Here’s a chart of the growth of Facebook. It doesn’t look to me like something that was once unpopular and is now popular. It looks to me like something that was once unknown to nearly everyone and is now known to nearly everyone in the world with Internet access (and to a lot of people without access to the Internet). I suspect that the curve of growth is an S-curve. This is what happens when some development starts out almost unknown and quickly moves into being known to almost everyone, a slow increase which becomes a fast increase and then becomes again a slow increase:
Yeah, but with rap you don’t have learn to play an instrument.
Yes, around there. I’m not sure what your point is, though. Even if they were critically lauded and super-cool here in the US in their heyday, they were not in the 80s and early 90s by music geeks, and sometime by the mid-90s, they had become critically reappraised.
I love Abba, but I don’t see how they did not undergo a significant critical reappraisal.
I mean, look at this article here:
That’s the attitude I grew up with around here.
And see the subtitle:
So I don’t think I’m particularly far off here.
In a similar vein, but different genre, I’ve been seeing glimpses of disco over the past decade or so being held in less contempt than it was for the rest of my lifetime. This radio program had a great episode in 2012 basically about how disco does not, in fact, suck. The disco bit is about 30 minutes, so it’s still going to end up being a cursory examination, but it’s a good listen for the disco naysayers and puts the music and genre and culture in perspective.
I was in my 20s in the 1970s when they first hit the charts, and they absolutely were regarded as “mindless disposable pop” by anyone who was the least bit hip. Maybe it was different elsewhere in the world, but that was their reputation in the US.
As I said, even in 1994, Muriel’s affection for ABBA in Muriel’s Wedding showed how un-hip she was:
Also in 1994 ABBA’s music was featured in The Adventures of Priscilla, the Queen of the Desert, about two flamboyant drag queens and a transgender woman, where it was included I think because it was regarded as campy.
By the late 1990s and Momma Mia! ABBA was being appreciated unironically more widely.
I’ve always been fascinated that punk, disco, and rap all originated in New York at around the same time. (British working class punk was a separate phenomenon.) Here’s another set of generalizations for you to pick at. Punk was a bunch of suburban white kids coming to the city and rebelling. Disco was a bunch of gay kids coming from around the country to let loose. Rap was a bunch of black kids already in the city letting their anger out, after an early dance phase. Remember, the late 70s was New York’s lowest point, when the city was bankrupt, crime-ridden, filthy, dangerous, and cheap. The perfect place for scenes to develop.
The three music scenes didn’t overlap much. It’s hard enough for the mainstream to learn about one scene let alone three simultaneous ones in totally different worlds. The rock establishment had spent the last decade fighting an incredibly hard fight to get mainstream rock acknowledged as a true art form. Now, suddenly, three challengers wanted to overturn rock as passe, boring, and out-of-touch with what this new generation wanted. Of course this was going end up in a violent clash. (Hey, that’s a good name for a group. The Clashing Pumpkins. Hmm. I’ll work on it.)
Rock went from more or less universal to a constellation of tribes. It not only stayed that way but broke up into smaller and smaller fragments. The superpopular artists today are more pop than rock. But rock diehards keep rock, classic rock, at the pinnacle, a losing fight that gets more absurd every year. That’s why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is dominated by classic rock but also lets in a million people that don’t do rock, to the scorn of some every time a new list of inductees is announced.
Popular music gets reappraised just about every year by people who weren’t the critical age when that music meant everything to a certain group. That’s good and bad. Nothing in your life will ever be equal to being 13 when the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show and ruled radio for the next year. How does anyone discount that feeling or the later equivalent ones to look at the music “objectively”? Every word needs to be taken with a pound of salt. Ask me again in a hundred years.
This approach also implies that pop music is the universe that rock is just a subset of. Imagine a Pop Music Hall of Fame, though. It would have almost exactly the same set of inductees as the RnRHoF does. In our world it couldn’t exist, because it couldn’t be taken seriously. All because “rock” won the critical acclaim. Maybe in that hundred years pop will bump rock aside because Taylor Swift and J-Lo and Adele and lots of Korean boy bands will be the only ones remembered. And reappraised.
I’ll give a couple, but these are only for me personally:
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - I was kind of “meh” on this movie when I saw it initially. I liked it, but did not think it was a great movie in anyway. I have now seen it several times on Netflix and other streaming services and it has grown tremendously in my view. It’s a great movie and one of the best Star Wars movies. I think the movie just benefits from seeing it many times and it just didn’t deliver a huge “wow” factor in the theater. I owe both the director and Disney(who tinkered with it a lot) an apology and a pat on the back. They did a great job.
Timeline - this movie from with Paul Walker, for those who forgot it. My wife and I loved it, thought it was a really great movie. We re-watched it a few years later and realized…yeah, it is really crappy. Honestly, we could not believe the two of us liked it and we both agreed that we were just flat-out wrong. It’s terrible, boring, and a total mess.
Lots I disagree with here…punk was in full force in Lima, Peru Where did punk begin? A cinema in Peru | Punk | The Guardian long before it appeared in NYC. Punk was bigger and more influential in SoCal than NYC Punk rock in California - Wikipedia and disco was not about gay kids; it was about partying, drugs and lots of unprotected sex of any kind. Rap was about a whole lot more than anger, including the first rap hit; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKTUAESacQM and most popular rap isnt about themes of anger at all.
Yet another artist who was written off as a one-hit novelty artist for “Another One Rides The Bus” and yet continues to crank 'em out 40 years later! 
This comic appeared in my local newspaper 2 weeks ago. Loved it! (And who would have thought at the time that the DRUMMER was the real musician in the band?
My brother was a college DJ in the late 1980s, and when “Nevermind” hit #1 in just about every nation on earth that keeps a music chart, I asked him if he ever played anything from their low-budget debut, “Bleach.” He replied that he did, and if a time traveler had come to him from the fall of 1991 to tell him that this band would release an album that would totally turn popular music on its ear, he’d have told them they were nuts.
…Jennifer’s Body. Along with redemption for MeganFox.
Anyone ever seen Jennifer’s Body? I had not even heard of it.
I told myself I wasn’t going to respond to nitpickers, but this is too silly to let stand for a moment.
Assuming whatever happened in Peru was punk, it didn’t have any influence on U.S. punk.
But SoCal punk definitely came from NYC punk, according to your own link.
Wikialso says, about disco and gays:
And I explicitly said that dance rap came first.
0 for 4.
I would have no problem if this was phrased as a re-reappraissal.
I don’t trust an article written in 2018, and citing as major evidence a photo of Lester fucking Bangs, to be very accurate on what the 70s *pop *critical zeitgeist was.
Bangs was a drug-addled rockist. And a shit critic. Post some *actual *70s *pop *criticism.
Or don’t, since that’s irrelevant, as I wasn’t claiming they were critically lauded. Just that they were, and I quote, “immensely popular” so certainly weren’t a guilty pleasure in their heyday. People don’t line the streets for their guilty pleasure. People were quite openly ABBA fans, in vast numbers…
…except in the US, where they were never *quite *as big. Still sold out their tours, mind, but not quite as big as elsewhere.
Slight quibble - disco samples were a big part of early hip-hop.
They were quite popular here in the US, and I am not arguing with that in any way. I grew up very much on ABBA, and it was the soundtrack of my early childhood. But the OP is about critical reappraisals, not mass popularity. Art criticis are mostly elitist and snobbish. If you want to be more specific, I wouldn’t call it a re-reappraisal, but rather put it as “in rock music criticism circles, ABBA experienced a critical reappraisal.” The rockists of the 70s turned into poptimists somewhere around the mid-90s to 00s.
I think we’re straying into some kind of philosophical and/or definitional argument here. One can draw gigantic crowds and still be a “guilty pleasure” to critics and those who consider themselves music aficionados, just like McD’s draws billions of people and it’d be a “guilty pleasure” to most food aficionados. It’s not We can argue about the elitism of this, but of course critics are largely elitist snobs.
OK, I see better what you mean, now, and I agree.
Yeah, I also feel that culturally there’s been a shift over the last twenty years ago or so, starting with the Millennial generation and beyond mostly to have a much wider appreciation of music and musical genres. Music doesn’t seem quite as “cliquish” to me as it was when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Like, if you were into Metallica and Maiden, you wouldn’t want to tell your friends that you unironically enjoy Paula Abdul, for example. Now, I get the sense you can be into niche music, but it’s almost cooler to admit that you love mainstream pop acts. The whole idea of “guilty pleasure” has been minimized (and I think that’s a good thing.) It amazed me when I joined a local music board in the early-to-mid-00s. to see how open everyone was in their musical tastes. The same kids who loved Can and Wire and Radiohead and Shellac, etc., were open about loving Kylie Minogue, Kelis, Justin Timberlake, etc. This was so very different than the vibe for me growing up. And it was encouraging.
Yeah. Back when I was in college, a friend of mine was in mixed relationship. He liked the Psychedelic Furs and bands of that ilk and his girlfriend liked Springsteen - and I swear it was like the Sharks and the Jets between them.
Charles Bukowski struggled for years for any kind of recognition. He was mostly just ignored in the United States. He mainly wrote for underground newspapers and magazines…hundreds and hundreds of short stories and poems.
Where I said “scenes” I meant that the clubs were physically separate and attracted different audiences, making it harder for the outsiders to experience what was at first a live music experience. Some people no doubt went to multiple clubs and some musicians no doubt appreciated other musicians.