Which was also ironic, because the Rolling Stones stole the song from the Staples Singers.
Huh, I didn’t know that… What song did they take?
Ah, thanks for the explanation. In the US it is nearly unknown, so it really stands out to the ear if used across multiple songs. Makes me curious what commonplace US lyrics are having the UKers scratching their heads. Probably our lyrical obsessions with California highways (PCH, Santa Monica blvd, etc). “boulevard” especially, seems a very awkward lyric to fit into a song.
The Last Time, which the Staples Singers picked up somewhere, as it’s an old, uncredited gospel song.
But the messed up part about The Bittersweet Symphony saga is what happened after Allan Klein (former Stones manager and rights holder) got 100% of the royalties. He turned around and licensed the song for use in commercials and movies/tv. The selling point, and most commonly used portion of the song, is the distinctive strings opening: a unique composition that wasn’t sampled from the Rolling Stones song.
I am the opposite of this. Lyrics are the first thing I notice and I’m willing to forgive a lot in a song if I like its lyrics.
I agree it can often come off as insincere, but I tend to like those songs. Weezer’s Pinkerton is pretty much an entire concept album dedicated to how much it sucks to be a rock star - and it gets extra ''pretentious points" for being based on the opera Madame Butterfly - the titular character Pinkerton being in Cuomo’s own words ''an asshole American sailor similar to a touring rock star." Shit, the first song, ‘‘Tired of Sex’’ is about how awful it is to get laid every night. But it feels totally authentic to me because Weezer’s front man Rivers Cuomo is an overeducated, neurotic, introverted geek like me, and the picture he paints of his life sounds like my idea of personal hell.
Artists dealing with their own disillusionment about what it would mean to be famous is one of my favorite themes in music. Even better than those are songs that bitch about the business side of music, dealing with record executives and the like. Someone upthread mentioned John Lennon’s run-in with the press when he married Yoko Ono. His song about it, The Ballad of John and Yoko, is one of my favorites.
I dunno, I think I just like songs that put me in someone else’s shoes for a while. Being famous or a rock star is so far outside the realm of normal human experience that I find the whole thing rather fascinating.
Listening to Rush’s music is about as close as I’ve ever been to being high, if that gives you an idea of how much I love them. But I can understand why people think they are pretentious as hell. "The Trees’’ is a great example but ‘‘Closer to the Heart’’ is to me a moment where they dial it way back to say, ‘‘hey, this is less about lofty ideas and more about compassion.’’ It’s also less musically complex than a lot of their other songs so it feels to me like it’s coming from a less cerebral place. I dunno. Rush fucking rocks. End of story. 
Do you think Green Day’s American Idiot is pretentious? The song, the entire album basically, is a monument to post 9-11 political angst from the point of view of a 90s kid. One of their best songs, ‘‘Jesus of Suburbia’’ is 8 minutes long (YouTube link here) and has actual movements like a concert symphony. And personally, as a 90s kid with political angst, I love it. I think it’s a masterpiece. (The video, however, looks pretentious as hell.)
So the moral of the story is, I like pretentious music, at least as it is conceptualized in this thread.
I think I would personally define pretentious (in the ‘‘do not like’’ sense) as music that is either painfully aware of, or overestimates, its greatness and importance. Most of Pink Floyd makes me feel that way, but then again, they aren’t talking about my generation. Pink Floyd to me is the Stanley Kubrick of music - genius that kills itself by being too aware of its own genius.
I’m a big fan of Live, particularly their earlier stuff, but I think their album V is pretentious (even though I like it) and everything Live made after V is just listening to the bloviation of a man with a messiah complex.
No, but I once saw Dudley Moore talking to Dick Cavett about the Fifth Symphony’s very long coda. DM referred to “the absurdity, the…(pauses)… chutzpah! of some of Beethoven’s cadences.”
Here you go. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=staples+singers+last+time
I don’t really think this song rates anywhere on the pretentiousness scale. Neil Peart has social phobia, he’s writing about how that’s a problem for someone who entertains for a living. So, he’s just writing about his problems.
I’d agree that a great deal of their catalog could be accused of being overreaching and having at least a little bit of pretension, but not this song.
I must be a musical illiterate, because “Bittersweet Symphony” and the two versions of “The Last Time” sound like three different songs to me.
OK, there are similarities between the two versions of “The Last Time,” but they’re not really that similar.
The whole thing boils down to whether or not they’re intentionally trying to be more momentous or give their songs Bigger Meaning than they really have, without having the chops to actually do it.
So some bands like Pink Floyd and Rush are pretentious in that they’re not serious philosophers or all that profound- they’re rock musicians, but some of their songs try to put on the coat of Serious Poetry. Bruce Springsteen pretty much always falls into this category, and Sting also does for the most part.
It’s even more convoluted than I remembered. The dispute between The Verve and their Bittersweet Symphony and Alan Klein, owner of the Rolling Stones catalog from the '60’s, stems from the looped sample they used of the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s verson of The Last Time.
Andrew Oldham Orchestra: The Last Time
Just to muddy the waters a bit more, Andrew Oldham produced the Rolling Stones version of The Last Time.
So the Verve over-sampled, as it were, and Klein successfully sued and got all the lolly. The end. Wiki.
ETA: I must be a musical illiterate too because I don’t understand how the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s version is meant to be a cover of the Stones song.
Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” was a little more than just whining about life as a rock star. Rather, it reflects the moment that a rock musician comes to realize, “I THOUGHT I was a rebel. I THOUGHT I was a maverick. I THOUGHT I was fighting The System… but it turns out I’m very much part of the very corporate system I imagined I was rebelling against.”
Millions of English and American kids who grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties saw Elvis or the Rolling Stones, and thought, “Yeah, that’s the life for me! I’m not gonna follow the herd, like all those other sheep out there. I have my OWN dreams, and I’m gonna follow them. I’m gonna do it MY way, and be an individual.”
“Welcome to the Machine” is saying to rock musicians, “You idiots! You think you’re rebels against The System? You think you’re fighting The Man? The Man and the System anticipate guys like you. Guys like you think you’re special, but you’re a dime a dozen. You’re just an ordinary spoiled middle-class white brat. Where did you get the idea of being a rebel in the first place? From US!!! We SOLD you the image of a rock star, and you bought it hook, line and sinker. Guys like you make music about rebellion, and we take that music and turn it into a product and sell it.”
“Welcome to the Machine” represents Roger Waters’ realization that he wasn’t a revolutionary fighting against the capitalist machine. He was very much PART of the capitalist machine.
That explanation actually makes me more interested in Pink Floyd.