The Police and Van Halen released their first albums in the 70s 
Thank you. Back then there were all these novelty hits - Ahab the Arab, Monster Mash, Name Game, etc., etc. Good indicator of the poor state of the industry. Much as I love Weird Al, if half the songs being downloaded are Weird Al like songs, we’re in trouble.
“I’m going to prove that they don’t make good movies any more by listing a bunch of good movies from the 60s and 70s.”
You really don’t see the flaw in that argument?
Ok, how about this? Here’s a list of the 100 greatest movies of all time based on a poll of people working in the industry: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/100-best-films-ever-hollywood-favorites-818512
54 of them were released in 1980 or later.
Don’t like that list? Here are the 100 greatest movies of all time based on their Rotten Tomatoes score: Certified Fresh Movies at Home (February 2023) - Rotten Tomatoes
60 of them were released in 1980 or later.
Yeah, they sure don’t make 'em like they used to.
The amount of trash and sleaze put out in the 60;s and 70’s was huge. I’m not even talking about straight up porn either; Badly choreographed Kung fu flicks, Gruesome cheap horror, R-rated sexploitation, etc.
Sure you had The Godfather and 5 easy pieces but you also had* Wrestling Women vs. The Aztec Mummy* and* Pieces.*
And, now that I think about it, Where would MST3K be without all the awful shlock from the 60s and 70s.
Good point. By my count, in the first 128 episodes of MST3K, there were 115 movies released before 1980 and 13 movies from 1980 or later.
I don’t want to godwinize this thread, but I have to get it out of my system: one should be very careful with calling art “degenerate” (I’m surely uncomfortable with it), that’s exactly what the nazis called art they didn’t like, persecuted some artist for and banned many, “entartete Kunst”. Not surprisingly, they were very anti-modernist.
Also see posts 7 and 16.
Don’t let the Nazis set a narrative and steal the language… If they call the sky blue, I wouldn’t argue.
At the time, Lehrer (and Freberg) were at least partially right. Rock ‘n’ roll, after bursting on the scene with a brash rawness that horrified the mavens of good taste during the mid 50s, had been tamed, mainstreamed, and slicked up into inoffensive pablum that was mainly about the petty concerns of adolescents. And it wasn’t just people over the age of 30 who felt that way about it. Rock (or what passed for rock then) was “kid stuff” you set aside when you turned 18 and went to college, joined the military, or got a job. If you listened to music, you listened to something “adult” like folk, jazz, C&W, or middle-of-the-road pop. This was the general rule until the British Invasion hit in 1964.
Sorry, I overlooked that.
Ok, then maybe I should begin to call people I don’t like Untermenschen. :dubious:
I’m 100% okay with letting the Nazi’s have this one. “Art made after <arbitrary time period> is evidence of the moral decay of society,” is, itself, a fundamentally immoral argument. It confuses personal taste with personal worth, and provides a stepping stone to the dehumanization of people who differ from you not in fundamental moral or ethical ways, but purely based on personal aesthetics.
I’ll also add that your list of “good” media from before 1980 is startlingly worthless. That’s not proof that art was better before the '80s, that’s just a list of stuff you like. None of it is objectively more worthy than anything that came after it. There’s no objective rubric you can point to that proves, conclusively, that the Beatles are better than the Backstreet Boys, and there’s certainly no evidence that people who like the Backstreet Boys are any more “degenerate” than people who like the Beatles.
nm
Ok this is a better song for this this thread
It actually wasn’t a list of things I necessarily liked. Many of my favorites aren’t considered classics, some are.
That doesn’t invalidate Miller’s point that such judgments are inherently subjective. That’s what I meant by my last post listing 61 great post-70s bands to match the 61 on your list. There’s no objective way to prove that Neil Young is better than Cowboy Junkies, to take a random example. Granted, a lot of the music on your list remains popular, and is acknowledged as important even 50 years on; but the only difference between the bands on your list and the bands on mine is time; in twenty years time, people will still be listening to Prince and R.E.M. and Adele.
You call some later bands “great”, but then say it’s all “subjective”? A lot of that sucked worse than the name game.
There’s no contradiction there. Those bands are great, in his subjective opinion.
That’s one thing.
That’s something else.
Great stuff and trash exist in the ratio of 1:19, sez Ted Sturgeon. Our cultural stew is a steaming toilet bowl*; biggest turds float to the top. HL Mencken** and PT Barnum*** reportedly commented on how easy people are persuaded to accept and demand crap. People will pay for crap so that’s what they get. But both great stuff and crap remain with us and the diligent seeker of almost anything will be rewarded. Globally, virtually every act recorded since 1890 is available somewhere. Online software, music forums, and trusted humans can suggest performances suiting our tastes.****
The notion of artistic “degeneracy” posits a degradation of quality since some earlier period of near-perfection. Thus since all music derives from ancient chants, drums, and whistles, what we have now is dog waste. How could degenerate 1950s a-capella doo-wop be better than my Samoan tribal chants on 1930’s 78s? It’s all downhill. Yikes.
- Like Phoenix as seen from the rest of Arizona.
** “Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”
*** “There’s one [sucker] born every minute.”
**** Gypsy guitar on YouTube leads to Russian guitar and John Fahey and…
I started to watch but didn’t finish. What’s the [del]punchline[/del] conclusion?