"EVERY HUGE ARTIST HAS A BE HERE NOW" AKA the UK version

nothing quite ever lived up to 'i should coco' either way.

― LIKE If you are against racism (omar little), Tuesday, January 13, 2015 5:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Again, I disagree.

Dunno man, this is possibly a generational thing but the eighties signified to us (16 y/o, grungey britpop kids) little more than ridiculous shoulder pads, far too much make up, mullets, slap bass, fretless bass, Stock Aitken and Waterman, and not much else. The Human League were doing 'One Man In My Heart'. And really you didn't really hear all that much about the Smiths (but certainly the Roses) when reading the mainstream indie press. The only eighties music I remember kids at school being into was stuff like Metallica. Other than that the 80s were largely considered as a bit of a joke - the decade fashion forgot etc... I think a lot of bands may have played a part in that - Nirvana's nihilism and rejection of excess/flamboyance, Oasis's Beatles and mod worship etc...
Blur had a couple of secret new wave excursions but it was only in retrospect that I became aware of them as such. And then there was talk of a few bands channelling this really obscure act called Wire who no one's ever heard.
what I'm saying is that it's incredible how the bulk of what the eighties really were about was kept under wraps to those who didn't know any better. I remember falling in love with a seventies King Crimson album and then hearing one of their 80s records and remarking about how much the latter one had aged compared to the 70s one. These days I think I would feel the opposite.

That was x post to woof

adult-oriented Travis/Coldplay/Texas

o rly

Dog latin's thesis there is kind of impaired by the fact that Texas's own New Jersey (i.e. The Hush) was actually released 2 weeks before The Man Who.

At the time that Texas were conquering the world in 1997, Travis were releasing songs with titles like "All I Want To Do Is Rock", "U16 Girls", "I Love You Anyways" and (lol) "Tied to the 90s".

So not really adult-oriented.

It fell off a cliff though and he never made another studio album so it's a Neither Fish Nor Flesh rather than a Be Here Now.

TTD kept making albums (and still is, tbf) - the next one went top ten both here and in the UK

it's true that the BritPop mob preferred the 60s and 70s, although there were a few 80s albums/artists that were faves of Britpop bands. Kate Bush (Suede mentioned her every chance they got), New Order, Prince, Smiths, Stone Roses, Mary Chain maybe.. but yeah the 80s pop canon barely got a look in.

Yeah Travis's first album was very different from their commercial peak.

was it any good though?I would think not.

i never knew before today that stereophonics had FIVE number one albums on the trot. i'm not sure i could even name five stereophonics songs tbh

xpost no it was really bad IIRC, save for one Lennon-esque song that seemed to pre-empt their later ballady work.

(xp to dog latin's previous)
ah right - I'm 7-odd years older than you, which makes the difference - more or clearer experience of the decade, more solid memories.

yeah it's that - i'm sure if you were there at the time you'd remember the eighties as they were. for us '90s kids it did feel like pop-culture's sinkhole

i quite liked all i wanna do is rock at the time but hated everything else with a passion so never actually heard the album

xp

wow 5? I didnt know that either. How did they get so big?

I grew up in the 80s and hated it im like that guy in the clickhole article who preferred the 90s lol

If the music of ten years previously ISN'T hugely unfashionable and lame to the kids then something's gone wrong somewhere along the line. Even after over a decade of 80s revival it still feels like the albums of the 80s are under-canonized relative to the 60s, 70s and 90s. But then the late 80s is also viewed as one of the most explosively creative periods ever in pop, so six of one...

If we're talking 80s albums though then both the Human League's Hysteria and Kate Bush's The Sensual World both feel like they qualify.

I still find I have a huge knowledge gap of music from circa 86-90 compared to other areas and I attribute this deficit in many ways to what I said upthread. Late 80s production and style makes me very wary on the whole. In my mind I see it as a transitional no man's land between 'old music I enjoy' and 'music from my time that I enjoy'

There's a few years at the end of the nineties that I kinda feel the same about. All nu-metal and plastic-pop, until The Strokes came and saved the day. Even though I don't really like The Strokes anymore, hard to get beyond that thinking.

i know i'm biased cos i was of a certain age during the period, but 86-89 is golden years stuff for me.

I hated it compared to 80-85

UK-specific 80s hugeness: maybe Erasure? but they BeHereNow-ed in the 90s, so, not really.

could make a case for Chorus (anticipated follow-up to two colossal number 1 albums; massive right from the outset but 'only' went 1x platinum),

except they followed this with Abbaesque and the Pop! singles collection which represent their single/album commercial pinnacles,

so it's probably I Say I Say I Say - Always was luxurious and this return treated as A Big Deal at the time but it didn't quite go all the way; album topped the charts but did not linger and now the casual fans were all buying Parklife instead. 18 months later they returned again and didn't have any casual fans left.

I'm the same about 98-00 Frederik. That's an indefinable inter-period in my mind where things were breaking down but not really building up. I found solace in older records, IDM and post-rock but I just couldn't get behind any popular styles (nu-metal, Ibiza trance, fratboy hip-hop, ska-punk, post-Britpop, 'cheese' i.e. Steps, S Club 7 (do university campuses still have 'cheesy tunes' nights? it's all i remember being advertised at our SU), chillout music etc) I'm sure there must have been some great music that I totally slept on, but I just remember being appalled by the vast majority of what was happening at the time. To me it all seemed so vapid and egregious. Being young suddenly seemed to be about shiny shirts and hairgel, expensive drinks, expensive superclubs with overpaid DJs, snotty brats telling their moms to fuck off, getting wrecked in Ibiza etc.. None of it made sense to me, politically, socially... I never got into the Strokes or the Hives or the Libertines either but still see 2001 as a good pivotal year for new music of all kinds.

When we're talking about 'Be Here Nows', are we actually framing these in terms of commercial success? I'm confused. So many artists' worst music happens to be their most successful.

Would the Boo Radleys' 'Wake Up!' count? It was the album that followed the indie smash 'Giant Steps' which broke them into top ten territory with a huge single that got played ad nauseum on breakfast radio. I like the record, but it comes nowhere close in terms of vision and ambition as GS and it kind of spoilt the band. They released two more albums but on the back of Wake Up Boo, they started being labelled as cheery one-hit wonders and commercially never recovered.

ah, remember when "Wake up boo" got played as much as "Bang bang into the room" does now?

If we're talking 80s albums though then both the Human League's Hysteria and Kate Bush's The Sensual World both feel like they qualify.

I've been looking up the career trajectories of some of the other new pop-era types. Maybe Simple Minds' Good News From the Next World fits the bill - first single went top 10 but only one other charted, a gold album following a run five platinum/multi-platinum ones (although the previous couple had both sold less than the one before).

xposts as far as 2014 is concerned, and looking at this year's P&J list, I'm worried about entering another musical 'depression' right now. After at least two amazing years of music, I couldn't help but feel like 2014 was a bit of a hump. I didn't have any trouble compiling an EOY list, but I'm feeling a noticeable qualitative dip, or a bit of an exhaustion of 'new ideas' compared to what i was hearing in 2012/2013. On a more positive slant, this most likely means that new exciting things are round the corner.

I just remembered Finley Quaye's 'Vanguard' exists, though I think that's the 2nd Darkness album bag of flops

Placebo's 'Without You I'm Nothing'?

All nu-metal and plastic-pop, until The Strokes came and saved the day. Even though I don't really like The Strokes anymore, hard to get beyond that thinking.

wait so you still buy this PR?

I tend to think that if I didn't like music one given year that it's my fault for pursuing certain sounds and genres past diminishing returns; it's a signal to try something else, not a sign of general decline (of which there's no such thing).

this thread really is a repository for some of the worst and most senile opinions to marinate in misremembered nostalgia

yeah I'm a bit appalled by what I've read in excerpts

uk-hours ilx is p much just 90s reminiscences at this point, i barely come on til the americans have woken up

All nu-metal and plastic-pop, until The Strokes came and saved the day. Even though I don't really like The Strokes anymore, hard to get beyond that thinking.

wait so you still buy this PR?

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), 14. januar 2015 15:52 (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

2001 is the year I turned 15. We're talking the difference between buying PR and not knowing PR existed. I KNOW that it isn't true, but everything before Strokes - or Kid A, or stuff like that - still feel alien and old.

Alfred, I do agree here - you make what you will of what there is - but in most cases, I've found myself generally repulsed or disappointed by the overall arena - not just what I'm listening to privately, but what I hear when I get out and about or look at critical / fan favourites of the time.
In the case of '98-00 I was young enough to figure I just wasn't the kind of person who liked what other people liked, and retreated into older and more leftfield music, but by 2001 I found my interest in the mainstream revived by stuff like electroclash and certain other strains of music which weren't really big features on the landscape a couple of years beforehand.
Same with 2014 - my mission to find great new music hasn't subsided - if anything it's only increased - but I'm not as inspired by critical or popular consensus as I was just 12 months ago. And yeah, that could just be me, or it could also be down to trends, opinion, where the money is going in the industry, who and what is being touted, technological factors, socio-political factors, what came before, what is to come...

Like, you're discussing Fat of the Land, and that's archaic, that's soooo old. I used to laugh at kids who listened to Prodigy, when all that electroclash and dancepunk happened. And there's a five year difference. I still love music from five years ago now, but back then, it was the difference between mattering and being worthless. And having felt that for a long time, even though I know it's not true, I still know comparatively little about that period, and I still have invested less in it.

uk-hours ilx is p much just 90s reminiscences at this point, i barely come on til the americans have woken up

― lex pretend, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 3:01 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a big part of this thread is discussing exactly why this is.

also, i mean, why do you bother posting on a thread called 'EVERY HUGE ARTIST HAS A BE HERE NOW' if you know you're gonna hate it before clicking?

Anyway, Alfred, I am ready to accept that human lifecycles most probably swing from enthusiasm to cynicism quite naturally and that all my VERY PERSONAL examples are testament to where my headspace is at at whatever time. Still think that save for a few examples (I agree wholeheartedly with the number one single and album) that the P&J list is comparatively lacklustre.

For what it's worth, I was listening to plenty '80s music in the '90s (courtesy of my dad's record collection), but there was no way at the time that I'd admit to it.

Placebo's 'Without You I'm Nothing'?

― PaulTMA, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 2:51 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Black Market Music probably fits the bill more than Without You I'm Nothing, I reckon.

Is Between The Gutter and The Stars another one was was a UK New Jersey and a US Fairweather Johnson?

i never knew before today that stereophonics had FIVE number one albums on the trot. i'm not sure i could even name five stereophonics songs tbh

― Ottbot jr (NickB), Wednesday, January 14, 2015 12:59 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow 5? I didnt know that either. How did they get so big?

― Cosmic Slop, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 1:16 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

At first I think people were taken by the more "storytelling" aspects of Word Gets Around, but by the time Performance and Cocktails had come out a lot of Britpop's first wave had either moved on, split up, or released their worst album to date, so people were (I guess) looking for another band to latch onto. I think Stereophonics actually nicked a lot of the casual Oasis fans.

As for their post-Performance and Cocktails "success", christ knows. I'm sure 'Dakota' brought in one or two fans and added a few more years to the life of the band, but...

this was their fifth number one album - i'm sure i'd remember such an atrocious cover but i have no recollection of it at all:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41HpaP6sfrL.jpg

goes without saying but the stereophonics were the epitome of late 90s shit UK music.

Critical response
Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source Rating
Metacritic 46/100[18]
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic 2.5/5 stars [19]
BBC (unfavourable}[11]
Drowned in Sound (4/10)[10]
The Guardian 2/5 stars[20]
Hot Press 1.5/5 stars[21]
The Independent 2/5 stars[22]
NME (7/10) [23]
The Observer (unfavourable)[24]
Pitchfork Media (3.4/10) [9]
The Skinny 2/5 stars[25]

Pull the Pin received generally mixed to negative reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has received an average score of 46, based on 12 reviews.[18] Contrasting with the negative reviews however, NME - who have been critical of the band's past albums - contributor Paul McNamee praised the album, stating it lives up as a successor album to Language. Sex. Violence. Other? and summarised it as "an unapologetic rock’n’roll record by a band who are hard to like but impossible to ignore."[23]

In the negative, Sonja D'Cruze from the BBC summarised the album as having "no real depth, imagination or anything to connect with."[11] Dorian Lynskey of The Guardian criticised the album, saying "the only things worse than Kelly Jones's aggrieved bellow and flatpack songwriting are his lyrics" and compared them to someone "performing brain surgery in boxing gloves: the patient always dies."[20]

Yeah, the thing is, not everything the Stereophonics did was awful, they'd pull out a good one to give people hope every so often. I used to cry Help me! I like the new Stereophonics single! but in retrospect, I'm not that bothered about that paperback book song anymore.

The point of this thread is really not 'reminisce about shit landfill bands pt. 245' or 'bang on about when you were feeling alienated from music'... like the 'Be Here Now'/'New Jersey' thing really should not be this difficult to grasp.

Still not sure why the original New Jersey thread needed a British spin-off though.

ah, remember when "Wake up boo" got played as much as "Bang bang into the room" does now?

― Mark G, Wednesday, 14 January 2015 14:13 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was true, but I was not reallly being nostalgic, yeah?