RIP: Good Music Albums

[bento]

There was actually a study recently that said it's a brain chemical thing. After age 25 or so, unless you actively work against it, you get set in your ways and think whatever crap you listened to in high school and college is pretty much "it" for great artists.

I heard about that on All Things Considered (NPR) with Robert Crolich. I like his science reports!

 

[bento]

I'd like to add to the list:

Brian Setzer's Guitar Slinger and the Traveling Wilbury's first album.

I liked the TW's first album also. Out of that I purchased a Roy Orbison GHs and probably was part of the reason I picked up the Tom Petty album, although Jeff Lyne had nothing to do with it.

For me it's not that I'm seeking safe music, I think it's like Felon just wrote - most of the music I hear today is by people who aren't really putting much into it. I'll take the Chili Peppers from 10 years ago over anything they do today.

Maybe we're at the point where "it's all been done" so no ones really willing to color outside the lines....

As for Quiet Riot, they ROCKED in 1984. Big Black Cadillac!

 

[Felon]

Right, but it was ALWAYS like that. Back when there was rock on the radio, in the days you're talking about, some of it was still Quiet Riot.

Yes, there was always pop music. In the 1970's, there was The Monkees. In the 1980's, there was The New Kids on the Block. The difference? Those bands were considered jokes back then, and whatever success they experienced was considered a fluke. They were for little girls.

To be a teenager back then, and to hear that the guys this in this band weren't friends who played in their dad's garage--that they were, in fact, a bunch of strangers who couldn't play any instruements or sing, they just met some formula for attracting girls ("heartthrob","big brotehr type", "bad boy")...man, that's not a real band. It was time to turn off the radio and put some good stuff in the cassette player.

But now the industry has refined the science of creating pop music. They don't need to have agents sitting in seedy clubs looking for garage bands. When was the last time a song with a killer electric guitar solo hit #1 on the billboard charts?

 

[Nightfall]

All hail classic Metallica forever!

Well at least the Metal head.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Yes, there was always pop music. In the 1970's, there was The Monkees.

1 - The Monkees were the 60s - they broke up in 1970;

2 - They Pre-Fab Four were a joke because they were intended to be a joke.

3- Despite all that, they were also one of the top selling bands of the 60s, and outsold the Beatles in 1967. They had 4, count em FOUR no 1 albums that year.

Serious music? Maybe not - but they were never NKotB.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Albums from new bands that I think are pretty awesome:
Scissor Sisters
Wolfmother
The Panic Channel
The first album by The Killers
Marty Casey and the Lovehammers

Not quite so new albums that completely rock:
Foo Fighers: The Colour and the Shape
Radiohead: Kid-A
Pearl Jam: No Code, Binural
Iron Maiden: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Strange New World
Led Zeppelin: Physical Graffiti
U2: All that You Can't Leave Behind
Stone Temple Pilots: Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Giftshop
Paul McCartney and Wings: Band on the Run
Mark Knopfler: Sailing to Philadelphia
Roger Waters: Amused to Death

 

[Nightfall]

Darrin,

See I don't mind you chose some good bands, just questionable albums of theirs. Like U2's. I thought that Joshua Tree was a much better album.

But eh.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I thought that Joshua Tree was a much better album.

Love it, one of my faves.

But then I am more into 80s music. I like The Police and Chicago the best.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Darrin,

See I don't mind you chose some good bands, just questionable albums of theirs. Like U2's. I thought that Joshua Tree was a much better album.

But eh.

Yeah, I realize that Joshua Tree was probably their most commercially successful album, but it isn't the one I enjoy most. I think some of the albums I listed are severely underrated.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'll settle for bands that play their own instruments, write their own songs, and in general have control over their own music.

There's a huge independent music scene. Has been for decades. It meets all your criteria and shares your disdain for the mainstream.

There was a show on TV a few years back called "Popstars" (both a U.S. and British version IIRC). Man, a show like that would've been considered a joke in decades past, as some executive comes in and explains that all the big decisions will be called for them, and the "stars" primary job is just to hit their cues.

That was how most groups were produced in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not a new phenomenon.