FYI: Truth Attack - All Genres Of Music That Have Ever Existed Contain Awesome Music In Them, And If You Write Off A Whole Genre Of Music You Are Being Closeminded And Dumb

i also think "punks couldn't play for shit" is way overstated usually...i mean...steve jones could play, glen matlock could play...the ramones, in their way, were a whup-ass band...then by 78 or 79 most of the punks were doing post punk or had gotten way more polished...even the US hardcore dudes ended up being chopsy and metal-ish after awhile.

If you look at what I wrote, I said that punk made people who thought they couldn't play think they were just as good as the guys who were successful at it, who could play. The problem, IMO, wasn't so much the original bands as it was the less talented people imitating them.

so in that case what damage has punk actually done?

I think punk is partially responsible for the ongoing denigration and devaluation of the singer in popular music.

i also think "punks couldn't play for shit" is way overstated usually

Totally agree with this

but hasn't american idol taken the Cult of the Amateur and completely rewritten it the other way?

(aside from all the kids with biz failures under their belts that turn up as contestants...)

xp

OK missed Dan's post there and there's some validity to that but this is true of almost any genre isn't it? Especially ones that have a certain DIY element to the creation of the music... like grime made on Playstations and Ableton laptop DJ types with no skill for beatmatching are two recent developments that spring to mind

I think punk is partially responsible for the ongoing denigration and devaluation of the singer in popular music.

lol this is some serious serious bullshit

Either say how or fuck off.

I think punk is partially responsible for the ongoing denigration and devaluation of the singer in popular music.

I don't think punk took the focus off singing talent. punk just codified and made explicit an attitude that was already there. punk was never popular enough to force a seachange in the mass audience's attitude about singers. it was just another symptom of a preexisting trend in popular music.

let's talk about hank williams, billie holiday, elvis, bob dylan, neil young; artists who technically should not have been popular but due to their force of talent redefined what "a good singer" does. every superstar who changed the game without adhering to the rulebook took a chink out of the "first, you need talent" argument.

how about ASCAP? when they doubled the performance royalties on "popular" music in 1940, radio broadcasters balked, banned ASCAP music, and turned to regional music styles like "race" and "hillbilly" music that ASCAP hadn't bothered to represent. and america found out, hey, that stuff is pretty good! and you don't have to be super-talented to make it work.

american democratization of the form? all music as folk music? that's the larger backdrop here, with punk being one obvious byproduct.

* almost every single punk band was centered around a lead singer who served as the de facto focus and frontperson of the band
* i'm assuming your problem with punk is that it made it ok for singers to not sing pretty, which isn't even true because folk had already done that in the '60s and rock music had already done that in the '50s and jazz had already done that in the '40s etc etc which leads me to:
* you're basically spouting the same historical revisionist bullshit that every generation cites for the music of the generation before it except for some reason you're using against something that happened 30 years ago
* even if it was true that "punk is partially responsible for the ongoing denigration and devaluation of the singer in popular music" (which it isn't), how would this be a bad thing?

let's talk about hank williams, billie holiday, elvis, bob dylan, neil young; artists who technically should not have been popular but due to their force of talent redefined what "a good singer" does. every superstar who changed the game without adhering to the rulebook took a chink out of the "first, you need talent" argument.

racist

"chinese person" is the preferred term

Not totally sure where all this popular music that devalues the singer is at.

if anything, the prog music that came before punk was responsible for the ongoing denigration and devaluation of the singer in popular music, because the emphasis was on long instrumental sections over vocals

yay ilx

poor greg lake

lol xp

punk's easy to blame because "I don't need no fookin' talent!" is built into the confrontational stance

however this statement is poor logic: punk doesn't require talent, ergo, all punks are talentless

I agree with this statement: "punk explicitly devalued singing talent"

not so much this one: "punk caused singing talent to be devalued among the general population"

Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count), James Brown didn't top the Billboard list until "Living In America" either. "Living In America" is actually a song I like, but it is obviously not representative of his style.

maybe agree with this one: "punk caused singing talent to be devalued among rock critics"

why doesn't the R&B chart count, geir

Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count)
Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count)
Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count)
Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count)
Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count)
Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count)
Other than the R&B chart (which doesn't count)

You should all learn to read and infer.

There has been an ongoing devaluation of the role of the singer as a musician in most forms of popular music for the past 50 years; punk is one part of a larger picture. It's not just about "singing pretty" and it's not the only reason; it's about the escalation of image and marketing as primary components of the musical landscape.

You run across people who are massively talented in traditional or non-traditional ways who don't make it all the time, and most of the reason why is because they either didn't catch the right break or they didn't have the right look. Add into this the ongoing culture of instrumentalists who consider themselves to be "real" musicians as opposed to singers, something that is prevalent across genres, and also the entire cult of the songwriter (aka the non-teenpop sections of ILM for a good example), and you'll see strong pattern suggesting that in modern society the singer's main function is to be the figurehead and when you have a band where the singer can't play that part, the band's frontman suddenly becomes someone else entirely (hi dere Fall Out Boy).

why doesn't the R&B chart count, geir

Because it is a specialist chart. No wonder James Brown had no competition from The Beatles on the R&B chart, eh?

so R&B charts do not reflect popularity?

Some good chin-scratching here, but no-one has yet said what awesome music was spawned by the following genres:
* crusty
* grebo
* funk-rock
* that early 90s fad for soulless covers, reasonably faithful to the original but with added drum machine
* McCartney-esque melodic pop

'Living In America' is not 'more melodic' than 'I Got You (I Feel Good)' and it's melodic qualities had no bearing on it's chart success which was more down to it's inclusion on the Rocky IV soundtrack.

so R&B charts do not reflect popularity?

They reflect popularity among a certain select demographic. Motown also had lots of R&B #1s, but also proved able to cross over to the pop charts to a much bigger extent than James Brown, because they managed to appeal to non R&B fans too.

a broader way of putting it would be "all musical aesthetics" rather than "all genres" so we don't have to worry about covering some obscure microgenre

either way it's all just noise u put in your ears - IMO all sounds are awesome and everyone should take the time to listen to all sorts of stuff and learn to appreciate the value of even the things he/she doesn't like personally

when I was growing up in the late 70s / early 80s, you'd have to be deaf to be unfamiliar with james brown's "I got you (I feel good)". who cares how many singles he sold the year it was released? he was an american icon. "living in america" was a comeback - what did he come back from, total obscurity?

* McCartney-esque melodic pop

"Penny Lane" and "Paperback Writer". For starters.....

I'd hardly call those melodic

"McCartney-esque melodic pop" has too many qualifiers to count as a genre

I'm betting every american wedding from the 70s to today has seen the DJ spinning "I got you (I feel good)"

except, you know, the ones with string quartets

I'd hardly call those melodic

you're just being contrarian right?

or the ones that play "sex machine"

those weddings are the best

Does 'most tolerant music lover' = 'biggest dilettante' and if so who is the best example of this on ILM?

Paul Edward Wagemann

Not at all xp. Penny Lane seems melodic, but it's a clever disguise what is actually primarily a rhythmic exercise (try tapping the vocal 'melody' to see what McCartney was up to). Same goes for Paperback Writer, which is less sophisticated rhythmically, but relies to a greater extent on added harmonic qualities in the chorus. Anyone who cites these as an example of good melodic qualities doesn't know what they are talking about.

You run across people who are massively talented in traditional or non-traditional ways who don't make it all the time, and most of the reason why is because they either didn't catch the right break or they didn't have the right look.

This is only true in the last 50 years? Sorry if I'm not reading and inferring hard enough but it seems like what you're describing is a side effect of the invention of the small combo band plus 50 years worth of pop culture. I would argue that virtually every artist that has achieved widespread notoriety and success in that time period has done so because people liked the vocalist.

And Fallout Boy is pretty much an outlier, right?

* crusty - what is this? crusty punks? if so, crass
* grebo - "grebo guru" by pop will eat itself! great song!
* funk-rock - did you make this up? who is funk rock? red hot chili peppers? I don't like 'em but they have some good songs.
* that early 90s fad for soulless covers, reasonably faithful to the original but with added drum machine - wow, that famous genre of music
* McCartney-esque melodic pop - ok you got me here, that shit sucks

does "grebo" really count as a proper genre?

The Wonder Stuff were considered "grebo" weren't they?

They were great. A great McCartney-esque pop band, that is :)

McCartney-esque as a term implies that he innovated somehow.

"a clever disguise what is actually primarily a rhythmic exercise"

^^^^ how does this disqualify it from being melodic? "melodic" = having emphasis on melody, and rhythm is one of the dimensions of melody.

geir, how to you feel about 16th notes? seem dangerous to me, could lead to syncopation....

McCartney-esque as a term implies that he innovated somehow.

He did. A lot of the harmonic and melodic stuff he did had only been done in classical music and Tin Pan Alley before. Never in "rock" music. Thus he helped improve rock with elements from superior and more sophisticated genres.

This is only true in the last 50 years? Sorry if I'm not reading and inferring hard enough but it seems like what you're describing is a side effect of the invention of the small combo band plus 50 years worth of pop culture. I would argue that virtually every artist that has achieved widespread notoriety and success in that time period has done so because people liked the vocalist.

I'd argue that for every person who shot up there because they were a great singer, you can find someone else who shot up there because they looked good behind a microphone (Diana Ross) and, that as the music industry has matured, the image has become much more important than the talent associated with it both with the people producing music and the people consuming it.

xp: Geir, The Beach Boys ruin your argument.

I'd argue that for every person who shot up there because they were a great singer, you can find someone else who shot up there because they looked good behind a microphone (Diana Ross) and, that as the music industry has matured, the image has become much more important than the talent associated with it both with the people producing music and the people consuming it.

you can say this about every type of musician, not just the singer, in addition to almost every single type of entertainment job in the entire world.

I can get with Dan on this count, I think.

x-post

In the case of the Beach Boys, they got the influence second hand, from Four Freshmen who must have been heavily influenced by Tin Pan Alley.

well, not like gaffer or best boy. you know what i mean.