Music that survived

Most of the prog rock I listened to in the 1970s I still listen to and deeply love. I’ll listen to 60s rock, 80s/90s rock from time to time, and still like a lot of it. I listen more to old pop standards and singers/bands from the 1930s through 1950s than I did as a teen. I did not listen to classical music for the most part as a teen, but now listen to it very often and have become far more conversant in classical music. I still hate disco and never liked rap/hip hop. I still like very little country and western (not much more than the soundtrack of “O Brother Where Art Thou”, some Dixie Chicks, Patsy Cline and a dose or two of Hank Williams Sr. I still find opera difficult to listen to except in small batches and tend to like orchestrations rather than the original singing. Punk music of the late 1970s is something I would say I like, but I find I just don’t have the patience I used to in listening to it…As to specifics on prog rock, give me Gentle Giant, early Genesis, King Crimson, Camel, National Health/Hatfield and the North, Yes and ELP and I’m a happy camper.

I would suggest wevl.com. This is a volunteer staffed radio statio with a format that changes with each dj. You aren’t very likely to hear anything from inside your rut but you are likely to hear things you like.

My Bloody Valentine (obviously), The Smiths (I used not like them, preferring the Cure, whose music I now find insufferable), Pulp, Primal Scream. Music that hasn’t survived, and that ought to have – The Boo Radleys (Giant Steps), The Blue Aeroplanes (Swagger, Beatsongs), the House of Love (Babe Rainbow, their masterpiece, received startlingly bad reviews at the time).

Who?

Kraftwerk keep getting more essential as the years pass…

Whatever happened to Bob Mould?

As to specifics on prog rock, give me Gentle Giant, early Genesis, King Crimson, Camel, National Health/Hatfield and the North, Yes and ELP and I’m a happy camper.

The Hatfields have worn well, and Crimson never stayed still long enough to wear. Camel, Genesis and (my favourite at the time) Giant all had good periods that have stayed good, preceded and followed by a lot that was less good (a lot in the case of Genesis). Can’t see myself ever wanting to listen to Yes or ELP again.

All this is early-teen stuff for me – I was 16 when punk hit. I realised the other day that I was listening to Faust at the age of 12 (my children are a sad disappointment in this respect). The re-formed band’s (or bands’) output has been patchy in the extreme, but the original four albums have lasted very nicely.

Never heard any MBV, as far as I know. I’m the opposite on the Smiths – I was so into them that I never need to hear them again. The music has worn well, though. Primal Scream – which period? They’re worse than Camel for unevenness.

I file Amon Tobin under “wonderful but unlistenable”, alongside Ergo Phizmiz and Venetian Snares (best band name ever, especially when you realise it describes one of his standby effects). Underworld were amazing for a while, but I can’t help feeling they went downhill when Karl went sober (sad thought). FSOL/AmAnd likewise, although they did tend to weird me out.

As for what hasn’t survived, I can only offer real obscurities. Some time in the 80s, everyone in the world should have got into Sudden Sway – they were making the best and most interesting music you could imagine. It didn’t happen, unfortunately, and the band eventually lost momentum. And Mighty Ballistics Hi-Power were wonderful.

What really has survived – I find on discovering it two or three decades late – is folk: 70s and 80s albums by Shirley Collins, Tony Rose, Nic Jones, Peter Bellamy, the Watersons et al sound just as wonderful now as they must have done then. But that doesn’t really count for present purposes, as I wasn’t into it at the time.

Are Kraftwerk a one-person operation now? I seem to remember reading that either Ralf or Florian had finally jacked it in, but I hadn’t drawn that inference.

Something else I read somewhere is that Kieran Hebden is tone-deaf – he literally can’t tell from hearing two notes which is higher than the other. But then, I’ve heard the same about David Thomas (someone else whose 80s/90s work has worn pretty well), and you wouldn’t immediately put them in the same box.

In lieu of anything comprehensive, some initial reactions to the open-thread challenge.

1. I don’t find the Cure so much insufferable as harder to forgive for what they do wrong. Some of their pre-Disintegration stuff holds up ok. But I always preferred the Smiths; Louder than Bombs remains a classic. If doing a “revisited” album is any indication, then the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Sessions has survived. But I’d argue it deserves to thrive. They Might Be Giants’ 1980s and 1990s fare lives on, abetted (often) by superior live treatments of their classic songs.
2. I’ve found myself recommending Chris Knox — or, at least, the “Stroke” covers — to inde-oriented college students, i.e., the ones who express surprise when they hear the music playing in my office.
3. Something will be seriously wrong if Neko Case’s work (particularly Blacklisted and Fox Confessor) doesn’t survive.
4. I think that, thanks to the interwebs, that median early 20-somethings know much more about a broad array older pop/rock/rap/etc. than they did in my generation.

Are we limited here to punk and post-punk 70s and 80s? Because I can go on all day. But to depart from that for a moment, anyone who hasn’t heard the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music should run out immediately and buy it. And then listen to it like 500 times.

Can’t see myself ever wanting to listen to Yes or ELP again.

I warily dipped my toe back into Yes not long ago, having been a massive fan in my early teens (before the various permutations of new wave pushed them aside). The three “classic” albums (Yes Album/Fragile/Close to the Edge) hold up surprisingly well, IMHO, especially the third. The level of musicianship is just so astonishing (Chris Squire OMFG!) that it still sounds fresh. A lot of the Gabriel-era Genesis that I used to love, on the other hand, sounds precious and mannered now.

As for music that will never, ever sound anything but amazing? The first 5 Roxy Music albums.

Wow. Reading this reminds me how much younger I am than most of the posters here. Born in the early 1980s and do not listen to any of the stuff I liked in high school. I am going to take this opportunity to recommend some stuff. I promise to keep it short:

Frank Turner is awesome. Please do yourself a favour and listen to some of his stuff on youtube. I saw him live recently and he just blew me away.
Regina Spektor is an amazing singer soungwriter. Checkout her new album.
The Hold Steady is great. I love the lead singers voice.

I will stop there.

I guess I’m in the ‘senescent’ category, so I won’t bother you all with music I listened to when I was a lad. My only free advice is that if you’ve never heard of Gillian Welch, right now would be a good time to remedy that.

Kraftwerk keep getting more essential as the years pass…

Agreed. But more and more, I think the real secret (or not-so-secret?) ur-text from that time and place is the first Neu! album. I’m fairly well shocked by how utterly contemporary Hallogallo sounds, e.g.

Time to check into the home, I guess.

Graduated form HS in 1965, a fairly good year for music. My raging hormones years run from approximately “Rag Doll” to “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. There were a couple of interesting bands in that period. You can’t get on an elevator without hearing them.

It’s always been a puzzle to me. The music you hear in puberty (say 1962 – 1970) is always the greatest music ever, so I have to severely discount my judgements, but really: Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Brian Wilson. What do you young people think about them?

People who announce how vewwy vewwy young they are are…no. Just don’t.

I would never think to recommend groups these days. In this a la carte world we’re living, I’d be more likely to recommend a song or two. Those songs would not be from my adolescence in the 80’s.

Regina Spektor is an amazing singer songwriter.

Srsly? I picked up “Soviet Kitsch,” listened to it once, and have no desire to hear her repeat the same line 23 times in a row, ever again. I guess “amazing” is literally correct.

Henry: part of this is because your children are small. When they get to be about 11 or 12 they’ll (hopefully) start listening to stuff you start picking up on again. I’ve got a big gap from about 85 to 95 and then my kids got into Britpop and related around the time of Euro 96. Both are now part-time musicians, but unfortunately one of them is in a Prog band (a genre I became allergic to in 1977).

Music that’s survived …. well let me make a special plug for the Small Faces. Check out the vid of Marriott singing Tin Soldier with PP Arnold on youtube. Fine fine stuff. > http://youtu.be/wcKZoFRpZCI

BBC4 recently ran a punk and post-punk series, which was great. I started listening to the Gang of Four again. Ian Dury never gets old, and nor, for that matter does John Cooper Clarke. Patti Smith as mentioned above.

(… and Richard Thomson, still going since 1967.)

I was 12 at the tail end of New Wave and found it shocking both then and now just how suddenly and completely that subgenre vanished. It was like the (admittedly regrettable) fashions in clothing and such associated with it went out, and somehow took the (much more worthy) music with it.

In Canada, there were a TON of acts broadly in that genre that seemed significant here then vanished so completely that in many cases, you can’t even special-order most of their stuff anymore, several of which deserved a far better fate. My personal faves from that time and place, The Spoons, were a really good band, maybe not innovative or anything but solid at what they did; their bass player, Sandy Horne, was (and is) both outstanding at her instrument and a childhood crush of many a Canadian guy around my age. Parachute Club were way ahead of their time, incorporating world music influences well before Paul Simon made it fashionable. Luba was and probably still is ten times the singer someone like Celine Dion was, and wrote most of her own stuff; on behalf of all Canadians, I’m terribly sorry we ended up mass-exporting Dion instead of her. For a while Platinum Blonde were as big here as Duran Duran, who they were seen as the Canadian answer to, then they vanished without a trace; they did some crap but some very worthy stuff as well, including a prog-influenced mini-concept album as the second half of Alien Shores. Pukka Orchestra never were that big but their only widely released album has some very good songwriting on it, and I was surprised how contemporary “Cherry Beach Express” still sounds – it helps that its subject matter, police brutality in Toronto, is sadly, still current.

You won’t hear any of this even on a Canadian radio station these days, and what little Canadian new wave you might hear is heavily skewed toward what made it big in the US regardless of its success or relative lack thereof here. “Sunglasses at Night” is the only Corey Hart song Americans are likely to have heard; up here he had nine top tens and that was almost the least of them. But guess which song of his you’re most likely to hear now, even in Canada?

Grew up in the heyday of the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Beach Boys, early Dylan, early Dead. Guess what, they’ve survived. The more interesting question is, should they have, or at least with the reputations they carry? Were they really that much better than, e.g the Yardbirds (NOT bloody Led Zepppelin) or Manfred Mann?

YES, yes, yes, yes, yes, and no.

I bought Absolutely Free on the strength of a single listening of Big Leg Emma on Radio One. I was a dumb 17 year-old and found The Mothers of Invention’s second album a nauseous and disorientating experience. Luckily there was an antidote on hand: The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter restored my transcendental apperception (though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time).

Siouxsie Sioux continues to be simply amazing, whether it’s her early stuff with the Banshees, The Creatures or her recent solo albums. For this aging Goth, she will always and forever be our Queen, whether she cops to the title or not.

My feelings about the Smiths/Morrisey are similar to yours, Henry. I used to like them OK back in the day, mocking Morrisey for being a mope but still enjoying the music But lately I’ve come to recognize the wit, sarcasm, innuendo and genuine heart of their songs. The mopey pose is just surface detail covering for a depth and complexity that I’m only now, in my mid 30s, really starting to appreciate.

Nirvana on the other hand, not so much. And this is heresy for my particular cohort, as I was a high school senior when Kurt Cobain killed himself, and so for most people my age he is the Jim Morrison/John Lennon figure we were supposed to want. But really, Cobain was a self absorbed twat, and his music is interesting, but not quite as important as a lot of people make it out to be. Grunge was, for all its bluster, a musical cul de sac. And there simply isn’t enough of Nirvana to be as influential as people claim it is. It would have been interesting to see what Cobain would have done, had he straightened his shit out and kept growing as a musician, but that’s one of these unknowable things. It’s just as likely that he would have turned into Eddie Vedder, doing the same old shtick for 20 years.

And how weird is it that Pearl Jam is on the way to being our generation’s Rolling Stones?

Now, Smashing Punpkins on the other hand are still awesome (and apparently have a new album!). I still bust out Melancholy and the infinite Sadness now and again. They managed to grow and change, escaped the grunge tag and became their own thing. And I have no idea if they’ve had any influence on contemporary music at all, but they should have.

The most unanticipated musical reassessment of my middle ages has to be Def Leopard. Never liked hair metal back in the day, but along side a lot of seventies rock that i dismissed as self indulgent twaddle, playing their songs on Rock Band has given me a begrudging appreciation for their music. It’s not the Beatles, mind you but for straight ahead rock and roll with no pretensions of being anything but a party band, it’s not horrible.

I’m not really sure what “survived” or not, because I’m not 15 anymore. Can anything really be said to survive that my oldest daughter has never heard of.

I remember thinking in the early- and mid-1980s that the future of music was the bands in the Vince Clarke oeuvre — Depeche Mode, Yaz, Erasure. I still like to listen to it, but it tends to sound a little overly precious now.

YMMV on whether or not that stuff “survived.”

The best album that’s stayed the freshest, longest for me, would be The Chronic. Esthero has done alright by me. Fiona Apple and Suzanne Vega and Chachao, I don’t really listen to quite so much. I still listen to Garbage, Bjork, PJ Harvey, and Tori Amos albums. In terms of popular music, what really holds up for me is Radiohead, Tricky, Massive Attack, to the point that I like trip-hop-ish rap like what Kno produces. It’s amazing how well Michael Jackson tunes hold up. In not so mainstream music, I think Cassandra Wilson is going to be greatest of all time, personally, especially Traveling Miles. I adore Sainkho Namschylak, Susheela Raman, and Rokia Traore, and the last really holds up. I’ve been more recently into Hiromi Uehara and Jorane. My period was essentially the mid 90s-late 90s.

Just for reference, what is it that causes one’s comment to require moderation? It’s not links, so what is it?

The interviewer summed up by saying “So essentially grunge was a sonic airbrush of punk.” He agreed.

The opposite side of that is that my friends and I were collecting all those early Sub-Pop singles, almost all produced by Jack Endino, which were guitar-heavy sonic murk. We all liked punk rock and were kind of put out by the lack of trebly white noise in those recordings. We got really excited when Butch Vig (who’d done Killdozer) recorded The Fluid because we thought it’d sound louder and more abrasive, and we hoped more Sub-Pop folks would jump ship from Endino to Vig. Nirvana did and produced a noisier record than they had before.

Question for those who know about this stuff. Part of the problem I have revisiting 1980s techno and new wave is the quality of the synthesizers is just so dang low. That and something about the production values makes the music sound hollow and tinny, rather than having the lush and evocative vibe lodged in my nostalgia receptor. Any of this sound credible?

And how weird is it that Pearl Jam is on the way to being our generation’s Rolling Stones?

Please, No! Not this. Anything. but. this. (Speaking as another mid 30-something.)

Re things that never get old, I’m a bit surprised that almost 5o comments in, no one’s mentioned The Clash. Is that just too obvious?

The internet has made it much easier to find out about obscure older artists who influenced musicians who got famous.

A propos of which, if you like Kraftwerk, you may like an Albertan eccentric named Bruce Haack. Very little known during his lifetime, his music is starting to be released much more widely than it was when he made it. See e.g. Stones Throw

He built a self-made vocoder called Farad, different synthesizers including a Dermatron, which he used in many of his 60s and 70s releases. Outstanding album artwork. Died in the mid 80s. Almost certainly the weirdest musician ever to be signed to Def Jam (current home of Rihanna, Kanye West, Jay Z etc)

Loved drum’n bass. It was obviously the music of the future, back then.

Then, what? I’m not even sure it disappeared – migrated, then dissolved into the rest.

Apart of that, go listen to Fip.

what is it that causes one’s comment to require moderation?

Mornington Crescent rules apply.

@Dave Maier (#58). Ok, you got me re: the center of the berlin school :) I was thinking much the same thing as I was writing that drivel. I think I put Hoenig on the “edge” because he essentially only did one album in the genre and then vanished from that particular scene. But yes, Schulze and Ashra were clearly part of the definition of the berlin electronic school as much as TD.

I just started listening to TD again recently, and I find that Hoening & Ashra feel as if they embody something much more insightful then even Phaedra & Rubycon. Maybe just more playful, perhaps. OTOH, “Zeit” by TD feels as strange and otherworldly as it did when I first heard it. Its just that at 48, I don’t want to go there that often, and prefer Steve Roach for that kind of stuff these days.

Paul Davis/61: I love that Hoenig disc for sure. I think he and Göttsching are better musicians than TD (Froese in particular), which might have something to do with it. (That sentence probably looks funny to others in this context, but I think you know what I mean!)

I got tired of Roach for a while after he put out the same record about ten times, but then (around Artifacts/Atmospheric Conditions and a couple of live shows) I got back into him. He and Robert Rich are the best of the Americans doing that sort of thing (also Saul Stokes).

…I’m old (3 score next week) – making music has been at least as important as listening to it, but I’ve gone through, and continue to go through everything from my parents’ (20’s, 30’s, big band) tastes, C&W, bluegrass, rock&roll, rock, folk (real and faux), classical of all types (avoiding the “inaccessible”), blues, old timey, jazz, world, lots of singer-songwriters (Randy Newman, John Prine, Jacques Brel e.g.) . The bottom line is – I’ll listen to anything once, and lots of things more than once. The “more than once” items are all over the map, but the most important thing is to do the “once”. That being said, if I listened to all the music I’d like to listen to, I’d never get anything done.

#20 Frank Turner is indeed awesome
#40 Smashing Pumpkins? Hmm. Saw them on their UK tour last year and thought it was the worst gig I’d seen in some time. Others evidently agreed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/nov/16/smashing-pumpkins-live-review?INTCMP=SRCH

bq. the Cure, whose music I now find insufferable

Turning up on a Henry thread; largely agreeing with Henry; finding something to argue against anyway, it’s becoming a habit. I hope it’s not a shtick. There are surely better shticks to have.

Anyway, the early stuff by the Cure still holds up. ‘Killing An Arab’, ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’ and so on. I remember being weirdly pleased when Massive Attack sampled ’10:15 On A Saturday Night’. It was as if the gift of cred was being deservedly given back to people who’d squandered it . And Henry’s right that they got less and less tolerable, ‘The Lovecats’ being exhibit A for the prosecution. But go back and listen to ‘A Forest’. That’s not just good for 1980, or good because it reminds me of when I wasn’t a past-it fart. I think as pop music goes it’s simply good.

I first heard ‘Whats Going On’ only in my last year in school. Before then, Marvin was the song off the 501 jeans ad. After then, I made up on lost time. If there’s a kid in your life who only knows all that stuff through hiphop samples, then sit them down and play them some Al Green, or some James Brown, or some Fela. They may even thank you.

I was a dumb 17 year-old and found The Mothers of Invention’s second album a nauseous and disorientating experience.

I’m pretty sure it was designed to be that way!

This is tiresome to say probably, but there is quite a bit of Zappa music which has held up very well and will continue to do, assuming that it’s really music you’re interested in. In Anglo-American discussions like this (about, you know, non-‘world’ music) when a lot of people say ‘music’ they mean lyrics-based (verbally-based) music-stuff, which is lyrics + very simple music; or certain appealing cultural poses/statements (however oblique). They don’t mean music. I am not necessarily criticizing anybody or any music, just making a distinction. There are cultures in the world in which music itself is important (India, Greece, Caribbean, some of S. America, others). I like music, so I like a lot of Zappa’s instrumental music and couldn’t care less about his more transient qualities.

I’m really old (born ’57) so a big pain, I know. I like Amon Tobin. Non-sentimental Tower of Power. I have to concur with some people who cite Kraftwerk – it’s amazing to me how well some of their stuff holds up! Dan Hicks. Capt. Beefheart. Miles Davis in the 50s-70s. Eddie Harris. Prog was humorless, unfortunately. Same with most fusion, IMHO. Bonzo Dog Band (where ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ got its name).

I notice that for a brief moment in the 50s- 70s the explicit idea was to blend genres, thereby making new genres (e.g. rock and roll). Now (from a marketing pov) the idea is to fit into an existing genre – if you don’t fit into one, you’re screwed! If you don’t know what genre it is and what lifestyle it is supposed to be connected to, how can you know if you like it?!

Of course people still blend stuff – it just isn’t seen as the explicitly correct way to do it, marketing-wise. But then again, we live in a libertarian dreamworld now, so musical value, like everything else, is ‘maximized’.

though admittedly it was better than dubstep

I think dubstep is the heavy metal of dance music. So I am supportive. This is funny:

Rusko himself has claimed in an interview on the BBC’s 1Xtra radio show that “brostep is sort of my fault, but now I’ve started to hate it in a way…It’s like someone screaming in your face for an hour…you don’t want that.”

I don’t?

Born in the USA–not just the song, but me in ’53. And ever since I can remember, I’ve listened to standard radio pop/country/rock and have listened to the contemporary stuff right up to today. (Even some rap; though mostly not a fan.) I have scores of songs (pun intended) that I can associate with specific memories of when I first heard them. (Example: driving down a road in Door County, WI hearing “One Week” for the first time.) I think because of my tendency to associate songs and times I transfer a kind of mnemonic “loyalty” to some songs that might not have the best aesthetic claims to listenability. (Another example here: sitting in a parking lot in Portland, OR; my first hearing of the execrable “Chevy Van”.) Even so, I have to put in my two cents for a lot of vanilla popular music as durable. I love the opening hard beat of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” as much now as when I first heard it in the 80s; Elton John’s “Sorry seems to be the hard word” still stirs something in me (and no, not in my bowels) as it did in the 70s; Jim Reeves’ “He’ll have to go” is just pure classic smooth voice; Carly Simon’s “You belong to me” sticks with me even more than “You’re so vain”; Yes’s “Roundabout” is perennial joy (though I admit I’m prejudiced because I share the drummer’s name). Depeche Mode’s “Strange Love ” anyone? But will I enjoy Gaga’s “Paparazzi” or Pink’s “Perfect” (original lyrics) in a decade? Probably. While I’m eating my vanilla yogurt.

In case one might think my tastes are easily pegged, however, my strongest music memory of a first-heard song: Jessy Norman singing Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” while going home one night after teaching an evening class. I was crying so hard I could hardly drive.

I gotta jump in here and defend grunge. I was a senior in HS when Nirvana and Pearl Jam hit big, and it was such a breath of fresh air for those of us who missed good old-fashioned heavy riff music (ala Zeppelin, Black Sabbath) which had been corrupted nay…molested by hair-metal for the past decade. While I agree that Cobain and Nirvana were fairly overrated (not my fav Seattle band by far), as a 4-some: Nirvana, pearl Jam, Alice and Chains and Soundgarden, hold up pretty well*. Still played, very frequently, on what’s left of FM radio, still in tons of jukeboxes, still covered by many crappy cover bands. While Nirvana and Soundgarden both claimed a connection punk the finished product rarely sounded punk in it’s musical stylings. I can think of a handful of songs that had the typical driving punk rhythm, whereas about 90% of the songs had heavy backbeats which are far more common in hard rock/metal. I was never real big on punk, and I loved grunge. I think grunge maybe stands up well in the minds of people more from my side, than it does for people from the punk/post-punk side of things.

*Not to mention Smashing Pumpkins, who while not a Seattle band, put out two of the best grunge era albums (Gish and Siamese Dream) that still sound like masterpieces, imo.

I’ll start out by saying I don’t get why so many people are afraid the Pixies are being overshadowed by Nirvana. All you need to do is go past any record store and then notice how they still stock stacks of Pixies albums whereas you’ll be lucky to find a copy of Nevermind. They don’t get talked up as much, but the evidence of album sales, club plays and movie soundtracks doesn’t lie: the Pixies have easily won that fight.

On classic albums, I’m slightly shocked that among all the post-punk New Wavers out there nobody mentioned Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden. As ambient goes you simply don’t do better: the production remains amazing and I don’t know any band that’s managed to fill out a sound like that. If those albums don’t last the world becomes a much sadder place.

As for the music I grew up with, I was a late starter so I only managed to catch the tail end of Industrial music, but it still exerts a deep emotional pull as the music of my teens. For a while there was a fairly loyal revival going on here in London which was every kind of fun, but that went the way of all things. As for names: Skinny Puppy, Die Krupps, Laibach, Ministry, KMFDM, Chemlab, Spahn Ranch, Young Gods. A special mention has to go Skinny Puppy’s Remission album which is currently having a revival in my life. It’s terribly dated but it’s so damn evocative of the style of music and my history that the nostalgia wins every time.

For must hear modern bands you can’t go wrong with the Thermals for short, punchy, no-fuss pop-punk tunes: think the Buzzcocks meet the Pixies. The Body, the Blood, the Machine was simply a revelation to listen to. On the folk side my vote is with Grace Petrie as a sort of modern Billy Bragg. We’re not talking revolutions here, but she does a really good job of capturing the spirit of great protest songs. Final mentions have to go the Carolina Chocolate Drops, my current favourite Bluegrass band. I don’t often trawl YouTube but I managed to lose an evening to watching all the live video of this trio. The sheer virtuosity on display is breathtaking and I mean come on, where else are you going to hear a jug solo?

@Keith: It’s just as likely that he would have turned into Eddie Vedder, doing the same old shtick for 20 years.

Plinking a ukulele?

PD #53:

I was just a tyke when fusion was big, but as a jazz/funk musician, some of that stuff still holds up remarkably well. Namely: Billy Cobham’s Spectrum, Herbie & the Headhunters, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and the Jack Johnson Soundtrack. That said, the genre spawned an Nth degree order of crap.

Born in ’76, adored Nirvana and loved Pavement. They’ve survived for me if not for others upthread. I started listening to new popular music three months ago in a lazy Pitchfork mediated way and it’s been joy. Best decision I’d made in years. Channel Orange, Watching the Throne, MBDTF, Fiona Apple, OFWGKTA, James Blake, EMA and and and. Could never be getting along with prog and unpersuaded by Smiths.

Henry. Something I’ve found that works well, is to find an artist you like on youtube, and just follow some of the links on the right side (youtube is for music, right?). mp3 blogs used to be good for that kind of thing too, but since the demise of filelocker sites they’re thinner on the ground.

Also, both Stuart Maconie and Tom Ravenscroft have pretty good shows (the later is Peel’s son) on radio 6. Maconie is slightly too into prog for my tastes, but its a good show nonetheless.

One process issue first. Part of reengaging with what the kids these days are listening to is freeing yourself from the shyte of FM radio and MTV, no matter how many channels they add. In the USA, one option is Sirius/XM. I was a sceptic when the recently acquired house vehicle came with it … but it’s good. Between the “alt”, “college” and “new wave” channels, as packaged as they are, you’ll hear lots of the good stuff mentioned above on no more than a 15-20 minute drive.

For the substance of the post, does it count if the band is still around doing different stuff? Those U2 1980s albums are pretty good. As for what’s around recently: shah8 has it right about Radiohead and Garbage (the bizarro Pretenders), and then there’s the bands that perhaps lost their touch a bit as mass marketing rose but still have some interesting stuff out there (e.g. Modest Mouse: Convenient Parking). And Hang Them All is the funniest video of the last 5 years.

My children were born in the early 90’s, so I spent most of that decade listening to Rafi and Fred Penner. In the last couple of years I’ve discovered the ’90s pleasures of Counting Crows, the Gin Blossoms, and Blues Traveler. Counting Crows, of course, takes you back to the Band, which is a band that will survive – as will the Allmans. And Little Feat.

Many many fine recommendations above. As a professional musician and son of one I have often wondered what will happen to music of these periods over time. My Dad now retired plays mainly on the trad/dixieland jazz festival circuit in Australia, the fans for which are mainly people of his age. Very few young people take up trad and dixie, and I would argue that blues is also becoming a niche/museum artform. It’s interesting also to look back over the sweep of music history – we only know a small fraction of course – and think about how thing might change with new technologies.

I had many arguments with him about rock and roll and whether it would inevitably suffer the same fate, as it is taking a different trajectory and continuing to evolve, unlike jazz broadly which I think has been largely in a stylistic, inward looking rut since the 80s. Then there is electronic dance music (EDM) which is finally becoming a mainstream phenomenon. My conjecture is that the skills and tools to make rock/pop/EDM have now become so widespread that very few artists will get such widespread acclaim and attention as the pioneers/breakthrough artists of the 60s-90s. There will probably never be another Beatles, at least in terms of their popularity, because everyone is too busy *making* music to spend all their time being fans. I think that’s a good thing.

@8 Bob Mould continues small scale touring and releases via his website, but Grant Hart is doing the more interesting work in my view. Husker Du, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag etc. deserve their raucous little niche in music history.

bq. I’ve heard DJ Marky, and liked him a lot – who else should I be listening to ?

I’m afraid that one comment pretty much exhausted my knowledge on the subject. Brazilian drum and bass sometimes gets called “sambass” – you might see what you find with that as a search term.
There was an interesting documentary on 1Xtra a while ago (not online unfortunately, as far as I can tell) that went into the roots of Brazilian percussion, and made the case that their drum and bass scene reached back into a very rich history, and benefited as a result. Here in the UK, by contrast, it just seemed to run out of steam, although Fabio and Grooverider still get two hours a week on Radio 1. For a while it seemed like the links with jazz rhythms would be the way forward, but that never seemed to get much of an audience. Then UK Garage nicked their club crowd, and now we have dubstep.

These twenty+ minutes, though. Maybe it’s too early to call it “music that survived” (1995 it came out). And maybe it’s still too early to hear it without having your ears muffled by all the stuff that came to surround Goldie the brandname. Musically, however? Woof!

For 80s stuff I still really like that I didn’t see mentioned above:

First of all, I’ve always been a huge fan of the Chameleons. Script of the Bridge has got to be one of the best indie rock albums of the era (and up there with London Calling for my ‘Desert Island’ collection (yes, while perhaps incredibly obvious, the Clash are essential!). And while they straddle the 70s and 80s, of course the Jam have to be near the top of the list as well. Hell, not only do I still listen to them often, but I’ve come to like everything Paul Weller has done even more as I grow older, especially his solo stuff (had the pleasure of seeing him live a long time ago at GWU’s Lisner Auditorium).

Then I would have to add Echo & the Bunnymen , Minutemen, The The, and the Housemartins.

Late 80s/early 90s: Stone Roses, Charlatans, Pavement, Galaxie 500/Luna, Trash Can Sinatras (Cake is a brilliant album!), Portishead, Saint Etienne.

Interestingly, there are loads of new(ish) bands that have a sound very reminiscent of the 80s. I call them “post-wave” bands: Bloc Party (especially Silent Alarm), Kaiser Chiefs, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Cut Copy.

Newer bands that I really love: Broken Social Scene, Modest Mouse, Spoon.

Wow. So strange reading this. I guess as a ’68 baby who was in the counterculture, I was supposed to like all that whiny sounding new wave and punk, and all the people I went to school with seemed to like it, but I hated most of it then, and with a few exceptions, I still don’t much like it. That’s not so much the case for some of the 80s pop or r&b music I also eschewed at the time, but now really enjoy.

Much of my favorite music from my teenage years didn’t stand the test of time all that well. I can still listen to it for nostalgia’s sake, but I can no longer consider most of it great music. Rush, most of Yes, early King Crimson (80s stuff holds up), ELP, Pink Floyd, the Who. I still hold a special place in my heart for Jethro Tull, Focus, the Mahavishnu orchestra and Steve Tibbets (surprised to see him mentioned upthread), but they aren’t what I thought they were when I was 19.

Bands among my favorites at the same time that have held up well for me include Queen, the Beatles, Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, Allman Brothers, Temps and a bunch of other motown and similar styles from the 60s and 70s.

My tastes veered away from pop styles and into jazz and classical (along with some more obscure fusion) when I was a teenager and pretty much stopped listening to the radio.

The Stones have grown on me to the point where I almost understand what all the fuss was about.

The biggest change is that I completely missed hip-hop’s arrival on the scene, and I actually like a fair bit of it in retrospect.

Whoever mentioned their country being limited to “O Brother, Where art thou” should note that most of that soundtrack is bluegrass and country blues, not country. Yes, it’s roots music that C&W is based on, but, indirectly, so is most of rock and roll. Only older country is all that much like it. One of the reasons I like some of the older country acts, is that you occasionally catch them doing old time favorites in the roots/bluegrass style. Modern country is closer to beer rock than to anything on the O Brother soundtrack.

Anyway, since so many people here seem to love new wave and punk — what’s with the massively nasal and stuffy vocals in at least half of this genre? Drove me batshit, and never wanted to listen to it either then or now. Is there some philosophy behind this, (as I suspected at the time) just a general political statement about making music without taking any voice lessons? Or was it just a random style that took hold? Also — do you notice it as a negative, but other aspects of the music are more important, or do you like some of these singers that I would describe this way? (Talking heads, REM, Violent Femmes would be canonical examples of the style I’m referring to).

Ok, I know I sound like a dick about this, but I’m actually serious. There are a lot of musical styles that I dismissed when they came out, but have turned out to appreciate. One thing that singing a lot of karoake teaches you, for instance is that a lot of pop singers that I never thought of as great singers, really are, and doing their stuff well is not trivial.

That said, new wave is one genre I’ve never been able to find my way into, but way too many smart people like it for me to just assume they are all full of nonsense.

The triumph of popular music is culturally interesting. I mean the fact that intellectuals like those who read CT, and who would be embarrassed to admit that they read very little that is more demanding than Dan Brown and JK Rowling seem utterly unembarrassed to admit that they listen to very little that is more demanding than the musical equivalent. I think, though I’m not sure, this is a phenomenon of the past 5 decades: prior to that intellectuals felt that they had to at least pretend to listen to jazz and classical.

prior to that intellectuals felt that they had to at least pretend to listen to jazz and classical.

I’m reminded of a quote from some article I read in the late ’70s about Dallas’s rise as a financial center. One recently transplanted bank executive enthused something along the lines of “[Y]ou don’t even have to pretend to like the symphony here.”

I’d consider a concert season without Tchaikovsky an improvement, but utterly unlikely.

Born in the early 50s, the music that I see of lasting value from my youth includes stuff like Richard and Mimi Farina, John Fahey, John Renbourne, Leo Kottke, the first few electric Dylan albums, Traffic, Increadible String Band, Dave van Ronk, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Paul Butterfield, Hot Tuna. Joni’s not bad, either. This was the fare on the Boston/Cambridge college stations in the late 60s and (very) early 70s.

My impression is that there was a burst of creative energy in the mid to late 60s, and in 1972 things kind of died for a few years, and then got better. But my post-72 listening to current music has been quite spotty. I spent the late 70s trying to learn how to fingerpick, and can still do a reasonable approximation to Last Steam Engine Train and Embryonic Journey (playing the latter being a requirement for one’s Boy Scout Child of the 60s Merit Badge).

Whatever, as is appropriate for an effete northeastern pseudointellectual snob, I’m now trying to learn how to play jazz guitar. (Ron Affif’s CD “52nd Street” is as good as music gets. At least in my current phase of life.) Here’s the guy who’s desperately trying to teach me how to play.

Poe’s Haunted (2000) is fantastic and hopefully timeless, and pairs pretty well with Loveless or We Love Life. She might end up forgotten, between extended hiatus and neverending fights with her label and 96kbps Youtube shredding the parts of her sound that actually sound cool, and so many people thinking at the time that Haunted was just a CD book promo for House of Leaves, and the fact that the album completely violates vacuumslayer’s In this a la carte world we’re living, I’d be more likely to recommend a song or two rule; there’s no standout representative tracks and the intermissions matter almost as much as the songs, etc. But it’s totally worth the 70 minutes, and hopefully an autoinclude on anybody’s top 100 of the 2000s type list.

There is little I liked then that I don’t still like now.

“Then” referring to pre-1985, that being the year I hit the ‘there’s nothing new that sounds at all interesting’ stage. Fortunately, there’s plenty of stuff like bop, 20th century symphony music (& most recently West Coast jazz) & so forth that revealed themselves to me post-’85: If you ain’t heard it before, it’s new to you!

I’ll agree w/ the supporter of Scientist, Augustus Pablo, Prince Jammy, &c. Still love that stuff even though I’m not the reefer fan I used to be.

Recently listened to Surrealistic Pillow (First “rock” album I bought.) on YouTube. Only two really good songs on it; “Somebody to Love” & “White Rabbit” enjoyable mostly as nostalgia, neither that good out of personal memory context.

Generalization: Few bands put out more than four or five good albums, total, usually their first four or five. From there it’s almost always downhill to self-parody or a “new direction.”

Note on vocals: A vocalizing member of the Angry Samoans was very disappointed when he had to have his adenoids removed. Made him sound too adult. And, as S. McGravitas has mentioned elsewhere, today’s vocal stylists sound like wimps, ’cause they’re scared to smoke tobacco. (So they are wimps.)

It’s interesting to pick up music that you haven’t listened to in 30 years.

I recently bought Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and it really sounds like a band playing music. Way Back When, it sounded full of overblown sound effects and studio nonsense, but in the years in between, studio nonsense has become so common that Floyd now sound like 5 lads playing in their garage.

And Japan used to be an electronic pop band, but now what I hear is the fretless bass.

Peter Broetzmann Octet, Machine Gun; still, along with Max Roach’s Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace, the soundtrack to our times. Which says a lot about our times, I suppose.

Sorry. That was half as funny and twice as bombastic as I thought it was when I was writing it. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and made a living selling used records ought to have made me know when to shut up…

But then we wouldn’t have anti-war marches with giant puppets.

The Arcade Fire… no, just no.

<a href="http://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/beauty-in-this-land/"What he said. This link also explains why I prefer to listen to (and play) folk these days – all that repression/release stuff gets very old once you start noticing it.

All that nasaly weird New Wave stuff? That came from Manchester.

Well, I’ve always thought of David Byrne as an honorary Brit, but Manchester can’t really claim him.

100+ comments in and nobody’s mentioned… the Fall? Somebody once said that there were three waves of Manchester post-punk: Joy Division, Buzzcocks and the Fall; New Order, A Certain Ratio and the Fall; and Happy Mondays, the Smiths and the Fall. I don’t think Slates will ever age.

I refuse to believe that anybody can seriously listen to the Smiths who didn’t get into them before their fifteenth birthday.

A sad fact widely known… I was 23 when “This Charming Man” came out, and it spoke to me loud and clear, let me tell you. (I was unmarried, short on friends, doing a job I hated, etc, which may have contributed.)

Chris, you’re right of course. And the comparison to Rowling and Brown is gratuitous. I should have used well crafted popular fiction. Still I think the thread is an indication that people like CT readers take popular music seriously in a way that would have been embarrassing to an earlier generation. And the phenomenon itself seems to be a genuine one. And it *is* an interesting phenomenon, if I’m right it exists. I’m not criticizing it. I don’t think it is compulsory to cultivate interests in anything, let own everything.

It’s fun going back and discovering stuff from the musical era you identify with, but that you missed the first time round.

I’m doing that with the Riot Grrl stuff at the moment, which I think I must have missed because by the time I became of aware of it in backwater UK, the whole thing had been mutated by the music industry into (gag) Girl Power.

@Bill Benzon:
John Julie Andrews Coltrane = genius.
Miles Cyndi Lauper Davis = mistake.
Hope I make myself clear.

Okay. I’m going by the record. Which if it didn’t have panpipes, sounded like it did.

Well, after work yesterday I was riding home and caught myself singing “Working Nine To Five”; so I guess Dolly Parton has held up, along withthe Tractors “I’m not Broke, But I’m Badly Bent” and “Everything We’ve Got is Falling Apart.”

@Phil
I’m also surprised at the lack of shouts for The Fall. I was still in nappies when Hex Enduction Hour came out but I imagined it would have melted older CTers faces back then as much as it did mine when I discovered it 20 years later. Almost everything from Grotesque to This Nation’s Saving Grace is immortal IMO.

For “new old,” The Strokes & Franz Ferdinand are really good, if you get the right albums. I listen to them lots. Also, the Bird and the Bee recent cover album of Hall and Oates numbers is THE BOMB (If you’re allowed to use that phrase in the same sentence as Hall and Oates.) and should be compulsory.

Incidentally, one of the great, great things about turning 40 is being able to say that I always liked Hall and Oates without having to fear some kind of reprisal.

Uncommented gestures:
Laurie Anderson [listen: United States (a 4 cassette performance over 2 days in NYC)]
(if someone gets to mention Diamonda, there is room for Lou’s wife)
Rufus Wainwright [listen: start mid-catalog with Want One] (literate, coined term popera)
Arnold Schoenberg (a little 12-tone love, difficult music hour)
Michael Nyman [listen: Belly of an Architect (soundtrack)]
Oingo Boingo [listen: Deadman’s Party (has the hits, plus)] (Mr. Danny Elfman, I like the varied arrangements)
10,000 Maniacs [listen: In My Tribe (mid-catalog)] (mellow music with acerbic lyrics)
B-52’s [listen: start early in catalog] (shake it)
The Dandy Warhols [listen: Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia] (portlandia)
Tool [listen: Lateralus (late-catalog)] (heavy textures, loud music)
Chuck Berry (Cahokia (wiki it), no duh)

Gospel-rooted African-American music [Ray, Aretha, JB, Al Green, Pickett, Sly, to name a few] will never fade. I don’t include Whitney Houston, because the golden age was over by the time she came up.
Parliament/Funkadelics
Stax in its heyday and in the early Isaac Hayes years.
Ellington whenever.
Don Cherry whenever and wherever
60s Merle
And B.B. King–who I saw for three straight shows at the Cellar Door in D.C., each set better than the last, [obligatory nostalgic remembrance]

And, of course, if we’re including Gospel-rooted African-American music, then we need to include Gospel from the golden years as well: Mahalia, Caravans, Dixie Hummingbirds, Swan Silvertones, Davis Sisters, the Ward Singers, Dorothy Love Coates, just to name a few of the most famous.

And let’s note a notable omission: no Bruce Springsteen. Which is fine by me; I don’t object if others like/love him (although I once had a piece of cake pushed in my face when I accused someone of being a lackey of the Boss), but he always sounded like Guy Lombardo to me.

Amen to XTC. Waxworks is a nice compilation, and the Todd Rungren-produced Skylarking is brilliant.

I think the comparison of music to literature is misleading—literature is intrinsically more intellectual as a genre,

A ‘genre’ of what? It’s pretty hard to talk about, isn’t it?

I think it’s misleading too, because music is both: intellectual, beyond the intellectual, and before it – and again, we’re talking about music, not The Three Approved Chords, in 4/4 Time, With Lyrics. George Szell might have said it best: ‘In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.’

Not a promising start when I couldn’t identify a song by any of the groups Henry mentioned if you held a gun to my head.
Reminds me of a rainy afternoon in 1992 when I was pulling up to the White Plains federal courthouse for a conference. The announcer (Richard Neer, from the old 102.7 fm) mentioned that the day was the 25th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper. Got me thinking: “What was 25 years old when Sgt. Pepper came out?” The answer that came to mind was Glenn Miller — as it happened I had been listening more to Glenn Miller than to the Beatles lately. As I got out of the car, I realized that I was my parents, and that I would never be cool again.
And just two days ago, I saw a young man in a vintage t-shirt from the Rolling Stones 1975 U.S. tour. He obviously couldn’t have been born less than a decade after the tour. Good chance his parents hadn’t yet hit puberty then, either.

If a lurker may weigh in: it would be interested to read answers to this question if it were asked in, say, 2020. I notice that there’s almost no rap or hip-hop on most people’s lists (and I assume, for other reasons, that the majority of posters here are white). I was listening to pop/rock/alternative/whatever music in the late eighties and early nineties, by which point there was quite a lot of rap and hip-hop available, but since there was no internet and there was a great deal of scandal around rap (remember all the moral panics of the late eighties?), it was not something that you heard a lot if you grew up in a very segregated white town like I did. I assume that white people who were coming up in the late nineties/early 2000s will have a much less rock/pop-exclusive list.

Actually, it’s taken me into my thirties to develop the musical and genre understanding to be a sorta-good listener to hip-hop – I’d say that I’m only starting to discover a whole bunch of interesting things that were around when I was in my teens. It makes me a bit sad to recall how racist and panicky everyone was about rap and hip-hop in my youth, and to realize that what seemed like legitimate “moral” concerns to a lot of people back then were just the same old racist anxieties.

I don’t really listen to very much of the then-contemporary punk I listened to in college – Superchunk, Jesus Lizard, all that Sub Pop stuff. But really, I was only listening to it because my friends did; I hadn’t developed much taste on my own yet. Those things I did discover on my own I tend to still like: the Mekons up through about 1994; the Pogues up through Peace and Love; Chumbawamba even in their popular period; Sandinista!; the Rezillos; Scritti Politti; Vic Godard; Husker Du; Dog-Faced Hermans. Things I could have in theory heard in the eighties and early-mid nineties but did not and now appreciate: the Homosexuals; Orange Juice; Belle and Sebastian; Elvis Costello up through Spike; Rip Rig and Panic; Pigbag; the Pop Group.

I do find myself wondering why jazz and classical don’t seem to be as de rigeur among brainy left types as they once were. I myself have few musical gifts and just don’t seem to get much out of any but the most obvious sorts of classical music (I try every once in a while) although I can appreciate some of that John Zorn/Glen Branca experimental business. I’m a big fan of Don Cherry, Max Roach and Panthalassa-period Miles Davis, but I wouldn’t say I’m an intelligent listener; those things just sound nice.

So, like, why? Is it a lack of musical education? In my own case, it’s not a lack of exposure as a child – my parents listen to virtually nothing but classical and I never heard any pop music until my early teens when I was given a clock radio. (I suppose I must have heard some in grocery stores or other public places before then.) I always assumed as a child that adults listened to classical and didn’t waste their time with pop music and was vaguely scandalized at fifteen to meet a grown-up who listened to rock music on the radio. I assumed that at some point I’d just become bored with pop music and suddenly be able to comprehend classical, and in fact felt rather guilty about this from my late teens through my mid-twenties because my family had always described a taste for pop music as childish and ignorant.

“Late 80s/early 90s: Stone Roses, Charlatans, Pavement, Galaxie 500/Luna, Trash Can Sinatras (Cake is a brilliant album!), Portishead, Saint Etienne.”

Although a little before my time, I’m surprised there’s not more love for Portishead here. At the very least Beth Gibbon is a genius, surely? (Sam Cooke live at The Harlem Square Club in 63, some of you must be old enough to have been there? Bill Benzon I’m looking at you, fill me in.)

“I think The Wire is one of the worst TV shows I’ve ever seen”

This seems over the top!

Let history settle it.

No argument from me on that, Platonist. When I was younger and more passionate about these things it would really make me angry that “deserving” artists were being ignored while the “undeserving” got all the hype and riches. I’m now able to say “Eh…I don’t get it” and move on.

Part of that’s the natural mellowing of age, and part of it is the availability of music on the Internet. Back in the days when I was in range of exactly two “rock” stations, and both of them were playing an endless loop of Zep/Stones/Who/Doors, these things mattered a hell of a lot more.

‘s (sigh)

rf, you’re right–that’s a pretty severe exaggeration. I should say one of the worst critically acclaimed shows I’ve ever seen.

Kvetch, I agree: it’s a much bigger deal when you’re worried you’ll never get to hear the good stuff if it’s unappreciated. Kind of gives the lie to the thread topic: thanks to digital technology, it’s likely that ALL music will survive for a very long time. So, the stakes of these debates are pretty low.

On the other hand, there is the question of the *musician’s* survival. It’s probably true that the stellar success of bands like Arcade Fire–particularly in a genre where so many bands sell so few records–may hurt the survivability of very good, less appreciated musicians. So, as much as I like AF, it might be better if indie rock moved away from the star system.

Henry @88,

If you like the first two Wire albums, the third one (titled 154) is pretty awesome as well — worth it just for the song “The 15th” if nothing else. (Though maybe you already know this.) Also, they put out an album a few years back called Object 47, which is a lot like their early stuff and well worth a listen.

I think maybe they suffer from the same syndrome that turned Cian against drum and bass.

No I disliked it as long before that happened. Hype probably had something to do with it, but I also found the music deeply boring and not much fun to dance to. There were a few record I liked, plus Squarepusher’s take it on was entertainingly bonkers.

I could have mentioned some of my favorite hip-hop artists of the 80s and 90s, but honestly I wasn’t listening to any of them when they were working. I started listening to hip-hop in my mid-30s because my wife liked it, so what I listen to is pretty much defined by what has survived. Since it’s not the music of my formative years, I didn’t think it fit what Henry was going for in this thread.

Very glad to see Bristol getting so much recognition in this thread!

“I do find myself wondering why jazz and classical don’t seem to be as de rigeur among brainy left types as they once were.”

I think that that’s because they’ve both failed miserably to continue to be a source of new musical and intellectual content. I played violin from 4 until 20 (parents’ idea, of course), but really don’t like any of the “classical” stuff after Dvorak. Jazz seems to be having a similar problem. Miles Davis kept pushing it, and quite a bit of the fusion blokes (mostly folks who had played with Davis) kept producing good music for a while there, but I’m not noticing anything new coming out, and I’m not sure how much new stuff has entered the repertoire since the height of the Shorter, Hancock, et. al. generation (again, the guys who played with Davis).

Of course, I could be missing a lot of stuff. My head is wedged in late swing and Sonny Stitt bebop. What new (this century) jazz has (or is likely) to become as recognizable (and thus part of the standard repertoire) as Giant Steps, Cantelope Island, and the like? What new music does the outrageously talented jazz player who has a day job and gigs for the fun of it evenings and weekends add to his set list?

Several of my top picks have already been mentioned: The Band, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen. I’m going out on a limb to suggest John Mellencamp belongs on the list – he’s adapted and matured since his “Little Pink Houses” days, and his more recent albums (for example, No Better than This) have depth and appeal that I expect will last.

In the category of musicians themselves staying fresh over a period of time rather than their music, I will say that Neil Young will almost certainly end up with the musical resumé during my lifetime that I am most “jealous” of.

“I don’t include Whitney Houston, because the golden age was over by the time she came up.”

She may not be in the same bracket as Ray and Aretha et al for the songs she produced, but none of them came even close as a singer. It’s just unfortunate she sang in the same era as Mariah Carey and Celine Dion….

http://jakefogelnest.com/post/17460767716

Am I allowed to mention a current artist who I think ought to survive?

Janelle Monae: See Cold War, or Many Moons especially. She has a science fiction theme through her albums that many here might enjoy on top of her amazing voice.

Thanks, Purple Platypus (#34) for reminding me of the Pukka Orchestra. I agree with you about the Spoons. Amazing! Some other good 80’s Canadian bands: Strange Advance (esp. their song ‘Worlds Away’). Jane Sibbery was absolutely perfect. And there’s a song by the Extras for which there’s a great animated video: http://youtu.be/3jwTmMxMxAc The song is called ‘Can’t Stand Still’. And I still like Saga — for some reason, people thought they were German. They weren’t. They were just super cool. Beyond Canada, I think some of Nina Hagen’s stuff will last. Also, Blondie and the Pretenders. I also like the Lotus Eaters. They were a British band. I heard them a few times on Toronto radio in the 80’s but it was years before I could find any recordings of their music.

praymont @ 182, I was just kicking myself earlier today for not mentioning Strange Advance in that post, so good on you for bringing them in. And I remember that Extras video well and probably still have it on a VHS tape somewhere, along with much else I mentioned in my earlier post and tons of contemporaneous non-Canadian stuff from the likes of Duran Duran, Tears For Fears, Bronski Beat (to name three I’m still fond of) and numerous others whose inclusion I am, in retrospect, far less proud of (Wham! jumps to mind).

What little Jane Sibbery I ever heard, on the other hand, I couldn’t stand.

I should add that a few years after the sort of music I mentioned above vanished without a trace, I got into prog. Floyd first, then Yes – I was also listening to Genesis by then but mostly their later, poppier stuff, which I now can’t stand, though in my defense my favorite track from Invisible Touch was always ‘The Brazillian”, then and now. (Just occurred to me that that title now has rather different connotations than it did in 1986… oh well.)

I’ll say a lot of the prog I liked then still holds up – Floyd, most Yes, some Tull, the first King Crimson album (I’ve never, then or now, liked the next three, except for bits of Lizard, and the three after that – starting with Lark’s Tongues in Aspic – I wouldn’t have liked if I’d heard them then, but dig now).

I’ve gone completely off ELP, however (totally outclassed even by some of their imitators, like Japan’s all-female Ars Nova). I went through a brief phase when Styx seemed like a good idea – not so much now. I still listen to Rush, but on the whole I don’t think nearly as highly of them as I did in my teens, and nowadays I mostly listen to neither their 70s prog nor their 80s synthpop, but the surprisingly gritty metal that dominates their albums since the mid-90s. These patterns seem to roughly correspond to what the more critical end of the prog community as a whole thinks of these three bands, except lots of people still rate some mid-70s Rush a lot more highly than I do.

People who still like most of those bands owe it to themselves to check out Porcupine Tree and Ayreon, among others. Some remarkably exciting things happened in that genre in the late 90s and throughout the 00s.

While I was doing something else last night it occurred to me to wonder whether Kevin Ayres should have survived better than he has. And the other components of Soft Machine as well, of course, but Ayres was the most accessible in his solo career

“I still listen to Rush, but on the whole I don’t think nearly as highly of them as I did in my teens”

I caught them live at the New Haven Colliseum back in the 80s. I was in grad school and my then girlfriend taught French through Berlitz, and the drummer took a lesson before every show (his then wife was French Canadian and they wanted to raise the daughter bilingual), so I got to hear the sound check as well as the show. I thought the opening act “Mama’s Boys” (a long forgotten heavy-metal trio) far more interesting; Rush struck me as speaking far more to generic teenagers than us pseudointellectual snobs. But they’ve certainly lasted.

“Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion”
I used to not get them, but I play guitar in a band that backs amateur singers (doing jazz standards) once a month; live Karaoke, so to speak. The singers take lessons and rehearse with the pianist in between sessions, so it’s not as bad as one might think. One of them brought their vocal teacher along once, and she sang the livin bejesus out of a Celine Dion tune. An “Oh, that’s what they’re about” light went on. I prefer Aretha, though. Music isn’t just about chops.

@Phil – David Byrne, an honorary Brit? He’s Dumbarton born, is he not?

I adored Funeral, Arcade Fire’s first album, but sort of drifted away from them after that.

relatedly a lack of female voices, as they didn’t tend to sing so much in the punk influenced genres

Dunno about that; post-punk especially had a lot of very good female singers: Ari Up, Poly Styrene, and Siouxsie Sioux stand out. And then there’s the whole Riot Grrl thing…

@ Uncle Ebeneezer

I disagree with you re classical/jazz being terribly complicated and stimulating different parts of the brain than pop, etc. Perhaps I’m wrong and too influenced by my own background/tastes, but lots of classical and jazz I think is just as accessible, if by that you mean based on fairly simple musical ideas, repetition, predictability, theme/variations, etc., as pop music. From Vivaldi to Philip Glass, a lot of classical music is just stuffed with repetition. Conversely, the Beatles, say, are quite un-simple in some of their harmonies and song structure. The divide between the genres has less to do with simplicity/complexity than you suggest. And a lot of the underlying structures are similar, as, e.g., Leonard Bernstein frequently pointed out in his musical lectures.

@189: The history of American music is odd, in that really the first mainstream music to capture the interest of the American psyche, was big-band/showtunes/jazz (the standards.)

That’s true only if you’re talking about recorded music. Before that there’s a much longer tradition of songs written specifically for DYI at home, church, tavern etc.

N Morley:
though jazz is, I think, simultaneously anti-repetition (never play the verse or chorus the same way twice) and to untrained ears rather repetitious

Agree.

“All the above are highly debatable, of course.”

Indeed. Paul Weller????????

@198

Well ‘on 24 February 2010, Weller received the Godlike Genius Award at the NME Awards. His 2010 album, Wake Up the Nation, released in April, was met with critical acclaim and subsequently nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. … In May 2010 Weller was presented with the Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement award.’

But it’s all subjective, innit?

I suspect that almost all music that gets attention for being “extreme” ages badly, simply because it will cease to be on the cutting edge after a while.

Watching a YouTube video of the Sex Pistols makes me think “wow, that’s a pretty thin sound” and also “weren’t they just adorable?” Not the look they were going for, I think.

Henry @203
“a lot has to do with where you grew up…”

Fair enough. (And perhaps also when one grew up, but I’d just as soon skip over that. :))

Or failed to: I cannot name a single band that was popular in the time of my youth, but spent it listening to King Crimson, Miles Davis, Yes, and other music that survived. But survival is a tricky thing: who here considers J.S. Bach superior to C.P.E. Bach? Yet that judgement is only commonly accepted after Mendelssohn reintroduced the music of JS Bach to audiences.

Today I think music is in a bit of a bind. The late 70’s are forever going to be the era when innovation sold. The latest Autechre album reached #124 in Britain. Insofar as survival depends on memory, the good music of today is going to need rediscovery.

Oh, and sometimes I find that the “classic” album for some artists isn’t as good as another one of their albums.

e.g. In Utero beats Nevermind, Sandinista beats London Calling.

This is just my opinion of course, but it may be useful for those who aren’t so keen on the “classic” album to try a different “flavour” of the same artist if they offered it.

I would answer the question in 193 with the already-mentioned Young and Bush, plus Richard Thompson, Robert Wyatt and Peter Hammill. There must be more….

For 1980-era new wave, there’s the aleady-mentioned Wobble and I’d add David Sylvian and David Thomas. The only band I can think of that might actually produce something interesting and new are, oddly enough for this thread, The Mekons. They’re still good live and still very funny – see archive.org . Julian Cope is interesting as a person and critic.

Oddly enough there’s tons of 1990-era musicians who are still turning out good stuff. They seem to last a lot longer now; because there’s less money or because there’s less substance abuse or because what, I don’t know.

My last comment: hey! No one’s mentioned Elvis! Or The Owl Service.

Sandinista beats London Calling

No wait, my last comment is that The Prisoner b/w White Man in Hammersmith Palais beats both.

@LFC/Neville Morley- I meant to begin with a caveat that I don’t think that jazz is always more complex than pop/rock, or that there aren’t songwriter’s who write complex pop songs. Some of my favorite songwriters do just that. But I would argue on the whole that jazz is more complex if only because the vocabulary used by the artists is so much more advanced. Rock songs are typically built on major and minor chords. With a few 7’s, and dim chords sparsely used here and there for flavor. Jazz features far more diminished, augmented, 11’s, 6’s, 13’s, maj7’s, maj/min’s etc. You can see this easily by picking up a book of classic rock covers and comparing it to a Real Book of jazz standards. I forget where I read it (I think in Levitin’s “This Is Your Brain On Music”) there was an account of studies that have shown that people greatly prefer simple major and minor chords over the more complex chords. Major and minor chords tend to feel more solid and have less tension built into them. Diminished and augmented chords are unsettling and feel unresolved or off kilter. They probably somehow work the brain harder because they have more going on (just a guess.) I’ve even had numerous instances where I’ve tried sneaking in some jazzier chords into songs and had more pop/rock minded band-leaders say something like “Cut it out. We play the chords people wanna hear. Save that shit for your jazz gigs.” An arrogant statement, but there’s also some truth to it. I’ve also seen it when I play various chords for young relatives. Major and minor chords get quick reception. More complex chords get looks of discomfort or confusion. Anyways, in addition to the chords, there are also other elements like polyrhythmic approaches, odd time signatures, unpredictable key changes that I see far more often in jazz (one of the reasons I love listening to it and playing it) that I think account for my view that jazz (and classical) are far more complex genres than pop/rock.

Re: repetition, I meant to make it clear that obviously repetition is a large part of jazz as well. The typical AABA form demands it. And there are some standards (Impressions, Caravan, etc.) that are highly repetitious. But the difference, imo, between jazz and pop/rock in this regard is that jazz features repetition of a form, but then it is livened up by a melody or solo that varies and goes off on a little exploration. You rarely hear a jazz song where not only are the chords and rhythm repetitive, but so is the melody (which is not to say it never happens, but it’s generally frowned upon.) Whereas in pop/rock and especially reggae and various dance music, you can have 4+ minutes of the exact same rhythm, the exact same chords, the exact same melody all played with the simplest major or minor chords. And you have yourself a big hit!

Re: Beatles, I agree that they can have some incredibly complex (which is why I love them, and why they are very popular for jazz covers) but they also broke-through with alot of extremely catchy, simple material. I would argue that if I wanted to pick a Beatles song to represent rock/pop, that the best pick would be something closer to the “I wanna hold your hand” end of the spectrum rather than “Eleanor Rigby”, even though I greatly prefer the latter.

@Hogan/Bill Benson- Good points. I confess to not knowing a ton about pre-recorded music and 19th century popular music. I was mainly looking at the fact that the musical revolution happened to coincide with a major shift on song-writing style (Elvis, Beatles, Beach Boys etc.) Obviously changes in recording, distribution, radio, television play a large role, so it’s hard to say whether rock just got lucky by coming about when the technology was ripe for something new, or whether there was something stylistically different about rock that made it appeal to more people than whatever music had existed before. Comparing pre-recorded hymn/marching music, to phonograph-era swing, to 45’s era Elvis, to mainstream-radio rock, to internet/Itunes is obviously a challenging comparison to make due to all the differences in the availability of the music to the general public. For the record, I think of hymns and marches to be fairly simple musically (lotsa major chords, lotsa repetition) so I’m not sure how they would change my (admittedly rough) theory. Of course, with hymns you also have added complications because: are they popular because they are well-written songs, or because the church forces you to listen to them and sing them as part of your duty to God? So it’s hard to compare their popularity with their secular competitors.

Given the amount of North Americans commenting here, I’m surprised that there haven’t been any mentions of Interpol or The Walkmen yet. Or the little-known and sadly short-lived The Organ.

the next book in the Brisingamen series

I came across this the other day, and it’s just about the best news of the year. CT seminar material?

“Diminished and augmented chords are unsettling and feel unresolved or off kilter.”

Well, yes. That’s the point. They drive the music forward into the next chord, which resolves that tension. Jazz (prior to modal jazz, anyway) was solidly based in functional harmony, and as such is very much the same game as classical music. The book “The Chord Scale Theory & Jazz Harmony” is recommended here (Nettles & Graf).

“there was an account of studies that have shown that people greatly prefer simple major and minor chords over the more complex chords.”

ROFL. If it’s as bad as that, it’s the sort of thing that gives psychology a bad name. The whole point of functional harmony is to build melodies over chord _progressions_ that lead your ear into the resolution. From Bach to Coltrane, it’s how Western Music works. Even Giant Steps does that (in little pieces, though; it’s interest is in the rapidly changing tonal centers in a manner that is (I think) unique to Coltrane) So the idea of “prefering major/minor chords” is, uh, doh, the whole point of functional harmony. Sigh.

Hardly any mentioned of what is nowadays being called electronic dance music (EDM), of course a underground but increasingly substantial part of the music biz, but not one where the single artist album predominates – much of it is mixes of other artists. Despite being a fan for 15 odd years I struggle to think of albums that will really last – it is a genre that is all about the fresh sound and beat and to an EDM fan even 5 years ago can sound very tired, plus there are myriad subgenres where people become part of the “scene” to the exclusion of others. But there are veterans that have been in the main game and managing to stay relevant, making original albums for many years – Orbital, Sasha, John Digweed/Bedrock, Hybrid, James Zabiela.
For an excellent and entertaining view of the development of EDM and its many styles check this http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

@Bill Murray:
I probably should have made clearer in the colloquy w/ H. that I’m ignorant of a great deal of pop music (Irish or American or whatever), for reasons that have little to do with when I grew up (b. ’57) or where. I just never got into pop/rock in a big way, though it was impossible not to absorb a bit b/c it so drenched the general environment. OTOH I played a wind instrument seriously through college so I was exposed to a lot of the classical orchestral & chamber music repertoire. (And some jazz, though that tended to be more listening than playing, though I did a bit of the latter.)

@Uncle Ebenezeer
Ok, I don’t think we are far apart on most of this.

I am young compared even to most of the commenters other folks are calling young, but nonetheless beginning to reach an age where I am listening to more old music than new, so perhaps I can respond.

Then-contemporary things I listened to in my preteen and teen years that hold up well for me: some 90s R&B like Whitney’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” or Boyz II Men; Smashing Pumpkins prior to the initial dissolution of the band in 2000; Alice in Chains; Soundgarden; At the Drive-In; Nine Inch Nails; some of the popular 90s hip-hop like Biggie and 2-Pac. I wish I could claim I’d listened to cooler stuff at this age, but I mostly didn’t until college.

Things that have not held up well that I enjoyed at the time: pretty much any nu-metal or screamo, most Rage Against the Machine songs, most Incubus songs, Pearl Jam’s bigger hits (though I’ll defend some of the deeper cuts).

As far as more recent bands with staying power, I’ll make a few suggestions: Wilco, who continue to make great albums; St. Vincent, who has pulled off the neat trick of three consecutive albums of high quality where each is more challenging than its predecessor; Gillian Welch, rightly mentioned upthread.

All of that said, most of what I love most has never been popular and never will be, like the Red House Painters or Idaho.

That’s the book by Alan Garner, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_Service_(band)

FWIW I teach high school students and often ask about the favorite songs they have listened to the most in life. Recently a pigtailed 16 year old girl said her all time favorite was definitely Over The Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin! Other students favorites included some Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, quite a few Beatles songs and even Creedence Clearwater Revival. Ancient music BEFORE their parents were in high school. So those appear to have some (generation skipping) staying power.

There’s basically only one thing I need say: http://rateyourmusic.com

Give it a few hours and you will understand why I sent you there, fellow music lovers.

Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel and Joanna Newsome are far and away the best songwriters of the past 20 years. Xiu Xiu, who are actually from my home town, are also reliably good.

But why listen to anything modern when you can listen to Bukka White, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, and Dock Boggs.

I’m pushing sixty, so maybe it’s no surprise that I didn’t recognize a single name on Henry’s list.

I had pretty catholic tastes in Rock music when I first got into it in the mid-sixties, and listened to The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, Cream, Jeff Beck, and Jimi Hendrix. Four things threw me off the rails way back when; 1) hearing “Seven Ate Sweet” by the Kaleidoscope on KMPX, 2) hearing Captain Beefheart sing “Electricity” on the same station, and later “Willie the Pimp” on Zappa’s “Hot Rats” album, 3) finding a cassette of African Soucous that my ex’s second husband had left behind, and 4) hearing Khaled sing “Chebba” (Safy Boutella produced version) on KPFA.

I went running off into the bush and never came back. Latest weakness: London Club Mix Bhangra.

Some of the ‘Post-Rock’ bands like Explosion in the Sky, Mogwai, God is An Astronaut are doing really interesting stuff (e.g. mostly instrumental bands—their sound is somewhere between prog rock and shoe-gaze bands—a heavy emphasis on dynamic shifts).

I’ll second that and add my favourite in that strand: Tortoise.

Agreed: it’s a golden age for indie. From the last decade: Sigur Ros, Sufjan Stevens, Interpol, Beirut, the National, TV on the Radio and the early Canadian invasion–New Pornographers, Metric, The Dears, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Final Fantasy.

More recently, I agree that Twin Shadow is a good one–worth a listen for those into vintage 80s electronic (hints of everything from New Order to Phil Collins). Chairlift, Stars, and Destroyer also draw on that territory very well.

A few mentioned Bob Mould and Sugar. The Menzingers’ recent album remind me of them, and of other bands from the early 90s (The Connells, Social Distortion).

And fans of My Bloody Valentine and showcase might like Pains of Being Pure at Heart and The Horrors.

Any other good ‘similar to’ recommendations for those looking to discover more recent music?

Sherman Hemsley died today. Relevant to this thread because in addition to famously expressing his enthusiasm^1^ for Yes, Gentle Giant, Nektar, and Gong at various points in his career, etc, he was a jazz player himself in the ’60s and became somewhat of a surprise early 90s funk star. Actually The Jeffersons might have been the first show to play a prog rock song during an episode, I think? Not sure how to check that though. Hemsley’s epic funk-prog-spacerock-godonlyknowswhatelse collaboration Festival of Dreams and his glorious spontaneous exaltation of Gentle Giant in an interview to Dinah Shore both appear to be lost to history, or at least not readily LMGTFY-accessible.

^1^for anyone else this would mean “praised in passing in an interview”; for Hemsley, this additionally meant stuff like “locate, contact, and pester a member of Gong and offer to fly them halfway around the world, just because, then buy ’em plane tickets not only to fly to meet him in Hollywood, but also to take an extended stay in Jamaica just because the band member and his girlfriend mentioned they wanted to spend some time there”

dana, great link! I’ll have to look them up. I know Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs, but don’t know any of the spin-offs and relatives.

And the vocalist’s voice reminded me of another band that deserves to survive: Yo La Tengo.

Pushing 250 now, and I counted only 1, maybe two commenters not mentioning exclusively bands or singer using English. Chikamatsu , I would bet dollars on the pennies you grew somewhere else than in the US, Uk or Oz.

I know it now, from many such threads on other sites, but I am still baffled how you English mother speaker are cut from the rest of the world. And seriously and self-uncousciously discussing if some obscure garage band was unjustly forgotten, when you ignore hugely talented and proven foreign artists…

Hoping the future is different, one can cross now a few of american commenters on Youtube under “foreign language” videos.
And maybe the hispanic demography factor in the US will do something for your ears starting accepting a song not in your mothertongue.

Ok platonist, I’ll try to be of help.
However, I am not really the right person, never been deeply into music listening. I mostly let the radio on in the background, I cannot stay more than 10mn listening Music without doing something else.

So in this spirit, my suggestion would be to find some internet radio outside of the English sphere, and to start from there.
first example for French Musicand beyond (including some English artists ;-):
http://www.fipradio.fr/player
I like it, because it is public – no nada niente commercials nor lobbying from big labels for the last hyped artist on tour- , 95% of the time music playing (the rest being 2 minutes news every hour and some live concert) , and not limiting itself to a style or a period.

Unfortunately I do not have found an equivalent for other popular music cultures I would know (german/English/Italian) ; not to speak for the one I do not know (slavophone, lusophone, asian…)

Let see if crooked timber may help?

tomslee – “Watching a YouTube video of the Sex Pistols makes me think “wow, that’s a pretty thin sound” ”

Hmm. I saw them once, while Matlock was in the band, and thought the rhythm section was almost as good as Entwistle/Moon. Didn’t think so much of the other two.