This is where my brain goes to, especially when confronted with crappy modern music. When were peak years in music? I've narrowed it down a bit to these two based on how many great albums were released year by year and personal preference mixed in, so you guys don't have to wonder anymore. So, drumroll please.
This thread has lead me to looking up a lot of odd musical trivia. I just read that Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell album sold 43 million copies. Is there anybody here old enough that they can explain why the people of 1977 thought a sweaty 300 pound man wearing a puffy shirt and suspenders singing parody versions of Springsteen's Thunder Road was the hottest thing on the planet?
43 MILLION copies!
I just don't get it. You can't blame everything on rampant cocaine abuse and the Nixon administration. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Mennonite:
This thread has lead me to looking up a lot of odd musical trivia. I just read that Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell album sold 43 million copies. Is there anybody here old enough that they can explain why the people of 1977 thought a sweaty 300 pound man wearing a puffy shirt and suspenders singing parody versions of Springsteen's Thunder Road was the hottest thing on the planet?
43 MILLION copies!
I just don't get it. You can't blame everything on rampant cocaine abuse and the Nixon administration.
That's such a great album, from end to end. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Mennonite:
This thread has lead me to looking up a lot of odd musical trivia. I just read that Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell album sold 43 million copies. Is there anybody here old enough that they can explain why the people of 1977 thought a sweaty 300 pound man wearing a puffy shirt and suspenders singing parody versions of Springsteen's Thunder Road was the hottest thing on the planet?
43 MILLION copies!
I just don't get it. You can't blame everything on rampant cocaine abuse and the Nixon administration.
Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud:
1980 was also a watershed year for me as well. I'd pretty much lost all interest in pop and rock music from around 1977 to early 1980 and instead, focused on Prog Rock, Jazz Fusion, Jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery and George Benson and Steely Dan.
That all changed once I heard Heaven & Hell, Blizzard of Ozz, The Scorpions Animal Magnetism, Pat Traver's Smokin'Whisky & Drinking Cocaine and Van Halen's Women and Children First.
All of the sudden, all was right with the world.
If you are ever feeling the urge to circle back around I really enjoy Geoff Farina's band Karate. Their album "Some boots" as this jazz\rock fusion college radio feel that is fantastic.
Originally Posted by htismaqe:
Yep. Music isn't the monolithic medium it used to be. There's literally something for everybody, every tiny little niche can be indulged by someone.
It's just that you have to go search according to your tastes because there's so much of it, it would never find it's way to mass distribution.
Spotify is the most incredible thing I can just jump through the looking glass of all these groups that influenced other groups or something that has an interesting sound and it just never ends. [Reply]
Originally Posted by GayFrogs:
As for grunge being dead in '94, I never understood that.
Kurt was murdered/"suicided".
Kirsten Pfaff was murdered/"overdosed".
Layne began his reclusive descent into hell, addiction, and death in earnest.
Billy shaved his head, declared that "Grunge [is] dead" and started turning the Pumpkins into his post-alternative psuedo-industrial band.
Candlebox.
Bush.
By 1996 :
Soundgarden was breaking up.
Candlebox still existed.
So did Bush.
Layne was already losing teeth (saw his last show ever, opening for KISS at Kemper)
Courtney Love had "cleaned up" and went Hollywood for People vs Larry Flynt...
But yeah, "grunge" wasn't ever a musical genre to me. It was totally a marketing ploy.
Jane's Addiction were an art-rock band.
Pearl Jam were always an arena rock band and had more in common with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and SRV than they did with Alice In Chains or Nirvana.
Alice In Chains was a metal band.
Nirvana was a punk band.
Stone Temple Pilots was like crossing Black Sabbath with Bowie and the Beatles, and really had absolutely nothing to do with Seattle, "grunge" fashion, or any of that shit other than their first album came out in 1992 so they got lumped in with all the other bands as "grunge" - just because it was convenient. It was category the industries could use to target a demographic.
When they had "Grungewear" at the GAP at the mall, when they had $49.99 flannel shirts and $120 pairs of Doc Martens with a Nirvana shirt on the mannequin in 1994...THAT is definitely when "grunge" died for me.
Marilyn Manson's first album came out that year, Floyd's Division Bell, NIN's Downward Spiral, Far Beyond Driven by Pantera, Tom Petty's Wildflowers, Sleeps With Angels by Neil Young, Tical by Method Man, Clapton From the Cradle, Portishead's Dummy, Beastie Boys Ill Communication Snoop's Doggystyle..and so did the Stones Voodoo Lounge, along with Tesla's Bust A Nut and the Black Crowes Amorica so I had PLENTY of great music in my life that summer and it had nothing to do with "grunge" or Seattle.
Even the so-called "alterna-grunge" bands were putting out albums that were showing a scope and artistry far beyond the limitations that are ascribed to "grunge" and all it implies :
Vitalogy is Pearl Jam's most bracing work. It's not their best songs (Yield) or best sounding (No Code) or most iconic (some would say Ten, I say VS...) but Vitalogy is their most daring, most bracing...
Purple was a huge leap forward for STP - and yet, this album sounds it could have been recorded 20 years before it was...
Superunkown is a veritable masterpiece of modern music. It's on the level of the greatest albums ever recorded - calling it "grunge" isn't accurate. At different turns melodic, metallic, and even recalling elements of Stockhausen's theory of musiqué concreté at times...they all were leaving the "grunge" moniker behind, like a fart in the wind.
Nice to see a strong consensus of mainly early 90's and 70's. I went to HS in the early 90's and the music was pretty incredible but I would have to vote 70's hands down. I mean Stones/Beatles/Zep/George Clinton in their prime (my opinion, miss me with that 50/60s crap and pass the White album please) is tough to argue against. [Reply]
