pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

i certainly do! it's underrated as hell, which is insane because it has "funny how time slips away" AND "crazy" on it, plus several other stone cold classics

xpost

it's an amazing record.

My favorite 60s country list would include the Louvin Brothers (pick any of 'em), Buck Owens' Sings Harlan Howard/I've Got a Tiger by the Tail/Sings Tommy Collins/Under Your Spell Again, Waylon Jennings' Leaving Town/Folk-Country/Only the Greatest, Dolly Parton's Hello I'm Dolly, Porter Wagoner's Cold Hard Facts of Life, Merle Haggard's Mama Tried/I'm A Lonesome Fugitive, maybe some Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Loretta Lynn, the obvious Johnny Cash etc

― Οὖτις, Thursday, August 24, 2017 2:50 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good picks here

there are some good george jones records from the 60s too

cant imagine ppl thinking joan baez has a bad voice

oh and George Jones duh

xp

lol thx marcos :)

heard it for the first time this summer at sunrise played off of a friends bluetooth speaker in a big grassy field while coming down after a wild night. it sounded so spacious and poised and confident, soothed me and made me reconsider the things i had been searching for in music

oh and Hazlewood's Trouble is a Lonesome Town! love that record so much.

Love that Willie Nelson album "Hello Walls" its so great!

cant imagine ppl thinking joan baez has a bad voice

can

"SF Sorrow" was one I noticed missing right away. Other favorite omissions: A Charlie Brown Christmas, Merry-Go-Round s/t, The Left Banke "Walk Away Renee." I wouldn't expect a record like Blind Faith s/t to appear in a Pitchfork list, but I think it's a solid record. And I feel weirdly happy that The Who "Tommy" is no longer essential canon.

Also it rules pretty hard that there's at least five free jazz records between 101-200.

it's kind of interesting that poptimism doesn't extend backwards - ie how much of what was mainstream listening in the past is just completely excised, like it never existed. So many soundtracks/cast recordings were huge in the 60s. Sinatra. Barbra. Peter Paul and Mary. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band. The Monkees. Tons of mainstream country. No one would make the argument today that current best-selling artists/albums are not worthy of critical analysis but the fact that this stuff is no longer cool and is so thoroughly alien (and, duh, OLD) has rendered it critically invisible. fwiw I'm not saying Pfork should have stumped for the Sound of Music soundtrack (altho tbh it is p awesome) but it's always interesting to me, the things that disappear. Sometimes I stumble on some old vinyl of like Mel Torme or something and I just marvel that this is something that was once huge, mainstream, popular and now it's like it almost never existed. Everyone who cared about it is gone.

Imagine Pitchfork asking Seth Colter Walls to write about Ferrante & Teicher.

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band

during my brief time working at a record store, older people who came in to unload their shitty record collections (or their relatives who came in to do it for them) almost ALWAYS had at least one album by herb albert. even if the rest of their collection was just classical and musicals, they would always have some herb albert. and yeah, he has pretty much zero cache now, although his albums seem to consistently deliver a certain vibe which isn't awful.

it's like the one-time ubiquity of this stuff ultimately became a curse

In the UK replace that with Mantovani.

and oddly, it feels like a phenomenon that's restricted to mass-produced mid-20th century pop, no? I could be totally wrong here. But things like pre-war jazz and string-band music I know still have vital subcultures devoted to them, and anything "cool" post the advent of rock-n-roll is canonized by various quarters and populations and kept in circulation in new and various formats. But a lot of shit that was absolutely huge from the post-war era through idk 1970 or so is just... gone. vaporized.

at the time my theory was that there were loads of middle aged people in the 60s who weren't down with the whole crazy R&B and rock young people music thing, but they wanted to branch out beyond their mozarts and south pacifics to have a record or two that they could play at a dinner party to show that they were still "with it". since herb albert can sound pretty fucking good when you're 3 martinis deep, and it doesn't really matter which one you get, he sold over 160 million records to this audience

like, no one thinks it's cool, nobody wants to listen to it, nobody wants to preserve it, nobody wants to think about it. that generation of squares and what they liked will never be redeemed.

xp

so in short, a result of squares just getting ripped on a daily basis

I think it was definitely dinner party or 'drinks with nibbles' music

James Last has been sampled to death so I imagine Mantovani and Herb Alpert have been too yet still not got any critical cache

believe Whipped Cream & Other Delights is universally acclaimed

"But things like pre-war jazz and string-band music I know still have vital subcultures devoted to them"

nobody listens to the pre-war music that was most popular anymore.

Alpert was able to embody/convey both sophistication and silliness in equal measure. smooth and expensive-sounding novelty songs about spanish fleas. laffs.

xp

Herb Alpert has some real jams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7O3eYJptTc

i think he'll have his comeback moment at some point

nobody listens to the pre-war music that was most popular anymore.

idk I recently busted out a Fred Astaire collection of his hits and my kids loved it

"Everyone who cared about it is gone."

feel free to listen to it. its everywhere.

in the uk in the early 80s -- before rockism or poptimism were named or had become dreary cliches themselves -- there was genuinely a push by musicians and writers to readdress a lot of this kind of music, pre-60s and "lost" 60s: to treat the "rock era" as a very narrow limited myth that needed to be overthrown or pushed past and to reassess and rediscover exactly this kind of stuff, and to but a big fucking question mark under the sanctioned die-off that the 60s had then become (late 70s/early 80s being quite a low point for the salience of the 60s

it didn't take hold for many reasons -- one very big one i suspect was the young musicians touristing their way thru these sounds really weren't good enough as musicians to get across in their own recording what they were hearing and loving… ppl could replicate psych and garage and nuggets punk but not tijuana brass (at least not in the UK)

there was a mini-retrojazz boom then of course

fred astaire was not one of the most popular musical artists of the pre-war era. irish tenors you've never heard were. tons of stuff that nobody really wants to revisit other than scholars.

so... light opera? my impression was that astaire was huge but idk what metrics there are to measure by,

Elijah Wald's book How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll is in large part a history of this kind of music. The Beatles don't even figure into the book until the last few chapters; most of it is a history of popular music starting in the 1920s. It made me want to read (and maybe even write!) a whole biography of Mitch Miller.

fred astaire was a huge movie star. and i'm sure he sold a lot of records but not like caruso sold records.

Millions of waltzes and fox trots sold in the 20s. Fred Waring was a god in the 20s. When was the last time someone listened to Fred Waring?

Late addition to the upthread roundup of good 60s country full-lengths: The Gosdin Brothers, 'Sounds of Goodbye'

it's okay though. that's just the way the world works. out with the old and in with the new. that's how plants work too.

A quick googling makes it seem as if this was the most popular song of the thirties:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3__g11HEvaI

This stuff is definitely out of favor. Nice afternoon radio stuff. But the reaction was probably harshest against uncool sixties music, perhaps because the boomer generation just got a lot more cultural influence than usual? Because of their, you know, boomerness.

Mitch Miller!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dY9gtYeHhk

my mentor at the wire, richard cook, who was a music polymath and one of the forces behind the push i'm talking about -- wrote a thing on van morrison in the mid-80s which talked abt one of those irish tenors scott mentions, john mccormack

(cook was the mind behind the penguin guides to jazz: like scott, he ran a record shop -- or anyway a regular weekly stall -- and collected 78s, he knew a ton abt music hall and the weird byways of pre-rock pop in the uk)

this is how people will be talking about John Mayer in 2077

genres like exotica still have their followers, it's just more of a niche audience thing and of course influence on bands

actually looking a bit more carefully, the van morrison piece was 1991 not mid-80s -- published under one of cook's pen names, mike fish, at a time when he writing abt two thirds of the wire single-handed

what about shit like The Grass Roots and Fifth Dimension that were selling way more records than the Doors or Jefferson Airplane, they are all forgotten largely as well

there is tons of stuff that was popular in every decade that nobody plays anymore. no big deal. its still history. and you can always listen to it. but the audience for mitch miller and lots of 40s and 50s and 60s stuff is no longer with us or not listening to much these days...

this is how people will be talking about John Mayer in 2077

I often wonder if these kinds of prognostications are true. Imagine Dragons, Taylor Swift, Gaga, Xtina - what will future generations find particularly irrelevant and why

The second half of that Mitch vid is a minstrel show, speaking of music that time has passed by.

I know it's just the "natural way of things" or whatever scott, I still find it interesting what gets carried forward vs. what gets plowed over.

i played a george shearing quintet album with string choir today. sounded nice. beautiful copy. you can't give his records away. i no longer take ella fitzgerald or oscar peterson records at my store. or joan baez records for that matter. impossible to sell.