I’m a wedding photographer, and I’ve been to 300-400 weddings. That statement isn’t true at all. “Almost no music”? Now, I do a lot of non-white weddings, especially Indian, and pretty much ALL the music is 2000s onward, wether American dance hits or Bollywood. Even in the white weddings, while not as heavy to the 2000s onward, it’s still like 20% of the music. I just think that it’s your crowd and the type of weddings you’re going to. I mean, same with me I suppose. But songs like Hey Ya, I Gotta Feeling, Yeah!, Sexy Back, Crazy in Love, Single Ladies, In Da Club, Party in the USA, Shut up and Dance, etc. are wedding standards today.
I said:
Not nothing but, 85% of what the DJ is playing…
So, we only disagree by 5%. Close enough to be in agreement I think.
And yeah…anecdotal. I have not been to all weddings and I suspect different ethnicities will do things differently (no surprise there).
And 20% or whatever is fine when you’re sifting through 70/80 years of music history. It doesn’t sound like that’s underrepresented that much, if at all. And one would expect a bit of a bias towards older music based on wedding guest demographics.
Ah, that’s a look of profound admiration on the face of Chuck.
If dulcet-voiced Yoko had just pushed her no-talent husband, ol’ whatshisname, to the background during their recordings and performances, the Plastic Ono Band could have been chart-toppers!
Kinda like cheating: The Traveling Wilburys.
I’d say Eagles comes close to being ‘equal talent’. While Henley and Frey were the main songwriters, The music itself was crafted by all of them. Joe Walsh is their best guitar player, Don Felder was a good guitar player and writer and backup singer, Henley, Frey, Walsh, and Timothy B. Schmidt all sang lead vocals and backup on each other’s leads. All of them wrote material for the albums.
Walsh already had a successful solo career before joining the band. Even the guys who left earlier like Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner were accomplished musicians.
When I’m the only customer in a coffeeshop/bar/cafe, I often tell the young’uns working there that they can play anything they want. “You don’t have to play Geezer Rock. We old farts can handle modern music.”
99 times I’ve gotten an answer to the effect of “Are you kidding? We LOVE Geezer Rock!”
At a bar yesterday, the bartenders then broke into an a capella version of “Tiny Dancer”, and one 20-something server sang two verses of “We Didn’t Start The Fire”.
They did? How exactly was that? I’m still laughing at that talentless crap.
Oh, I sure was around in the 70s. And despite those less than stellar examples you provided, I would still say that, compositionally, even those tunes (with the exception of “Disco Duck”) were far more sophisticated in their chord changes and melodies than almost anything modern you might hear today with their 2-3 chords total. Music has been dumbed down for the masses and it is painfully obvious to anyone with an understanding of theory.
Pop music maybe, but there is an incredible amount of outstanding complicated music out there.
Yes, I should have specified pop music.
I was gonna say that Berger not be a goddamned link to Rick Beato. He’s good for a lot of stuff but he’s a stodgy old codger when it comes to modern pop music. I’ll take much of modern pop over the 70s crap mentioned.
I mean, for that matter, Jack White is not the most technically adept guitarist out there. He’s certainly not out there playing those 128th note runs like Yngwie Malmsteen.
But I saw Yngwie a few years ago (he was inexplicably playing in my little town, so what the hell?), and good God, it was boring. Two hours of the same damn song with the same noodling solo. I stayed to the end, but for the life of me I’m not sure why.
Meanwhile I’ve seen Jack at least a dozen times, in nearly every configuration he’s been in (yes, I’m a bit of a fanboi) and it’s been compelling from start to finish, every single time.
Asking if the White Stripes would be better with a more technical player instead of Meg is like asking if they’d be better with Yngwie instead of Jack. Or even with an undeniably skilled and more interesting player like, say, Pat Metheny. Of course not.
I know exactly what you mean. I can’t stand the ‘guitar god shredder’ kind of music. A lot of it is just pentatonic scales played lightning fast, but even the more complex stuff leaves me cold. Yngwie is the perfect example of that kind of playing. Joe Satriani sometimes, but he has a better ear for melody.
My favorite guitar player is David Gilmour. His solos are amazing, and yet he almost never ‘shreds’. He can play three notes and make you cry.
15 minutes of missing the point. I wish I had that time back. Quite telling that he had to switch to non-commercial pop music to make his point. In other words, he hoped we wouldn’t notice that he changed the subject. And once he called Beyonce’s Lemonade one of the greatest records of all time, I had to shut it off.
And yes, Rick is a stodgy old codger when it comes to modern pop music, as am I, because for the most part, it is a bunch of dumbed down crap in my opinion. Of course, there is a huge audience for people who prefer that sort of thing, and that’s why we are so fortunate to be able to listen to modern songs all written by the same handful of people who write for all the major artists. Dumbed down music is here to stay, and I’m certainly not going to change that. Those people can all enjoy their autotuned singers, 2-3 chords. and banal lyrics until the end of time. I’ll continue to listen to music that was interesting, original and actually had some substance.
Did anyone actually ask that though? I simply stated that I thought that she was lucky, and one of the least talented drummers I’ve heard. People apparently like that though, just like some people prefer a cheeseburger at McDonald’s to fine dining.
I like both. And that goes for music too. But not auto-tuned bland pop.
When I first started seeing everyone going ga-ga over Beato vids, I looked up and listened to some of the music he produced.
If that’s what he presumably thinks good music should sound like, I’m happy for him to be disappointed in modern music.
I love that Beato annoys the hell out of people that love modern pop music. It’s perfectly understandable that anyone would get defensive over something they like being bashed. But there are millions of us old school musicians out there applauding him for speaking the truth. We spent our lives learning our trade, only to find that those skills are not “popular” anymore, mostly because the industry won’t allow them to be popular by only putting out garbage that appeals to simple tastes. But hey, that’s what happens when you eliminate music education in public schools. Tastes change.
I would expect fans of “Fast and Furious” to feel the same way about someone saying the “The Godfather” was superior, or Thomas Kinkade fans when confronted with Picasso.