Dumb Political Correctness

Mr. Deez said:
Mon and @bystander , I was born in 1976, so my overall impression of U2 isn't going to be based on their first three albums. I was in second grade when War came out. It's basically going to be from approximately 1984 on, which wouldn't include the first three albums but the ten or so since then. I have listened to some of what's on the first three albums but certainly not all of it. What I have heard is pretty good music, but I wouldn't say it blows me away. If you have any particular tracks in mind, I'm happy to listen to them. What would you say are the "Ferrari tracks?"
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I don't know about any Ferrari songs. I think at the time the entire first album was just a real eye-opener for me. I was around 21 years old and the music was just very different to me than what I'd been "raised" on; The Beatles, Cream, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, The Who, CSNY not to mention bands such as RUSH, UFO, Pat Travers etc. So then Tom Petty came along and The Cars. So the shift started occuring. Blondie, Television, the B52's etc again. I moved to South Padre Island in 1981 and met a local musician who was up on the current stuff. His collection included The Talking Heads, Adam Ant and the Ants (who I never liked), Split Enz, The Motels and yes, U2. So I was young, on the beach, smoking doobies and this band was exactly what I wanted to hear. Later songs such as New Years Day and Sunday Bloody Sunday came out and now they are about as cliche as it gets, but at the time, they struck the right chord with me.
 
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Mr. Deez said:
To me, you have to be able to do more than write lyrics to justify being a great musical artist.
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It's not just the lyrics, it's also the ability to perform, to be a storyteller, and that's where he excels. You can argue that he's a bad singer, but that depends on what you like in a voice. I don't think anyone's ever said he's a classical singer, but he has good pitch, he uses his voice well to suit the song, and it's a recognizable, distinct tone, which is a pretty important factor IMO. If you don't have a distinctive voice, then what's the point? Anyone could be singing that song. Bob Dylan (not that I'm a huge fan of his) had a voice that a lot of people can't stand, but a lot of people really resonated with. I don't think John Lennon has a particularly good voice, but no one ever complains about that.

If you appreciate singer-songwriters, you can't separate the voice from the lyrics from the performance. It's not about who sings it better, it's about who makes the song come to life, who gives it authenticity.

And I would add that he's an underrated guitarist. Certainly not a guy who would be playing lead in anyone's band but his own, but certainly no worse than Lennon.
 
Thing about the Beatles - and I count myself as being on the "less impressed than is permissible by society" - is that I'll admit it's harder to get what made them great in retrospect, since so much of what they did influenced things that came after. So now, we hear the reverb and distortion and some of the other things they did with their music, and we say "who cares, everyone does that." And frankly that's what made a lot of what they did great. I'd say they had a whole lot of mediocre music and a lot of catchy 60's rock stuff that's remarkable mainly because they were the first ones doing it. And if you like LSD-induced gibberish, then they had some of that, too.
 
ProdigalHorn said:
Thing about the Beatles - and I count myself as being on the "less impressed than is permissible by society" - is that I'll admit it's harder to get what made them great in retrospect, since so much of what they did influenced things that came after. So now, we hear the reverb and distortion and some of the other things they did with their music, and we say "who cares, everyone does that." And frankly that's what made a lot of what they did great. I'd say they had a whole lot of mediocre music and a lot of catchy 60's rock stuff that's remarkable mainly because they were the first ones doing it. And if you like LSD-induced gibberish, then they had some of that, too.
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Listen to the early Beatles after their early pop rock songs but before their LSD songs. The mid-Beatles don’t get AirPlay, but there are some amazing songs.
 
mchammer said:
Listen to the early Beatles after their early pop rock songs but before their LSD songs.
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Talking about stuff like "I Feel Fine," "Ticket to Ride," "Paperback Writer"? That's probably the stuff I like best of theirs, along with some of the later songs like While My Guitar..., Hey Jude and Let It Be.
 
ProdigalHorn said:
Talking about stuff like "I Feel Fine," "Ticket to Ride," "Paperback Writer"? That's probably the stuff I like best of theirs, along with some of the later songs like While My Guitar..., Hey Jude and Let It Be.
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Okay. I was taking about before then. It’s Chuck Berry plus.
 
Ah gotcha. Anything influenced by Chuck Berry is going to be good. But then you're basically just a Chuck Berry cover band with new lyrics, and that doesn't qualify you as a great band. It qualifies you as being a fun listen. Nothing wrong with that, of course!
 
It's very difficult to describe how important The Beatles were to everyone. So many musicians were inspired by them. And it wasn't just the fact that they wrote so many legitimately good songs. It was their image, the excitement and their cultural impact. The thing is, they had three very good to great songwriters in the band. They had great depth. I compare that depth to CSNY and even The Eagles. How many bands today have at least three songwriters who could each carry a band for years with their material alone?

I believe they were the first to be known to use the recording studio as an art form. They experimented constantly and opened up a lot of doors. I was born in 1958 so I grew up with the phenomenon and saw them on Ed Sullivan. Every album release was a major event. Songs such as Eleanor Rigby, Michelle and Yesterday stand next to songs such as Revolution, Tomorrow Never Knows and Come Together. They had so much versatility and everyone pointed to them as the standard of the culture. Even Bob Dylan.

I think we've had enough of them by now. I went years not wanting to hear any of their songs and to this day I don't listen to them that much.

But I can play While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the piano at a party...
 
ProdigalHorn said:
Ah gotcha. Anything influenced by Chuck Berry is going to be good. But then you're basically just a Chuck Berry cover band with new lyrics, and that doesn't qualify you as a great band. It qualifies you as being a fun listen. Nothing wrong with that, of course!
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Nope, it is Chuck Berry plus one step evolution. It’s in there. When the songs come up on Pandora, I’ll note them and the album.
 
bystander said:
They had great depth. I compare that depth to CSNY and even The Eagles.
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First of all... it's "Eagles" not "The Eagles." Get it right! ;) And I'd put them at having... oh let's say 2 1/2 great songwriters. (Joe Walsh had his moments, but not ready to call him "great".)

But it's a good point and made me think of something else, which is one of the reasons that Eagles broke up to begin with. Basically Glen and Don ran the band and knew exactly what made it successful - mainly that they wrote the songs, Don did most of the singing, and the guitars made everything come to life. When Don Felder wanted to insert himself into the creative/vocal and was basically told to get back in line, that was pretty well the end of it, from what I've read/heard.

Basically unless you've got a band with a clear sense of itself and what makes it great (and what makes it great isn't ME), the band isn't going to last.
 
bystander said:
Chuck Berry is considered to be on rock and roll's Mount Rushmore. Talk to Keef about that....
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Agreed, that is why I think these songs found only on 1-2 albums are fantastic. You can hear the Berry influence but they go somewhere that Berry cannot.
 
ProdigalHorn said:
First of all... it's "Eagles" not "The Eagles." Get it right! ;) And I'd put them at having... oh let's say 2 1/2 great songwriters. (Joe Walsh had his moments, but not ready to call him "great".)

But it's a good point and made me think of something else, which is one of the reasons that Eagles broke up to begin with. Basically Glen and Don ran the band and knew exactly what made it successful - mainly that they wrote the songs, Don did most of the singing, and the guitars made everything come to life. When Don Felder wanted to insert himself into the creative/vocal and was basically told to get back in line, that was pretty well the end of it, from what I've read/heard.

Basically unless you've got a band with a clear sense of itself and what makes it great (and what makes it great isn't ME), the band isn't going to last.
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I liked the pre-Joe Walsh EAGLES (ha). Hey, on the Netflix documentary I think Glen introduced themselves as The Eagles from Los Angeles.

But back to the pre-Joe Walsh Eagles; Randy Meisner and even Bernie Leadon made significant contributions to the band. I agree that Glen and Don ran the show and I've heard that Glen likened the band to a football team that needed a coach and structure. Supposedly he and Don were the arbiters of what was Eagles quality. They guarded the brand and unfortunately for Don Felder (a guitar player of such skill that you'd think his ego would be assuaged) his voice and songwriting was not worthy of the brand.
 
mchammer said:
Agreed, that is why I think these songs found only on 1-2 albums are fantastic. You can hear the Berry influence but they go somewhere that Berry cannot.
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Led Zeppelin is an example of taking it somewhere Berry could not. The basis of their early stuff was black blues music; re-arranged without attribution. That is probably why they were held in such disdain by the critics; they knew they were ripping people off and walking around with the arrogance of someone who had pulled excaliber from the stone (We are all the Britons and I am your King!). The thing is, their arrangements were spectacular. No doubt about it.

As an aside, John Lennon lifted some lyrics from a Chuck Berry song for Come Together and The Beach Boys Surfin USA (I think that's the one) was a direct lift from Chuck (the music). I played the Berry song for my 15 year old daughter (who loves Surfin USA) and it opened her eyes about plagiarism.
 
bystander said:
Hey, on the Netflix documentary I think Glen introduced themselves as The Eagles from Los Angeles.
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Yeah I kinda feel like naming it is one thing, but when you start introducing yourself as "Eagles" it just sounds weird. Maybe it's the plural part of it... but yeah I kinda think they might have been inconsistent about that too!

bystander said:
unfortunately for Don Felder (a guitar player of such skill that you'd think his ego would be assuaged) his voice and songwriting was not worthy of the brand.
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Guy was a fantastic guitar player, one of those guys that could play great rifs but was able to bring a real melodic quality to his solos.

One of the stories from that documentary that I remember was about how they'd kinda laugh that Felder would always send them tapes of stuff he'd been doing and most of it was just junk, but one time they got one and said "Wait a second, this could be something," and it ended up being Hotel California.

Glenn was pretty funny talking about that conflict because they interviewed Felder and he had claimed to write or co-write a song (think it might have been HC), and Glenn says "OK first of all, he didn't send us a tape of the song... he sent us a tape of a bunch of rifs that we took and worked with and integrated them into a song" or something along that line. But it's an example of how some people view song-writing - and the reason why some are good at it and some aren't.
 
bystander said:
But back to the pre-Joe Walsh Eagles; Randy Meisner and even Bernie Leadon made significant contributions to the band.
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That was another great story from the doc, before Meisner quit. He basically was tired of singing Take It To the Limit, and one show they got to the encore and he just refused to go on and sing it. And Glen just told him "Look we sing this stuff every day, but there's some guy in the audience that's never seen us and may never see us again, and we're here to sing that song for him. So get out there and sing the *@$##*! song!" Or something to that effect.

bystander said:
Supposedly he and Don were the arbiters of what was Eagles quality.
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I heard Don one time talk about how the group would get together in a circle before each show and harmonize, and Don called it "the circle of truth." I always imagined that the other band members had a less flattering name for it, but who knows. :D
 
Monahorns said:
Deez,

Maybe you have already listened to them but the first 3 albums are very very good. War in particular is one of the best overall albums I have heard. Their 4th album is pretty good, but they started on a bit of a pretentious road from there.

Maybe that's not your taste, but those first 3 are of a different character. Probably because they were all pursuing a faithful Christian life at the time.
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Concur that the first couple of albums had some good work on them...I think it was listening to New Years Day and Electric Co that first got my attention. However, the songs that followed just lost me...it also seemed like that coincided with the time they were trying to make the breakthrough from fringe artist to commercial success, which is ALSO a journey that tends to lead to MUCH musical suckage. At that juncture, a band is following the lead of their agent and NOT the lead of their actual creativity...
 
When I told Deez that I thought the Beatles were overrated, I thought it might hijack the thread. I never expected one of the most thorough and spectacular thread hijacks in the history of the intergooglez!
 
480 BC: 'Violence is violence'
2016 AD: 'Words are violence'
2019 AD: 'Smiles are violence'
2022 AD: 'Gazing wistfully upon the smoking ruins of Enlightenment civilization is violence'
 
ProdigalHorn said:
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BTW, saw this at MSG last week:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/SpHFmKpkJxPk2hnx7

Always fun to have a Billy Joel sing-along with 20K New Yorkers...
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You're full of crap on thet Beatles, but I'll find some agreement with you here. Billy Joel is great. Furthermore, he's a great showman. Right after we got married, Mrs. Deez told me she always wanted to see him in concert. So I found tickets to Joel teaming up with Elton John. I've never been an Elton John fan, but they were both great and put on an awesome show.
 
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