Igor's "you should know about music" thread

[DigDog]

Premise; i know what i know, but i don't know what i don't know.
When i was really young, middleschool years, we had pocket change as spending money, and music was sold on 45' single records - one song per side. These cost more than we could afford so buying one was a big decision.
I must have been smart already because in my class, the vast majority of kids would all spend their money to buy "whatever the single of the week was", let's say, 9 years old me, it would have been something by Duran Duran.
Not only did everyone own the same record, this was also the same music that came out of the radio, all the time.
I figured, "if we all buy different records, we can have more music for the same money"; and also, "why spend money on a song you are already getting from the radio?".

Believe me, these concepts were quantum physics to 9yo kids.

Anyway, i got into the habit of looking for weird stuff. Stuff that was as far possible from the "center" of whatever music was the peak of commercialization at the time, the songs that were constantly blaring out from every radio station.

Now, in this adventure of discovery, i have found both good and bad, but it did leave me with what Wikipedia calls Déformation professionnelle; in my case, a tendency to see as bad anything that was too common, too mainstream, too commercial.
Because of this, i have never really enjoyed many mainstream artists that would be good, if not for the fact that they are being pushed all the fucking time.

Top this with the fact that i studied music, and then in college went into Music Business, and the end result is that i see music in a cynical way, as a product. Where certainly art exists, but my concept of "art" isn't what the typical consumer would see the same, and i despise many well loved products because, rather than attempting to be art, they are crassly designed to appeal to you. Some people may love this - some hate it.

For @igor_kavinski

 

[DigDog]

Let's briefly dispel the myth that the 80s were in any way good. They may have had some aspects that are better than the shit we are living in now, but compared to the 70s, this is where the period of commercial exploitation *we are experiencing today* started. We were drowning in plastic, cheap disposeable products, and bad, bad music. I mean, BAD music.
Not only a ton of 80s music was bad, but the way the music was delivered to us was bad as well.

Obviously me being a dirty unwashed Euro, my experience would have been different than that of a Glorious American Superhero, but pretty much your typical 80s radio would blast almost incessantly Duran Duran, Wham, Madonna, and a ton of other music which relied on cheesy synthpop loops, kindergarden-complexity drums, background guitars without solos; as obviously this is a commercial product, what you would have to suffer constantly from the radio wasn't dictated by how good musically it was, but rather from how the band dressed, or how sexy the singer was.

Fortunately enough in the 80s there was still market traction for 70s music, the big commercial giants of the time still having an adult following, which meant we kids were exposed to them; The Rolling Stones, sometimes The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and so on.

Now i personally have never been a fan of the Stones. Their music is veery simple, the audio engineering is terrible, and while many of the songs are decent tunes, i have figured over the years that, sadly, the majority of their success derives from Mick Jagger being sexy. Also Angie and Ruby Tuesday are atrocious.
Led Zeppelin were a bit better and obviously Stairway To Heaven is a big classic.

But again, this is about my journey, and i wasn't a rock fan when i was 9 years old. Here instead is how my world was in 1981.

 

[DigDog]

My dad had a permanent seat at a music theater called http://www.auditoriumconciliazione.it/ , which worked closely with the Santa Cecilia conservatory, one of the world's most important music schools - as long as you're dead and you enjoy classical boredom.
My very earliest musical awakening was very confused.
I remember hearing a Pink Floyd guitar and my brain thinking "omg what is that sound". I remember being 12 and having one of my camp scout leaders blast out Back In The Village, and discovering Queen - tbh, not a great start with Invisible Man.
But in 1981, we got the italian dub of The Blues Brothers, and that is what really led me down the hole.

By coincidence, there was a brand that packaged greatest hits cassete tapes of all the various artists in the B.B. soundtrack: Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding. I spent what little money i had on buying out all those i could find, as they cost about half what you would pay for a new release. Not only did this lead to discovering other soul artists, e.g. Tina Turner, but also made me realise a pretty dangerous concept, that the artists that i listen to today, had made music before today. So i was actually allowed to go and buy music made *before* i was born. 1960s music? Yes, you can buy it. You can fucking buy music all the way back to Mozart, if you really want to, and nobody can stop you.

This was a pretty hard divergence from anyone of my age, because to them anything that wasn't music from NOW was absolutely forbidden. You were only allowed to buy stuff that was on TV, on the radio, or in the cinema. If it wasn't you were uncool and you were out.

Well fuck them.

My much smarter than me niece convinced me to buy "just any David Bowie album", which her mother was a fan of, and i wound up picking the Ziggy Stardust live at the Hammersmith, which is nothing short of a masterpiece.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Since you studied music, have you tried creating your own tunes?

 

[DigDog]

By this time i was still thrown about by the seas of musical ignorance, and i simply picked up whatever i could from my surroundings. Going to scout camp was pretty cool because the people there were from different cliques and thus they had different "this is acceptable music" stuff so i got Iron Maiden, Beastie Boys, Queen, more Pink Floyd, unknowingly even Metallica - which i would wouldnt actually listen to until many years later. I also started music class with a very forward thinking teacher who practically forced me into Zappa.
I had also picked up what my parents were listening to, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Elvis, but once again keep in mind that this was "what i can find" music, because we still had to PAY for music, and if the records you were looking at in the record shop were not being played on the radio, you would have no idea what was in them. You would look at the cover and pray that it didn't suck.
I had a few lucky breaks finding many Zappa albums in the $1 bin, also Made In Japan, and i got lucky enough to catch a single showing of a Weird Al song - Eat It, on tv. I was obviously allergic to anything hyper-commercial, and Michael Jackson fit snugly into this category. it doesnt help that in his videos he likes to portray himself a being super cool. Relax ok buddy? Anyway, i bought the Eat It record. I also had to learn to play Lions for a guitar class so i got into Dire Straits, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner. Many of these artists, e.g. Turner, they were "not cool anymore" so you could find cheap records.

I also have to reiterate that by this time i despised anything that came out of the radio. I mean, The Final Countdown is an amazing song, but by god to have every 13yo girl around you swoon about the singer and have the song on permanent replay out of every digital orifice will fucking drive you insane.

In the meanwhile i also started playing music. I picked up the saxophone LITERALLY because of the song "Freedom" in the Blues Brothers film, where Blue Lou Marini gets up on the counter to play the sax and i thought "I want to do THAT".

 

[DigDog]

Since you studied music, have you tried creating your own tunes?

no interrupting plos.

I also played guitar because, you can't play a full song just on the sax, and Round Midnight gets stale quick trying to pick up chicks.
By my 16th i was, well, into nerdy but essentially normal music. Blues and soul, Weird Al, Pink Floyd, Bowie, and Zappa, weird for people who were listening to "modern" music but not completely weird.

By luck i was in a friend' house in Rio, and i found a unmarked copied tape, asked him what it was, and he said "oh no, that's bad". And i said, "yes but what is it", and he replied "that's just bad".

"Bad" was actually Surfer Rosa by the Pixies. LOL.
Obviously i had my mind blown and i bought everything pixies i could lay my hands on.
I went to Berklee for a 5-week summer program and i got put in a room with two rednecks who got me listening to No Rest For The Wicked by Ozzy, where i discovered another dangerous concept, that music can be "unpleasant BUT good".
Now maybe my life wasn't perfect, but i HATED sickeningly sweet "i love my baby" music stuff like most Beatles songs. Ozzy and Sabbath showed me that there was music that expressed feeling of NOT being happy with the world.

I went dumpster diving at Mystery Train in Boston and randomly discovered Bolt Thrower, Fudge Tunnel, Lawnmower Deth, DRI, Crass, all the less known Bowie albums like Low, more Brian Eno stuff, looking back i have to say that i have been *extremely* lucky. I also found Bauhaus, NOFX, Mercury Rev, The Dead Milkmen, a whole bunch of 1960s / 70s bands like Focus, Thin Lizzie, Alice Cooper,

My guitar playing got me exposed to Stevie Ray, Eric Clapton, Deep Purple, Dire Straits - the Alchemy double-record live album is phenomenal - and my saxophone playing made me play stuff like Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk.

The Boston freaks crowd got me in The Rocky Horror, which made me pull up a ton of musicals, such as Jesus Christ Superstar .. who have a record version of the film .. where Jesus is played by .. none other than .. Ian Gillan, the singer from Deep Purple? WTF?

By this time the music i was listening to was already alien to pretty much everyone around me. If you were into ONE of the things i was into, you hated the rest. Good luck finding in 1986 someone who found Ween acceptable music.

I went back home decided that i would go to barklee as my college.

 

[DigDog]

There were a few bumps in the road due to me not being prepared for berklee, having to deal with Italian bureaucracy and the compulsory military service, but also this was the very beginning of the 90s and "LOL copyright" was a thing, so there was a shop where you could rent a CD for three bucks x 3 days. I copied a ton of cassette tapes those 3 years, The Clash (kinda disappointing), Pixies bootlegs (live at Zurich Rotefabrik ftw), more Dead Milkmen, more NOFX, a ton of punk stuff.
I also got a girlfriend (weird uh?), went totally punk, and spent 3 years going to punk clubs, of which we had *a lot* in Rome. Fortunately "alternative music" was becoming more accepted. I found a LP copy of Justice For All in the cheapo bin, saw Ozric Tentacles live, saw a shitton of punk acts, and i discovered another dangerous concept: "bad music is more creative than good music".

Through trial and much error, punk had a lot more creativity than most normal stuff. There's a Music Theory aspect to this which is quite complex. You structure you chord progrssions and associated harmonies with what is musically correct. Punks have no concept of this and will happily follow a chord with another with is absolutely bad for it, and with some luck, then move on to another which fixes the whole mess. Also, punk clubs got hash.
I mostly saw shows from bands that are so obscure, i can't even google them. Korruptus, Raymonde et les Blancs Becs, but in reality most were nameless. And most were absolutely terrifying. The concept i took away is that: "they determine what is good music". What one group of people sees as good is based on their cultural environment. So while you may be listening to something that is truly atrocious, you can still classify it as "this is good".

Example. I find Black Metal music to be absolutely horrible, but *within* the sphere of this style there will be bands that are considered better, and others worse. There is a culturally objective decision on which exponents of the style "are good".

Then i went to college.

 

[DigDog]

I studied briefly at Berklee, College of Music.

Briefly mostly because i started as a Performance major, and realized that there is zero chance to graduate unless you have been born into a musical family and practiced since you were no older than 6. I started at 15.
I took a bunch of non-course lectures, and tried to persuade the head of Music Business & Production to allow me to change majors, but MBP has very limited availability.
I also bough and *memorized* this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Handbook-Engineers-Engineering-Society-Presents/dp/041584293X
and more important, during a lecture the lecturer said this:
"i am a professional producer. I would not be here if they paid me the usual berklee teacher salary. I get paid under the table. And i tell you that it doesn't matter if you study music production, it doesn't matter if you graduate with a degree. You will not be able to call yourself a music producer. Do you want to know WHEN you will be able to call yourself a music producer? When you get paid."

I also met a whole bunch of musicians in the dorms, that regardless of musical style, they were MUSIC MACHINES. You cannot compare most modern commercial artists on a skill level, with some nerd who has been practicing 8 hours a day for 13 years.
People who have perfect pitch. People who can write music without needing to double-check on the piano what they were writing. People who can look at sheet music and go "oh wow that is cool" because they are hearing the music without playing it.

At the same time, i also met some old friends who were *not* at Berklee, but rather were in finance-based majors, and they were ALL into, essentially, techno.
At high school we were pretty lucky to have been exposed to techno (a word which i use broadly to describe all electronic music) in the very early stages. They picked this up and by the time i got there, they were into serious clubbing.

Of course they were, you know, Boston College MBA majors, so they couldn't organize the contents of their own shoe cabinet, and it took ME to use their contacts and set up a business doing afterhours for rich spoiled brats. I spent the next year doing weekly afterhours that were so ridiculously good, we've had Stone Temple Pilots *crash* uninvited.

I saw the music and the effect it had on people. As a sidenote, i had a business idea which was, to get the nerds from berklee actually do the "put music on paper" thing, and us "writing the songs". Because, if MBA majors are imbeciles, then musicians are ten times more stupid. My friend who wound up on the fucking cover of Blue Note ,at the time i met him, did not understand how a record comes into existence. How you go from being a sax player, to your music being sold in the shops.

.. i was also 3 years older than anyone else, had money and weed, and 2 suits i bought in rome, so everyone thought i was in the mafia, and i let them believe it.

But, back on track.

I saw the effect of the music on people. I understood another critical and dangerous concept: "music is just sound".
Likewise, just sound can be music. Humans react to many aspects of a song, and while musical review professionals will tell you how "the interplay of this guy's guitar with that guy's keyboard is sooo magical", sometimes it's just, "how the snare drum is tuned", or "how the bass sounds".
Techno is JUST NOISE, and yet people react to it just as they do to normal, fully orchestrated and sung music. We judge songs subconciously for things that we have no idea we are picking up from a song.

So, i was going to class in the morning, i was going to my crew in the afternoons. We had raves that lasted through the weekend. I was on drugs. I fell in love. I lost 40 pounds and i received a divine vision.

After not finishing college i went to dedicate myself to what i wanted to do, setting up a version of a recording studio that did not rely on 1970s technology, but that would use modern tech such as ProTools, binaural recording, digital tape (there was no direct-to-disk yet), and i went off to another school where i did acoustics, audio room building, and modeling (which is a weird form of synth- recreation of other instruments).

In the end i never got enough stable work to be able to enter the music business .. business. I can't survive on carrying amps for King Crimson for 1 show a month, or occasionally setting up a PA, and 90% of the time just carrying electrical cables. But i did take away some notions from all this, which are as follows.

 

[DigDog]

1. creativity is important, regardless of where it comes from.
2. you can work within a limited frame of reference.
3. success is and is not the only thing that matters.
4. music is a business, a skill, and an art.
5. how are YOU going to make it?

1. creativity is important, regardless of where it comes from.
I can tell you, i have found good stuff in the weirdest of places. I think i have hit peak pain with stuff like Crass' "The Feeding of The 5000" which is fucking atrocious, but it exemplifies what some tribes consider "good". I found bands such as NOFX and Dead Milkmen to be vastly more creative from a lyrical perspective than just about anyone on the charts. I love the barebones instrumentation of Bauhaus - 1 singer, 1 guitar, 1 bass, 1 drum machine. I love that Bolt Thrower music sounds like it's a soundtrack to a non-existing film about constant war. As a musician, you need to expand your knowledge of what can be done, what is not forbidden, of what tools you have at your disposal. Being boring is the worst offence you can commit, it's the one thing that will make me turn off your song.

2. you can work within a limited frame of reference.
There are many great bands out there that do ONE thing. And they try to do that one thing as best as they can, and they try to make sure they do as little as possible of what is not that one thing. This both results in a very marketable product, because there's no fucking misunderstanding as to WHAT this band makes, but also they focus on a particular thing and they tend to become very good at it. The downside is that you may need some time to approach that one thing and figure it out, before you can appreciate it.
Example, Manowar. Take that one image of the macho metal fantasy warrior, and keep hammering at it until it's beyond exagerated. Or listen to Brian Eno's The Drop. Or take for example, Out To Lunch by Eric Dolphy. These professional musicians don't give a fuck if *you*, a newcomer, do not understand what's going on; they have a stable audience who expects progression in one direction only, and they intend to appease them.

3. success is and is not the only thing that matters.
You gotta make people happy when they listen to your music. It really doesn't matter how incredibly skillful and intelligent your music is, if your audience thinks it's shit. Example: Pierrot Lunaire. Again, this is within music only, and often commercial success is the result of business structures which have very little to do with the music creation process. I respect groups i do not like, but do not respect bands that are successful mostly because of their advertisement campaign. It turns out that people are very easily influenced by hearing something over and over. People are also easily convinced that something "is great", regardless if they themselves think it's great.

4. music is a business, a skill, and an art.
You need to keep in mind who you are "selling" you music to. If you have an audience and you massively deviate from the product they initially bought into, you are gonna do badly, despite how YOU feel you've made a major step forward as a creator of pure abstract art. Yes musicians are really stupid, even many successful musicians think themselves to be great artists when in fact they are morons who got lucky.
Music is also a skill so you will be appreciated for being actually good at what you do. And the opposite too, if you are not good, you will not be appreciated, it doesn't really matter if you are now successful, if your next album is shit, your sales will go down, maybe over time, but they will.
And music is an art, therefore you need to be creative. JUST being skilled is not going to be a big selling point. You got extremely talented performers like Guthrie Govan, Paul Gilbert, or the older Steve Vai, or Malmsteen, and these guys are still doing guitar classes and studio work because their record sales suck balls. The songs suck. Buckethead is a phenomenal guitar player but jesus christ, his songs are fucking terrible.

5. how are YOU going to make it?
Considering that to be a paid, successful musician you will need to write good songs with skillfully written parts, manage the brains of the other 3-4 idiots you work with, sign a reasonable distrubition contract, promote yourself, collaborate with hundereds of professionals who have too little time for you, then gig incessantly, manage your finances, and be naturally good looking and decently talented, this is a hard life. You need to try everything you can to have an edge and the best way is to create an image for yourself and for your product that is JUST YOU, that you hold the sole "intellectual property" to because it is immediately and exclusively associated with you. It doesnt matter if it's the insane 30 second squeaking sax solo that John Zorn calls a song, or if you are going on stage with corpse paint on. The worst thing you can do is to "be someone else", a clone band. Unless you are somehow spinning that in your favour. Example, the excellent Tragedy band, a band that makes heavy metal covers of Abba and other "gay rock" bands, while in glitter AND corpse paint. (i saw them live - they were amazing)

 

[sdifox]

 

[DigDog]

ok, time to do the actual thing we came here for.

These are bands, songs or albums i have found to be particularly worthy of note. Me endorsing one doesnt imply endorsing another. A musician may write one great song and then tons of shit.
As i wrote above, this is music that is *interesting*, not necessarily "pleasant".

Classical music

I find classical music to be absolutely shit. This may surprise you, but the problem is that we no longer consume classical music the way that it was originally intended. You would need to be in a specifically-deigned hall, take your time to listen to the whole thing, and it needs to be reproduced live, or at least at a reasonable volume. LOUD classical music is infinitely better than non-loud classical music.
Also, CM is long. This would be ok in a world where music doesnt exist, but in our world of saturation of music, it doesnt work as well. And also also, CM .. means a lot of things. There are parts of that music which are meant as background while the actors perform.
I would recommend some stuff. I won't recommend all that i have enjoyed, because, it's probably the most difficult to enjoy and even though i may have, i wouldn't really ever think "oh boy, i wish i could listen to Bela Bartok' Hungarian Dances".

Instead i would advise to get:
Keith Jarret Plays Mozart. This very unusual double-double CD on ECM has Jarret playing something completely out of his normal style. Spoilers, he kills it.
Also worthy of a single listen may be Glenn Gould's famous variations, but don't stress it. Deutsche Gramophone has some good Bernstein / Beethoven recordings.
Then my second best choice would be stuff like they used to advertise on TV, "Classical Thunder", where they take famous snippets of otherwise deadly-boring 3h operas, but only play the good bits. Example, the 3 minute Aida march, which is awesome, in an opera which is shit.
You could pick up a CD from italian guy Vadrum, who has an album called Classical Drumming. Absolutely blasphemous on one side, absolutely awesome on the other.

I suppose maybe Die Zauberflote stands out as being not completely shit, or rather, the good stuff is far more per-hour-of-shit than your average opera. Maria Callas, THE soprano, never sang it, but there is/was one video on youtube where she's teaching one of her students the Der Holle Rache aria, and *she* sings it .. great video because you can hear Maria explaining that the attitude of the singer reflects in how her voice will come out, and that the singer must match the character for the aria to work. You need to be angry, like the Queen of the Night.

that's it. it's just that classical music has changed into modern music and there is no part of CM that will surprise you, if you've ever owned a radio.
I'll leave out some experimental shit like Schoenberg and *maybe* ill talk about it later.

 

[BurnItDwn]

If bored of the mainstream top 40000 or whatever, why not give a listen to some freejazz?

 

[DigDog]

If bored of the mainstream top 40000 or whatever, why not give a listen to some freejazz?

What a coincidence!

Jazz

.. i'm not entirely sure how to approach this because you can either say, go crazy because everything you touch is good, but the opposite can be true as well.
Let me explain, if i can. You take, idk, a great musician and excellent jazz player like Michael Brecker, who would ever say he's bad. But he's very *normal*, and while he may be a milestone if your life is exclusively jazz, he becomes a footnote if your interest is ALL music.
I would strongly strongly recommend:

Keith Jarrett, many of his works. Not all, but many. One of the greatest pieces of music ever made is The Koln Concert, but also worthy of note from him are Paris Concert and La Scala. This is fucking mindblowing stuff to people who already are at the peak of jazz art, for a common man it may take years to fully appreciate it.
I would also recommend the easy to find on youtube Live At The Village Vanguard of Michel Petrucciani.

John Zorn has both a large amount of experimental music, and of instead very down to earth jazz. Saving the worst for last, i would recommend trying to get a hold of any of the 10 Masada in-studio albums (not the live), as they are truly excellent.

I find Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch to be a very easy way to get into Free Jazz, without having to suffer through, idk, Joe Zawinul soloing acappella for 20 minutes in front of a shocked theatre audience (it happened to me ..).

John Coltrane is obviously a giant. Giant Steps is a work of a complexity that goes beyond normal human understanding. He was brought to fame by Mile$ Davi$ and, while Davi$ is a very popular artist, i reeeeally dont like his music.
I also dislike profundly anything "lite jazz", like Weather Report, Spyro Gyra, anything that mixes jazz with funk, etc simply because jazz is the art of beating each other senseless. No wait.
Because jazz is the art of playing really difficult things, kinda like MMA is the art of beating each other senseless. Right. Imagine MMA but with cushioned gloves, that's how hard funk-jazz sucks.

I would generally stay away from "old" jazz, like Charlie Parker, because A) the audio engineering was terrible, and B) there is modern jazz that represents it better without losing anything. Much better to listen to some Oscar Peterson rather than digiging out dusty old jazz that is essentially the same thing, but worse.
You can still go look for nice stuff in big band, probably just pick up the Whiplash soundtrack and go from there.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Cool, i'm quite familiar with Coltrane and Zorn!

These guys are a bit more jam/rock jazz fusiony ... but I'm quite obsessed with the meanderings of ADHD from Iceland....

Otherwise, really love the works of "The Flying Luttenbachers" (though to be fair, I came across it from Weasel Walter's death metal related projects) .. amazing drummer he is.

Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch sounds very good ... quite accessible, but, interesting none the less ... <-- im listening to this for the first time now ... thanks!


My weird obsession tends to be .. strange jazz fusions ...
I know you mentioned you aren't a fan of Black metal already, but, I simply can never get enough of black metal jazz ... Works like those from Etienne Pelosoff are too few and far between!


Its like, not diluted or watered down, full bore insane black metal and full bore jazz both at once and in their full potency.

I wish for more undiluted music.

 

[DigDog]

Soul and Blues. And more.

.. i dont really know much about soul.
See, while i loved Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, i was young, and didnt have money, and i never wound up being able to dig much into soul.

the same way, i don't know much about blues. I could well recommend THIS masterpiece, and probably the other spectrum - almost difficult calling it blues - but the gist of it is that soul and blues are both *simple* musical styles. The art is in the purity of the tones and sounds, and in the voices. If you are ok with this then there is a ton of valuable music out there worth listening to, and here i can just say - go find whatever you find, it's all good - Elvis, the Temptations, Ray Charles, Percy Sledge, and it's no shame to want to go back to Bing Crosby, all the 40s music.
You can deviate in two major ways:
Doowop - which is a fairly minimalistic approach to soul, and you can follow this "simple acoustic rock base, strong voice leads + choirs" all the way to modern reinterpretations, or
older stuff, like "oldies", where the main appeal is the unusual audio sound of early recording - stuff from as early as the Belle Epoque.
this is stuff that ties in very well with some early Beatles stuff, of which .. covers .. do exist.

I hesitate to put Tina Turner in the "soul" group, because though she was marketed as a "soul" artist in the 60s, she had mostly rock songs. Maybe soft rock, although she doesn't write soft rock melodies. I would recommend the Tina Live! In Europe album, that should scratch your itch.

Soft Rock

Essentially every american artist of the 70s who didn't go hard. Eagles, Grateful Dead, Phish, plus all the Prog Rock stuff like Jethro Tull, early King Crimson, etc.
I find there is a big disparity between things like The Eagles and stuff like King Crimson; i like the Eagles stuff because it's honest rock, instead KC is too stuffy and pretentious. Which is a shame because their first single, 21 Century Skitzoid Man is almost metal and absolutely glorious. They also rapidly went to shit and i would absolutely *not* recommend their later stuff. Adrian Belew is a pretty decent guitar player and even though he is very "soft" when it comes to writing music, some of his stuff is worth a single listen.

Also modern soft rock, including a ton of "chick rock" is fun enough to listen to at least once. Come on, Torn - which is not an original song - by Natalie Imbruglia is a great song, Alannah Miles has Black Velvet, there's Euro chick rock, there's even male-fronted chick rock out there. But you can't die and not listen to The Bangles, or Cindy Lauper, who has more worthwhile singles that i can shake a ATOT link at.

Soft Pop Rock

Here i have to throw my hands up and say, have a go. You should have at least a basic understanding of all the commercial rock market, stuff like Duran Duran, Flock Of Seagulls, Psychedelic Furs .. just stick to the singles. To be clear, i would put a clearly punk bank like Joy Division is this group, they were punk simply because they sounded like shit, if they had a decent producer they would have been pop.


all in all i have to say that this music is pleasant but mostly unoffensive, and i can't think of anything i would strongly recommend. Go ahead and have a trippy 6 months being a deadhead, but then come back to planet earth because there's much better stuff out there.

 

[DigDog]

i need to take a break because i've been arranging multiple medical flights today *while* typing this so my brain is melting.

More to come tomorrow .. and more interesting. At some point i will do "THE LIST" of stuff that i want you to listen to, but i gotta first explain WHY you should listen to it.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Looking forward to tomorrows posts. Maybe some opinions on Ragtime and Boogy Woogy to keep things fresh!

 

[Torn Mind]

Italian.

Music.

Stereotype checks out(Long list of significant musical names from history up until the present).

 

[Muse]

Let's briefly dispel the myth that the 80s were in any way good. They may have had some aspects that are better than the shit we are living in now, but compared to the 70s, this is where the period of commercial exploitation *we are experiencing today* started. We were drowning in plastic, cheap disposeable products, and bad, bad music. I mean, BAD music.
Not only a ton of 80s music was bad, but the way the music was delivered to us was bad as well.

Obviously me being a dirty unwashed Euro, my experience would have been different than that of a Glorious American Superhero, but pretty much your typical 80s radio would blast almost incessantly Duran Duran, Wham, Madonna, and a ton of other music which relied on cheesy synthpop loops, kindergarden-complexity drums, background guitars without solos; as obviously this is a commercial product, what you would have to suffer constantly from the radio wasn't dictated by how good musically it was, but rather from how the band dressed, or how sexy the singer was.

Fortunately enough in the 80s there was still market traction for 70s music, the big commercial giants of the time still having an adult following, which meant we kids were exposed to them; The Rolling Stones, sometimes The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and so on.

Now i personally have never been a fan of the Stones. Their music is veery simple, the audio engineering is terrible, and while many of the songs are decent tunes, i have figured over the years that, sadly, the majority of their success derives from Mick Jagger being sexy. Also Angie and Ruby Tuesday are atrocious.
Led Zeppelin were a bit better and obviously Stairway To Heaven is a big classic.

But again, this is about my journey, and i wasn't a rock fan when i was 9 years old. Here instead is how my world was in 1981.

You talk of the 80's and commercial music, but 1980 is the year I became a college radio DJ at a station with great DJ's, a great and ever expanding record collection and we could and did play anything and everything, no matter how outrageous. We could play commercial stuff too if we wanted, but didn't do that a lot. I LEARNED SO MUCH! We could do that then but the FCC and the political climate of the country has drifted further and further right and nowadays we have to watch what we play. In the early 80's I played tracks like D.O.A.'s "Let's Fuck," "Fuck Me Dead" by the Forgotten Rebels, "Too Drunk to Fuck" by the Dead Kennedys, "Fuck Shit Up" by Jon Spencer, ad infinitum. We were WAY OUT THERE. We still have that stuff in the library and we can play some of it if we blank/bleep or whatever the "bad" words. I used to be able to say whatever on mic too.

I'm still DJing at www.kalx.berkeley.edu, my show is Wednesdays 3-6PM Pacific Time. I just finished listening to my last show "aircheck," i.e. 11/2/22. I always listen to my shows later both to enjoy and continue to improve, advance my programming.

 

[Muse]

Looking forward to tomorrows posts. Maybe some opinions on Ragtime and Boogy Woogy to keep things fresh!

Boogie Woogie rules!!!!!!!!!!

 

[brianmanahan]

Looking forward to tomorrows posts. Maybe some opinions on Ragtime and Boogy Woogy to keep things fresh!

scott joplin is in my top 5 of favorite composers of all time

 

[Muse]

I hesitate to put Tina Turner in the "soul" group, because though she was marketed as a "soul" artist in the 60s, she had mostly rock songs. Maybe soft rock, although she doesn't write soft rock melodies. I would recommend the Tina Live! In Europe album, that should scratch your itch.

Tina Turner's best work, most defining, purest was before she parted with Ike Turner. They played the "chitlin circuit" and were a staple for quite a few years as the Ike and Tina Turner Review. I saw them live, I believe more than once and it was quite an experience... Ike standing still playing lead guitar and Tina and the 3 Ikettes dancing like mad and belting out THE BLUES! Later, they made some records riding the wave of what was popular, i.e. capitalizing beyond their blues roots. Tina took off after parting with Ike but that was all untethered and driven by commercial success subject to the whims of those powerful swirling currents/influences.

The blues transcends the contributions of all of its artists. It's bigger than any of them. The same thing can be said about rock, jazz, country, classical and the avant-garde.

 

[DigDog]

I saw them live, I believe more than once and it was quite an experience... Ike standing still playing lead guitar and Tina and the 3 Ikettes dancing like mad and belting out THE BLUES!

.. you .. saw them live? In the 60s ?? Muse, how old are you?

 

[Torn Mind]

.. you .. saw them live? In the 60s ?? Muse, how old are you?

IIRC, he's 88 or something.

He'd be younger than my dad if my dad was still alive but older than my mom by 16 years.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I read some article that said basically, "Above the age of 30, your body starts trying to kill you". It gave some examples which I don't remember but the logic was that you had 30 years to disperse your seeds, NOW DIE!

But once humans cross the age of 50, various factors like hardened arteries cause their bodies to resist shock AND excitement better which leads to healthier aging and longer life. That's why usually heart attacks under 50 can prove to be fatal but over 50, the incidence of heart attacks may drop.

As always, I can't find that article coz my google fu sucks. Or Google sucks. I'm more leaning towards the latter.