My favorite, though, was Seven Mary Three. I saw them in Virginia Beach in a bar with no air conditioning, it was miserable but they had some seriously catchy tunes. Less then a year later I was painting a high school in Orlando and the song Cumbersome came on the radio with the announcer stating "can you believe these guys are unsigned???". Not too long after they were all over MTV. Second place goes to seeing No Doubt open for a forgotten band in '91. They were incredible. When I heard I'm Just a Girl for the first time on the radio I knew who it was before being told.
Primus, faith no more, Dee lite all in heavy rotation on mtv.
Umass spring concerts included phish, beastie boys, bostones one year, Dylan and the Wailers (without Bob Marley) the previous.
I worked security for Perl Jam playing the student union ballroom.
Lots of that music holds up really well. Eve6 if my underrated band of choice. Phish had some fun weekend camp out with fish concerts/fests in Maine and Upstate NY.
It ended kind of badly with riots at the Woodstock 99 concert.
I say this as someone who was 5 years old at the turn of the millennium, so this isn’t some sort of nostalgia filter.
I used to have reductivist explanations such as "struggles with music technology" or "too old to rock and roll" but after hearing a lot of late music that I like, despite being unpopular, I think every artist follows a different trajectory.
[1] Except for the polemical Monsanto Years
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer_(album) was one of the few things my evil twin found me that I won't disavow
[3] Answering problems in so many ways: members who passed away were replaced with other illustrious rock and rollers -- I wasn't expecting to hear "Play that funky music white boy" or an instrumental from the Heavy Metal soundtrack but these were great, Foghat even paid a songwriter to make a new song that fit in perfectly with their set.
Then there is Cher, who has had 52 charting singles (Billboard Hot 100) so far, from 1965 to 2023.
The Rolling Stones have charted singles from 1963 (UK) to 2023, so their hits also span 7 decades.
On the songwriting and production side, there is Max Martin, who has written or co-written 27 #1 hits (Billboard Hot 100) so far. The first one was for Britney Spears in 1998, and the most recent two (!) were for Ariana Grande in 2024.
Can't be too upset though given his prolific album releases prior to his Synclavier moment.
I was about to jump to Veruca Salt's defense, but apparently there was a band called Seether? I must have missed that.
That line needs to go in a song
Local H, "Eddie Vedder", 1996
I prefer unsigned for guys that don't go negative on me.
Another early one-hit-wonder is from Deee-Lite, "Groove is in the Heart" (1990). I still watch the video from time to time...the woman can dance like no other.
But in modern times, now you can have smells link or lock memories in...
So for you as a line cook - you have a bunch of experiences with these songs linked to whatever you were smelling at the time which then locked the 'nostalgia' into memory - so now in the Reverse RAG situation, you hear a song and your memories of those times are really strong.
And to quote the magnanimous Steven Wright:
"Memories... they're really the only thing you have to think back on"
At one point, while I was talking to him, Stairway to Heaven started playing, and he told me that every time he hears that song he remembers the taste and smell of a cheeseburger he had when he visited the US years before.
Now, every time I hear that song, I think of cheeseburgers.
It's sad that we no longer have soundtracks for eras the way we did. Look at movies set during various decades; you know the time period from the songs being played.
After 2000 or so... that's over. Even if you play period-correct music, it will not evoke memories across anywhere near as much of the audience as it would have for previous generations.
Back in the day, on a road trip with friends, you could have an assorted-music tape where people would know and rock out to every song. Today not so much. Or... you'd be playing the same tape from the '80s to 20-somethings now and they'd still know the songs.
There's a reason '80s music enjoyed such a resurgence among young people: Much of today's popular music sucks ass. It sucks both from a creative standpoint (lacking even legitimate song structure, like melody, chorus, & bridge) and from a technical standpoint (being dynamically compressed into a wall of noise).
These days I listen to both old and new music. And also some music that is older than me. My motto is that if it was worth listening to fifty years ago it probably still is. And if it was crap then, it probably still is.
There are a lot of new/young artists making music in the style of pretty much any style you can name happened in the past 60 years or so. I need to get over the "these kids are less than half my age" thing of course. But some of that stuff is pretty good. There's an enormous long tail of relatively obscure artists that simply did not exist in the eighties/nineties. Worth exploring.
Pop charts stopped mattering a long time ago. People don't buy lps, cds or singles. And those don't get played on the radio based on sales statistics. There's still some artists that get played on the radio obviously. But radio is for old people. Most kids have headphones connected to their phones, not a radio. They'll listen to whatever they want, whenever they want.
I went to see Kneecap yesterday (Irish mockumentary about a real band doing Irish Rap). Pretty decent music and fantastic movie. Obviously inspired by eighties/nineties hip hop.
Legitimate song structure = melody + chorus + bridge
Is there something about such a song structure that is somewhat universal or is it just so established in our culture that any song that doesn't have those elements sounds... impoverished? Are there other, alternative song structures that tend to produce satisfying music?
I'm not being dismissive; I'm legitimately interested in exploring this idea.
For some reason it is very appealing to the listener, and I think it's a combination of sonic qualities but also relief from repetition. And this is what's lacking from a lot of today's music.
Today we have what amounts to a loop where someone presses Play, mumbles over it for a period of time, and then presses Stop. There's no payoff.
I think one of first times I thought about this was listening to "Crazy in Love" by Beyonce. It has this big build-up that you think is going to go into a satisfying chorus... but it goes nowhere. Nowhere, for the whole song.
And that song is fairly dynamic by today's standards.
If you’re interested in stuff like this, YouTube has approachable music theorists making good content. 12Tone is quite good.
Is it cheating to not use pop in the examples?
Takes a lot of effort to break the mold though!
"Badger Badger Badger" (and their kin) is likely to evoke a particular era in your memory.
In a similar way "Uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh" may possibly evoke a more recent era.
I feel like as I get older, it takes me more time to find new music I enjoy. Perhaps it's oversaturation, or the way that apps and media are set to display those who pay the most money, rather than those most talented or unique. I mostly listen to heavier music, but enjoy quite a few different genres. I tend towards music that is "progressive", or brings something uncommon or new to the style. I don't think there's anything wrong with people liking current pop music, but I think people are missing out if they restrict themselves to it.
In the 90s a lot of movies had accompanying songs that would go into the charts. I remember Titanic, Bond movies, Godzilla, gangsters paradise, some Bryan Adam’s and Aerosmith songs.
I don’t know if that is still the case today as I listen mostly listen my own Spotify playlists or ”classic” radio stations (meaning 90s/00s music nowadays).
I can imagine it was an effect of the commercial music industry at the time and these songs were heavily subsidized by the movie’s marketing budget to get into the charts.
The stuff I see nowadays is very different from what you see, despite using the same platforms. It’s sad, because it’s not even just internet, it’s all types of media. No more Game of Thrones discussions at work on Mondays, because almost everyone watching it. No more songs that almost everyone knows. And the list keeps going on.
Basically algorithms catering to every taste, rather than some humans being the curators. I understand the negative sides of it as well, but talking to my nephews… things don’t look that fun even for them.
And even that was what, 10 years ago?
Before, it looked very off why people in the future only hear that music. Now it look perfectly accurate!
(Also, the joke in my home is that not good music was ever created after 2010-ish so that is why everyone in the future is like that :) )
This tells the story of a vaudeville comedy act, a husband and wife team, booked on the Ed Sullivan show, on the day that The Beatles made their American debut. They were completely blindsided. They didn't have any comprehension of what was happening until they were in the middle of it. They didn't really get it until later. The story includes an encounter with John, surreal for the juxtaposition of the ordinariness of the interaction, and the symbolism -- these two completely different eras encountering one another without any awareness of what was represented.
To push the point too far maybe, what was changing was the very sound of life in the US. You hear these old timey comedians, and they have the rapid fire delivery, the tone of voice, the corny jokes, the style that characterized vaudeville and TV sitcoms. And then you have The Beatles, ushering in something brand new (to the vast majority of Americans). I think it's the same sort of difference you see in movies: Before the mid or late 60s you had this very stylized and artificial way of speaking, often with this weird and phony "mid-Atlantic" accent. And then you had much more realistic movies and ways of speaking, e.g. anything from that era with Jack Nicholson.
Also, the general style of speaking in those movies wasn't any more artificial than the older style, it was just differently artificial. The older style was focused on portraying characters' motivations and feelings very clearly. The newer style is called realism, but still isn't actually how people speak, because the dialogue is still just dialogue (purely functional plot-progressing conversation), not realistic conversation. That's part of why Tarantino's movies were so revolutionary: much of the dialogue was much closer to how people actually speak, and that this was 40 years after 'realism' seems to have escaped the notice of many people. In reality, I think 'realism' has mostly been interpreted by actors as 'mumbling' to such an extent that I have to turn the volume up or put subtitles on to understand what the characters are even saying.
I'm not discounting at all that it was a revolutionary time, but the idea that the old style was basically fake and the new style was basically real is quite wrong. They're both quite fake. The new style is so ingrained that it has actually trained people into talking like that, though. The way Americans speak in real life sounds to me like they've been brought up watching movies - and I mean almost all of them. In older recordings they do not sound like this, they sound 'normal' enough (although still with strong accents).
I think of it like fashion. Outfits get slim/tight then the next generation comes and fits get roomy/baggy, then then next generation comes and they'll get slim/tight. There is a swaying back and forth from formal to relaxed, even in politics. Like a Boris Johnson in the UK.
I think it can just feel like "the big change" when our own generational cohort makes the break. And baby boomers have been dominating the conversation for so long, that the particular change that happened in the 60s is banged on about so much. In fact, in the article the author themselves tries to downplay the change that happened in the 90s as a change in how billboard ranked artists. I think that is actually partially just a desire to see the 60s as exceptional or legendary in a way that plays into boomer nostalgia.
1) The stuff that happens in your teens is special because of your age. That may well explain why I think The Beatles (and the music of that era) was so special.
2) The music from the 60s really was special. There was certainly rock and roll well before The Beatles, and it grew out of black music, and blues, and can be viewed as nothing really new. And yet: it really was a significant break from the past in the global adulation for their music and the quantum change in tastes that they ushered in.
Not to minimize Nirvana (whose music I love) or metal, or anything else, but the musical examples that you cite were simply not as globally shattering as The Beatles. They just weren't. They were variations within the world of rock and roll. The only comparable change I can think of is the rise of rap music. Which I cannot stand, but I recognize how it changed the world in the same way that The Beatles did.
Like technological and social disruptions, I think usually the difference is that the new thing has a different agenda than the old - different goals. As a result, the old can't make sense of it - by their goals the new thing is obviously worthless. To the market-dominating Blackberry phone maker, obviously their phone was far superior for email, so why would someone in business buy an iPhone?
My working theory is that the new thing 60s rock'n'roll aimed for was personal expression. Vaudeville acts weren't expressing things about themselves (very much - it's always a matter of degree). There was no 'Let It Be' moment, or expressions of aggression or deeply felt love. Vaudeville and a lot of the pre-Beatles pop music was (very generally) entertainment, not so much art. Look at jazz too, going from Ellington to Coltrane. Look at the rise of folk music. 50's crooners mocked the singing voices of rockers because that was their goal - an aesthetically beautiful voice; they perhaps didn't see the point of rockers was personal expression.
Again, that's speaking very generally. There were many beautiful voices post-Beatles, and there was self-expression before them, and the dividing line isn't perfect.
Now it seems to me that we are leaving behind personal expression. If true, I think partly it's an outcome of culture wars: it's associated with liberalism, so many reject it; and real personal expression can be uncomfortable and non-conformist, and that's divisive and provocative to many. But I am building speculation on speculation.
Are we? Can you expand on that?
Miles Davis Kind of Blue was one of the best selling albums of the 50s. The #1 best seller though of the decade is the Elvis Christmas album.
By the 60s, Sinatra and the Rat pack were considered lame. That was your dad's music. The Beatles are the Beatles because of the size of the baby boomer generation and that someone had to be the stars of the new generation. As great as the Beatles are, the marketing of the Beatles albums was just as great.
But I just assumed that's the way people spoke in older times, just like they dressed differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
> According to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".
There's literally no year that isn't a rabbit hole of very interesting hits, progressions where one thing is going out of fashion while another thing gains attention as it moves from edge to center, marginalia, you name it when it comes to music.
I suppose there are examples of like late '92 when grunge blew up beyond reasonable proportions where one could point to a specific time range and place for a sea change like Nirvana and fellow indy rockers triggering Glam Rock/Hair Metal's decline. But those kinds of events are less frequent or at least less consequential and that probably has to do with the average josephine liking a wide range of musical genres, which was very much not the case until maybe the mid to late 90s.
Seriously, folks' musical tastes were monosyllabic af
Shouts to giving Franky Valli his props. One of my favorites of his songs is a disco groover called "Who Loves You".
Interestingly there was a bit of a resurgence in 50's style and culture during the mid '70s, probably due to the movie Grease's and lead Travolta's success
Such a variety of sounds which somehow all seemed somewhat original.
You had the new wave thing in pop music while the hard rock had resurged with Van Halen/Boston/AC-DC/ZZ Top/etc. Early metal (Metallica). Early hip-hop (Sugar Hill Gang/Houdini). Bands which had emerged in the late 60s like the Rolling Stones/The Who/Pink Floyd still putting out quality.
Loveless, 4 November 1991
Lazer Guided Melodies, 30 March 1992
Nothing like them since, my ears are open, I'm still waiting. Getting old here.
I remember also being blown away by Bucketheadland so much that every other album I put on sounded simple and linear. And we're only a couple of years away from the whole Bristol-led Downbeat sound (Portishead, etc) and Notorious B.I.G's debut.
I'm there with you on age. It gets harder to catch my attention because the differences between what I hear now vs what I heard then are so slight. So new stuff I like, eg. Lost Under Heaven, is a few measures of familar combined exactly correctly with a few measures of tastily strange; perhaps not "brand-new" strange but strange in stylistic juxtaposition(s) I suppose?
But it was a fairly slow burn .. rock didn't really resurge into the national consciousness until about 79 ... airwaves were dominated by disco.
I think Disco Demolition Night (summer of 79) had something to do with it.
Listened to "the song that some claim made Dylan go electric and pushed rock music into a completely new direction." I always liked it.
It's profoundly odd that "The Brits," mostly working class youngsters had this impact on american culture, by introducing and merging american themes and styles to americans... by mixing them with other american art memes.
Infusing rock n roll with smokey blues vibes. Putting Beat Generation themes into pop. Three years in and you have american musicians mimicking Liverpool lads doing impressions of an american singers' accent.
...and somehow it's not cheesy. That song sounds like authentic americana... at least to me.
If you listen to the Beatles back catalog today it's pretty bad. Motown still sounds fresh.
Yes, there's plenty of dross, particularly on the early albums, but, say, "Strawberry Fields Forever", or "We Can Work It Out", or "Yesterday"? Superb.
I’d argue nothing successful in rock came out over the next 20 years without somehow relating to nevermind.
Metallica, Metallica Pearl Jam, Ten Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion I Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion II Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger Nirvana, Nevermind
Nirvana's impact on the actual sound of music I would say is really not that much.
It is really Sonic Youth that had a much bigger impact on the 90s sound than anyone. Including taking Nirvana on tour as an opener when they were complete nobodies.
Even punk music barely felt the influence of Nirvana. I think you are confusing sound with MTV marketing.
It is actually curious how much Nirvana and The Beatles are not reflected sound wise in modern music.
Nothing close to say the way Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has influenced modern rap.
It’s not a referendum on their music at all, which I generally liked in the 90s and am generally tired of now. It’s about the economic success and the knock on effect that had on music production.
You'll have to define what constitutes "rock", and what you mean by "came out" - just any "rock" album, or only new "rock" bands. You also have to define what "successful" means, to have this argument.
Let's also not forget that in the late 1990's the world of music changed with Napster and music sharing, so "successful" in the 20 years after Nevermind came out may not be the same kind of "successful" in 1990 since people were often downloading music.
I personally had no interest in Nirvana, but enjoyed "rock" music from many other bands. Cobain just came off as too depressing a figure, even when he was alive - and so I just didn't connect with their music at all.
George Harrison tried his best at producing, but he just didn’t have it. Doris Troy’s album under Apple has very little soul.
Too bad John and Paul didn’t care enough to consistently produce other artists.
I guess a simplistic relevance survival rate change analysis akin to top 40 hits before/after a shock must've been done for companies or individual careers where the shock is say a new general purpose technology or shift including the one happening now around LLMs. I'm having deja vu while commenting, there is a non-superficial literature on just this focused on adaptation and adoption as important factors if I recall correctly; I'd need to ask a LLM for specifics or rack my brain for longer, the piece that immediately comes to mind is at a different looking at a different scale, Jeff Ding's writing on such shocks and geopolitical power. Anyway, I guess such a literature focused on entertainer survival given shocks must exist, and might help explore which ones matter; the Beatles or any specific megastar might just be the froth; I presume that's the case.
Based on the title I was expecting a different question (entirely due to my presumptions such as mentioned above, nothing wrong with the title or article), namely how many star careers does a megastar career end or preclude, and on down to the impact of stars (mega to small) on amateurs. It's possible that stars are positive sum when considering consumers or even that they are positive sum for smaller producers (increasing overall demand, including demand to create as an amateur) though I'm skeptical of the latter given attention is finite.
I'm way more sanguine about the positive sumness of megastars where demand is insatiable (e.g., not limited by attention) such as for non-attention-based (e.g., media/entertainment) technology, but I'd love to read serious analysis of this either way.
I would argue that it was GREAT for artists and the reason there are so many one hit wonders is that those times opened up and created public appetite for new music. Those artists (who he argues would have had more than one hit) I argue would not have had ANY hits as they never would have gotten airplay to begin with.
How many artists did the Beatles kill? Maybe a better question is – How many artists did the Beatles help produce?
Even more, googling, I get about 100k working musicians currently in the US. It should be obvious that most of those aren't hit-producers for major labels and things likely weren't that different back in the 1960s. Back in the day, they were live performers, teachers and performers in radio-orchestras. Presently they are live performers, teachers, session musicians , and composers-of-themes for movie, TV-shows, commercials, video games and so-forth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard
> He holds the record, with Presley, as the only act to make the UK singles charts in all of its first six decades (1950s–2000s). He has achieved 14 UK No. 1 singles, and is the only singer to have had a No. 1 single in the UK in each of five consecutive decades
Had a family friend who was in a kicking oompah bad in the early 60s.
They thought there was going to be a surge in this market, and were getting some pretty big gigs.
The saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show and promptly quit for different careers.
Not if you were living through the 1950s nostalgia revival which was going strong at the time and lingered through the early 80s. It was on TV (Happy Days and Sha Na Na), the movies (American Graffiti, Porky's) and a bunch of retro musical acts (The Stray Cats) or retro projects by established artists returning to the music they grew up with (Robert Plant's The Honeydrippers).
The sound of rock music undoubtedly changed between the beginning and middle of the 1960s. But by looking at the Billboard Hot 100, we can see if that change in sound was being made by a fleet of new groups or a bunch of older acts adapting.
This methodology leaves out a lot of bands, and not just the long tail that never cracked the top 100. There are MANY locally popular bands that never broke out nationally and therefore never made it to the Billboard Hot 100. There were also bands doing types of music that never charted particularly well yet were influential in their own way. For a sampling of this, go to the MIT/WMBR archives (https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/arch) and listen to "Lost and Found" which highlights a lot of these types of music. Or search for things like "60s garage bands" "60s funk" etc. on YouTube.
The author also mentions the 1991 change to the Billboard methodology which really calls into doubt a some of the "hits" that came before. In a nutshell, music charts in the United States were based on a sample of self-reported sales from record store managers. You can imagine the bias and BS that went on with those numbers.
Then there was manipulation further up the funnel. Record companies weren't supposed to give outright cash payments to DJs (wink wink) but there were many other ways of exerting influence on influential media gatekeepers.
Some of the influence was obvious. Picking artists that had the "right" look. Promoting "safe" artists. Forcing hitmaker producers on new and established artists. Selective access and backroom benefits for powerful DJs and music journalists and other influencers. Ignoring, sidelining, or co-opting trends bubbling up from the underground, from proto-metal in the late 60s to punk in the 70s to rap in the 80s.
As soon as Soundscan was implemented, there was an immediate realignment, with rap and grunge and techno and country storming the pop charts.
Background on the 1991 Soundscan change is here, if anyone is interested: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/billboard-soundscan/
;-)
