Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by øøøøøøø » Sun Dec 20, 2020 4:53 am

CivoLee wrote:
Fri Nov 20, 2020 11:29 pm
Um, nearly every pop song in the 80s had a sax break. That's why IMHO M83's "Midnight City" is most accurate of the many 80s pastiches, because it has a saxophone solo.
Right, but the point I'm trying to make is that what you're describing wasn't because saxophone was on the bleeding edge of pop culture relevance at the time.

That was the last big pop-culture echo of the big bang that was Lester Young, five decades earlier. There wasn't a wide movement of innovation within pop music centered around the saxophone at the time. And by the mid-1990s, the conspicuous presence of the saxophone was almost entirely gone from pop music (with a few prominent exceptions).

We're now a bit over five decades removed from the Beatles and Hendrix, and I feel like the guitar is in a similar position. It's still got a presence in pop music. There is even at least one "guitar hero" who has released charting albums as recently as three years ago.

But this seems unlikely to keep recurring into this coming decade. Those who already have fans/audiences will probably continue to have them, but new "guitar heroes" will build their followings among niche audiences.

I don't want to make it sound like this is bad news. It's just the natural progression of things, and as has been alluded-to above, "guitar band" and "guitar hero" culture was too often packaged with a lot of sexism, shallow machismo, and other things better left behind (or actively repudiated).

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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by Larry Mal » Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:53 am

The point to me is that human beings everywhere are inherently musical and there will always be drive to create great music. The tools will change and the music will change but the underlying fact that human beings need to sing and play music and dance and love never will. I am just happy knowing that... the rest will take care of itself.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by s_mcsleazy » Sun Dec 20, 2020 7:13 pm

budda12ax7 wrote:
Sat Dec 19, 2020 10:38 pm
Those are good points, but that’s why there is an underground.
i know there's an underground. i'm basically part of that underground. BUT, for young music fans who might get into rock music but only listen to what's on the top 40 radio, there's basically no entry point for them to do so. mainly because there's no rock bands crossing over. hell, 2 of the most recent "rock" songs i've heard on the radio were post malone and machine gun kelly. both people who came from the hip hop word.

i'm 29 and a lot of my friends are around my age (say 26-35) now, i was quite lucky in that i had my dad who was pretty into music and usually tried to keep current. but some of my friend's parents knew nothing about music. so most of their exposure to music was whatever was being played on top 40 radio. but at that time (around 2004) there was still rock music on the radio which could act as a gateway into new music.

so this is a 100% true story. i had a friend in high school called luke. basically how i met him was one day when me and his cousin were talking, he came up to us and said "i heard this song on the radio, you guys like rock music, do you know who it is or more music like that" he pulled out his phone and he recorded the chorus of the song. not the best example of a rock song but it was american idiot - green day. i wasn't the biggest fan of that album at the time (i'm still not) but i was like "yeah, that's green day. i got one of their albums upstairs i can burn you" ran into the house, burned him a copy and he loved it. he came up to me the next day and was like "what other music sounds like this?" so every few days i'd burn him a new album i thought he'd like. that got him to start looking into music for himself. i still see him every so often and he's got a really wide taste in music. all because he heard a green day song on the radio. sadly, i dont see any rock songs getting into the top 40.

i mean, if you're trying to show a 13 year old kid "rock" music is good actually, are you going to take them to a lightning bolt show? no, you're going to start off with something that's close to what they already know.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by andy_tchp » Sun Dec 20, 2020 9:57 pm

s_mcsleazy wrote:
Sun Dec 20, 2020 7:13 pm
i mean, if you're trying to show a 13 year old kid "rock" music is good actually, are you going to take them to a lightning bolt show?
Yes.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by burpgun » Tue Dec 22, 2020 4:22 pm

I’ve kind of stopped caring about where guitar based rock stands in the pantheon. I’m always finding stuff I like, be it new or something old that’s new to me. That said I have developed a deepening hatred for what rap has become and what it has made acceptable in music making.

Rap was exciting for a while and I’m old enough to have been very conscious of its arrival. I was a teen when Run DMC and Aerosmith did their thing. Somewhere along the point of gangsta rap arrived rap took a ugly turn, and moving away from sampling also changed it. Now it seems like the bulk of it is just mashing presets and doing nasty shit with auto tune. So far from Public Enemy. All of that’s like whatever, but what really gets me about rap was that it opened the door to people on stages with no musicians and backing tracks holding it all down. Remember when it was a scandal when that pop punk girl got busted lip syncing on SNL? Most pop music is that now, fully automated and I don’t think anyone cares.

Back in 2019 I took my kids to see Greta Thunberg in NYC. Will Smith’s boy opened, for want of a better word. It was just him, backing tracks and I’m not sure the vocal was even live cause he had to dance. The acceptability of this has downgraded pop music played by humans. Bands aren’t as important and it’s ok to just press play. It is what it is, but it still feels weird to me.

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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by Embenny » Tue Dec 22, 2020 5:11 pm

Don't write off a collection of genres as diverse as "rap."

There's plenty of fantastic stuff that is the antithesis of what you describe. There's a lot more out there than SoundCloud mumblerap and top-40 autotuned shit.

Case in point, one of my favourite artists in any genre - Brother Ali.

I never saw this particular live performance before but it's a pretty great recording of him. Here is another one of his greatest tracks, from the same night.

Edit to add: didn't even notice this performance has a cameo appearance by a JMJM. I've never considered there to be overlap between Brother Ali and OSG but clearly this was fate.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by charmonder » Tue Dec 22, 2020 5:46 pm

nah. I think we'll always love seeing people rip on drums and the guitars will always have to be loud enough to compete with that

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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by burpgun » Tue Dec 22, 2020 6:34 pm

mbene085 wrote:
Tue Dec 22, 2020 5:11 pm
Don't write off a collection of genres as diverse as "rap."

There's plenty of fantastic stuff that is the antithesis of what you describe. There's a lot more out there than SoundCloud mumblerap and top-40 autotuned shit.

Case in point, one of my favourite artists in any genre - Brother Ali.

I never saw this particular live performance before but it's a pretty great recording of him. Here is another one of his greatest tracks, from the same night.

Edit to add: didn't even notice this performance has a cameo appearance by a JMJM. I've never considered there to be overlap between Brother Ali and OSG but clearly this was fate.

I’m as close to writing it all off as I am modern commercial country music, which sucks in its own special way. I live in a neighborhood where I’m exposed to rap and adjacent stuff far more than I’d like, and most of what the guys in cars rock sounds like rhythmic booms with robots singing over it. Hate it. I try to give the genre a try sometimes. Run the Jewels is decent but I was surprised how quickly I turned off Kendrick Lamar.

I’ve tried to keep in mind I may have aged out. That may be the case. But my broader point stands: Rap dumbed down live music in a way that devalued musicians in live settings, which is a net negative for guitars.

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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by Embenny » Tue Dec 22, 2020 6:43 pm

burpgun wrote:
Tue Dec 22, 2020 6:34 pm
But my broader point stands: Rap dumbed down live music in a way that devalued musicians in live settings, which is a net negative for guitars.
Did you click on either of my links to watch Brother Ali performing his intelligent and original music with a full live band, including a guitarist?

My point is that "rap" is a massively diverse umbrella and I have yet to find a human being with two ears and a heart who can't recognize that Brother Ali has chops.

He came up alongside some other fantastic underground artists like Atmosphere and it's pretty hard to lump those guys in with the stuff that tops charts.

Once again, that performance featured a Toronado...these guys' guitarists know what's up.

These guys are a force of nature live and my point is that they help disprove the hypothesis that "rap" killed live performance.

Pop and "live" performance have had a rocky history independent of rap. From Top of The Pops to Milli Vanilli, it's been many decades of live pop music being more of a visual aid for prerecorded performance so you can't pin that on rap.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by stevejamsecono » Wed Dec 23, 2020 1:50 pm

mbene085 wrote:
Tue Dec 22, 2020 5:11 pm
Don't write off a collection of genres as diverse as "rap."

There's plenty of fantastic stuff that is the antithesis of what you describe. There's a lot more out there than SoundCloud mumblerap and top-40 autotuned shit.

Case in point, one of my favourite artists in any genre - Brother Ali.

I never saw this particular live performance before but it's a pretty great recording of him. Here is another one of his greatest tracks, from the same night.

Edit to add: didn't even notice this performance has a cameo appearance by a JMJM. I've never considered there to be overlap between Brother Ali and OSG but clearly this was fate.
Thanks for sharing this! Sounded pretty great.

Also I wouldn't say I'm a deep connoisseur of hip-hop (only recently took a deep dive earlier this year so fairly late in the game), but easily one of the top 5 shows I ever saw was a B. Dolan show in Pawtucket RI that a friend took me to. He was played with What! Cheer Brigade and this other act from New Orleans and the showmanship and crowd engagement was INSANE. Infinitely more pleasing than 90% of rock shows I have been with where the fuzz maestros cloak everything in reverb and act like we're looking in on a band practice.

Guitar doesn't have to be "throwback", but it does have to prove itself relevant to the modern pop landscape and likely take its place back in the ensemble that it originally usurped from well... everything else. It will always have a place as a songwriter's instrument.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by Larry Mal » Wed Dec 23, 2020 3:05 pm

I wouldn't be worried about the guitar, I think I am seeing that sales are up, and more importantly it seems like a lot of women and girls have been driving sales. I think that's great.

So probably music with guitar in it will be popular for some time, I might be leery the concepts of "loud" and "guitar-based", though.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by Embenny » Wed Dec 23, 2020 3:28 pm

Very good points, Larry. I'm very excited to see the direction things go in after correcting the historical gender skew of guitar culture. Online gear demos are the one area where I still get exposed to music I really don't want to listen to, and hearing things like the riff from "Sweet Cherry Pie" or similar dreck reminds me of so many things that have gone wrong in the past, musically and culturally.

I don't think "loud" is going to change, though. The two most recent generations of music-listeners grew up blasting their eardrums to hell with headphones from a young age. 30% more teens have noise-induced hearing loss compared to those growing up in the 80's and 90's.

And the teens they talk about in that 2016 study are a technological generation behind the current/upcoming ones, who often got their first smartphone or tablet well below the age of 10. Loud things sound good to young ears, and other than parental lockouts of volume controls which exist on some devices (but aren't standardized given the wide range of sensitivity of different headphones and earbuds), there's not much that parents can do to monitor just how loud the music and games their kids are listening to really is.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by s_mcsleazy » Wed Dec 23, 2020 11:10 pm

one thing i've noticed in this thread is the big confusion between mainstream attention and lesser/scene attention. so i'll give a definition to each.

mainstream attention is when you hear them on pop/top 40 radio and they're having an influence on mainstream culture. think of things like nirvana popularizing the grunge scene or my chemical romance popularizing the mall goth/emo scene or the britpop wars.

lesser/scene attention usually means charting on the genre charts. or having a lot of buzz but not enough momentum to hit the top 40. for example. death grips have a lot of die hard fans but are highly unlikely to ever break into the mainstream.

when i say "rock music is dead in the eyes of the mainstream" what i mean is not "X band you're going to bring up isn't successful or isn't valid" what i mean is it's not crossing over. yeah, we can argue that a lot of the bands/artists who crossed over from the rock scene to the mainstream were pretty bad, but it's often a stepping stone for people who want more like that but ain't finding it.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by BoringPostcards » Mon Dec 28, 2020 7:17 am

I have one thought regarding guitar 'culture', and that is, the art of shredding has always been far more impressive to non musicians than to actual guitarists.
People who don't play guitar see shredding and they see speed, and dexterity and think its god like.
Most guitarists, who don't care to shred, just hear too many notes and a shit ton of ego.
I can actually shred. This opinion does not come from jealousy. I am quite capable of fast playing. I have subbed in for guitarists in metal shows, and it was just money. I never enjoyed doing it.
It's the sonic equivalent of flexing your muscles at the beach.
Nobody cares, except for non musicians and guitar n00bs.
80s rock is hit or miss for me. So is metal from any era.
I am not into the dark, moody and edgy stuff, nor am I into the big hair womanizing stuff, like Van Halen.
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I have a soft spot for Iron Maiden, but that is due to their melodicism in the lead lines, and Steve Harris' writing.
Their songs were about many different things. They wrote about movies and books. They employed imagery and nostalgia to a certain degree.
Then we have metal bands like Cannibal Corpse, Slayer, and Lamb of God. I don't understand the vulgarity they employ.
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Re: Is loud guitar-based music destined to be "throwback" music from here outwards?

Post by Larry Mal » Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:23 am

I never could shred. Never really tried.

People are handed a canon of classic rock in at least English speaking Western nations, and this comes with some kind of ranking about who is the "best" guitar players and shit. I worked with a guy who told me that Eric Clapton was one of the "best" guitar players and I could not understand what that meant.

In what way? Did that mean that he wrote great songs (hint: he didn't) or maybe he didn't write great songs but the guitar playing was still great? I just never knew what he meant and I doubt he had given much thought to it, either, there simply is a Classic Rock Guitar Hero canon and Eric Clapton is in it.

What always used to mystify me was Jeff Beck... I'm an old guy, but he's still talked about as if he was part of the same triumvirate of Yardbirds guitar players. Don't believe me? Go to the Gear Page right now.

Like it's 1965 and the Yardbirds are still a thing, and we just gloss over the new five decades of mediocrity with some of these people, the Michelob ads, the fusion albums no one bought and shit.
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