Modern Rock #1 Hits of 1995

hahahaha

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/RikkiRockett.JPG/800px-RikkiRockett.JPG

since when was the drummer even a hot chick?

Shades of Family Guy:

Peter: If you could be stranded on a desert island with any woman in the world, who would it be?
Glen Quagmire: Taylor Hanson.
Joe Swanson: Taylor Hanson is a guy.
Glen Quagmire: [Laughs] You guys are yankin' me. "Hey, let's put one over on Quagmire."
Peter: No, he's actually a guy, Quagmire.
Glen Quagmire: What? That's insane. That's impossible.
[Pause]
Glen Quagmire: Oh god. Oh my god. I've got all these magazines. Oh god.

he was going off of this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b7/Poison-Look-What-the-Cat-Dragged-In.jpg

when we told him that was a guy, his response was "well if he was a chick I'd totally do her"

that whole LA school of "Liking the NY Dolls But Not Understanding What Made Them Good" was a toxic moment in music...you might even say it was...poison

Wow. That's a LOT of makeup on those dudes. I can see it (not sure which is the drummer there.. based off prettiness, bottom left?)

re the Poison album sleeve: are those their nicknames?

Wow. That's a LOT of makeup on those dudes. I can see it (not sure which is the drummer there.. based off prettiness, bottom left?)

I think that's CC? My guess is bottom right because that makes the story even more hilarious

Quoting lyrics to discredit good-to-great pop songs is really kind of dead end...

You'll burn the house down, then you'll do it again, and again, and again still.

hey wait are Poison to blame for the 2012 duckface epidemic? Hmmm..

that whole LA school of "Liking the NY Dolls (Insert Band) But Not Understanding What Made Them Good" was a toxic moment in music

Fixed. I mean, this is pretty descriptive of a whole slew of the shittiest music in the world.

drummer is bottom dude on the right side, cece is bottom dude on left side, bret is top left

"bottom dude" of course an homage to http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=77&threadid=79985

Quoting lyrics to discredit good-to-great pop songs is really kind of dead end...

I disagree strongly with this and offer as exhibit A for the defense Holland/Dozier/Holland's immortal run in the 60s. Exhibit B is Ashford & Simpson's arguably even greater run. Great pop songs have great lyrics for decades, I'm not quite sure exactly when that goes south but it doesn't have to be wordy nerdy stuff to be great: it just has to not be quantifiably bad & horrible. Acts that go "well, pop isn't really about the lyrics" and write garbage are shitty acts imo. A really really great song can get a pass on some clams, the Stylistics write really effective songs whose lyrics are but fuck "hey, I've got a not-terrible melody so "to hear that tears me up inside/and to see you cuts me like a knife" is an acceptable payoff line. One can comb through the greats listed above and say "well, here's a line where they stumbled" but most of the time they were writing fun killer pop tunes whose lyrics didn't suck. Literally all it takes is 1) not being a dumbass and 2) taking a minimal amount of pride in your work

Stylistics...whose lyrics are "not always at the level of the musicianship"

& actually I've never looked at the writing credits on a Stylistics record and for all I know it's some in-house dude writing "Stone In Love With You"

Hugo and Luigi mate.

Just noticed that these are the same font:

http://i.imgur.com/AvZPS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/SKVR2.jpg

Actually, not this one:

"I'm Stone in Love with You" was a 1972 hit by the Philadelphia soul group The Stylistics. The song was written by Thom Bell, Linda Creed, and Anthony Bell.

Yeah, lots of cruddy typewriter fonts in the 90s.

I'm at work, and it's hard to respond with counter-examples right now, but give me some time and I'll have loads. I've loved songs about birds that surf, about woolly bullies and chewy chewies, about men who profess their love for cows. I've loved every kind of song imaginable. If you're saying everything else that's great about pop music is able to transform a lyric that would otherwise die on the page, then we don't have a disagreement.

eddie vedder BOUGHT A TYPEWRITER and did a lot of the pearl jam liner notes and lyric sheets with it

aerosmith, you're clearly someone who cares a lot about lyrics (and who is, himself, a spectacular lyricist), but there's a lot of room for awesome pop songs with shitty lyrics. I mean, that way lies a dismissal of probably the majority of pop music ever released. Which you're free to do, but I'd wager a lot of people would disagree with that dismissal. Also, I have strong love for a lot of songs where the lyrical content is basically incidental and secondary to the presence of voice qua voice.

yeah i mean lousy lyric writing can be as much an essential part of the character of an enjoyable piece of music as lousy musicianship. it's not all about appreciating how smart and talented the person who made the song is.

I'm at work, and it's hard to respond with counter-examples right now, but give me some time and I'll have loads. I've loved songs about birds that surf, about woolly bullies and chewy chewies, about men who profess their love for cows. I've loved every kind of song imaginable. If you're saying everything else that's great about pop music is able to transform a lyric that would otherwise die on the page, then we don't have a disagreement.

this is a point aside though - subject matter is no barrier to decent lyrics, and decent lyrics need not be brainy lyrics. "Tutti Frutti" is an excellent lyric. That's partly because "daisy" and "crazy" rhyme. "tears me up inside" and "cuts me like a knife" is the lyric-writing equivalent of farting in your listener's face. "dumb" i.e. inconsequential lyrics aren't dumb at all! "Every Rose"'s lyrics are stupid in an insulting, turgid way.

grammar isn't a barrier either - this isn't about Ooh It's Not Smart Enough. It's about having some respect for the actual song you're writing, doing well by it. Poison hasn't passed that test even once, they fucking suck & have always sucked

The lyrics to "Surfin' Bird" and "Wooly Bully" are dumb, but they are not shitty. Big difference.

x-post what the head goat said.

like if Poison had written "Surfin' Bird," they should be so lucky, the line would have been "have you heard/about the curb/everybody's heard/about the curb/c-c-c-curb curb curb, curb is the word" and then they would get all mad when I curb-jobbed Bret M

TS: "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" vs "What's Up?"

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/glee/images/3/36/Santana_rolling_her_eyes.gif

xpost

It's basically the argument made by people who were horrified by the first Ramones album. Today, (most) everyone recognizes those lyrics as brilliantly minimalist and absurd and all the rest--and some people did then, too. But it was pretty much the same argument. Now, I understand that "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" does not operate on the same plane as the Ramones. But whether you're talking about one or the other, I don't see much difference in saying, "The lyrics are the lyrics, the song is the song, and one is not interchangeable with the other."

"What's Up" is more easily sung/clucked in the voice of a psychotic chicken.

clemenza, thank you for explaining in a nutshell how Kara DioGuardi has a career

Quoting lyrics to discredit good-to-great pop songs is really kind of dead end...

― clemenza, Friday, May 25, 2012 11:25 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah i mean quoting lyrics, whether to admire or ridicule, is good fun and all but using it to 'prove' an argument about the record's worth is basically the lowest form of music criticism

It's basically the argument made by people who were horrified by the first Ramones album. Today, (most) everyone recognizes those lyrics as brilliantly minimalist and absurd and all the rest--and some people did then, too. But it was pretty much the same argument."

it's not at all - as I just said, there's plenty of room for dumb, fun, actually-well-written lyrics. This has nothing to do with ppl singing about the French revolution or w/e. It has to do with lyrics that bring some semblance of care to the table. Most people will never notice, which is sort of the big reveal of this era, which is kinda why I hate it: suddenly there's literally nobody writing anything worth parsing, and people start comparing Guns n Roses to for example Aerosmith, whose lyrics, while kinda dumb, are also very clever, rhythmically completely awesome, and suit their music well. Poison are one of the bands who say "you know, I'll bet most people, critics too, don't give a shit one way or the other" - I count that as a big loss, door swings wide open for an avalanche of shit

yeah i mean quoting lyrics, whether to admire or ridicule, is good fun and all but using it to 'prove' an argument about the record's worth is basically the lowest form of music criticism

lol gimme a hierarchy of music criticism sd - does talking about form or composition ever come into it, or is it mainly cultural-crit?

xpost

See, I have to stop you there because (and I may be severely in the minority here) I actually find a lot of Guns N' Roses lyrics (particularly Use Your Illusion-era) to be surprisingly thoughtful.

yeah i mean quoting lyrics, whether to admire or ridicule, is good fun and all but using it to 'prove' an argument about the record's worth is basically the lowest form of music criticism

lol gimme a hierarchy of music criticism sd - does talking about form or composition ever come into it, or is it mainly cultural-crit?

― cosi fan whitford (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Friday, May 25, 2012 12:31 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

uh yeah, i was taking a stance against cultural crit, duh

there was an undeniable devolution from Bon Scott and The Real S Dot Tyler and David Lee Roth writing these kind of over-the-top but ultimately witty and fairly well constructed dirty limericks to some of the "she's my cherry pie" shit that followed in their footsteps, but history has already kind of settled that argument so definitively that it's kind of beside the point

there was an undeniable devolution from Bon Scott and The Real S Dot Tyler and David Lee Roth writing these kind of over-the-top but ultimately witty and fairly well constructed dirty limericks to some of the "she's my cherry pie" shit that followed in their footsteps, but history has already kind of settled that argument so definitively that it's kind of beside the point

lol as you can imagine I will still be loudly rejecting history's verdict on this when they lower me into the grave

you're rejecting the verdict that early Aerosmith and VH is better than Poison? huh?

I understand the distinction you're making, I really do, but it's based on a very 2012 assumption that

I don't wanna walk around with you
I don't wanna walk around with you
I don't wanna walk around with you
So why you wanna walk around with me?

always counted as "lyrics that bring some semblance of care to the table." It really wasn't always that way; the things you're saying to dismiss "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" were exactly the things people said about the Ramones in 1976 (or "Love to Love You Baby," for that matter).

xp no no, that's my exact verdict, it's exactly where my complaining comes in - people defending Warrant say "what's not to like, Van Halen was dumb & so's this!" and it's like saying "what? you like to eat Doritos, here's a milkshake with actual human shit in it, same diff!"

Y'all, this convo is so 1989.

every strawman sings a sad, sad song

dude most lyricists I know would look at those Ramones lyrics and see something actually clever going on, something that takes super-careful account of how stuff hits your ear, how syllables ride the rhythm: something that is actually listening to what the words sound like against the tune. "Every Rose," stem to stern, is just like...so profoundly bad, it would be a better song if he'd just spewed obscenities or something, or done nonsense syllables, made animal noises, anything really

every strawman sings a sad, sad song

lol, nice try

yeah i mean lousy lyric writing can be as much an essential part of the character of an enjoyable piece of music as lousy musicianship. it's not all about appreciating how smart and talented the person who made the song is.

vs.

there was an undeniable devolution from Bon Scott and The Real S Dot Tyler and David Lee Roth writing these kind of over-the-top but ultimately witty and fairly well constructed dirty limericks to some of the "she's my cherry pie" shit that followed in their footsteps

"strawman! strawman!" lol