I used to listen to the local classic rock station at work, and over the course of an 8-hour shift I could count on hearing the following acts, four times each:
Led Zeppelin
AC/DC
Boston
Foreigner
and …
Freaking Billy Squier. I honestly don’t remember Squier being so popular in his time to warrant showing up every 2 hours in this station’s rotation.
D’oh!:smack: I had meant to include Pink Floyd and Zeppelin on my original list!
And Nirvana. Not my age group but they played/play it on most stations around here. Was everybody depressed and on heroin in the early 90’s? Whats the fascination with that dead shitbag anyway?
Honorable mentions:
Rush. Don’t out right hate them but I find a lot of their music and lyrics just plain odd. Not that you hear any of their songs but Tom Sawyer played on the radio.
several of my collegel chums were nuts about them. I didn’t get it!
REO Speedwagon. Again, don’t outright hate them but if I don’t hear one of their songs played for the next 20 years and then hear one I’ll think “not this again”.
Another concert my friends dragged me too. For a band I don’t really care for I admit it could have been worse.
Ever my complaint, too, when it comes to classic rock stations. They keep cranking out the one, two, or three blockbuster hits from each album and ignore the other songs on those very same albums. The CR format wouldn’t be half bad if only they would expand their playlist a bit.
As for Foreigner, though, I’m not sure they even had any cool album cuts…
There’s a reason classic rock stations do this. Allow me to introduce you to the concept of mass taste.
Incredible as it seems, the average radio listener WANTS to hear the same very limited number of familiar songs over and over again, and does NOT want to hear anything unfamiliar, or out of his/her comfort zone. That will cause him/her to switch the station or turn off the radio, striking horror into station management.
You and I are on the same page as far as what we personally would like to hear. But we are not the average listener. I’ve been having this discussion in one form or another for 25 or more years now. When I read someone (and I’m not singling out you for this) who says “Why don’t radio stations program their music the way I want to hear it?” I just smile and shake my head.
Nick Cave, Kenye West, Lady Ga Ga, The Black Eyed Peas, and pretty much anything popular in the last seven or eight years. The newer the more horrible. It’s not like I only like my generations music either. I liked a lot of many decades music until recently.
This one really gets people’s dander up.
The Beastie Boys.
Nope, don’t get the “legendary” thing and never have. :dubious:
The thing about Boston is that their studio-perfect sound was one of the reasons Punk Rock got really rolling in that era (followed by some rather interesting New Wave and Grunge), so as schlockish as their sound is, you have to give them at least a little credit for fomenting the backlash (more, I think, than any other band).
There is one that has not come up yet, and I am not sure why, perhaps everyone was able to give wide berth. But I was working inventory in the mid-80s and found myself riding in a van where I was subjected to this unpleasant garbage. And the speakers were in the back, so obviously the driver had to cranking up that horrendous noise. I speak, of course, of Madonna. Argh, she was awful.
I’ll second the Beastie Boys. I don’t get at all what people see in them. They’re annoying.
The Beatles. A few good songs but IMO way overrated.
Yes! So glad to see so many votes for the Beatles. They bore me right to sleep.
Every time I go back to the midwest to visit family, I’ve stepped back into a 70s-80s time warp. It’s the same rock station that rarely updates their playlists & everyone is still nuts about the same old stuff.
I still like a few songs from most of the rock bands mentioned, but I rarely play them anymore from overexposure.
–I still like Rush, but I refuse to play Tom Sawyer. Limelight is still listenable. I do agree with the other posters about Lee’s voice.
It would make for an interesting accent once in awhile, but they’ve needed a better singer.
As a kid I used to hate Stairway to Heaven, but as I’ve gotten older I can give it a listen once in awhile.
Same for Hotel California, but now I love it & when I hear it by accident I crank it up.
U2 has been living off of their rep for 30 years. They suk now.
Led Zep pure dee ol’ eats.
Pearl Jam is crap.
Around 1976, Styx was the hottest band around. They were shit, but, everybody liked them. The lead singer sounded like somebody whose testicles had not yet descended.
Also, I can’t stand most of Pink Floyd’s music. The song “Another Brick in the Wall” seemed like stupid filler, but, everybody that I knew thought it was phenomenal. It blew then, it blows now.
The first couple times I heard it I thought “Hey this is catchy.” Then I listened to the lyrics and was like WHOA WHOA WHOA. It is a skeevy song and brings back very bad memories of high school. I read somewhere that Robin Thicke said he wrote it for his wife. Yeah right. :rolleyes:
Guns N Roses. To me, they seem like a fad band one should have left behind by sophmore year in college. I’m honestly perplexed how anyone can like them.
I’m not into the hagiography of Kurt Cobain, but he wrote catchy tunes with energy that kind of captured the spirit of those times. I was a happy, upbeat (and, at the time, politically conservative) youth, but I really enjoyed his music, his esoteric lyrics, and it was a welcome respite from the hair metal and dance music of Top 40 radio at the time. Before Nirvana, all I was listening to at the time was 70s classic rock. Nirvana kind of opened up my ears to a whole sea of college/alternative rock that I had only tangentially been aware of.
Total hijack for Muppet fans.
Picture of The Electric Mayhem. Notice what color Floyd is. 
This. I always thought the other popular grunge bands (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains) of the era were better, but didn’t have the benefit of having a Top 40 hit in Fall 1991 (Smells Like Teen Spirit), or a somewhat dramatic, angsty and mopey lead singer. I think people identified more with Kurt Cobain himself than the actual music.
Basically Nirvana opened the door, but the other bands that came flooding through were better.
I think Kanye West is completely, totally unlistenable garbage. So it always confuses me when people say “genius” and “masterpiece” in reference to anything he’s done.
I’d have to dispute this. The Ramones album, as well as Patti Smith’s Horses and Television’s first single, all preceded Boston’s first album. The first singles by The Damned and the Sex Pistols were released a month or 2 after Boston’s first album, but that’s not enough time for them to have been reacting purely to Boston. I’d say it was more bloated stadium rock in general that punk was against - Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd as well as the more corporate sounds of Boston and Foreigner.
Yeah, add him to my list as well. And it doesn’t help that he’s a total d-bag.
I agree that Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and the like were musically and lyrically better, but I think a lot of Nirvana’s success was Kurt Cobain’s pop songwriting. As I’ve mentioned in another thread, Nirvana was always a bit of an outlier to me in the “grunge scene.” I don’t think it’s identifying with Kurt Cobain himself necessarily (although that did happen for a segment of the population), I just think the ears of the average listener were more in tune to Nirvana’s style of songwriting vs. the darker (at least to me in sound), more complicated work of Soundgarden or Alice in Chains. Kurt’s work had an immediate accessibility to it: strong, simple melodies, somewhat unusual but basic chord progressions centered around a small handful of chords, and a straightforward verse-chorus type of song structure. It was different, but not too different for Top 40 radio. It was immediately accessible in a way something like “Man in the Box” wasn’t.
At least that’s my take on it. The image of Kurt Cobain certainly helped, but before anyone was too aware of it, Nirvana had already taken hold of listeners, and that was through their music and Kurt’s ear for pop.
