco stock definitely down

r.e.m.'s stock has gone down, not really clear why apart from less of a critical focus on college rock etc with the 80s

Consider how beloved and 'important' Animal Collective were in 2009 compared to now.

Huh. I would have thought Italo Disco went up what with stuff like Synthwave becoming a big thing in the decade, and people like Giorgio Moroder, who I releaize is not necessarily Italo Disco, gaining new exposure via that Daft Punk album.

The big italo revival was around 2005, it's been fading ever since.

(and synthwave as the dead cat bounce)

I don’t think numetal is being reconsidered yet, and hope it never does.

i don't know about the genre as a whole, but system of a down and korn have both been elevated above their peers for a while now

no one really seems to care about basement jaxx these days unfortunately, compared to the acclaim they got at their peak

Also the Deftones.

Not so much Limp Bizkit, thankfully.

Xxpost: Mac Demarco is certainly one of the main exponents but I think it can be traced back to Daft Punk’s Discovery reevaluation and popularity. The whole album but particularly singles like “digital love” and “something about us” kind of have soft rock dna in them. Then came Phoenix, Ariel Pink, Toro y Moi further solidifying it as “cool” with the kids. By the time Destroyer’s Kaputt and Cass Mccombs “county line” came out, most critics couldn’t resist it anymore. Bon Iver kind of popularized and made it influential it in a different vein, Anderson Paak, and Thundercat are also influenced by that sound. And of course Mac Demarco in a right place, right time event rose to the top as one of its champions.

Limp Bizkit now firmly established as Classic Rock icons.

Vampire Weekend too with that heavy Paul Simon influence should be mentioned on that initial wave of indie that helped make soft rock cool again.

Air: 10,000 Hz Legend is also ground zero for the soft rock revival I think.

Re: Vampire Weekend, I got the vibe that by 2009 they were already lumped in with all the other bargain bin hype indie that surfaced during the mid-to-late 00s and was quickly forgotten about, but they surprisingly (for me, anyway) turned out to be something special.

Justin Bieber is probably more critically acclaimed now than ten years ago. Not that it takes a lot.

David Boeie? Although his 00s albums were not at all bad, he was still very much considered a has been in 2009. Then he signed off with two magnificient albuns that were almost up there with his 70s masterpieces

I feel like Cardiacs belong here - when I got into them around 2005 they were still virtually unknown, but since then it seems like the internet's vast recommendation algorithms and the explosion of music communities have led them to their audience. maybe I'm wrong here but they seem to be more popular now than they were in their day, even though their last album was 20 years ago

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

I am a big Felt guy and was skimming to see if anyone on there asked him about producing The Poem of the River. iirc Lawrence supposedly recorded his vocals in the dark for that one? And now repudiates the production i think?

Alan only ever asked me to do two things, otherwise he left me on my own. He decided to have a house producer at Creation. He said, “From now on, everyone has got to use the same producer, like at Motown. It will be Mayo Thompson.” In the end, only two of us used Mayo before he was dumped. It didn’t work out at all.
...
You could write a book on that one. I took it here, I took it there; I remixed it. We took it to Robin (Guthrie) to try to rescue it; we chucked two songs off; we wrote two new songs for it. Poem… is a great album and people love it, but it’s like an album with a mental illness. It’s crazy.

https://recordcollectormag.com/articles/lawrence

It’s funny how it has like the EXACT OPPOSITE problem that ignite has

Ha, thanks visiting. I swear I read something, I'm too lazy to look it up right now, where he recorded his vocals in the dark

I do love the original finished product. The guitars sound so warm. I'm the last person to ever be accused of being an audiophile, but I am not a huge fan of the remastered Felt reissues. There is a remoteness, vox and instruments seem distant somehow where they were formerly more intimate. I dunno what that's about, but also granted I don't listen to music mostly under the most ideal audiophile setups. I am a rather crude and simple man, you see...

Bizarre that he would take it to Robin Guthrie, as I thought Lawrence famously hated the production on ignite the seven... regardless, poem is yah kind of a weird record for someone as ocd as he to have put out in its final form. it is essentially a couple of hippie jams bookended by a bizarre "rock" song, the most beautiful jazz-inflected lyrical pop song ever, a dylan-ish tell-off, and a nick drake wadoff. That said, it is so good. PJR is even better and more insane by my standards, but then I love half-assed demo shit in which ppl spend a half hour complaining about the state of the world in two-minute bursts .it is like nutella to a honeybear for me.

brimstead, i'm not even sure what you mean, but preemptory lol. i guess artists are notoriously bad at evaluating their own stuff and what of it appeals to fans, etc.

What podcasts would Genghis Khan, Elagabalus, Socrates, Ching Shih, Helena Blavatsky and Henry 8th be on if they just stuck around a tad longer?

The Bugle

Ching Shih would be a good chapo ep

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81sHF0-loUL.jpg

^^^^^^ pretentious as fuck. None of these are as good as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

when I work out Friends is always on, albeit with the volume off. to me the show is just an endless series of long conversations that end in 2 characters making out

― frogbs, Wednesday, July 17, 2019 10:24 AM (one month ago)

Here’s an article about this phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/21/the-age-of-comfort-tv-why-people-are-secretly-watching-friends-and-the-office-on-a-loop

Not artists, but ideas/attitudes

Something I recently thought about that I haven't thought about in a very long time: the cult of drugs. Those guys who over-mythologize the role of drugs in creativity, searching for the right combination of drugs so they can magically turn into Jimi Hendrix. Have they all died out?

The tradition of building up a band then knocking them down. I wonder why this happened and how deliberate it was, but a lot of people recognized it.
I get the impression that somehow the business only accommodated a small enough number of bands at a time, so people would inevitably grow sick of them. High priority bands that some magazines felt obliged to praise are later left to any reviewer who wants to stick the knife in them?
When paging through music magazines I used to notice bands I was sick of getting this treatment and I started to feel a little ghoulish about being pleased to see them get low scores, felt really bad about it eventually.
How much does this still happen? Why did it ever happen? When did it start and when did it peak?

I don't think it's a case of over-mythologising, it's just a change in the type of drugs which are popular

Some people were seriously delusional about what drugs can do for people.

I feel like the last guy who had a serious "drug mythos" around him that didn't just consist of worrying about whether they could stay alive was...Ariel Pink, maybe?

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/204f3389ae28a45eaea3b4032f421f1e2a4e7715/0_227_4968_2980/master/4968.jpg

I can imagine drugs became a lot less romantic w/r/t rock stars after Kurt Cobain died

Hardly seems fair to pin it on drugs when Courtney's right there.

jfc it's so hard to post a picture on mobile now.

anyway, here I try again to demonstrate that this is a silly argument, this picture is from 2017

https://i.redd.it/jd8bmdpdyh5z.jpg

to Simon's point, I can't think of a post-94 case where it wasn't "omg look how crazy!" and "omg when are they gonna die??" Libertines, Winehouse, Britney, Amanda Bynes, Layne Staley. Maybe Elliott Smith, but not the disaster live shows, only because he so consciously made his last album about his substance abuse. Cat Power? I don't think so- that was just people worrying.

Actually, now that I think of it Charlie Sheen 2011 was maybe the most recent example, because he turned it into performance art. Maybe Lil Wayne? But surely not after dozens and dozens of seizures.

Cobain definitely didn't calm it down. I remember this drugs = musical genius idea going strong into the late 00s

You guys must not be paying attention to rap music, because...

I mean, I did just post the picture of Lil Pump with a xanax cake

Cobain definitely didn't calm it down. I remember this drugs = musical genius idea going strong into the late 00s

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, December 24, 2019 4:03 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Really? with heroin?

I don't know about rappers now, it's halfway between glamor and candor about addiction and dependency. I don't think there's anything romantic about Peep or Pump's drug use in their music, and it has nothing to do with being perceived as a musical genius. it's more relatable than anything else, or aspirational... this is how people cope... and maybe I'm putting too narrow a focus on this. Because Cobain never made heroin seem like an appealing thing, unlike EVERYONE in the 60s-70s until people realized coke wasn't like pot. Like I can imagine idiots thinking dropping acid and picking up a Strat could make them Hendrix, or smoking pot and living in the Chelsea Hotel was just something geniuses did.

mixture of "it was always like this" "different drugs in fashion = different kinds of glamourisation" and "psychedelics are due a comeback once we have a glimmer of hope for the future"

True. Downers were the drug of the decade. Hard to really romanticize Xanax like LSD.

psychedelics seem super important to all manner of whooshy warbly post-AnCo stuff but i have no idea. party drugs now just plain old mainstream - la da di da di, we like molly, etc. but neither touch on precisely the macho dude genius artist schtick that i'm taking the question to be about

right, and that AC psychedelic trend very quickly (and very unfortunately) just folded into jam band culture as soon as the decade turned

in other words, there were no illusions about AC being driven by psychedelics, and they actively dismissed that idea even pre-Sung Tongs, complaining that so many people assumed their sets were improvised and always under the influence of psychedelics like Crash Worship or something. as for all the ripoff bands, it was just an accessory, or at worst, the entire aesthetic. that also doesn't meet the question as I take it.

I mean, is it:

Creative geniuses take drugs to access knowledge and power we mere mortals can never reach

OR

Creative geniuses take drugs to numb the pain endemic to their sensitive, artistic condition (ergo, you take a ton of drugs, some people will assume it's because you're Hendrix)

?

there was quite a bit of ketamine love in the mid-2000s minimal house and techno days. perhaps not referenced directly in the music, but there was a vibe that the two went hand in hand

'wonky techno' and 'purple sound' dubstep

“my baby does k all day”

I have read a whole bunch of claims that ketamine was the big new drug of 2019 which sorta makes sense both thematically and in terms of what i see going on socially, but is also kinda funny given there was a whole sub-genre of house devoted to the drug about 15 years ago.

In terms of ideas and attitudes that have changed:

The idea of being reflexively skeptical at the corporate mechanics behind enormous pop acts has fallen out of favour. Very few music critics seem willing to question the sincerity or level of artistic input that the biggest and most powerful pop stars have in terms of making their music or shaping their image. The weird hagiography of Harry Styles in Rolling Stone recently made this particularly apparent to me, and I guess you can contrast it to how much stick LDR was given for being a phony industry puppet at the start of the decade.

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