Hot Take/ Musical Confession Thread!

gaporter said:
I would like Beach House more if they didn't indirectly spawn a million boring sound alike copycat bands in the next two decades. They, along with the Strokes, helped make 85% of indie rock music homogenous and absolutely reek.

On that note, "Is This It" by the Strokes isn't as good as y'all remember.
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I would like Beach House more if I went to more funerals in Hawaii.
 
sorcerer said:
The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worthy of being saved. In a sense, the Beatles are emblematic of the status of rock criticism as a whole: too much attention paid to commercial phenomena (be it grunge or U2) and too little to the merits of real musicians. If somebody composes the most divine music but no major label picks him up and sells him around the world, a lot of rock critics will ignore him. If a major label picks up a musician who is as stereotyped as can be but launches her or him worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of rock criticism: rock critics are basically publicists working for major labels, distributors and record stores. They simply highlight what product the music business wants to make money from.

Hopefully, one not-too-distant day, there will be a clear demarcation between a great musician like Tim Buckley, who never sold much, and commercial products like the Beatles. At such a time, rock critics will study their rock history and understand which artists accomplished which musical feat, and which simply exploited it commercially.

Beatles' "Aryan" music removed any trace of black music from rock and roll. It replaced syncopated African rhythm with linear Western melody, and lusty negro attitudes with cute white-kid smiles.

Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for good reason. They could never figure out why the Beatles' songs should be regarded more highly than their own. They knew that the Beatles were simply lucky to become a folk phenomenon (thanks to "Beatlemania", which had nothing to do with their musical merits). That phenomenon kept alive interest in their (mediocre) musical endeavours to this day. Nothing else grants the Beatles more attention than, say, the Kinks or the Rolling Stones. There was nothing intrinsically better in the Beatles' music. Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney. The Stones were certainly much more skilled musicians than the 'Fab Four'. And Pete Townshend was a far more accomplished composer, capable of entire operas such as "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia"; not to mention the far greater British musicians who followed them in subsequent decades or the US musicians themselves who initially spearheaded what the Beatles merely later repackaged to the masses.

The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic. If somebody had not invented "Beatlemania" in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time reading these pages about such a trivial band.
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💩
 
Joe Mac said:
I’m mean I’m as much a leftie as anyone on here but: why does that matter?
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It doesn't really other than to say they were trust fund kiddies. That's all i said and @Lee Newman disputed it. So I backed it up. It's really no different than a lot of people in the entertainment industry. They're successful because their parents afforded their lifestyle until they 'made it'.

Even in 1984, before the Beastie Boys broke wide, Diamond and his bandmates wanted for nothing—Gary Winter, who booked them on his public access show in January of that year, describes his first encounter with the group:
"We picked [Diamond and Yauch] up on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights. I had a '69 Buick with a big trunk, and we went up there and looked at each other and went 'woah!' They were quite wealthy and had incredible film equipment in their homes. And they were very pompous, saying things in the car like, 'We shouldn't have to do this show, we're going to be big stars.' I was like 'If you really don't want to do it you don't have to. If this is too much for you. 'No, no, we'll do it.'"
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edit; these are the same rich kids that wanted to call their first album, "Don't Be A Faggot" and unironically wrote, Fight For Your Right To Party .. which they later backpedaled on because they became woke.
 
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chrb98 said:
I'm not really sure if this is a "hot take", but when I'm feeling especially argumentative, I like to propose that grunge, at least in its heyday, was hardly a real genre at all. If you look at the big four of the genre, the similarities had more to do with geography than with the music itself, and the similarities in the music are minute at best: Nirvana was taking way more from Albini-led noise rock than Pearl Jam, and Alice In Chains's best work had far more in common with sludge metal than whatever else was going on in Seattle at the time. The "genre" term was built around superficial similarities that, when reduced to their lowest common denominator and lumped in together, led to post-grunge forming as one of the most unbearable genres in music history. Sure, you had members of the big four collaborating with each other (both before they found fame in their main bands, and while it was happening) in bands like Mad Season, Temple Of The Dog, and Mother Love Bone, but those three have far more in common sonically than the big four, and if we're going to try to argue grunge as an actual cohesive style of music, I'm pointing to those three way before I try to argue that Nirvana, Alice In Chains, and Pearl Jam are all similar enough to be the same subgenre
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Agree on the grunge genre. I feel the same about Glam Rock. The only similarity (or difference from them and other bands of the time not labeled glam) I see between the New York Dolls, Bowie, T. Rex and Alice Cooper is that sometimes they wore makeup and/or sometimes dressed affeminately.
 
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