Damn straight! And, speaking as a 52 year old, I have not grown out of screaming guitars and snarling lyrics. What I have done, is broadened my taste to include a whole buncha genres depending on my mood and/or the events of the day.
Critics periodically emerge from their caves, peer about the planet, find their favorite bands departed or altered and pronounce The Death of Rock n Roll, but that turns out not to be the case in real life.
And, as **Purd Werfect ** so astutely points out in his post, it has ever been thus. “Rock” is a mighty big tent, and there has always been room under it for dozens of offshoots and subgenres from the sublime to the ridiculous. Remember surf rock, car songs, Motown, British Invasion, girl groups, psychedelic, pop rock, folk rock, rockabilly, glam-rock, punk rock, bubblegum, etc. and etc. And that’s just up through the 70s.
Every time I dispair myself, something will come along like the killer opening riff in Dire Strait’s “Money for Nothing” or Slash’s work on “Sweet Child of Mine” and I’ll say, “Oh, yeah!”
As the lyric goes “take what you like and leave the rest.” And enjoy the hell out of it, no matter what anyone else thinks. Your taste is your taste. Rock on, G. Nome
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the most thoughtful of rock critics, the ones who know the WHOLE story from prehistoric times to now, look upon the “Classic Rock” era as any kind of a Golden Age.
I agree with your general assessment of the banality of most music made in this era. Of course, I’m prejudiced toward the era I grew up in, when you could find a bit more variety in your musical selections than a bunch of macho white guys braying in front of guitarists playing the same cliched licks over and over.
Not enough to spell his name correctly, apparently! But I disagree with you. Phil Spector made some great records at a time when a lot of really bad ones were being made. I think what he proved is that The Stones’ line “It’s the Singer, Not the Song” is incorrect. It’s the song. There are variables, but generally a great song sung by an unknown singer will have a better chance of reaching people than a lousy song sung by a well-known singer.
To those of us who were listening, Phil Spector’s girl groups (and others) were not “interchangeable” (even if he did twice record The Blossoms and call them The Crystals). We all knew the difference between The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Crystals and The Chiffons. Plus, the records Spector made had plenty of genunine rock ‘n’ roll and R&B influences.
You’re also leaving out that there’s a direct line to be drawn between Frankie Lymon and Ronnie Spector in terms of vocal approach.
Except that, once you get past Little Richard and Chuck Berry, there were hardly any black artists who actually played rock ‘n’ roll. (Bo Diddley is sort of on the borderline between rock and blues or R&B). Do you have any specific artists in mind who were, in your view, “attracted away” from rock ‘n’ roll by soul music?
As well they should. Bottom line again is, you like what you like, and the hell with everybody else. I used to get a little exercised about it, and say “How in the hell could anyone actually LIKE xxxxxxxx (while ignoring xxxxx, who’s so much better)?”
But I just let it go now. I’m still open to new music and hear something from time to time that speaks to me. But not all that often any more.
Hmm. You seem to have gotten a different message from that commercial than I did.
First up, it doesn’t look like a blind date, although there may be some indication that it is. But blind dates usually involve meeting somewhere, not going to the guy’s apartment. The impression I get is that he doesn’t know her down to a T, but does know her well enough to be fairly sure that she’ll like the mix.
Second, the song is a thrash metal mix of an early 20th (late 19th?) standard. There are plenty of mainstream commercials whose gags depend on the styles of two eras clashing. I think they were going for a laugh, not for shock.
Third, the man and woman look to be in their late 20s. The man seems like a middle-of-the-road type, but the woman is extremely thin, with sharp features and a non-fussy hairstyle. She’s stylish for the 2Ks, but might recently have grown out of a more hardcore fashion. And from her shrewd look when she (apparently) realizes that he meant to put in this CD, it appears that she’s glad he knows her taste, instead of being turned off by his.
Finally, you said it yourself: the music has a sufficient level of novelty to stand out to jaded consumers’ ears. It wasn’t a commercial for the music; it was a commercial for the product. The message was that Phillips allows anyone to indulge their individual taste. They could have shown a dinner scene where the same couple gets cozy something more melodious…but you probably wouldn’t remember the commercial!
So what I’m really saying is, that music was the joke in the commercial, and it’s not relevant to a discussion of rock music as a genre.
Can’t go along with you on Joni Mitchell. Some of her stuff bugs me, but I’ve been listening to her 1976 album Hejira a lot over the past month. It is really good.
Yes, I’ve also heard that he aquitted himself well outside the girl group' genre, too. I don't deny that he was probably very good at what he did. Nor do I deny that his girl group’ songs were good. I liked them a lot better in those halcyon days when I had never heard of Spector, however. Nowadays, though, it’s like I suddenly know how hot dogs are made. It’s just not the same.
I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of the producer taking prominence over the singer not just in actual aesthetic influence, but in mythic importance. But I can accept that this is merely a hangup. And the singer doesn’t exactly make the song either. Ella Fitzgerald did a lot of songs I can live without. But there is an irreducable element of the auteur behind the appreciation of music, even where that element is largely an illusion. Spector did his stuff in an era pretty short on divas. But when he brought pop music around to female voices again, they were lost against his `wall of sound.’
But what do I know? There were twenty some odd configurations of The Drifters in the fifties, and I can’t tell you who’s who by ear.
I suppose it depends on what distinction you want to make between Rock and R&B. I consider any R&B that was marketed as Rock to be Rock. James Brown was marketed to a Rock audience. His Chonnie On Chon was self-consciously a Rock song.
Also, I happened to notice one day, browsing some information on soul groups, that many of them seemed to have been members of Doo Wop groups once upon a time – Smokey Robinson, The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye. That’s where that theory came from.
Hey, I’m wide open for new music, as long as it was recorded forty years ago. Just recently, I’ve discovered a great new group called The Nutmegs. They’ll be the next Lillian Leach and the Mellows, mark my words.