Now that the history lesson is over, it's time to have some fun. This section will feature remixes and covers with an emphasis on genre-crossing examples.
"Come Together" and "Closer," Beatles and Nine Inch Nails. Apparently this mashup is so popular that it's now dubbed "Come Closer Together" on the interwebs.
Dirt off Your Wonderwall, Jay-Z and Oasis. This one's not that hard to conceptualize, actually. Isn't this what rap basically does all the time anyway?
KT Tunstall - Get Your Freak On (Missy Elliot cover)
White Rabbit - by Living Legends
Stairway to Heaven - Dolly Parton covers Led Zeppelin
Matthew Good - Moon Over Marin (Dead Kennedys cover)
Thriller - Imogen Heap covers Michael Jackson
Newton Faulkner covers Teardrop (Massive Attack)
Apocalyptica - Nothing Else Matters (this is a cello band that does classical covers of Metallica songs)
And finally, because every party should end with this song, here is Sparklehorse covering Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 7: 2000s
Now, unfortunately, we get to the 2000s. I know I promised not to do this, but I really can't help remarking on how patently awful most of the popular music of this decade is. I mean, seriously. What happened?
Oh, well. Only time will tell.
Post-Grunge
Even as rock and alternative are becoming increasingly less popular as hip hop/R&B/rap take over airwaves, the post-grunge genre keeps chugging along with bands like Creed and Nickleback. The good news was that Creed disbanded in 2004. The bad news is that they're supposedly back together. Nickleback (actually a Canadian band, and named for some reason after the amount of change you get back after ordering a coffee from Starbucks, which is probably the most un-grunge like concept for a band name that I can think of) is probably the most successful post-grunge act thus far, with 40 million sales. The Foo Fighters, formed by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, is technically also a post-grunge act; the difference being that they are actually...good. Here is a Foo Fighters song from The Colour and the Shape, which is actually from the 90s.
Foo Fighters - Everlong
Metal
There is a renewed interest in metal during this period, and older acts like Slayer and Metallica are popular again, along with a slew of new ones such as Killswitch Engage and Lamb of God. Also, metalcore, a fusion of metal and hardcore punk, becomes popular.
Killswitch Engage - My Last Serenade
British Invasion
Coldplay's single "Yellow" comes out in 2000. They head the popularity of British bands during the decade -- other bands include Radiohead and Muse.
Muse - Hysteria
Pop Punk
Pop Punk remains popular. Fall Out Boy's "Sugar We're Going Down" came out in 2005.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Numetal
Numetal (a fusion of metal with hip hop) bands enjoy a slew of hit singles. Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory came out in 2000, and they are credited with being one of the biggest rock acts of the decade. Other artists from this trend are Evanescence and Staind.
Linkin Park - In the End
Emo
Emo isn't really a musical style; it's more of a term that describes the people that listen to the bands rather than the bands themselves. Popular "emo" bands include Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance, even though they themselves repudiate the term.
Dashboard Confessional - Vindicated
New New Wave/synthpop/post punk
There is a renewed interest in synthesizer music and 1980s music during this time, as bands such as The Killers become popular as numetal fades away in the later part of the decade.
The Killers - Human
Indie
With the increased commercialization of alternative music, the indie music scene burgeons, helped considerably by technology that enables better advertising and distribution for bands not signed to major labels. There isn't really a particular style of indie music, it has been associated with a huge variety of different sounds and aesthetics, including lo-fi, post-rock (rock instrumentation, like Mogwai), sadcore, C86, math rock (featuring complex rhythms, like Dillinger Escape Plan), shoegaze/dream pop (My Bloody Valentine), indie pop, noise rock, noise pop, riot grrrl, post-hardcore, twee pop, alt-country, post-punk revival, garage rock revival, dance-punk, indie folk, baroque pop (classical music elements brought to rock, like Arcade Fire), and indietronica.
Arcade Fire - Wake Up (with David Bowie)
New Pornographers - Challengers
The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together
Death Cab for Cutie - Soul Meets Body
The Strokes - Reptilia
Teen Pop Rock
Boy bands fade out of popularity by the middle of the decade and a new slew of pop artists targeting a tween audience achieve success, like Avril Lavigne and Miley Cyrus.
Dance Music
Dance music is becoming the dominant force on the radio. Along with dance music comes Auto-Tune. See Black Eyed Peas.
Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (I could swear he's actually just saying Boom Boom Boom but whatever)
Ethnic Music (what a terrible genre name)
World music in general enjoys more widespread success. Shakira and MIA achieve mainstream popularity.
MIA - Paper Planes (theme is actually a Clash song)
Hip Hop/R&B/Rap
This decade pretty much belongs to this kind of music. Eninem is considered the best-selling artist of the decade. This is the era of Kanye West, Destiny's Child, and Beyonce.
Eninem - Forget About Dre
Country
Country music is becoming increasingly popular also in this decade. Carrie Underwood became the first American Idol winner to go into country instead of pop. Taylor Swift ushers in the popularity of country pop.
Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me
Changes in the Music Industry
Whereas before, the major entertainment networks used to hold the reins of distribution and fame, changes in technology are making it increasingly possible for musicians to control distribution themselves. With the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the music industry is fighting a losing war against the increased piracy of music, despite studies that have shown that people who pirate the most music also tend to buy the most music. The response from the musicians has been mixed, some are extremely against piracy and others have come to terms with the 21st century. Radiohead released In Rainbows on a "pay for it if you like it" basis, Nine Inch Nails released their latest album for free on their website, and many artists are releasing material directly in MP3 format (such as on a flash drive). My personal opinion is that the music industry in general needs to come to grips with this new paradigm instead of fighting it. People also need to realize that most listeners are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as it's actually good.
And we'll end with this, for good measure:
Video Killed the Radio Star
Oh, well. Only time will tell.
Post-Grunge
Even as rock and alternative are becoming increasingly less popular as hip hop/R&B/rap take over airwaves, the post-grunge genre keeps chugging along with bands like Creed and Nickleback. The good news was that Creed disbanded in 2004. The bad news is that they're supposedly back together. Nickleback (actually a Canadian band, and named for some reason after the amount of change you get back after ordering a coffee from Starbucks, which is probably the most un-grunge like concept for a band name that I can think of) is probably the most successful post-grunge act thus far, with 40 million sales. The Foo Fighters, formed by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, is technically also a post-grunge act; the difference being that they are actually...good. Here is a Foo Fighters song from The Colour and the Shape, which is actually from the 90s.
Foo Fighters - Everlong
Metal
There is a renewed interest in metal during this period, and older acts like Slayer and Metallica are popular again, along with a slew of new ones such as Killswitch Engage and Lamb of God. Also, metalcore, a fusion of metal and hardcore punk, becomes popular.
Killswitch Engage - My Last Serenade
British Invasion
Coldplay's single "Yellow" comes out in 2000. They head the popularity of British bands during the decade -- other bands include Radiohead and Muse.
Muse - Hysteria
Pop Punk
Pop Punk remains popular. Fall Out Boy's "Sugar We're Going Down" came out in 2005.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Numetal
Numetal (a fusion of metal with hip hop) bands enjoy a slew of hit singles. Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory came out in 2000, and they are credited with being one of the biggest rock acts of the decade. Other artists from this trend are Evanescence and Staind.
Linkin Park - In the End
Emo
Emo isn't really a musical style; it's more of a term that describes the people that listen to the bands rather than the bands themselves. Popular "emo" bands include Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance, even though they themselves repudiate the term.
Dashboard Confessional - Vindicated
New New Wave/synthpop/post punk
There is a renewed interest in synthesizer music and 1980s music during this time, as bands such as The Killers become popular as numetal fades away in the later part of the decade.
The Killers - Human
Indie
With the increased commercialization of alternative music, the indie music scene burgeons, helped considerably by technology that enables better advertising and distribution for bands not signed to major labels. There isn't really a particular style of indie music, it has been associated with a huge variety of different sounds and aesthetics, including lo-fi, post-rock (rock instrumentation, like Mogwai), sadcore, C86, math rock (featuring complex rhythms, like Dillinger Escape Plan), shoegaze/dream pop (My Bloody Valentine), indie pop, noise rock, noise pop, riot grrrl, post-hardcore, twee pop, alt-country, post-punk revival, garage rock revival, dance-punk, indie folk, baroque pop (classical music elements brought to rock, like Arcade Fire), and indietronica.
Arcade Fire - Wake Up (with David Bowie)
New Pornographers - Challengers
The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together
Death Cab for Cutie - Soul Meets Body
The Strokes - Reptilia
Teen Pop Rock
Boy bands fade out of popularity by the middle of the decade and a new slew of pop artists targeting a tween audience achieve success, like Avril Lavigne and Miley Cyrus.
Dance Music
Dance music is becoming the dominant force on the radio. Along with dance music comes Auto-Tune. See Black Eyed Peas.
Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (I could swear he's actually just saying Boom Boom Boom but whatever)
Ethnic Music (what a terrible genre name)
World music in general enjoys more widespread success. Shakira and MIA achieve mainstream popularity.
MIA - Paper Planes (theme is actually a Clash song)
Hip Hop/R&B/Rap
This decade pretty much belongs to this kind of music. Eninem is considered the best-selling artist of the decade. This is the era of Kanye West, Destiny's Child, and Beyonce.
Eninem - Forget About Dre
Country
Country music is becoming increasingly popular also in this decade. Carrie Underwood became the first American Idol winner to go into country instead of pop. Taylor Swift ushers in the popularity of country pop.
Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me
Changes in the Music Industry
Whereas before, the major entertainment networks used to hold the reins of distribution and fame, changes in technology are making it increasingly possible for musicians to control distribution themselves. With the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the music industry is fighting a losing war against the increased piracy of music, despite studies that have shown that people who pirate the most music also tend to buy the most music. The response from the musicians has been mixed, some are extremely against piracy and others have come to terms with the 21st century. Radiohead released In Rainbows on a "pay for it if you like it" basis, Nine Inch Nails released their latest album for free on their website, and many artists are releasing material directly in MP3 format (such as on a flash drive). My personal opinion is that the music industry in general needs to come to grips with this new paradigm instead of fighting it. People also need to realize that most listeners are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as it's actually good.
And we'll end with this, for good measure:
Video Killed the Radio Star
Monday, November 16, 2009
20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 6: 1990s
And now, we come to a decade of music that I actually remember personally.
Every decade has an event which can be seen to begin or end an era, like the Disco Demolition, and the Day the Music Died. If I had to pick an event that ushered in the 90s, it would be the release of Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991, which soon unseated Michael Jackson's Dangerous on the charts and ushered in the grunge era. But before we get there...
Teenpop Continues
This is the era of Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and boy bands like the Backstreet Boys. Do I really need to link videos? Fine, I'll just do one, to make an example.
As pop acts go, the Spice Girls are not actually that egregiously bad. There, I said it. I mean, they weren't good, but they weren't unlistenable, and I find them somewhat less vapid than most of the pop acts going on today, which, admittedly, is not saying that much.
The Spice Girls - Say You'll Be There. From the Spice World movie. The lip-syncing is hilariously off on this track, but making fun of that would be like kicking a dead horse in the head, so....
Hip Hop/Rap/R&B
Hip hop and rap are also gaining in popularity during this decade. This is the decade of Usher and R Kelly. We can thank this era for giving us the ridiculous baggy pants and oversized shirt look. And for guys in white middle class suburbia trying to be all gangsta. Like that was ever attractive. But you're in high school, and you don't know any better -- and neither do the girls you're trying to impress. So I guess it worked out all right.
Usher - My Way (1997)
Hip hop in particular becomes really takes off during the 90s. As a movement, it first developed in the Bronx as a "response to oppressive social conditions." According to Wikipedia: When hip hop music began to emerge, it was based around disc jockeys who created rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, which is now more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rapping" (a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry more formally in 16 bar measures or time frames) and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip hop DJs.
It became increasingly commercialized as the decade wore on and rappers gained a huge level of superstardom and success.
In 1993, Puff Daddy formed Bad Boy Records with the Notorious BIG as his headlining act. They quickly became adversarial with Death Row Records, which was founded in 1991 by Dr. Dre and Suge Knight and featured a lot of big West Coast rap names like Tupac and Snoop Dogg. The Notorious BIG and Tupac would both be shot later on in the decade. Puff Daddy would have a hit song commemorating Biggy that sampled a Police/Sting song from the 80s. It would become one of the most played and most overplayed songs of the decade, even though it is neither a particularly good rap song (Puff Daddy has had much better songs) nor even very representative of the genre as a whole. It is also ridiculous to try to dance to at clubs, and I do not know why DJs insist on trying to play it as part of a dance mix. Time and place, man...
Pandora helpfully explains the difference between East Coast and West Coast rap:
"East Coast rap roots" refers to music that references East Coast style rap. East Coast rap may be characterized by the heavy use of samples (often R&B), occasional use of swung 16th notes, light or sparse bass lines, and a vocal aesthetic originating from New England and the Middle Atlantic USA. The lyrical delivery of East Coast rap is exemplified by a varied vocal delivery, highly developed rhyme structure, an East Coast urban accent, etc.
"West Coast rap roots" refers to music that references West Coast rap. West Coast rap may be exemplified by use of funk samples, heavy funk influence, prominent bass lines, beats made for dancing, and heavy backbeats. The lyrical delivery of West Coast rap is exemplified by traditional rhyme structures, simpler rhythms, prominent use of hype men [a performer responsible for backup rapping to emphasize certain parts of the rhyme] and backing vocalists, and a West Coast (L.A./Bay Area/Latino) accent.
Tupac - Me Against the World
I love the sampling technique but sometimes I think rap music is a bit of a tease because of it. I mean, I turn on the radio, and I hear something that sounds like the opening bars of "White Rabbit" and I think, "All right, they're playing some Jefferson Airplane!" But then the breakbeat kicks in and I realize it's actually a rap song featuring a 9-second sample from Jefferson Airplane song. Goddammit. And then there's all the classical music samples (hey, no copyright infringement to worry about!), and really, the whole experience confuses me a bit. It's the same way I feel about people trying to make techno remixes of "Carmina Burana." Speaking of which...
Electronic Music
Elsewhere in the world, trance had developed as a genre out of house and techno music. From Wikipedia: Trance music is generally characterized by a tempo of between 130 and 155 BPM, short melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and down throughout a track. Trance is basically a more melodic and less chaotic form of techno and house.
DJ Tiesto - some party mix
Trip hop, otherwise known as the Bristol sound, arose as an experimental genre in the first part of the 1990s from artists such as Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. Massive Attack's Blue Lines (1991) is seen as the blueprint of the genre. It is basically a brand of downtempo electronic music that is a fusion of hip hop and house until neither influence is recognizable. It also features a reliance on breakbeats and a moody, sample heavy sound. I could write a lot more about it because I happen to like it a lot, but that would probably be very disporportionate for this article and so we'll leave it at that.
Massive Attack - Angel (from Mezzanine, 1997. Mezzanine is probably their most commercial album. "Angel" was used in the movie Snatch, "Teardrop" is now the theme song for the show House and "Dissolved Girl" was used in the Matrix movie in the scene at the beginning where Neo is asleep at his computer and music is playing on his headphones. The album itself is less hip hop and has more of a goth/post-punk, largely a result of Del Naja's influence).
Singer/Songwriter
There is a bit of a fem singer-songwriter revival in this period, mostly attributed to the Lilith Fair. This produced artists like Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos.
Alternative
Alternative music continues to enjoy success. I'm using this section to talk about bands that were concurrent with the grunge movement but that aren't really part of the Seattle grunge movement per se.
In 1997 Our Lady Peace releases Clumsy. They had a good deal of success in the States during the 90s, but they were huge, really huge, in Canada.
Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead (Clumsy, featuring Raine Maida's insane vocal acrobatics)
In the same year, Smashing Pumpkins releases Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Being Canadian, Our Lady Peace escaped being lumped in with the grunge movement, but Smashing Pumpkins were associated with it for a long time, which is something that Billy Corgan probably didn't like that much. This particular song became somewhat iconic for the 90s.
Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings
Grunge
Grunge is a loose subcategory of alternative music that sprung up around the Seattle music scene in the early years of the decade and that had its roots in heavy metal, punk, and indie/hard rock. It usually features angsty lyrics and a simplistic aesthetic tone that repudiates theatrics and flashiness. Kurt Cobain was famously too lazy to wash his hair and a sort of unkempt appearance became the hallmark of this genre. Like "alternative" in general, it is not so much a style of music as a general attitude of disillusionment and fuck-the-establishmentarianism.
Also, grunge gives us the t-shirt and shorts look of the 90s. And both should ideally be unwashed.
With the release of Nevermind in 1991, it exploded into popularity and brought groups such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains to the attention of the world. It is a short-lived movement, more or less ending in 1994 with Cobain's death, but it had a lasting impact on the music that was to follow. Soundgarden has since disbanded, but Pearl Jam is still around and making music today, and Alice in Chains recently reformed with a different singer after Layne Staley OD-ed in 2002.
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind, 1991)
Pearl Jam - Jeremy (Ten, 1991)
Post Grunge and Pop Punk
In the later half of the decade, grunge becomes post-grunge with bands like Bush and Silverchair. Post-Grunge is essentially a more commercial form of grunge and is still popular today.
Pop Punk also emerged during this time with bands like Greenday and Third Eye Blind. Pop punk is basically exactly what it sounds like.
Greenday - Long View
Britpop
Britpop emerges as a reaction to America's grunge influence, with British bands drawing upon themes common to British youth and drawing upon the cultural history of British sounds. Blur and Oasis are two of the more commercially successful of the genre.
Oasis - Wonderwall (1995)
Indie Rock
Indie rock has a bajillion offshoots and doesn't describe any unified sound. It basically just means groups that are not signed to major record labels, even though some indie bands join major labels eventually. With the rise of the internet and the MP3, indie bands find it easier to distribute music themselves through their own channels, and indie music begins to find mainstream success in this decade.
The Pixies' Surfer Rosa was released in 1988. The song "Where Is My Mind" was featured in Fight Club, which helped the Pixies' rise to fame.
The Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999 and was a big underground success.
Three years later they would release Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
In 2000 Modest Mouse would release The Moon and Antarctica.
Modest Mouse - 3rd Planet
Industrial and Shock Rock
In 1994 Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral from Trent Reznor's vanity label, Nothing Records. A combination of metal and futuristic, synthetic influences balanced by surprisingly accessible hooks, melodic lines, and pop sensibility, it was a major success despite its dark and controversial themes and thrust industrial music into the spotlight. It was also one of the first multi-platinum records from what is essentially an indie label.
Nine Inch Nails - Reptile
In many ways, this song is not a particularly good example of the album as a whole, even though it's still a great song, but the other hit single from TDS is even less representative. "Closer" has the line "I want to fuck you like an animal," but despite its B&D/S&M overtones, features a basic disco beat with a distorted disco bassline. Maybe that's why it really gets under your blood -- it sounds familiar, but you don't really know why unless you think about it a little.
Reznor's label also spawned Marilyn Manson, whose 1996 album Antichrist Superstar caused a lot of controversy because of its openly anti-religious themes and the shock appeal of much of its subject matter. The band's sound changed quite a bit over the years, but back then it was more or less a heavy metal/hard rock band that drew quite a bit on a sort of decayed glam rock sensibility. I remember disliking the music but thinking the lyrics were pretty good at the time it came out. After a few years and some maturing, I've really come to like this album. It's funny because a lot of people assume Marilyn Manson is automatically "slash your wrists" music, even today (in the era of Dashboard Confessional and the like), but there's an element of dark humor about the message that maybe isn't so obvious at first blush.
Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People
This kind of shock appeal might have been controversial for the 90s, but the entire nation underwent a huge crisis of conservativity when 9/11 happened and suddenly this sort of thing wasn't really cool anymore. I think 9/11 is a good event with which to close out the 90s and launch into the 2000s.
Every decade has an event which can be seen to begin or end an era, like the Disco Demolition, and the Day the Music Died. If I had to pick an event that ushered in the 90s, it would be the release of Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991, which soon unseated Michael Jackson's Dangerous on the charts and ushered in the grunge era. But before we get there...
Teenpop Continues
This is the era of Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and boy bands like the Backstreet Boys. Do I really need to link videos? Fine, I'll just do one, to make an example.
As pop acts go, the Spice Girls are not actually that egregiously bad. There, I said it. I mean, they weren't good, but they weren't unlistenable, and I find them somewhat less vapid than most of the pop acts going on today, which, admittedly, is not saying that much.
The Spice Girls - Say You'll Be There. From the Spice World movie. The lip-syncing is hilariously off on this track, but making fun of that would be like kicking a dead horse in the head, so....
Hip Hop/Rap/R&B
Hip hop and rap are also gaining in popularity during this decade. This is the decade of Usher and R Kelly. We can thank this era for giving us the ridiculous baggy pants and oversized shirt look. And for guys in white middle class suburbia trying to be all gangsta. Like that was ever attractive. But you're in high school, and you don't know any better -- and neither do the girls you're trying to impress. So I guess it worked out all right.
Usher - My Way (1997)
Hip hop in particular becomes really takes off during the 90s. As a movement, it first developed in the Bronx as a "response to oppressive social conditions." According to Wikipedia: When hip hop music began to emerge, it was based around disc jockeys who created rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, which is now more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rapping" (a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry more formally in 16 bar measures or time frames) and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip hop DJs.
It became increasingly commercialized as the decade wore on and rappers gained a huge level of superstardom and success.
In 1993, Puff Daddy formed Bad Boy Records with the Notorious BIG as his headlining act. They quickly became adversarial with Death Row Records, which was founded in 1991 by Dr. Dre and Suge Knight and featured a lot of big West Coast rap names like Tupac and Snoop Dogg. The Notorious BIG and Tupac would both be shot later on in the decade. Puff Daddy would have a hit song commemorating Biggy that sampled a Police/Sting song from the 80s. It would become one of the most played and most overplayed songs of the decade, even though it is neither a particularly good rap song (Puff Daddy has had much better songs) nor even very representative of the genre as a whole. It is also ridiculous to try to dance to at clubs, and I do not know why DJs insist on trying to play it as part of a dance mix. Time and place, man...
Pandora helpfully explains the difference between East Coast and West Coast rap:
"East Coast rap roots" refers to music that references East Coast style rap. East Coast rap may be characterized by the heavy use of samples (often R&B), occasional use of swung 16th notes, light or sparse bass lines, and a vocal aesthetic originating from New England and the Middle Atlantic USA. The lyrical delivery of East Coast rap is exemplified by a varied vocal delivery, highly developed rhyme structure, an East Coast urban accent, etc.
"West Coast rap roots" refers to music that references West Coast rap. West Coast rap may be exemplified by use of funk samples, heavy funk influence, prominent bass lines, beats made for dancing, and heavy backbeats. The lyrical delivery of West Coast rap is exemplified by traditional rhyme structures, simpler rhythms, prominent use of hype men [a performer responsible for backup rapping to emphasize certain parts of the rhyme] and backing vocalists, and a West Coast (L.A./Bay Area/Latino) accent.
Tupac - Me Against the World
I love the sampling technique but sometimes I think rap music is a bit of a tease because of it. I mean, I turn on the radio, and I hear something that sounds like the opening bars of "White Rabbit" and I think, "All right, they're playing some Jefferson Airplane!" But then the breakbeat kicks in and I realize it's actually a rap song featuring a 9-second sample from Jefferson Airplane song. Goddammit. And then there's all the classical music samples (hey, no copyright infringement to worry about!), and really, the whole experience confuses me a bit. It's the same way I feel about people trying to make techno remixes of "Carmina Burana." Speaking of which...
Electronic Music
Elsewhere in the world, trance had developed as a genre out of house and techno music. From Wikipedia: Trance music is generally characterized by a tempo of between 130 and 155 BPM, short melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and down throughout a track. Trance is basically a more melodic and less chaotic form of techno and house.
DJ Tiesto - some party mix
Trip hop, otherwise known as the Bristol sound, arose as an experimental genre in the first part of the 1990s from artists such as Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. Massive Attack's Blue Lines (1991) is seen as the blueprint of the genre. It is basically a brand of downtempo electronic music that is a fusion of hip hop and house until neither influence is recognizable. It also features a reliance on breakbeats and a moody, sample heavy sound. I could write a lot more about it because I happen to like it a lot, but that would probably be very disporportionate for this article and so we'll leave it at that.
Massive Attack - Angel (from Mezzanine, 1997. Mezzanine is probably their most commercial album. "Angel" was used in the movie Snatch, "Teardrop" is now the theme song for the show House and "Dissolved Girl" was used in the Matrix movie in the scene at the beginning where Neo is asleep at his computer and music is playing on his headphones. The album itself is less hip hop and has more of a goth/post-punk, largely a result of Del Naja's influence).
Singer/Songwriter
There is a bit of a fem singer-songwriter revival in this period, mostly attributed to the Lilith Fair. This produced artists like Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos.
Alternative
Alternative music continues to enjoy success. I'm using this section to talk about bands that were concurrent with the grunge movement but that aren't really part of the Seattle grunge movement per se.
In 1997 Our Lady Peace releases Clumsy. They had a good deal of success in the States during the 90s, but they were huge, really huge, in Canada.
Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead (Clumsy, featuring Raine Maida's insane vocal acrobatics)
In the same year, Smashing Pumpkins releases Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Being Canadian, Our Lady Peace escaped being lumped in with the grunge movement, but Smashing Pumpkins were associated with it for a long time, which is something that Billy Corgan probably didn't like that much. This particular song became somewhat iconic for the 90s.
Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings
Grunge
Grunge is a loose subcategory of alternative music that sprung up around the Seattle music scene in the early years of the decade and that had its roots in heavy metal, punk, and indie/hard rock. It usually features angsty lyrics and a simplistic aesthetic tone that repudiates theatrics and flashiness. Kurt Cobain was famously too lazy to wash his hair and a sort of unkempt appearance became the hallmark of this genre. Like "alternative" in general, it is not so much a style of music as a general attitude of disillusionment and fuck-the-establishmentarianism.
Also, grunge gives us the t-shirt and shorts look of the 90s. And both should ideally be unwashed.
With the release of Nevermind in 1991, it exploded into popularity and brought groups such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains to the attention of the world. It is a short-lived movement, more or less ending in 1994 with Cobain's death, but it had a lasting impact on the music that was to follow. Soundgarden has since disbanded, but Pearl Jam is still around and making music today, and Alice in Chains recently reformed with a different singer after Layne Staley OD-ed in 2002.
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind, 1991)
Pearl Jam - Jeremy (Ten, 1991)
Post Grunge and Pop Punk
In the later half of the decade, grunge becomes post-grunge with bands like Bush and Silverchair. Post-Grunge is essentially a more commercial form of grunge and is still popular today.
Pop Punk also emerged during this time with bands like Greenday and Third Eye Blind. Pop punk is basically exactly what it sounds like.
Greenday - Long View
Britpop
Britpop emerges as a reaction to America's grunge influence, with British bands drawing upon themes common to British youth and drawing upon the cultural history of British sounds. Blur and Oasis are two of the more commercially successful of the genre.
Oasis - Wonderwall (1995)
Indie Rock
Indie rock has a bajillion offshoots and doesn't describe any unified sound. It basically just means groups that are not signed to major record labels, even though some indie bands join major labels eventually. With the rise of the internet and the MP3, indie bands find it easier to distribute music themselves through their own channels, and indie music begins to find mainstream success in this decade.
The Pixies' Surfer Rosa was released in 1988. The song "Where Is My Mind" was featured in Fight Club, which helped the Pixies' rise to fame.
The Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999 and was a big underground success.
Three years later they would release Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
In 2000 Modest Mouse would release The Moon and Antarctica.
Modest Mouse - 3rd Planet
Industrial and Shock Rock
In 1994 Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral from Trent Reznor's vanity label, Nothing Records. A combination of metal and futuristic, synthetic influences balanced by surprisingly accessible hooks, melodic lines, and pop sensibility, it was a major success despite its dark and controversial themes and thrust industrial music into the spotlight. It was also one of the first multi-platinum records from what is essentially an indie label.
Nine Inch Nails - Reptile
In many ways, this song is not a particularly good example of the album as a whole, even though it's still a great song, but the other hit single from TDS is even less representative. "Closer" has the line "I want to fuck you like an animal," but despite its B&D/S&M overtones, features a basic disco beat with a distorted disco bassline. Maybe that's why it really gets under your blood -- it sounds familiar, but you don't really know why unless you think about it a little.
Reznor's label also spawned Marilyn Manson, whose 1996 album Antichrist Superstar caused a lot of controversy because of its openly anti-religious themes and the shock appeal of much of its subject matter. The band's sound changed quite a bit over the years, but back then it was more or less a heavy metal/hard rock band that drew quite a bit on a sort of decayed glam rock sensibility. I remember disliking the music but thinking the lyrics were pretty good at the time it came out. After a few years and some maturing, I've really come to like this album. It's funny because a lot of people assume Marilyn Manson is automatically "slash your wrists" music, even today (in the era of Dashboard Confessional and the like), but there's an element of dark humor about the message that maybe isn't so obvious at first blush.
Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People
This kind of shock appeal might have been controversial for the 90s, but the entire nation underwent a huge crisis of conservativity when 9/11 happened and suddenly this sort of thing wasn't really cool anymore. I think 9/11 is a good event with which to close out the 90s and launch into the 2000s.
20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 6: 1980s
New Wave/Synthpop
The 80s are the era of MTV, and if I had to pick the defining moment when the 80s kicked in, it would be the launch of MTV in 1981, even though it didn't really take off until a year or so later.
At the time of MTV's first airing, the American music scene was in a bit of a creative slump, and videos did not exist for a lot of American acts. In contrast, British television had been used to music videos for many years now and English bands were already very aware of the music video as an idiom, so MTV started showing lots of videos by English artists. This helped spawn the second New Wave, where British artists were extremely popular in America. "New Wave/New Music" became a blanket term for "young, androgynous, technology oriented British artists," many of whom had begun their careers during the punk era and had evolved out of the post-punk movement. There wasn't a unified sound to this group per se, they were instead characterized by a general risk-taking attitude. MTV would mostly air New Wave until later in the decade when they switched to metal and rock. Here is a Duran Duran video.
Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
The second New Wave is also associated with synthpop. A lot of New Wave acts used synthesizers heavily.
Gary Numan - Metal (from The Pleasure Principle - 1979)
Many contemporary indie artists, such as The Strokes, Interpol, and the Killers, are influenced by the New Wave acts of this period.
Arena Rock
Arena Rock is basically rock with an emphasis on large anthemic hooks and choruses. It is best typified by Journey, who released Escape in 1981.
Journey - Don't Stop Believing
Alternative Rock
This is basically a blanket term to describe any kind of rock music that owes a debt to the punk aesthetic and ethos. It consists of many subgenres, including grunge, Britpop, indie rock, etc.
It rose to national attention during the 80s with a few acts like R.E.M. and U2, although it wouldn't really take off until grunge kicks in. R.E.M. releases Murmur in 1983, a commercial success.
R.E.M. - Radio Free Europe
By the middle of the decade, alternative was moving away from a punk sound to a more melodic line, as typified by bands such as Husker Du. At the end of the decade, it had already branched out into many various forms, including alternative pop like They Might be Giants to industrial pop/metal like Nine Inch Nails. It feels really weird to be even talking about those two in the same sentence.
They Might be Giants - Istanbul (1990)
Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole (Pretty Hate Machine - 1989)
Metal (Glam Metal/Thrash Metal)
In the wake of Van Halen's success, a hair metal/glam metal scene sprung up around LA's Sunset Strip, with bands like Motley Crue. They took the makeuped look of glam rock acts like KISS to a new level. The music was heavy shredding metal with a pop influence.
Motley Crue - Girls Girls Girls
Many metal bands gained wide exposure by being featured on MTV and metal began to capture a wider audience than just young white males. Here is Def Leppard's video for Rock of Ages from Pyromania (1983).
In 1987 Guns n Roses released Appetite for Destruction.
Guns n Roses - Sweet Child of Mine
Thrash metal also developed around this time and is mostly associated with 4 bands: Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeath. Metallica released Master of Puppets in 1986, in the same year Slayer released Reign in Blood, which is described as "the heaviest album of all time." It also provoked allegations of Nazism because of the themes in the music and the artwork, which the band denied. Slayer's music also spawned a whole slew of submetal acts such as death metal, etc, which I do not have time to get into.
Metallica - Battery (Master of Puppets)
Slayer - Angel of Death (Reign in Blood)
Teenpop is Born (or revived, or whatever)
This is also the age of Madonna and Whitney Houston. Pop takes on a new sound as orchestra-heavy disco is replaced by a lighter synthpop as the new bubblegum music.
Madonna - Like a Virgin (1984)
In 1982 Michael Jackson released Thriller, which is still the best selling album of all time.
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (from Thriller)
Hip Hop
The 80s are when Hip Hop's Golden Age (1986-1994, when the genre exploded onto the national scene and stopped becoming underground) kicked off, and its inception is usually attributed to Run DMC's album Raising Hell.
Run DMC - Raising Hell
Another notable name from the period is Grandmaster Flash, who is basically the guy who invented modern DJing techniques. He is now "immortalized" as a character in DJ Hero.
The 80s are the era of MTV, and if I had to pick the defining moment when the 80s kicked in, it would be the launch of MTV in 1981, even though it didn't really take off until a year or so later.
At the time of MTV's first airing, the American music scene was in a bit of a creative slump, and videos did not exist for a lot of American acts. In contrast, British television had been used to music videos for many years now and English bands were already very aware of the music video as an idiom, so MTV started showing lots of videos by English artists. This helped spawn the second New Wave, where British artists were extremely popular in America. "New Wave/New Music" became a blanket term for "young, androgynous, technology oriented British artists," many of whom had begun their careers during the punk era and had evolved out of the post-punk movement. There wasn't a unified sound to this group per se, they were instead characterized by a general risk-taking attitude. MTV would mostly air New Wave until later in the decade when they switched to metal and rock. Here is a Duran Duran video.
Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
The second New Wave is also associated with synthpop. A lot of New Wave acts used synthesizers heavily.
Gary Numan - Metal (from The Pleasure Principle - 1979)
Many contemporary indie artists, such as The Strokes, Interpol, and the Killers, are influenced by the New Wave acts of this period.
Arena Rock
Arena Rock is basically rock with an emphasis on large anthemic hooks and choruses. It is best typified by Journey, who released Escape in 1981.
Journey - Don't Stop Believing
Alternative Rock
This is basically a blanket term to describe any kind of rock music that owes a debt to the punk aesthetic and ethos. It consists of many subgenres, including grunge, Britpop, indie rock, etc.
It rose to national attention during the 80s with a few acts like R.E.M. and U2, although it wouldn't really take off until grunge kicks in. R.E.M. releases Murmur in 1983, a commercial success.
R.E.M. - Radio Free Europe
By the middle of the decade, alternative was moving away from a punk sound to a more melodic line, as typified by bands such as Husker Du. At the end of the decade, it had already branched out into many various forms, including alternative pop like They Might be Giants to industrial pop/metal like Nine Inch Nails. It feels really weird to be even talking about those two in the same sentence.
They Might be Giants - Istanbul (1990)
Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole (Pretty Hate Machine - 1989)
Metal (Glam Metal/Thrash Metal)
In the wake of Van Halen's success, a hair metal/glam metal scene sprung up around LA's Sunset Strip, with bands like Motley Crue. They took the makeuped look of glam rock acts like KISS to a new level. The music was heavy shredding metal with a pop influence.
Motley Crue - Girls Girls Girls
Many metal bands gained wide exposure by being featured on MTV and metal began to capture a wider audience than just young white males. Here is Def Leppard's video for Rock of Ages from Pyromania (1983).
In 1987 Guns n Roses released Appetite for Destruction.
Guns n Roses - Sweet Child of Mine
Thrash metal also developed around this time and is mostly associated with 4 bands: Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeath. Metallica released Master of Puppets in 1986, in the same year Slayer released Reign in Blood, which is described as "the heaviest album of all time." It also provoked allegations of Nazism because of the themes in the music and the artwork, which the band denied. Slayer's music also spawned a whole slew of submetal acts such as death metal, etc, which I do not have time to get into.
Metallica - Battery (Master of Puppets)
Slayer - Angel of Death (Reign in Blood)
Teenpop is Born (or revived, or whatever)
This is also the age of Madonna and Whitney Houston. Pop takes on a new sound as orchestra-heavy disco is replaced by a lighter synthpop as the new bubblegum music.
Madonna - Like a Virgin (1984)
In 1982 Michael Jackson released Thriller, which is still the best selling album of all time.
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (from Thriller)
Hip Hop
The 80s are when Hip Hop's Golden Age (1986-1994, when the genre exploded onto the national scene and stopped becoming underground) kicked off, and its inception is usually attributed to Run DMC's album Raising Hell.
Run DMC - Raising Hell
Another notable name from the period is Grandmaster Flash, who is basically the guy who invented modern DJing techniques. He is now "immortalized" as a character in DJ Hero.
20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 5: 1970s
Glam Rock
Largely a British phenomena, glam rock is typically characterized by a deliberate shunning of the peace and love generation's aesthetic, with performers wearing a very artificial style including lots of glitter, makeup, outrageous outfits, and platform boots. They typically cultivated an androgynous, bisexual image and courted lots of spacey futuristic themes in their clothing and lyrics. A really good representation of the aesthetic of this movement can be seen in the movie Velvet Goldmine.
The protean David Bowie and his space-age alter ego Ziggy Stardust is probably the best and most commercially successful in this genre. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) is heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.
David Bowie - Space Oddity
Punk
Punk developed around the mid 1970s in the UK and the US out of the garage band tradition of the 1960s. The previous generation had seen the likes of Jimi Hendrix and virtuosic guitar solos; the aesthetic of punk was against the excesses of mainstream rock music and featured usually stripped down, "no bullshit" instrumentals with few solos. Other characteristics of the style include fast and short songs, hard edged music featuring lots of distorted power chords to create a "buzz saw drone", and shouted lyrics without much variance in pitch and tone usually about politics and social issues.
Production value is typically low because the DIY attitude was prized in this genre. Many musicians produced and distributed themselves through underground channels. The famous three-chord paradigm is kind of a joke, but also typifies the attitude of the movement, which is "Here is a chord, here is another chord, here is a third chord -- now go make a band." Meaning: you may not be a terribly good musician but you can still express yourself through music. The accompanying visual aesthetic was simple: safety pins, leather jacket, ripped shirt, jeans. Later it would become Mohawks and piercings.
The Who is somewhat associated with this movement, more in terms of attitude than anything else. Other influential bands were the Ramones, whose debut album in 1976 was integral to the movement, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.
Ramones: Blitzkrieg Pop
The Clash: Should I Stay or Should I Go
Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen
New Wave
New Wave is a late 1970s movement that used to be synonymous with punk rock before branching off to become its own category and overtaking punk as the spearhead of the underground English movement. Sometimes punk acts were referred to as New Wave. By the latter half of the decade, New Wave came to be those acts associated with the punk scene that didn't play punk music, in that their music was more lyrically complex or their songs were more polished or they tended to experiment more with a sort of synthpop sound. In America, it was used as a term to describe acts that played CBGB, such as the Talking Heads. Sometimes it is used as a catchall term for new music out of Britain.
Talking Heads - Psycho Killer
From Wikipedia: "According to music journalist Simon Reynolds the music had a twitchy agitated feel to it. New Wave musicians who often played choppy rhythm guitars with fast tempos. Keyboards were common as was stop and start song structures and melodies."
Power Pop became associated also with this movement. See Cheap Trick.
Cheap Trick - Hello There
Later still, "post-punk," which is a darker less pop-influenced kind of punk, came to describe music by Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and Joy Division. The Cure in particular became very dark and helped influence the goth movement.
The Cure - Boys Don't Cry
Hard Rock
Hard Rock developed out of the blues rock, psychedelic, and garage band tradition and uses the blues pentatonic scale with heavy distorted sounding electrical instrumentation. Jimi Hendrix was one of the first to experiment with guitar effects like distortion and phasing, a tradition that was later taken up by people like Pete Townshend and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Some of the first hard rock albums are Led Zeppelin's first album and The Who's Live at Leeds and Who's Next.
Roll call:
Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin IV, 1971)
The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (Who's Next, 1971)
Alice Cooper - School's Out (1972)
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (A Night at the Opera, 1975)
Aerosmith - Walk This Way (Toys in the Attic, 1975)
Van Halen - Eruption (Van Halen, 1978)
AC/DC - Highway to Hell (1979)
Country Rock
I don't really have much to say about this category because it's mostly an excuse to include the Eagles and Hotel California (1976). The Eagles are credited with popularizing the Southern California country rock style.
The Eagles - Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over version)
Metal
Metal also formed out of the blues rock/psychedelic rock trend but later on shed much of its blues influence. Metal is characterized by "thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness." The sonic power of the amplified guitar is one of the mainstays of metal music, with the bass guitar also very prominent in making the sound "heavy." Heavy metal drumming requires a lot of endurance and precision because there are usually lots of intricate patterns.
Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin II, 1969)
Black Sabbath - War Pigs (Paranoid, 1970). It is said that Tommy Iommi, the guitarist, had an accident that affected his hand, and he had to tune down his guitar so he could play power chords with easier fretting. That particular sound became iconic.
Judas Priest - Rocka Rolla (1974). This is pre-leather and studs Judas Priest. They are credited with helping metal shed much of its blues influence.
Motorhead - Overkill (1979). This band is credited with being the first group to span the metal/punk divide.
Disco
This is also the era of disco. It was originally a type of dance music for black gays but was picked up by the mainstream by the end of the decade and became the dancehall staple. According to Wikipedia: "Musical influences include funk and soul music. The disco sound has soaring, often reverberated vocals over a steady "four-on-the-floor" beat, an eighth note (quaver) or sixteenth note (semi-quaver) hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, and a prominent, syncopated electric bass line sometimes consisting of octaves." Four on the floor is just your basic 4/4 steady beat.
The Bee Gees recorded Staying Alive for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977.
By 1979 the disco backlash was well under way as Disco Demolition Night would prove. Tt did give rise to the "dance pop" of the 80s, which uses the disco beat.
Reggae
This type of music, which developed in Jamaica following ska and rocksteady, is characterized by the stress on the offbeat. Obligatory Bob Marley link to follow:
Hip Hop
Hip hop is born in 1979 with Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang.
Largely a British phenomena, glam rock is typically characterized by a deliberate shunning of the peace and love generation's aesthetic, with performers wearing a very artificial style including lots of glitter, makeup, outrageous outfits, and platform boots. They typically cultivated an androgynous, bisexual image and courted lots of spacey futuristic themes in their clothing and lyrics. A really good representation of the aesthetic of this movement can be seen in the movie Velvet Goldmine.
The protean David Bowie and his space-age alter ego Ziggy Stardust is probably the best and most commercially successful in this genre. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) is heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.
David Bowie - Space Oddity
Punk
Punk developed around the mid 1970s in the UK and the US out of the garage band tradition of the 1960s. The previous generation had seen the likes of Jimi Hendrix and virtuosic guitar solos; the aesthetic of punk was against the excesses of mainstream rock music and featured usually stripped down, "no bullshit" instrumentals with few solos. Other characteristics of the style include fast and short songs, hard edged music featuring lots of distorted power chords to create a "buzz saw drone", and shouted lyrics without much variance in pitch and tone usually about politics and social issues.
Production value is typically low because the DIY attitude was prized in this genre. Many musicians produced and distributed themselves through underground channels. The famous three-chord paradigm is kind of a joke, but also typifies the attitude of the movement, which is "Here is a chord, here is another chord, here is a third chord -- now go make a band." Meaning: you may not be a terribly good musician but you can still express yourself through music. The accompanying visual aesthetic was simple: safety pins, leather jacket, ripped shirt, jeans. Later it would become Mohawks and piercings.
The Who is somewhat associated with this movement, more in terms of attitude than anything else. Other influential bands were the Ramones, whose debut album in 1976 was integral to the movement, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.
Ramones: Blitzkrieg Pop
The Clash: Should I Stay or Should I Go
Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen
New Wave
New Wave is a late 1970s movement that used to be synonymous with punk rock before branching off to become its own category and overtaking punk as the spearhead of the underground English movement. Sometimes punk acts were referred to as New Wave. By the latter half of the decade, New Wave came to be those acts associated with the punk scene that didn't play punk music, in that their music was more lyrically complex or their songs were more polished or they tended to experiment more with a sort of synthpop sound. In America, it was used as a term to describe acts that played CBGB, such as the Talking Heads. Sometimes it is used as a catchall term for new music out of Britain.
Talking Heads - Psycho Killer
From Wikipedia: "According to music journalist Simon Reynolds the music had a twitchy agitated feel to it. New Wave musicians who often played choppy rhythm guitars with fast tempos. Keyboards were common as was stop and start song structures and melodies."
Power Pop became associated also with this movement. See Cheap Trick.
Cheap Trick - Hello There
Later still, "post-punk," which is a darker less pop-influenced kind of punk, came to describe music by Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and Joy Division. The Cure in particular became very dark and helped influence the goth movement.
The Cure - Boys Don't Cry
Hard Rock
Hard Rock developed out of the blues rock, psychedelic, and garage band tradition and uses the blues pentatonic scale with heavy distorted sounding electrical instrumentation. Jimi Hendrix was one of the first to experiment with guitar effects like distortion and phasing, a tradition that was later taken up by people like Pete Townshend and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Some of the first hard rock albums are Led Zeppelin's first album and The Who's Live at Leeds and Who's Next.
Roll call:
Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin IV, 1971)
The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (Who's Next, 1971)
Alice Cooper - School's Out (1972)
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (A Night at the Opera, 1975)
Aerosmith - Walk This Way (Toys in the Attic, 1975)
Van Halen - Eruption (Van Halen, 1978)
AC/DC - Highway to Hell (1979)
Country Rock
I don't really have much to say about this category because it's mostly an excuse to include the Eagles and Hotel California (1976). The Eagles are credited with popularizing the Southern California country rock style.
The Eagles - Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over version)
Metal
Metal also formed out of the blues rock/psychedelic rock trend but later on shed much of its blues influence. Metal is characterized by "thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness." The sonic power of the amplified guitar is one of the mainstays of metal music, with the bass guitar also very prominent in making the sound "heavy." Heavy metal drumming requires a lot of endurance and precision because there are usually lots of intricate patterns.
Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin II, 1969)
Black Sabbath - War Pigs (Paranoid, 1970). It is said that Tommy Iommi, the guitarist, had an accident that affected his hand, and he had to tune down his guitar so he could play power chords with easier fretting. That particular sound became iconic.
Judas Priest - Rocka Rolla (1974). This is pre-leather and studs Judas Priest. They are credited with helping metal shed much of its blues influence.
Motorhead - Overkill (1979). This band is credited with being the first group to span the metal/punk divide.
Disco
This is also the era of disco. It was originally a type of dance music for black gays but was picked up by the mainstream by the end of the decade and became the dancehall staple. According to Wikipedia: "Musical influences include funk and soul music. The disco sound has soaring, often reverberated vocals over a steady "four-on-the-floor" beat, an eighth note (quaver) or sixteenth note (semi-quaver) hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, and a prominent, syncopated electric bass line sometimes consisting of octaves." Four on the floor is just your basic 4/4 steady beat.
The Bee Gees recorded Staying Alive for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977.
By 1979 the disco backlash was well under way as Disco Demolition Night would prove. Tt did give rise to the "dance pop" of the 80s, which uses the disco beat.
Reggae
This type of music, which developed in Jamaica following ska and rocksteady, is characterized by the stress on the offbeat. Obligatory Bob Marley link to follow:
Hip Hop
Hip hop is born in 1979 with Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 4: 1960s
A lot of really interesting things happened during this decade. In no particular order:
Bubblegum pop emerges.
Wikipedia has this to say about it:
The chief characteristics of the genre are that it is pop music contrived and marketed to appeal to pre-teens and teenagers, is produced in an assembly-line process, driven by producers, using faceless singers and has an upbeat "bubblegum" sound. The songs typically have singalong choruses, seemingly childlike themes and a contrived innocence, occasionally combined with an undercurrent of sexual double entendre. They also have a catchy melody, simple chords, simple harmonies, danceable beats, and repetitive riffs or "hooks".
Well, that sound familiar. Wikipedia goes on to say that the music of the 90s, such as Britney Spears and boy bands, developed from this same genre. I'm glad we're all in agreement.
Their main example is the Monkees, who, apparently, were formed for a TV show of the same name. It doesn't really get more corporate than that.
Folk Music and Bob Dylan
Folk Music saw a revival, with a crop of singer-songwriters writing "protest music," spearheaded by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota and was really into early rock and roll in his youth, such as the music of Little Richard and Buddy Holly. He only turned to folk music later, in his college days, because for him, it seemed more tragic and deep and had the ability to express a wider range of human emotions. He started introducing himself as "Bob Dylan" when he was playing his college folk circuit (he was a fan of the poetry of Dylan Thomas). In 1961 he dropped out of college and moved to New York, where he started playing the Greenwich Village scene and made his first few records with Columbia. By 1963 he was already established as a singer-songwriter and associated with the anti-war and civil rights movements, along with his supporter and lover Joan Baez, who promoted him at her own concerts. His music had a great following amongst the fringe elements of the 60s.
Starting to feel a little constrained by the folk movement, he reinvented himself as a folk-rock pop star. In 1965 he released "Like a Rolling Stone." According to Wikipedia: At over six minutes in length, the song has been widely credited with altering attitudes about what a pop single could convey. Bruce Springsteen, in his speech during Dylan's inauguration into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said that on first hearing the single, "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind."
Rolling Stone has it as the greatest rock song ever made, and it's easy to hear why. It sounds like it could have been written today. Hell, if it came out today, it would probably immediately chart and eclipse most of the drivel that enjoys airtime now.
He also started using electric instruments, which was a big controversy at the time and alienated a lot of fans (presumably, they thought he had betrayed them. How dare he experiment with something unfamiliar!).
He would leave a very extensive legacy. He is considered the voice and the guiding spirit of the counterculture movement. His songwriting has been compared in depth and quality to Keats, Eliot, and Tennyson and he is credited with bringing a level of seriousness and intellectual ambition to pop music. His musical style spanned everything from rock to gospel to R&B to folk to country -- basically every genre of pop music that had been invented at the time. Many artists credit him with laying down the foundation for "lyric, tune, seriousness, spirituality, and depth of rock music." Basically, he was the first really famous rock star to use music to actually say something profound.
Soul and Motown develop
I'm trying to avoid talking about the Beatles just yet, so we're going to move onto something else in the meantime.
Soul music is a combination of gospel music and rhythm and blues. There are a bajillion offshoots and I simply don't have the patience to go into all that. Instead, here is a video of James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul."
Sort of in response, Motown develops, which is actually a record label founded in Detroit owned by African Americans featuring mostly African American artists that sang soul music with a distinct pop flair.
San Francisco Sound and Acid Rock/Psychedelic Rock
Psychedelic rock is a genre that tries to recreate the experience of tripping out on acid in a musical form. As Wikipedia puts it: Psychedelic rock bridged the transition from early blues-based rock to progressive rock, art rock, experimental rock, hard rock and eventually heavy metal.
Elements include:
Los Angeles also got into the the psychedelic scene. In 1965, the Doors formed with Jim Morrison, and they released the song "Light My Fire," which at 7 minutes long, broke the 3-minute pop radio song idiom.
In England, the advent of Pirate Radio helped psychedelic music reach a huge audience. Soon, everyone was getting into the scene. In 1966, the Jimi Hendrix experience was formed, fronted by Hendrix, who is considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
The Beach Boys got rid of their squeaky clean image to release the psychedelic-influenced Good Vibrations. The Who's Tommy and the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black" and Their Satanic Majesties Request featured psychedelic sounds. Even the Bee Gees were psychedelic for a time, before reinventing themselves to disco. Then, there was the Beatles.
Now we have to talk about them.
In 1963 "I want to hold your hand" was first played in the US. The Beatles were already popular in England before making their extremely well received US debut in 1964 amidst a rising tide of Beatlemania. Once they became established, they started the British Invasion. Their albums Revolver and Rubber Soul had already established their dominance in trippy experimental ism (although, after all, it was the 60s. Most of rock and roll as it exists today hadn't been invented yet. Just about everything they wrote that was modern sounding was "experimental" at the time. And the acid was showing its effects, too). These two albums were greatly inspired by Bob Dylan's example, while proving to be just as catchy and radio-friendly as "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," which had just come out in 1965 and was a huge smash hit for their countrymen, the Rolling Stones.
The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in 1967, in the aftermath of waning Beatlemania and a decision to return to the studio after a long time touring. The Beatles had made their career in studio albums but had been touring excessively and were starting to feel the strain of being so special. The idea was to record an album as a fictional band, so that they could be free and not feel the pressure of being "The Beatles." It is rated as one of the most influential records of all time. Rolling Stone has it at #1 position on its list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and after gushing over it for paragraphs (how influential it is, how it perfectly complemented the 1967 "Summer of Love" and spearheaded this feeling of love and peace all across the globe, how it represented the pinnacle of cutting edge studio work and collaborative harmonics, and on and on), it finally says, "Yet Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts -- it is simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place."
As Wikipedia puts it: it is a veritable encyclopaedia of psychedelia (among other elements), as well as an explosion of creativity that would set the standard for rock albums decades later. From the title track to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" to "Within You Without You" to "A Day in the Life", the album showcased a wildly colourful palette, with unpredictable changes in rhythm, texture, melody, and tone colour that few groups could equal.
Other "British Invasion" bands included the Rolling Stones and The Who. Here is "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones, featuring a very characteristically psychedelic-rock sounding opening riff:
The Who formed in 1964 and soon rose to fame in the UK, helped by the advent of pirate radio which became a major contender to BBC broadcasting. They had crossover success in the US, starting from Tommy (1969). They became known for energetic live performances and for trashing their instruments on stage, and later on became associated with the punk and hard rock movements. Here is Baba O'Riley from Who's Next, featuring a synthesizer intro:
Prog Rock
Another notable band from this genre is Pink Floyd, whose sound influenced the Beatles on the making of their Lonely Hearts album, as they shared studio space with them. Progressive rock formed out of the late 1960s and went on through the 70s partly as a response to the influence of the Beatles and is, according to Wikipedia, a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." The following characteristics are all lifted from Wikipedia:
Form: Progressive rock music either avoids common popular music song structures of verse-chorus-bridge, or blur the formal distinctions by extending sections or inserting musical interludes, often with exaggerated dynamics to heighten contrast between sections. Classical forms are often inserted or substituted, sometimes yielding entire suites, building on the traditional medleys of earlier rock bands. Progressive rock music also often has extended instrumental passages, marrying the classical solo tradition with the improvisational traditions of jazz and psychedelic rock. All of these tend to add length to progressive rock music, which may last longer than twenty minutes and are usually not "songs" per se, but musical works that have a lot more in common with more established musical concepts.
Timbre (instrumentation and tone color): Early progressive rock groups expanded the timbral palette of traditional rock instrumentation of guitar, organ, bass, and drums by adding instruments more typical of jazz or folk music, such as flute, saxophone, and violin, and more often than not used electronic keyboards, synthesizers, and electronic effects units. Some instruments – most notably the Moog synthesizer and the Mellotron – have become closely associated with the genre.
Rhythm: Drawing on their classical, jazz, folk and experimental influences, progressive rock artists are more likely to explore time signatures other than 4/4 and tempo changes. Progressive rock generally tends to be freer in its rhythmic approach than other forms of rock music. The approach taken varies across different works but may range from regular beats to irregular or complex time signatures.
Melody and Harmony: In progressive rock, the blues inflections of mainstream rock are often supplanted by jazz and classical influences. Melodies are more likely to be modal than based on the pentatonic scale, and are more likely to comprise longer, developing passages than short, catchy ones. Chords and chord progressions may be augmented with 6th, 7th, 9th, and compound intervals; and the I-IV-V is much less common. Allusions to, or even direct quotes from, well-known classical themes are common. Some bands (notably King Crimson) have used atonal or dissonant harmonies, and a few, such as Henry Cow, Shub-Niggurath, and 5UUs, have even worked with rudimentary serialism.
Texture and imagery: Ambient soundscapes and theatrical elements may be used to describe scenes, events or other aspects of the concept. For example, leitmotif is used to represent the various characters in Genesis' "Harold the Barrel" (from Nursery Cryme) and "Robbery, Assault and Battery" (from A Trick of the Tail), and more literally, the sounds of clocks and cash registers are used to represent time and money in Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.
Technology: To aid timbral exploration, progressive rock bands were often early adopters of new electronic musical instruments and technologies. The analog synthesizer is the instrument best associated with progressive rock. This included the modular Moog used by ELP, Mini Moog by Yes, ARP Pro Soloist by Genesis, Oberheim by Styx, etc. The mellotron, particularly, was a signature sound of early progressive bands. Pink Floyd utilized an EMS Synthi A synthesizer equipped with a sequencer on their track "On the Run" from their 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. In the late 1970s, Robert Fripp, of King Crimson, and Brian Eno developed an analog tape loops effect (Frippertronics). In the 1980s, Frank Zappa used the Synclavier for composing and recording, and King Crimson utilized MIDI-enabled guitars, a Chapman Stick, and electronic percussion.
Concept albums: Collections of songs unified by an elaborate, overarching theme or story are common to progressive rock. As songs by progressive rock acts tend to be quite long, such collections have frequently exceeded the maximum length of recorded media, resulting in packages that require multiple vinyl discs, cassettes, or compact discs in order to present a single album. Concepts have included the historical, fantastical, and metaphysical, and even, in the case of Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, poking fun at concept albums.
Lyrical themes: Progressive rock typically has lyrical ambition similar to its musical ambition, tending to avoid typical rock/pop subjects such as love, dancing, etc., rather inclining towards the kinds of themes found in classical literature, fantasy, folklore, social commentary or all of these. Peter Gabriel (Genesis) often wrote surreal stories to base his lyrics around, sometimes including theatrical elements with several characters, while Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) combined social criticism with personal struggles with greed, madness, and death.
Presentation: Album art and packaging is often an important part of the artistic concept. This trend can be seen to have begun with The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and played a major part in the marketing of progressive rock. Some bands became as well known for the art direction of their albums as for their sound, with the "look" integrated into the band's overall musical identity. This led to fame for particular artists and design studios, most notably Roger Dean for his work with Yes, and Hipgnosis for their work with Pink Floyd and several other progressive rock groups.
Stage theatrics: Beginning in the early 1970s, some progressive rock bands began incorporating elaborate and sometimes flamboyant stage theatrics into their concerts. Genesis lead singer Peter Gabriel wore many different colourful and exotic costumes in one show and frequently acted out the lyrical narrative of the songs, Pink Floyd would utilize burning gongs and crashing airplanes and inflatables, Yes incorporated futuristic stage sets designed by Roger Dean, performing 'in-the-round', and one of ELP's many stage antics include Emerson's "flying piano" at the California Jam concert, in which a Steinway grand piano would be spun from a hoist.
In short, prog-rock incorporates just about every "modern" feature of modern rock music.
Earlier on in the 60s part of their career, Pink Floyd was associated with psychedelic rock. Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in 1967 when Syd Barrett was still with the band, and is considered one of the most influential albums of all time. By 1973, when Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon, the prog-rock sound is hard to deny:
Ah, Pink Floyd - so ahead of their time.
Country Music
Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton are popular.
Velvet Underground
In 1967 The Velvet Underground and Nico was released. The band itself had gained notoriety, although not commercial success, as the house band for Andy Warhol and his shenanigans. The album is considered to be extremely influential to the punk and alternative movements of the 70s and 80s. At the time, it was controversial because of its blatant themes of S&M and drug use.
The Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs
In 1969, Woodstock was held, featuring many of the great acts of the time, including the Who, Hendrix, Joan Baez, Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. It was a flagship moment for the hippie peace and love generation.
The Beatles split up in 1970, Hendrix died in 1970 under mysterious circumstances, and Morrison was found dead in his bathtub in 1971. Thus, we kick off the 1970s.
Bubblegum pop emerges.
Wikipedia has this to say about it:
The chief characteristics of the genre are that it is pop music contrived and marketed to appeal to pre-teens and teenagers, is produced in an assembly-line process, driven by producers, using faceless singers and has an upbeat "bubblegum" sound. The songs typically have singalong choruses, seemingly childlike themes and a contrived innocence, occasionally combined with an undercurrent of sexual double entendre. They also have a catchy melody, simple chords, simple harmonies, danceable beats, and repetitive riffs or "hooks".
Well, that sound familiar. Wikipedia goes on to say that the music of the 90s, such as Britney Spears and boy bands, developed from this same genre. I'm glad we're all in agreement.
Their main example is the Monkees, who, apparently, were formed for a TV show of the same name. It doesn't really get more corporate than that.
Folk Music and Bob Dylan
Folk Music saw a revival, with a crop of singer-songwriters writing "protest music," spearheaded by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota and was really into early rock and roll in his youth, such as the music of Little Richard and Buddy Holly. He only turned to folk music later, in his college days, because for him, it seemed more tragic and deep and had the ability to express a wider range of human emotions. He started introducing himself as "Bob Dylan" when he was playing his college folk circuit (he was a fan of the poetry of Dylan Thomas). In 1961 he dropped out of college and moved to New York, where he started playing the Greenwich Village scene and made his first few records with Columbia. By 1963 he was already established as a singer-songwriter and associated with the anti-war and civil rights movements, along with his supporter and lover Joan Baez, who promoted him at her own concerts. His music had a great following amongst the fringe elements of the 60s.
Starting to feel a little constrained by the folk movement, he reinvented himself as a folk-rock pop star. In 1965 he released "Like a Rolling Stone." According to Wikipedia: At over six minutes in length, the song has been widely credited with altering attitudes about what a pop single could convey. Bruce Springsteen, in his speech during Dylan's inauguration into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said that on first hearing the single, "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind."
Rolling Stone has it as the greatest rock song ever made, and it's easy to hear why. It sounds like it could have been written today. Hell, if it came out today, it would probably immediately chart and eclipse most of the drivel that enjoys airtime now.
He also started using electric instruments, which was a big controversy at the time and alienated a lot of fans (presumably, they thought he had betrayed them. How dare he experiment with something unfamiliar!).
He would leave a very extensive legacy. He is considered the voice and the guiding spirit of the counterculture movement. His songwriting has been compared in depth and quality to Keats, Eliot, and Tennyson and he is credited with bringing a level of seriousness and intellectual ambition to pop music. His musical style spanned everything from rock to gospel to R&B to folk to country -- basically every genre of pop music that had been invented at the time. Many artists credit him with laying down the foundation for "lyric, tune, seriousness, spirituality, and depth of rock music." Basically, he was the first really famous rock star to use music to actually say something profound.
Soul and Motown develop
I'm trying to avoid talking about the Beatles just yet, so we're going to move onto something else in the meantime.
Soul music is a combination of gospel music and rhythm and blues. There are a bajillion offshoots and I simply don't have the patience to go into all that. Instead, here is a video of James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul."
Sort of in response, Motown develops, which is actually a record label founded in Detroit owned by African Americans featuring mostly African American artists that sang soul music with a distinct pop flair.
San Francisco Sound and Acid Rock/Psychedelic Rock
Psychedelic rock is a genre that tries to recreate the experience of tripping out on acid in a musical form. As Wikipedia puts it: Psychedelic rock bridged the transition from early blues-based rock to progressive rock, art rock, experimental rock, hard rock and eventually heavy metal.
Elements include:
- electric guitars -- 12-strings being preferred for their 'jangle';
- elaborate studio effects, such as backwards taping, panning (sound placement in the stereo field), phasing, long delay loops, and extreme reverb;
- exotic instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla
- a strong keyboard presence, especially Hammond, Farfisa, and Vox Organs, the Rhodes electric piano, Harpsichords, and the Mellotron (an early tape-driven 'sampler');
- a strong emphasis on extended instrumental solos; and/or
- modal melodies (a melody that is not really in any major or minor key) and surreal, esoterically-inspired, or whimsical lyrics;
- Rather than writing about love or poverty they would write about literature
Los Angeles also got into the the psychedelic scene. In 1965, the Doors formed with Jim Morrison, and they released the song "Light My Fire," which at 7 minutes long, broke the 3-minute pop radio song idiom.
In England, the advent of Pirate Radio helped psychedelic music reach a huge audience. Soon, everyone was getting into the scene. In 1966, the Jimi Hendrix experience was formed, fronted by Hendrix, who is considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
The Beach Boys got rid of their squeaky clean image to release the psychedelic-influenced Good Vibrations. The Who's Tommy and the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black" and Their Satanic Majesties Request featured psychedelic sounds. Even the Bee Gees were psychedelic for a time, before reinventing themselves to disco. Then, there was the Beatles.
Now we have to talk about them.
In 1963 "I want to hold your hand" was first played in the US. The Beatles were already popular in England before making their extremely well received US debut in 1964 amidst a rising tide of Beatlemania. Once they became established, they started the British Invasion. Their albums Revolver and Rubber Soul had already established their dominance in trippy experimental ism (although, after all, it was the 60s. Most of rock and roll as it exists today hadn't been invented yet. Just about everything they wrote that was modern sounding was "experimental" at the time. And the acid was showing its effects, too). These two albums were greatly inspired by Bob Dylan's example, while proving to be just as catchy and radio-friendly as "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," which had just come out in 1965 and was a huge smash hit for their countrymen, the Rolling Stones.
The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in 1967, in the aftermath of waning Beatlemania and a decision to return to the studio after a long time touring. The Beatles had made their career in studio albums but had been touring excessively and were starting to feel the strain of being so special. The idea was to record an album as a fictional band, so that they could be free and not feel the pressure of being "The Beatles." It is rated as one of the most influential records of all time. Rolling Stone has it at #1 position on its list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and after gushing over it for paragraphs (how influential it is, how it perfectly complemented the 1967 "Summer of Love" and spearheaded this feeling of love and peace all across the globe, how it represented the pinnacle of cutting edge studio work and collaborative harmonics, and on and on), it finally says, "Yet Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts -- it is simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place."
As Wikipedia puts it: it is a veritable encyclopaedia of psychedelia (among other elements), as well as an explosion of creativity that would set the standard for rock albums decades later. From the title track to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" to "Within You Without You" to "A Day in the Life", the album showcased a wildly colourful palette, with unpredictable changes in rhythm, texture, melody, and tone colour that few groups could equal.
Other "British Invasion" bands included the Rolling Stones and The Who. Here is "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones, featuring a very characteristically psychedelic-rock sounding opening riff:
The Who formed in 1964 and soon rose to fame in the UK, helped by the advent of pirate radio which became a major contender to BBC broadcasting. They had crossover success in the US, starting from Tommy (1969). They became known for energetic live performances and for trashing their instruments on stage, and later on became associated with the punk and hard rock movements. Here is Baba O'Riley from Who's Next, featuring a synthesizer intro:
Prog Rock
Another notable band from this genre is Pink Floyd, whose sound influenced the Beatles on the making of their Lonely Hearts album, as they shared studio space with them. Progressive rock formed out of the late 1960s and went on through the 70s partly as a response to the influence of the Beatles and is, according to Wikipedia, a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." The following characteristics are all lifted from Wikipedia:
Form: Progressive rock music either avoids common popular music song structures of verse-chorus-bridge, or blur the formal distinctions by extending sections or inserting musical interludes, often with exaggerated dynamics to heighten contrast between sections. Classical forms are often inserted or substituted, sometimes yielding entire suites, building on the traditional medleys of earlier rock bands. Progressive rock music also often has extended instrumental passages, marrying the classical solo tradition with the improvisational traditions of jazz and psychedelic rock. All of these tend to add length to progressive rock music, which may last longer than twenty minutes and are usually not "songs" per se, but musical works that have a lot more in common with more established musical concepts.
Timbre (instrumentation and tone color): Early progressive rock groups expanded the timbral palette of traditional rock instrumentation of guitar, organ, bass, and drums by adding instruments more typical of jazz or folk music, such as flute, saxophone, and violin, and more often than not used electronic keyboards, synthesizers, and electronic effects units. Some instruments – most notably the Moog synthesizer and the Mellotron – have become closely associated with the genre.
Rhythm: Drawing on their classical, jazz, folk and experimental influences, progressive rock artists are more likely to explore time signatures other than 4/4 and tempo changes. Progressive rock generally tends to be freer in its rhythmic approach than other forms of rock music. The approach taken varies across different works but may range from regular beats to irregular or complex time signatures.
Melody and Harmony: In progressive rock, the blues inflections of mainstream rock are often supplanted by jazz and classical influences. Melodies are more likely to be modal than based on the pentatonic scale, and are more likely to comprise longer, developing passages than short, catchy ones. Chords and chord progressions may be augmented with 6th, 7th, 9th, and compound intervals; and the I-IV-V is much less common. Allusions to, or even direct quotes from, well-known classical themes are common. Some bands (notably King Crimson) have used atonal or dissonant harmonies, and a few, such as Henry Cow, Shub-Niggurath, and 5UUs, have even worked with rudimentary serialism.
Texture and imagery: Ambient soundscapes and theatrical elements may be used to describe scenes, events or other aspects of the concept. For example, leitmotif is used to represent the various characters in Genesis' "Harold the Barrel" (from Nursery Cryme) and "Robbery, Assault and Battery" (from A Trick of the Tail), and more literally, the sounds of clocks and cash registers are used to represent time and money in Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.
Technology: To aid timbral exploration, progressive rock bands were often early adopters of new electronic musical instruments and technologies. The analog synthesizer is the instrument best associated with progressive rock. This included the modular Moog used by ELP, Mini Moog by Yes, ARP Pro Soloist by Genesis, Oberheim by Styx, etc. The mellotron, particularly, was a signature sound of early progressive bands. Pink Floyd utilized an EMS Synthi A synthesizer equipped with a sequencer on their track "On the Run" from their 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. In the late 1970s, Robert Fripp, of King Crimson, and Brian Eno developed an analog tape loops effect (Frippertronics). In the 1980s, Frank Zappa used the Synclavier for composing and recording, and King Crimson utilized MIDI-enabled guitars, a Chapman Stick, and electronic percussion.
Concept albums: Collections of songs unified by an elaborate, overarching theme or story are common to progressive rock. As songs by progressive rock acts tend to be quite long, such collections have frequently exceeded the maximum length of recorded media, resulting in packages that require multiple vinyl discs, cassettes, or compact discs in order to present a single album. Concepts have included the historical, fantastical, and metaphysical, and even, in the case of Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, poking fun at concept albums.
Lyrical themes: Progressive rock typically has lyrical ambition similar to its musical ambition, tending to avoid typical rock/pop subjects such as love, dancing, etc., rather inclining towards the kinds of themes found in classical literature, fantasy, folklore, social commentary or all of these. Peter Gabriel (Genesis) often wrote surreal stories to base his lyrics around, sometimes including theatrical elements with several characters, while Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) combined social criticism with personal struggles with greed, madness, and death.
Presentation: Album art and packaging is often an important part of the artistic concept. This trend can be seen to have begun with The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and played a major part in the marketing of progressive rock. Some bands became as well known for the art direction of their albums as for their sound, with the "look" integrated into the band's overall musical identity. This led to fame for particular artists and design studios, most notably Roger Dean for his work with Yes, and Hipgnosis for their work with Pink Floyd and several other progressive rock groups.
Stage theatrics: Beginning in the early 1970s, some progressive rock bands began incorporating elaborate and sometimes flamboyant stage theatrics into their concerts. Genesis lead singer Peter Gabriel wore many different colourful and exotic costumes in one show and frequently acted out the lyrical narrative of the songs, Pink Floyd would utilize burning gongs and crashing airplanes and inflatables, Yes incorporated futuristic stage sets designed by Roger Dean, performing 'in-the-round', and one of ELP's many stage antics include Emerson's "flying piano" at the California Jam concert, in which a Steinway grand piano would be spun from a hoist.
In short, prog-rock incorporates just about every "modern" feature of modern rock music.
Earlier on in the 60s part of their career, Pink Floyd was associated with psychedelic rock. Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in 1967 when Syd Barrett was still with the band, and is considered one of the most influential albums of all time. By 1973, when Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon, the prog-rock sound is hard to deny:
Ah, Pink Floyd - so ahead of their time.
Country Music
Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton are popular.
Velvet Underground
In 1967 The Velvet Underground and Nico was released. The band itself had gained notoriety, although not commercial success, as the house band for Andy Warhol and his shenanigans. The album is considered to be extremely influential to the punk and alternative movements of the 70s and 80s. At the time, it was controversial because of its blatant themes of S&M and drug use.
The Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs
In 1969, Woodstock was held, featuring many of the great acts of the time, including the Who, Hendrix, Joan Baez, Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. It was a flagship moment for the hippie peace and love generation.
The Beatles split up in 1970, Hendrix died in 1970 under mysterious circumstances, and Morrison was found dead in his bathtub in 1971. Thus, we kick off the 1970s.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)