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

I've never known The Who as anything other than one of "THE IMPORTANT©" bands of the classic rock era. People still know 'Baba O'Riley'

My experience as well. That my dad was never a huge fan probably contributed to my ignorance of their music.

Oh exactly, when I was in high school in the early '90s, The Who were absolutely sold to me by older friends as one of the important, canonical classic rock bands. Which kinda underscores my point, because while I would argue that Zeppelin and Pink Floyd still serve that role, I'm not so sure that The Who would even be named by the equivalent theoretical kids today.

the main difference between Zep & The Who is that Zep's records are way more fun

xpost - "Chapter 19: The Great Canadian Indie-Rock Collective Invasion of The Mid-Aughts"

Three pages on Arcade Fire in Ch. 15 of the US edition of Starr/Waterman. The Canadian edition Rock: A Canadian Perspective has a five-page section on millennial Canadian indie rock and post-rock in the last chapter.

what Zep record is more fun than "Boris the Spider"???

Well more like 1.5 pages on AF in the former.xp

I think as mentioned upthread one of the important differences is that Zeppelin was recorded better, has aged well sonically

Growing up w nyc radio in the 80s WNEW would do a weekend of "the big four" once or twice a year and it would be nothing but Beatles, Stones, Zep, and The Who... Definitely seems the Who have slipped from that canon though

An interesting contrast, at least in my personal experience, would be Rush. While we all knew Rush's classic rock staples in high school, my friends laughed them off as kinda nerdy has-beens whenever I would try to play them. I would say the cultural cachet of Rush is higher than that of The Who at this point.

It is my belief that any artist itt could be rehabilitated by the right Netflix documentary or biopic, or inclusion on the soundtrack of a popular movie

I worked at a record store when Rushmore came out and even Chad and Jeremy's stock went up for a bit

Conversely, I get the sense that the Doors's stock is partly back up after a long spell in the semi-wilderness.

XP Their Netflix doc happened in 1979, and is called The Kids Are Alright.

in terms of radio play, imho The Who's biggest disadvantage is that their first few singles, which are fucking incredible and mind-blowing as performances, were at best middlingly-well-recorded at the time, and only sound thinner and tinnier as years go by and they're competing with these booming, FM-ready 70s tracks. so it would be easy to just not realize how dynamic and insane Keith Moon was - you can barely hear him! (might be recapitulating the TS: Moon vs Bonham thread here...). meanwhile, mid-60s rock singles have been really wiped out as CR has advanced forward in time, so that's a big part of their narrative washed away, in a way Zep hasn't had to contend with. or take the Stones - they still "work" as a titanic rock act if you only know them from Beggars Banquet forward and have never heard "Satisfaction" (bizarre though that might seem) --- not sure the equivalent holds true if you start The Who at Tommy and don't have "I Can't Explain" etc.....

Rush's stock definitely rose in the 2010s. I saw them in 2011 and 2013, post-Behind the Lighted Stage, and the crowd was all ages and much more female than I had expected.

Of course this is all from a US perspective. Queen are bigger than Led Zeppelin and the Who put together in the UK.

Queen are the go-to example of a lewronggeneration band

Isn’t that true on this side of the Atlantic as well? For a good while, redditors only swore by Queen and the Foo Fighters.

xp

Queen have been enormous in the UK for decades.

I worked at a record store when Rushmore came out and even Chad and Jeremy's stock went up for a bit

― Paul Ponzi, Wednesday, August 12, 2020 3:09 PM

God damn right!

Signed,
An unapologetic Chad + Jeremy fan

But then we don't really have Classic Rock as a thing in the UK. There are probably radio stations that play that stuff but I've never heard them.

My half-baked theory re Rush is that some of the qualities that might have made them seem cold/alienating/nerdy in the 80s and 90s - the almost machine-like precision of the playing, the fusion of guitar rock with a wholehearted embrace of synths, the ultra-crisp production - are de rigueur now, making them seem weirdly prescient. Even high voices came back in for rock singers. Also, their 90s records weren't that good and we're further away from them.

Isn’t that true on this side of the Atlantic as well? For a good while, redditors only swore by Queen and the Foo Fighters.

If so, it's a very recent development. No way was Queen bigger than Zep during most of my life.

But yeah, since that movie, everyone seems to love Queen.

Re Rush I think the Netflix doc theory upthread helped too, Beyond the Lighted Stage got a lot of people reconsidering the band.

Zep at #5 on this list (US-specific), Queen at #47: https://www.businessinsider.com/best-selling-music-artists-of-all-time-2016-9#5-led-zeppelin-1115-million-units-46

I don't know if I've seen another reassessment as kind as Queen's in recent years. I've seen / heard people suggest that Freddie Mercury —not Michael Jackson, not Prince, not Bowie— was the "true" king pop star of the 80s.

45. Bob Dylan

wut

He's no Garth Brooks.

And we're all the better because of that.

That whole list is interesting. Taylor Swift is the only artist on it whose first album came out this century, and because of changes in consumption it's fair to speculate that even in another 10 years there might not be too many more along with her. Em and Pac as the only hip-hop representatives is maybe predictable, tho I'm not sure I would have guessed Pac as the second one because his run was so short. But he hit at peak CD sale time.

The old fogeys in the upper reaches have benefited from constant reissues and compilations and changing formats, which may not be true for future artists. So it certainly seems possible by those metrics that the Beatles will still be #1 in 50 years. But maybe in 50 years no one will care about those metrics at all.

re: Cream

They still get used in a fair amount of movies/tv shows ("White Room" in a Joker scene)
https://www.what-song.com/Artist/1696/Cream

I don't know if I've seen another reassessment as kind as Queen's in recent years

its crazy cuz it's still only like the same 4 songs everyone is crazy over. their studio albums haven't exactly gone through that sort of reappraisal have they? there's only like 3 good ones.

speaking of Rush one band I've seen become surprisingly ubiquitous is King Crimson, definitely seem to be in a different place than they were when I got into them in 2003 (despite having released exactly 0 albums since then)

yeah King Crimson were definitely helped by the internet/file sharing. I don't think I could ever find their early albums in stores back in the day.

re: queen, it's definitely been interesting to see their LPs go from "we literally can't give this shit away" to "people might reasonably pay eight or nine dollars for JAZZ"

Those are like $15+ 'round these parts!

That aside tho, Queen definitely seems like an old band that sold way more on CD reissues than they did in total sales during their heyday.

Prince is another one of those, even the shit albums seem to regularly go for like, $15-20

Michael Jackson too, never thought I'd see the day when fucking Thriller would be a 20 dollar record

I have a record dealer acquaintance who made fucking bank unloading a ton of previously unwanted Jacko records on eBay right after he died. Several pieces going for $100+.

Baba O'Reilly and Eminence Front because of those rolling loop sounds seem to be the two Who tunes you hear used as bumper music quite a bit.

What is the Queen argument here? I thought they were roundly praised for being a great rock band in the 70s, culturally relevant in the 80s bc hits, LiveAid and AIDS, big boost in the 90s via Wayne’s World and the quintessential 2nd Best Band Of All Time onwards, with nods to Freddie’s biography as being contentiously portrayed and Brian May being an intellectual

intellectual doctor of astrophysics

i think the argument is that they're irrelevant in the united states outside of like 4 singles

I do think there's something pretty startlingly new about their current level of popularity and esteem in North America. I mean, they were also critically reviled in the 70s and fell totally out of the American top 40 from 1984 until Wayne's World revived "Bohemian Rhapsody". (I don't think that boost went further than that one song?) They were easily a tier or two below Zeppelin/Floyd in terms of sales and airplay.

i'm not sure if there's an argument. i'm just reporting anecdotally from being a record store rat that their LPs were once ubiquitous in the bargain bin and now those records seem to demand quite a bit more. if i was pressed to say something about their "reputation" in the late 1990s / early 2000s, when i was coming of age, i'd say my peers and i generally regarded them as a novelty act with two notable songs: the fake elvis song that they played on the classic rock station and the silly opera song from "wayne's world"

i'd wager that, if queen does indeed have a notable increase in popularity with younger folks (i have no idea), it would have more to do with the kids eschewing canon-building altogether

I have a record dealer acquaintance who made fucking bank unloading a ton of previously unwanted Jacko records on eBay right after he died. Several pieces going for $100+.

The day of, I saw copies of Thriller on eBay going for that much. Pretty fucking impressive considering it's the least rare record on the planet!!!

just wanna salute those Sund4r posts, delicious stuff, and I can't even decide if it's better if the textbooks are real or if it's all performance

anyway my prediction is that the next "why the hell are they still so popular" band will be Van Halen

queen has 33 million monthly listeners on spotify, the beatles have 23 million, the rolling stones have 20 million, and led zeppelin has 14 million.

How many do The Who have?