Hey: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Richard Thompson & Neil Young all have limited vocal ranges. I love them all–but some are still on the “cult” list.
Is Diamanda Galás’s amazing vocal range the only thing keeping her off The Hit Parade?
Quite true. In no way is the most popular and best-selling rock group in the history of recorded music a “cult” band. This thread needs some definitions of its terms.
In fact, the title of this thread is fairly obvious. A “cult” artist by definition is someone who most people don’t “get.” I can see how anyone or anything can have a “cult” following. Whether I like them is a different question altogether and that’s what this thread seems to be mostly about.
(Sorry to nitpick.)
If you ever get a chance to see them live, do so. They’re great musicians and their live shows ROCK.
I can’t listen to the recorded albums though.
I don’t get Steely Dan and Van Morrison. In fact I think they’re the same band. They’re played on classic rock stations, but they don’t “rock.”
You should watch the documentary Crumb: he was the sane one in the family.
Basically, art reached a point where it stopped having any meaning outside of whatever you were looking at. Abstract expressionism was about feelings, emotions, whatever - Andy Warhol was about removing all of this from his work. He wanted to be a machine, to produce work that had absolutely no touches from the artist.
After about 1930 or so, the audience for art was limited to basically other artists. So the idea of art as being mass produced seems simple, and a lot of modern art is just really simple ideas, but art had never been mass produced before. Artists liked this idea, it caught on, so Andy Warhol became legend. “Not getting it” is kind of the point.
Yeah, they do, but it’s mostly their old stuff and even then only occasionally. 
Mostly they fell into the rock category because there were little but rock, country, hippie and easy-listening (i.e, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme, etc.) stations on the air when Steely Dan and Van Morrison (as a solo act apart from Them) started releasing music, and rock was the closest fit.
Still, all are top flight, highly respected musicians who fairly consistently produce brilliant work.
I’ve heard it said that all of Steely Dan’s music sounds the same. I don’t agree but I can see how someone not an aficionado could feel that way. But the same as Van Morrison? No way!
I’m not sure if he qualifies as “cult,” but: Lenny Bruce.
I’ve heard clips of some of his act, and I found it dull, and not funny in the slightest. I actually don’t think he was trying to be funny - I think he was deliberately trying to be offensive, and “comedy” was an afterthought.
Besides that, what was shocking and groundbreaking in 1964 was ho-hum and routine by the time Eddie Murphy said the same kinds of things in 1984.
And I’ll 2nd Andy Kaufman: Call me a Cretin if you must, but I believe that a performance artist should, you know, perform for the audience, rather than manipulate the audience for his own amusement.
Is there any chance that what you tried listening to was their album Surfer Rosa? Because that one is hard to get into for some people. I didn’t get it either until I bought the album Doolittle. If you haven’t listened to that one yet and want to give them another shot I’d recommend it.
The first song, Debaser, is a catchy song and one of my favorites. If you don’t like that one, you could try listening to Here Comes Your Man, which is possibly their poppiest song. You may or may not like it, but you’d be hard pressed to call it noisy or tuneless.
I guess I can just link to the music videos on Youtube:
Debaser
Here Comes Your Man
I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but there are some bands that sometimes when I listen to them I’ll feel lukewarm towards the music, but other times I’ll listen to the same songs and think they’re the greatest ever. This happens with both The Pixies and The Smiths.
Heck, he was the founder and first editor of “Weirdo” magazine. I have a complete collection, something no true weirdo can do without.
He comes by his cult status honestly though, having turned down millions of dollars to “sell out”. Toyota wanted to buy “Keep On Truckin’” to use as an ad campaign and he refused. It’s one thing to say you’re not going to sell out, it’s something utterly different if they’re practically kicking the door down to give you money to do so.
Going back to the Warren Zevon reference - Zevon was brilliant, but I understand that some people don’t get him. To appreciate Zevon, like a lot of other ‘cult’ bands, you really have to invest effort in the appreciation. It’s like reading great literature - to a lot of people (me included, for some books), great literature is dreary and dull. Pop fiction, like pop music, is about instant gratification, simplicity, straightforward plots/lyrics/melodies. It’s accessible and catchy. And there’s nothing wrong with that, and I like lots of pop music and pop novels.
But Zevon was a writer’s writer. To appreciate him, you have to appreciate a well-crafted turn of phrase, a particularly clever rhyme scheme, a great metaphor, or an inventive use of words. This is why his biggest fans and closest friends tended to be writers like Carl Hiassen, Hunter S. Thompson, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Steven King, and others.
Here’s an example, from ‘Genius’:
Did you light the candles? Did you put on “Kind of Blue?”
Did you use that Ivy League voodoo on him, too?
He thinks he’ll be alright but he doesn’t know for sure
Like every other unindicted co-conspirator
Those last two lines are brilliant. The song is about how geniuses can manipulate people and relationships (well, that’s the subtext. The song is ostensibly about being personally manipulated, cheated on, and dumped, but Zevon being Zevon, he turned it into a statement a bit bigger than that).
Drawing the parallel between a guy who’s being seduced but feels something isn’t quite right and an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ is fantastic. If you take the time to really think about what it means to be an unindicted co-conspirator, to feel the hammer coming down, but not quite knowing where or when, to know you’re guilty but maybe might get away with it, is perfect. Coupled with the fact that the rhyme scheme is perfect, and that it takes a certain kind of brilliance to even work a phrase like ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ into a song about relationships, this is the kind of thing that Zevon fans love.
Then there’s the lighter side. Take this lyric from ‘Mr. Bad Example’:
I got a part-time job at my father’s carpet store
Laying tackless stripping, and housewives by the score
I loaded up their furniture, and took it to Spokane
And auctioned off every last naugahyde divan
First, he works in a little verisimilitude by mentioning something as mundane and ‘inside knowledge’ as tackless stripping. Then the clever bit about also laying housewives by the score. But the last line is really great - not only do you never expect someone to work the phrase ‘naugahyde divan’ into a song, but it tells you a bit about who his customers were - not rich old ladies, but poor vulnerable housewives who have cheap stuff. And that his father’s carpet store probably wasn’t a swank affair, but a tawdy ‘discount carpets’ or somehing. And this guy still rips the poor ladies off. It’s all a little seedy. Zevon called his music ‘song noir’ and this is the kind of stuff that made it that.
Here’s another stanza from that song:
I opened up an agency somewhere down the line
To hire aboriginals to work the opal mines
But I attached their wages and took a whopping cut
And whisked away their workman’s comp and pauperized the lot
That’s just great writing. And if you hear it set to music, that last line scans beautifully.
There - my short defense of Zevon. I could go on.
Bringing this back around to the appeal of ‘cult’ music (and cult film) - part of it is those little moments that you love - whether it be a special look of a character in a film, a particularly funny line, a particular melody that grabs you in a way that other music doesn’t. As you become a bigger fan, you start to savor more and more of these moments, and listening to the music or watching the movie feels like being rewarded over and over again.
For some, there’s an added pleasure in feeling that this artist is your little undiscovered gem, something you get to appreciate that the masses won’t ever know about. For others, that doesn’t matter, but what does matter is that the special qualities the artist has (even the qualities that keep them from having mainstream appeal) are the ones that really touch your soul.
Well, if that doesn’t get me to re-evaluate Kate Bush, I guess nothing will. (snicker!)
No, Doolittle is the one I’ve been trying. I’ll give it another go, just for you.
As much as I’ve tried, I can’t really get into King Crimson, although I will admit they’re a pretty good band. Also not a big fan of Jimmy Buffet.
I’ve got to join you on that bandwagon. Its not that I don’t “get” Buffet, I just have no interest in buying what he is selling.
Saw it. It brought me no closer to understanding or enjoying his work. It only made me decide that, if I ever met Robert Crumb in person, it’d be a struggle not to snap his neck like a rotten twig.
I’ll add another: Dave Matthews Band. I saw them live numerous times and they’re great people and great musicians, but I just don’t like the music. Also the long jams I think are more fun for the musicians than the audience, unless the audience is under the influence of something.
I love Zevon’s writing as well, but the overall quality of his writing is so high that when he misses, the clunkers really stick out. Tragically “Mr. Bad Example” contains one such clunker:
Whereupon I stole her passport and her wig
And headed for the airport and the midnight flight, you dig?
Really? “You dig?” He couldn’t come up with a better rhyme than that?
Not to pile on, but you avoided responding to your calling the one album you’ve heard, Hounds of Love, “witchy-bitchy-airy-faerie”. Sorry, but that’s like telling a James Joyce fan that Finnegan’s Wake is “just a bunch of gibberish”. Say that you don’t like it, or that you don’t have the time or inclination to devote to understanding it. But to dismiss it and to do so with used mud previously slung at a completely different artist…sorry, but that’s being unfair.
Enjoying one musician over another doesn’t involve “fairness” any more than favoring one football team over another does. Imagine some pissed-off kid saying “If you weren’t so ignorant and closed-minded, you’d love Joey Fatone as much as I do!” and you’ll get the picture.