Years ago, I started this thread with a similar concept.
I know! Saying Benny and Bjorn didn’t add value is insane - they may not have been the star performers but as a songwriting team they’re incredibly talented.
No kidding, huh? I’m really glad I avoided this turd the first time around. :rolleyes:
It should be allowed to die again.
Weird how many posters in this thread wound up getting BANNED…
I completely disagree with the OP’s inclusion of Bill Bruford. If anything, Bruford was held back when he was with King Crimson. Robert Fripp, possibly the most anal rock musician ever, gave him a big long list of things NOT to do. He especially objected to Bruford putting in soft percussion riffs during the boring parts of the music.
That wouldbe a good thread. My nominee is Todd Rundgren - not too many rock stars who animated their own videos, write software, produced the 5th best selling album of all time, etc.
Actually, he might qualify for Bat Out of Hell, which he produced out of his own pocket because he thought it was a hilarious parody of Bruce Springsteen. No idea how much he ultimately made from it, but he did say the first royalty check was six figures.
I been wondering since i got here where are the (numbers of) people with good taste or the threads about music and not video games, strawberry jam, plushies and movies for kids. I was traumatized trying to convince people that with a little help from my friends was a great beatles track.
Used to be it was all about music, everywhere you looked. Music was good then I guess.
Gotta give props to Madonna. If you compare her singing between the beginning of her career and now, you can hear right away how much effort she’s put into learning to use and refine her voice–to become a real singer. If only she would abandon the hotsex persona and branch out into other kinds of music, she could be one of the great ones.
As for coasting along, I gotta go with every monotone rapper. How you can make any money just standing there spouting off rhythmless and meaningless reels of dreck is beyond me. It’s not even music. It’s the James Joyce of spoken words, and I fucking hate Joyce, so there!
Lydon liked Van Der Graaf Generator, which was the epitome of empty 70s prog bombast. I can hear echoes in his vocals, though.
Yeah. VDG were not int’l stars though. He really had a hard-on for successful groups.
I find it curious that his wife was good friends with Jon Anderson (Aris Godfather) and Keith Levene was a Yes roadie and Steve Howe acolyte; They do this song “poptones” which is the riff from Starship Trooper, and maybe the only song they did aside from the first that has a guitar riff.
Does Lydon like Yes? Would he admit it? Does he know Jon Anderson? Does he know poptones is copped from Yes? It doesn’t seem like it from his book.
I think he is less hypocritical than most pop stars but it seems incomprehensible to like the BeeGees, the who and Zeppelin and not like the beatles. Those bands are like divergent aspects of the Beatles collective personality evolved a stage.
The Eagles. It’s been well over 40 years now and they’re still yet to make a worthwhile contribution to music.
Ya know, that thread was where I turned the corner, and decided I was pretty tired of the Beatles and their influence on pop music. It’s not that they weren’t good, but what have they done for me lately?
Remember, there’s no accounting for taste. I’m horrified at all the love there is for Baker Street, but that’s how it is.
And some of the replies in this tread don’t really get what it takes to make a band work. Just because you’re a supporting player, it doesn’t mean that you’re just soaking up the money. They learned the songs, showed up for gigs and practices, and didn’t rub anyone important the wrong way. On most of my gigs, if you noticed me, I was doing it wrong. Lots of other instruments are the same way.
For me the Beatles keep on giving. I play this game where I try to figure out the chords of a song, usually in the key of A, until I’m sick of it and then look at the book. I get something new every time. Just watching the devices that one of them figured out and then the other one used on their song on the same record, wow.
It was Carl Palmer in Asia. But yeah, the criticism of Bruford is silly.
Technically, he was a better singer than Jerry, and he still sounded good at the reunion shows. I much prefer Jerry overall, though - but the Dead wouldn’t have been the same without Weir’s songwriting and rhythm guitar though.
There is a Letterman with the two of them. Jerry sings and then Bob, with acoustic guitars. Without the band its painful to listen to Bob. Jerry had infinity in his voice.
Also not to pick on Bob., but he did get fired early on for not keeping up musically. They changed their minds though.
I wonder what the deal is with Alec John Such.
If I remember correctly he was fired from Bon Jovi in the mid-90s because he was a terrible bassist. By that time, they were huge and had been so for about a decade. I mean Slippery When Wet came out in 1986. Did it really take the other guys so long to realize that he sucked? After all of those years? All of this exposure? I also notice that they never officially replaced him. Hugh McDonald has played bass for them since 1994 but he is not officially part of the band. Weird (and kind of unfair for McDonald).
No I don’t.
No, but you DO have to admit that millions of people bought her records because they DID love her voice. Which means she’s no money hog! She earned whatever money people gave her.
If there is any such thing as a money hog, it’s a musician who doesn’t sing, doesn’t write songs, and doesn’t have a trademark sound, but who makes a lot of money because he/she happened to join the right band at the right time.
Which, IIUC, is the premise of this thread.
I still wouldn’t call such a person a “money hog” if they’re crucial to the band’s chemistry, or act as a catalyst to the creative members, or do a lot of behind-the-scenes support work, that isn’t always apparent from the outside.
Quite right- point is, whether you like Celine Dion or not, you have to admit she’s made her money because millions of people DO love her voice. SHE is the reason people bought “Power of Love.”
By contrast, while Larry Mullen Jr. is a perfectly fine drummer, he is NOT the reason millions of people bought “With Or Without You.” He did his job on that record, and I don’t begrudge him a cent he earned from it. But any number of drummers could have played it about as well as he did, and it would have sold about as well.
The correct answer was Joey Fatone of boy band NSync, as proven in a thorough survey by Jon Safran.