pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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.

this is the first record i "owned" (i mean it was my mum and dad's but for me to listen to)

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51OJ1pDShwL._SR600%2C315_PIWhiteStrip%2CBottomLeft%2C0%2C35_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

the greatest value for your dollar record-wise - in my opinion - is 50s jazz that isn't blue note/prestige/bop/etc. so cheap and so good. just thousands of 50s jazz records that nobody cares about or listens to other than old jazzbos who make up about .00001% of the population. lots of great big band and vocal jazz and studio jazz records. i listen to a lot of shorty rogers records.

Herb Alpert has some real jams

hey i got yr back on this nomar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5w1RfbVJ6E

imo The Monkees don't belong in that list, they have some jams and are still relevant as an influence. they have a secret garage/punk/psych connection.

I only mentioned them because they were gigantic and also not on the pfork list

Some of the most popular music today is stuff like this, at leat in 'mitteleuropa' (which Denmark doesn't really belong to, but a bit):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR1-3gYXsfE

This freaks me out. Shitty versions of fake greek film songs, and all these people lose their shit. But it's functional, it's reliving the dream of the Habsburg Empire. A lot of music is basically functional, and when the function stops being necessary, the music goes out the window.

Or something like the Pappy O'Daniel Flour Bands that was in O Brother Where Out Thou? Guy made a band to sell flour, became a giant radio star in Texas, turned that into becoming Governor and Senator. But who listens to this stuff anymore?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2RlFA8tSq0

I mean, the Coen version is not this.

catchy!

andre rieu has loads of adverts for his latest release here in the UK every xmas, he must sell shitloads

Pitchfork and the rock crit establishment they represent is falling in relevance and what they choose to remember or ignore for any given time is not really worth a whole lot. Grass Roots LPs will still be around in 20 years, the Pitchfork website most probably not.

catchy!

― Οὖτις, 24. august 2017 23:35 (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, it's kinda good, isn't it? This is from his old band, after he fired them:

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

Less bibley.

. Grass Roots LPs will still be around in 20 years, the Pitchfork website most probably not.

Earth will not.

whether something will be around in 20 years or not isn't a particularly good metric of its usefulness to a discussion, is it? legit q, I'm more sympathetic to "the test of time" than I remain 100% convinced that "relevance" in the sense it's used re: pop culture/music isn't a good or useful idea

*than I used to be, but I remain, etc

my uncle had a radio show in north carolina with stuff like pappy o daniel. had an entire episode devoted acutally. so him i guess xxxp

the test of time remains bad, pay attention only to the test of space

i agree w/the test of space, what will the bulbous headed creatures of Kepler 10c listen to when they conquer us?

"relevance" in the sense it's used re: pop culture/music isn't a good or useful idea

Totally agree. The question "Relevant to whom?" always seems to be answered "me [the writer] and my friends." This is why I say critics should never use the word "we" (as in, "Why We Love Bruce Springsteen").

guys I only referenced Pfork because this *is a thread about Pfork* not because I am convinced of their significance as universal arbiters of taste or whatever. I was just interested in how certain things that were huge in the 60s are totally absent from their 60s list and why that is, and how it's reflective of larger cultural patterns in terms of what gets memorialized and sort of carried forward to the subsequent generations vs. what gets abandoned.

thought this was p clear but