what's the most critically acclaimed band...

[jon abbey]

I always thought Daydream Nation was a concept album based upon William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy. I can't prove this, but I remember them stating this in an interview in _Guitar Player_ magazine around the time the album came out.

30 seconds on Google would tell you that this refers to the track "The Sprawl", not the entire record.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daydream_Nation

[Wombatz]

I still have to hear a drummer, in that kind of "dull group", who can offer that sensitive jazzy touch like Steve Shelley.

Funny, because when I heard Sonic Nurse accidentally long after it came out, I was surprised how much I liked everything, except the drummer. His playing is really on the plodding side of textbook.
My personal SY peak was Sister.
When I was 15 it was either The Cure or The Smiths. We all didn't understand English that well, so lyrics didn't hurt. Musically I was on the Cure team, the man plays amazing rhythm guitar and piano, that's a serious skill.
It's funny how wrong the canon always is (gotta have to do with rating systems which cancel the stuff out that provokes strong love/hate reactions).

[negative potential]

It's funny how wrong the canon always is (gotta have to do with rating systems which cancel the stuff out that provokes strong love/hate reactions).

I think in the information society, the very idea of a canon is rapidly become obsolete.

Or rather, maybe for the period 1917-1992 or so the idea of a "canon" for recorded music still makes some sense, because the means for producing and disseminating and broadcasting music are still limited to relatively few hands. The product of the major recording companies, and a handful of influential independents, constitutes the shared experience of listeners.

I read an interview with somebody recently, I can't remember who, who actually expressed nostalgia for the idea of a "monoculture", because it offers sort of a standard template to either adopt or rebel against. Thus if you're a punk in the 1970s, it doesn't matter if you love the Beatles or hate the Beatles, you've been hearing the Beatles since your childhood or adolescence, it connects you to everyone else of your generation (at least in affluent Western societies), and you can either go with it or reject, but it constitutes the context that you emerged from.

But these days, the monoculture is rapidly dissolving. The Internet disseminates tastes and also allows them to fracture into a thousand little microtastes. It's quite impossible to keep up with everything out there. People growing up now won't necessarily have overlapping tastes in any meaningful sense. And this applies not only to contemporary music, but also music of the past as well. It's probably much easier now for somebody to hear an out-of-print FMP record or a lost '77 punk single then it was any time in the past 30 years.

I regard this on the whole as a positive development, at least for music lovers. But it also means music will no longer have the broader cultural impact that it once had, yielding generation-spanning youth cultures and the like. Music will increasingly become a matter of mere private taste.

[Gaendaal]

I really dont like Robert Smith's voice, and I think the arrangements are really banal and muddy, plodding. Not to mention the lyrics are stupid much of the time. I was just listening to UCSC radio the other day and they were playing a live set of early Cure: Killing an Arab, Boys Dont Cry, and a bunch of others, and I didnt like any of it. Their later stuff like Pictures of You and all that crap is really really unlistenable to me, I heard a lot of it in HS, so there's that too. Obviously imo, and I dont mean to demean them if you like them Gaendaal.

Heh, I don't much care what people think to music I like so don't worry. I understand your points and, to be honest, agree with a few of them. Doesn't stop me liking them, though...

[Wombatz]

As long as there's a desire to write history, I fear a canon will always be firmly in place, because of the need to create storylines. I don't really mind, since it allows me a healthy adolescent pride in the obscurity of some of my tastes.

In my few fields of mild expertise, there's always an established canon, and it's always a joke. Especially art history is pure myth mongering, it makes no sense at all. In music it actually looks much better since peer evaluation factors in within most genres, but still.

[will]

I put Sonic Youth in the "might not like so much had I not heard them as a teenager" pretty much for the reasons listed in the last page or so. They definitely sounded more radical to me when I was 15 then they do now, and I mostly like their records from the last decade for the nicely crafted pop songs than for their more out explorations.
As to Bob Marley, I've heard a track or two from the Skatelites on which he sang early in his career, it was nice, but not remarkable to my ears. I think that I'd probably like his work as a bandleader more had I not been involuntarily exposed to it so many times.

Interesting that so few classical composers have made any lists.

edit / late addition: nostalgia for the monoculture - I think that it may well be that most people are still enjoying a widely distributed popular culture (Avatar? [country name] Idol?), it's just that there's more marginal stuff available to anyone who takes the time to look.

[negative potential]

edit / late addition: nostalgia for the monoculture - I think that it may well be that most people are still enjoying a widely distributed popular culture (Avatar? [country name] Idol?), it's just that there's more marginal stuff available to anyone who takes the time to look.

But contemporary enjoyment of widely distributed popular culture already has the ironic distance built in.

In 50s and 60s America, everybody tunes into Ed Sullivan to find out what's happening in music. It's a primary source for constructing tastes.

From my experience with the "American Idol" here in Germany, "Deutschland sucht den Superstar", nobody actually watches this stuff in an unmediated or unironic way, if they watch it all. Even when they talk about "our" candidate for the Eurovision song contest, they discuss it in the mercenary terms of whether or not "Germany" can successfully sell its "product" to the rest of Europe.

In his book _Future Now_, Bruce Sterling discusses how contemporary political campaigns are discussed in the mainstream. On CNN and Fox News and MSNBC, nobody takes politicians at their word. Rather, everybody discusses politicians like they're discussing the performance of sports players, i.e. is the politician "staying on message", will his new statement on abortion "get over" with the "American people". But the funny thing is, nobody actually is the American people. Instead, the American people is some hypothetical mythical entity to which we address our statements (I really had to fight the temptation here to bring in a half-educated Lacan reference). So all of us are actually totally shrewd, cynical, perceptive critics, so we don't say is this politician right or wrong, but rather we ask whether his statements can convince some hypothetical "American people" who do take things at face value.

And I think it's the same thing with contemporary pop culture. Nobody actually takes stuff like American Idol or DSDS or whatever at face value, but we all sort of assume that there is an audience out there that does, and discuss it accordingly, and then all go home to listen to Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Trio Sowari or whatever.

[bedouin]

I think in the information society, the very idea of a canon is rapidly become obsolete.

Or rather, maybe for the period 1917-1992 or so the idea of a "canon" for recorded music still makes some sense, because the means for producing and disseminating and broadcasting music are still limited to relatively few hands. The product of the major recording companies, and a handful of influential independents, constitutes the shared experience of listeners.

I read an interview with somebody recently, I can't remember who, who actually expressed nostalgia for the idea of a "monoculture", because it offers sort of a standard template to either adopt or rebel against. Thus if you're a punk in the 1970s, it doesn't matter if you love the Beatles or hate the Beatles, you've been hearing the Beatles since your childhood or adolescence, it connects you to everyone else of your generation (at least in affluent Western societies), and you can either go with it or reject, but it constitutes the context that you emerged from.

But these days, the monoculture is rapidly dissolving. The Internet disseminates tastes and also allows them to fracture into a thousand little microtastes. It's quite impossible to keep up with everything out there. People growing up now won't necessarily have overlapping tastes in any meaningful sense. And this applies not only to contemporary music, but also music of the past as well. It's probably much easier now for somebody to hear an out-of-print FMP record or a lost '77 punk single then it was any time in the past 30 years.

I regard this on the whole as a positive development, at least for music lovers. But it also means music will no longer have the broader cultural impact that it once had, yielding generation-spanning youth cultures and the like. Music will increasingly become a matter of mere private taste.

i would like to agree to this, but i fear that (a) the handful of influential independents is still there, only with a different name [e.g. iTunes/Apple], (b) the unsolicited amount of crap that makes it public only discourages someone mildly interested in music.

As for "thousand little microtastes", personally I see no difference between death metal, black metal, satanic metal, etc metal. for me it's mostly clever marketing.

[Gaendaal]

And I think it's the same thing with contemporary pop culture. Nobody actually takes stuff like American Idol or DSDS or whatever at face value, but we all sort of assume that there is an audience out there that does, and discuss it accordingly, and then all go home to listen to Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Trio Sowari or whatever.

Hoo boy... I take it that you've never worked in a call centre? That seems to be where the 'mythical audience' resides and, I assure, that shit is serious business there.

On topic, I never understood why The Clash are so well-liked.

As for "thousand little microtastes", personally I see no difference between death metal, black metal, satanic metal, etc metal. for me it's mostly clever marketing.

*Insert outrage here*



(BTW, first I've heard of 'satanic metal' as a genre)

[negative potential]

Hoo boy... I take it that you've never worked in a call centre? That seems to be where the 'mythical audience' resides and, I assure, that shit is serious business there.

I worked in a call center for a number of years. I never got the impression that my co-workers constituted the mythical audience. Or do you mean the callers?

On topic, I never understood why The Clash are so well-liked.

I think there are two distinct groups that praise the Clash, the punks and retro-punks who have made the first self-titled album part of the official punk canon, and then the classic rock types who highly regard "London Calling" as an example of punk, even though the whole punk thing was already over by then.

London Calling: the "punk" record that even Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith fans enjoy.

[bedouin]

(BTW, first I've heard of 'satanic metal' as a genre)

it rhymes with death and black

edit:
searching google....

voila:
http://www.squidoo.com/satanicmusic

[Gaendaal]

I worked in a call center for a number of years. I never got the impression that my co-workers constituted the mythical audience. Or do you mean the callers?

Both.

I've had to extricate myself from hugely involved and passionate conversations about pretty much any of the reality shows you'd care to name (Strictly Come Dancing is a big one here). There's no ironic distance whatsoever.

Maybe the Scottish call centre employee is a less rarified breed?

[will]

The Ed Sullivan show was hardly the only channel for hearing music in the postwar era, and the barriers to inclusion on the show helped structure a diverse and reflexive music market. Most cities in the 1950's had jazz clubs, which featured music that certainly wasn't going to be on tv. The difference between then and now might be the assumption of irony versus the experience of difference (in the US at the time, African-Americans still had limited civil rights, so cultural spaces had more formal distinction). The Ed Sullivan show was the spearhead of a proposition that there was a mainstream in the US, something that could relegate music made by African Americans and poor rural whites to the margins of society. The tripartite division of recorded music into "popular", "race" and "hillbilly" was a model for as much as a model of a mainstream.
I wouldn't want to make the argument that there aren't now more channels for experiencing culture-works nowadays, and that they allow for unpredictable connections between people, places, and practices; clearly, we live in a more diversely connected world before, but this doesn't mean that there isn't widely circulated material of varying quality, nor does it mean that there was total homogeneity in the past.
And as to people having detached criticism of media nowadays, I see your point and raise you: televised FIFA tournaments. Unabashed enthusiasm.

[frozen reeds]

Maybe the Scottish call centre employee is a less rarified breed?

I've worked in a Scottish call centre. Once I saw a bearded co-worker reading Chomsky. Looked pretty mythical to me.

[jon abbey]

if you move past the sixties, I don't think anyone was creating 'canons' in the seventies and eighties who was nearly as influential as Pitchfork is now. maybe Rolling Stone magazine? I kind of doubt it, but this isn't something I pay a huge amount of attention to.

[jon abbey]

so, for instance, it took years and years for bands like the Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers, Big Star to become part of the 'canon'. even if the 'canon' isn't nearly as unified these days, those bands would never languish in obscurity like they did.

[leroysghost]

for a lot of people rock music only matters up to Woodstock (69), a few years back and dying slowly by the end of the 70s. Primarily because of lack of social dimension (Neil Young was 'rocking in the free world' by the end of Reagan's 80s! - what free world?).

what are you trying to say here? Rockin' in the Free World is 100% social criticism.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

4) lastly, (...) the records are pretty much all OK, not terrible, not great, and it ends up being mostly about when in someone's listening life people hear them (this isn't meant to disparage the taste of someone like sevenarts, whose listening skills I respect very much, just a general statement of something I've observed over the years).

this is very true. the stretch of albums I listed are the first SY albums I've really listened to.

[bedouin]

for a lot of people rock music only matters up to Woodstock (69), a few years back and dying slowly by the end of the 70s. Primarily because of lack of social dimension (Neil Young was 'rocking in the free world' by the end of Reagan's 80s! - what free world?).

what are you trying to say here? Rockin' in the Free World is 100% social criticism.

just read the lyrics, and i must admit, i spoke too fast about this track.
Neil Young had by the end of the 80s declared being a-political and kind of sympathetic towards Reagan policies. I seem to remember "keep on rocking.." being played in conservative election rallies. but, i guess like with "born in the USA", myopic campaign managers liked the slogan and just used the track.

[quiet guy]

But contemporary enjoyment of widely distributed popular culture already has the ironic distance built in.

Yeah, I disagree. From our point of view, it's hard to understand the point of view of someone who appreciates American Idol on a sincere level, but I believe that it's very common. Some people in my family watch it, and I can tell who is watching it ironically and who is serious about it. I never watch the show, but I often listen to pop music on the radio when I drive. I don't "like" the music, but I enjoy analyzing it from a considerable ironic distance as if I'm some kind of cultural researcher. But to other people, pop music is music.

As for the topic,

I can't stand Frank Zappa. There are so many rock fans to whom he is one of the de facto musical geniuses of the last century. I guess I get where they're coming from, but I hardly even like rock anymore, and Zappa was simply the most pretentious of them all.