Yeah, I call B.S.
The They Might Be Giants album currently playing in my office didn’t come out until I was just out of college. :)
(Although we did get their first album while in high school....)
Yeah, I call B.S.
The They Might Be Giants album currently playing in my office didn’t come out until I was just out of college. :)
(Although we did get their first album while in high school....)
1988RedT2 said:There are entire decades of popular music that I have absolutely zero knowledge of and zero interest in.
That's me with TV shows.
Not everybody is interested in music
z31maniac said:So here's a kind of a different question, I'm also 42 class of 2000. I don't know all these different categories of music now.
Post-rock, post-punk, trip hop, shoegaze, metalcore, mathcore, etc.
I listened to a lot of metal when I was growing up. There was "metal" and a few subcategories like Thrash, Death, Groove, and Black metal. And that seemed to be about it.
It is easy to get too mired down in genres. I think of it as if superfans of a particular type of music are wine snobs - they use excessive differentiation as a way of weeding out the n00bs.
Postrock is a softer, dreamier version of non-blues-based guitar rock that still has a bit of an edge to it. Often instrumental, but not specifically so. Some random examples that I like include:
Shoegaze is similar to psotrock and there is a lot of overlap. The origin of shoegaze actually predates postrock and it tends to be even dreamier and less distinct. So named because the bands would just stand still and look down while playing live. Most of these bands are older, but the genre is still alive. Some examples:
Triphop is a derivative of hiphop, but with less of an emphasis on funk, and not really intended to be a backing track for a rapper. Heavy reliance on sampling and loops; long, often slowish, meandering tracks that move through an imagined atmosphere. Not necessarily built around typical song structure. HUGE variety in this genre. Some of my favorites are:
David S. Wallens said:The They Might Be Giants album currently playing in my office didn’t come out until I was just out of college. :)
So, I'm guessing...
I'm a Beatles guy, there, I said it. Have been since 7th grade and the older guys in my neighborhood introduced me to them. When high school in the early 80's hit, I discovered New Wave. Late 80's and 90's turned to Tom Petty, Melencamp, and the like. Since the late 90's, I haven't veered much from these kinds of music. Music is my comfort zone and those are the kinds I find comfort in. I'm not into any of the new millennium stuff. My friends are into country, but todays country which is more pop than country to me. I'm not into that.
One thing about music as it's currently consumed is that it's easy to have a "greatest hits" awareness of a musician or group. As a munchkin, there were only so many records and tapes that I had access to, so I'd listen carefully to every second, often finding jems hidden away in b sides.
Duke said:So named because the bands would just stand still and look down while playing live. Most of these bands are older, but the genre is still alive. Some examples:
- Cocteau Twins - one of the very best
- My Bloody Valentine - probably the originals
- Jesus And Mary Chain
Supposedly they were looking down at the effects pedals in order to operate them. :)
J&MC released a new single last week. I don't like it as much as Darklands (see my earlier comment about 1987 being my favorite year) but they're still going!
As for genre labels, they tend to change a lot. "post punk" originally just meant the bands who came out of the punk scene but weren't playing classic punk rock, and was really over by 1980 or 1981. These days almost anything remotely "alternative" from the 80s and 90s get labelled "post punk".
You guys have some very deep and interesting taste in music. I've never heard of so much of the stuff listed here. In the 80s I was a Top 40 kinda kid, then got into mainstream classic rock. Now I listen to all kinds of stuff, but it's still mostly what you'd consider mainstream. I'm a huge closet yacht rock fan.
z31maniac said:So here's a kind of a different question, I'm also 42 class of 2000. I don't know all these different categories of music now.
Post-rock, post-punk, trip hop, shoegaze, metalcore, mathcore, etc.
I don't know what "Post-rock" would be.
Post-punk is sort of an umbrella category for a lot of late-70's and arly-80's music taking much of the energy of punk, but cleaning it up and getting more experimental. Think Blondie and Talking Heads. There's a lot of overlap with early New-Wave.
Post-grunge is same idea but in the 90's. Taking the grunge energy, but toning it down to be less aggressive. Bush, Candlebox, Silverchair, Matchbox 20, Seether... and of course Foo Fighters.
Trip-hop is lower energy electronica drawing inspiration from hip-hop sampling but including more elements of jazz, soul, and R&B. Portishead and Massive Attack.
Shoegaze is... exactly what it sounds like. A guy with long hair bent over a guitar gazing at his shoes. Dreamy pop with airy vocals and a guy doing low-tempo guitar noodling.
Dunno about metalcore.
Mathcore is prog metal for math nerds. Taking the metal idea of going to the extreme... with weird time signatures and rhythm patterns. People who think Tool doesn't do weird enough time signatures.
Edit: Duke beat me to it. I can't believe he left Massive Attack and Portishead off his list of trip hop bands.
In reply to Beer Baron 🍺 :
I was focusing less on the traditional vocal artists, and more on the abstract stuff. They're both solidly in the genre, as is Morcheeba.
Beer Baron 🍺 said:z31maniac said:I know for me, it's kind of like a lot of content.........analysis paralysis. There is SO MUCH new content coming out all the time. Music, TV Shows, movies, documentaries, YouTube, etc. It's difficult to invest time in to something only for it end up sucking.
I think you may have really hit on it here. I know there's lots of great new music, but there's too much to sift through. Music wasn't better back in the day. There were just more people doing the work of curating it and sharing it on radio stations targeted at different audiences.
It's easier for me to discover great older music, because more people have gone through the trouble to identify the best albums of past decades.
I remember back when I was in high school there were a couple of Top 40 radio stations on AM that everybody listened to and they found new music on those stations. I would imagine that the big money record companies had back then had a lot to do with what those stations played and there was probably payola involved. The cooler kids would listen to FM album rock stations that would play less pop and more rock and roll along with more laid back DJs. Those stations were also introducing new stuff all the time and it also came from the promotions of the same record companies with different labels.
In the 80's Hip Hop took over from Rock and those who wern't into the Hip Hop scene retreated into classic rock, others spun off into metal or new wave and there really wasn't a mainstream anymore. Then big corporations bought up all the stations and started laying off DJs, automating stations, voicetracking and so on. Radio started to suck and they drove these corporations into bankruptcy in many cases.
Then along came Napster, iTunes and streaming and sales of CDs and tapes tanked. Record companies had less money to promote new artists and put more effort into concerts where the real money was now being made. Now you have Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon music and on and on and on. Anybody with a garage band can stream off their own website and submit it to YouTube or Tic Toc. If anything, there is probably more new music out there than there ever was, but with all those outlets and all those different streams, it is much harder to find. Most older people just fall back into they music they grew up and already know.
Radio stations are starving and record companies don't have money for promoting new stuff, much less hiring a/r guys to go out and find it, so who is out there to discover new talent and promote them? Not really anybody.
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