Out of nowhere, today after state testing in Alhambra, CA HS, I heard on someone’s PSP (I presume), "Sweet Child ‘O’ Mine, by GNR. This being about 20 years after that was recorded. Real music often makes it through the trials of time.
Like hell.
I read this and got pissed and then I walked over to the TV to see a “Monsters of Rock” CD advertised on Comedy Central that included several of the bands I had in mind. You have to take in the whole theme into account to appreciate the effect They were Monsters…of Rock…that kicks ass and pretty much petrified and pussyfies what is out today. The Metal 80’s were like years of ongoing Woodstock except with better music and without the smell (and minus the ugly girls that wouldn’t know a razor if you put just one of them in a bag and told them to pick a prize).
Just for the record, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a heavy metal song as are a few of their others. I realize that everyone that knows a thing about music theory will strongly disagree with me but is a fact that I said it and I think it.
I am concerned about kids today and their light and fluffy rock music. What can we as parents do to encourage harder edged themes and more serious lifestyle rock?
Sweet Child O’ Mine is within the top 10 rock songs ever recorded and probably the Top 5. You can ask most people if they like Heavy Metal and they will usually say no. Then ask them if they like Sweet Child O’ Mine and most will say yes. There you go. It has a perfectly innocent and universal theme. I listen to it every day. It could have been the greatest song of all time but it breaks down into solos and filler later in the track. It needs more lyrics and definition but still people will listen to it 100 years from now.
I think what IS going the way of the dodo are the fans from the 60’s. All the kids who stood in line for hours to get tickets, and then stood in line for hours to get in to places like Winterland and The Fillmore. When people would buy an album and have a listening party. Rock and Roll seemed “newer” then, and bands would come up with songs and concepts that were revelations to us. The connection we had with the music and the people who performed it is somehow different than it is today. That’s not a good or a bad thing, but the people who didn’t experience it missed out on quite a scene.
The biggest trend I noticed among buzzy bands at this year’s South by Southwest was the return of the Guitar Hero. (Yes, I blame the video game.) I heard the words “shred” and “rip” more often than I’ve heard them in twenty years. Marnie Stern and Earl Greyhound are a couple of acts that come to mind.
I have to agree that I don’t get this. I haven’t heard the second album, but the first one didn’t strike me as remotely proggy.
Just for the record:
Metal ≠ Rock
Metal = Rock minus poetry minus all traces of soul plus tin-eared white suburban preteen boys
Oh, I totally agree that Sweet Child O’ Mine is a great song, but it’s not Heavy Metal as I know it. Metal heads here hated GnR and, stylistically, they don’t have much in common with bands like Metallica and Megadeth. That said, once upon a time, Led Zeppelin was considered metal, and, by today’s terminology, I would definitely not consider them as such. They were hard rock. While you can argue the progenitors of metal, I feel it starts with side one, song one, album one, Sabbath, although there are certainly a few bands prior (Blue Cheer, for instance) that laid the groundwork. I don’t feel GnR comes from the Sabbath tradition. And, yeah, I don’t consider Nirvana metal, either.
But there’s plenty of HARD shit out there. You need not look farther than Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The Scandis know how to put the black in black metal and scare the shit out of people through music.
Exactly. Popular music in the forms of pop, rock’n’roll and rock went through a golden age between 1965 and 1975, as jazz did in the 20s and 30s and other styles had done before. This was possible because western society was breaking out of a very stultified period; not only were people ready to break the rules but there were rules to be broken. After a dead period it is natural to get an exciting explosion of possibility; those 60s and 70s songs sound so fresh raw and energetic because it was an exciting time to be alive and making new music.
Now, there are no rules. Musically, anything goes, there are no limits. Popular music is fragmented into a thousand sub-genres with none dominating and so anything new and exciting in any one of them is only going to be evident to a small section of the listening public. It will be lik ethat until and unless we go through another period like the 40s and 50s, which frankly looks unlikely in the forseeable future.
No one who was really into rock listened to it just because it made their parents angry. That’s not why I listened to Sabbath, Zepplin, The Talking Heads, King Crimson, Pere Ubu, Echo and the Bunnymen, David Bowie, Hawkwind, The Doors :o , Siouxsie and the Banshees, Hendrix, or any other band when I was a teen. I doubt it’s why anyone is listening to hip-hop today.
Seriously would you listen to any music just to piss someone off? No one listens to anything save that they like it.
You’re wrong.
No I’m not.
The fact that Scandinavia produces scads of metal should tell you just how little soul there is in metal. (And if I had to pin it down, I guess I’m using “soul” to mean African influence.)
And what exactly is it about Scandinavia that is soulless?
Edit: you really need to expand your definition of soul. No race has the monopoly on soul, man. Everyone has stories to tell.
Well, I’m not sure that was the point, but rock was the music of rebellion, just in the same way rap was. The fact that it did make parents angry, because of the generational music gap, was merely a bonus.
I have absolutely no idea what point this is supposed to make.
At least over here (Scandinavia) art rock took a big kick in the nuts when punk hit hard. No one could seriously start out to do art rock after that. So that subgenre lost its impact. It might’ve survived and eventually newer bands started playing art rock, though IMO Radiohead is to Genesis 1.0 as Garth Brooks is to Johnny Cash.
As for White Stripes and the like, they’re more like tribute bands.
I never meant to imply that young people listen to any sort of music to piss their parents off. If it does, it’s an added bonus. And it’s true that some music becomes eternal, but I don’t think Deep Purple’s Machine Head really qualifies, yet I know an 19 y.o. who recently bought it.
This OP is pretty funny. Perhaps we’re looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. I seem to remember a lot of the big acts in the 70s getting shit for being corporate - including Led Zep, who had their own plane, remember?
As many have stated, there are a million different ways to find music nowadays. Back in the 70s and 80s all you needed was to listen to one or two stations, hit the clubs, and hang out in record stores and you were set. Maybe get an issue of Creem, or Rolling Stone. (When I was coming up in Britain I regularly read - wait for it - Smash Hits and Kerrang! Didn’t discover the NME or Record Collector until a little later.)
The first alteration of the music scene was the advent of the cheap home synth, like the Roland DX-7. Now you could sample a voice, put down a track with your 808, and boom shanka! You had a band. Look at how much Vince Clarke accomplished in the 80s. Virtuosity already took a hit with the advent of punk; cheap electronics went even further to make music-making accessible to the masses. With hip hop, you didn’t even need to play an instrument - just some beats and an ability to rhyme. (A great DJ always helps, but there are a lot of great raps without a lot of help from the DJ.)
There was a time where I could tell you pretty much all of the alternative bands out there. Sire put out the “Just Say Yes” samplers and I knew all of the bands. Nowadays there are bands of varying levels of popularity putting their stuff out there, which is cool for the kids who spend time following their interests. The stuff that gets packaged to the masses always sucks. There’s a “Hits of the 70s” ad for a Time-Warner CD set that comes on Saturdays after SNL here with the guys from Air Supply. Remember how huge they were? Occasionally a innovative band hits the big time, but most of the stuff we hear today we won’t hear 20 years from now. Sure, they’ll put on “Toxxxic” but I doubt the oldies station will be delving deep into the Britney catalog, or the Ying Yang Twins’ stuff.
On the point of Scandinavian bands being soulless… I’m aware of the death metal bands out of there, but there are great bands out of that part of the world that have “soul.” The Hives sound like a mix between The Stranglers and the Stones and I freakin’ love 'em. There was a band called Span that came from Norway - broke up, unfortunately - but I swore the lead singer was Black. I have often proclaimed my love for a-ha on this board as well, who have touched on synthpop, light jazz, even a little funk in their long career.
Metal being “soulless” is a crock too. Fishbone, Living Colour, anyone?
The other thing is that a lot of bands that had their heyday in the 80s and 90s are still around, making great music direct on the internet and on small labels. I would suspect that with the market being fragmented as it is, it is rare that an album or a song gets huge without a huge corporate push. (I was stunned when Modest Mouse’s latest album hit number one, but not surprised when it dove down the charts the next week.) So to find the good stuff, you’re going to have to seek your own path.
I think all the forms of music I listen to - what used to be called “alternative” or “indie” are as vibrant as ever. I think it’s great that it doesn’t take very much to put your music out there nowadays as well. I do admit I am something of a nostalgist, but I’ve discovered a lot of new bands that I dig in the last few years - and I still follow my old favorites.
There’s also the Kings of Convenience, who sound like Simon and Garfunkel’s more relaxing twins and are guaranteed seduction music.
As for rock not evolving (and not pissing off your parents) what about hardcore, grindcore, thrash, and all of those other punk and metal derivatives? You may not like it, you may just think it’s noise, but… well… isn’t that what everyone’s parents’ thought about the Ramones?
For a good example, here’s Vitamin X. I don’t think this is particularly hard at all, but I have a lot of friends who are into grindcore and thrash so this is actually quite slow, melodic, and intelligible by comparison.
This is Finntroll. My friend found this by searching for “elf metal” and I think it kicks ass. He introduced it to me by asking, “Do you like Middle Earth stuff?” “What, like Bilbo Baggins?” Certainly unique, anyway.
There’s also Against Me!, a (semi)local band I feel obliged to include, and this “video” is a rather funny illustration of the lyrics. Here’s another one of their songs. I remember the rhythm guitarist from a shity local punk band, and I had no idea he had a set of lungs like that (he does backup vocals). They’re fairly mainstream by my standards, but have a wide variety of sounds and influences. Plus, any band that can do a love song that is actually an allegory of the relationship between liberals and ultra-radicals is pretty awesome in my book. Baby, I’m an anarchist.
Anyway, like others have said, the crap you hear on the radio or MTV (egads I hope Against Me! never makes it onto MTV but I don’t watch so I dunno) is absolute shit compared to what you can find at local venues or on the internet. Indie rock and punk rock, IMO, are the closest you can get to the original spirit of rock n roll i.e. rebellion, social change, etc. There are so many different subgenres I don’t think it’s really fair to lump the radio bullshit like Creed (apologies to any Creed fans) together with stuff like Flogging Molly (excellent lyricists) or Vanilla Muffins’ self-described ‘sugar Oi!’
Plus, there’s something really… powerful about rock n roll. There’s an awesome Japanese zombie movie featuring Guitar Wolf, and one of the over-the-top but ridiculously awesome themes is the power of rock n roll. “I swear on my leather jacket, and rock n roll…” It’s a great movie, you oughta check it out (if you like cheesy Japanese zombie flicks).
Whatever. I <3 rock n roll, punk’s not dead, yadda yadda yadda, YMMV and all that.
I’m not making a racial comment so much as a cultural/musical comment.
There’s a reason rock and roll was born in the southern US. It was a convergence of European and African musical forms.
When I hear metal, it seems to me like rock without the African influence, or at least with that influence minimalized. I hear a lot of heavy downbeats. I hear fewer backbeats (the heavy backbeat being a marker of African influence).
I hear almost no blues influence. I hear guitars being played like they were typewriters, whereas (and credit to Harry Chapin for the metaphor) in the blues the guitar is caressed like it’s a woman.
I was being humorously hyperbolic when I said metal had no soul (note the smilie in the post; I was kidding my metalhead friends). But the grain of truth which gave rise to the hyperbole is that the African influence is less evident in metal. (Not entirely absent - that’s where the hyperbole comes in.)
And I am in no way disparaging Scandinavia. (Well, not seriously anyway.) Just pointing out that there’s not a lot of African influence to be found there.