Downplaying the 1960s British Invasion

[westen44]

I've discussed this already to an extent in other topics.  The main idea is that there are people out there (like a close relative I have) who dislike the music of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and think "real" music only began with rap/hip-hop in the early 90s.  Having been around someone who feels this way in real life, the chasm between someone like myself who likes rock and someone who doesn't is almost impossible to completely put into words.  Suffice it to say that there is no room for any compromise or negotiation at all.  It's just people having extremely radically different tastes in music.  But now we have attempts to quantitatively "prove" that current music is really great and music from the past isn't so great.  Certainly, my relative feels that way. 

It appears that these so-called "scientists" feel the same way.  It isn't enough that they dislike rock music.  They also want to prove that it was never even as important as a lot of people seem to think.  I doubt if I would have even bothered posting this if I hadn't had to live with it on a personal level for so long.  I suspect a lot of it is just a generational thing.  It's pretty common for one generation to not like the generation's music that came before it.  There are quite a number of articles about this today.  This one just happens to be the first one I ran across this morning when I was reading through NME as I often do. 


http://www.nme.com/news/the-beatles/85172

[Dave W]

Hip-hop is music?

Seriously, it all depends on how you look at it. If you're talking about charts and record sales, that's different from actual musical influence. And even that can be misleading. A lot of the sounds you heard in the 60s are rarely heard today. But the influence of those groups on the generations since is huge.

[westen44]

Hip-hop is music?

Seriously, it all depends on how you look at it. If you're talking about charts and record sales, that's different from actual musical influence. And even that can be misleading. A lot of the sounds you heard in the 60s are rarely heard today. But the influence of those groups on the generations since is huge.

They also seem to be really down on 80s music.  It seems the people doing the study think music itself reached a low point in the early 80s.  I thought there was some really great music at that time.  I might agree, though, that maybe some of it was getting derivative and maybe even strange.  But I liked it. 

[drbassman]

This view of current "music" makes me laugh.  I wish I could be alive to witness when the rap and hip-hop fans of today are sitting around the rec room of the local nursing home trying to do "sing alongs."  Now THAT will be funny!   

[westen44]

Being around someone obsessed with it, I ended up listening to a fair amount of rap.  I actually tried to like it, but was simply unable to.  Mostly what I heard was late 90s/early 2000s.  The only rap artist whose music I could listen to was Tone Loc. 

[Pilgrim]

I suspect that when rock n'roll broke out, people who grew up with polka and big band music found little to like in it.  The new form was really based on a very small existing form (blues) but as an evolution of blues that used 3-4 people in many bands, it lacked the instrumentation and melody that they were used to.

I remember that in the early 60's radio stations were playing a LOT of instrumental music - James Bond music, Tijuana Brass, Baja Marimba Band, Al Hirt, Acker Bilk, Antonio Carlos Jobim...at least where I lived, that was programmed on the "popular" music stations. Rock n'roll was more of a specialty sound on a limited number of stations.  Peter Paul & Mary were part of the mix with the instrumentals, but Mitch Miller, Patti Page and others were still there.

Then the British Invasion and the Beatles hit. Their earlier rock isn't that much of a stretch (Catch us if You Can, other "soft rock stuff) from big band with vocals.  But rock quickly evolved into a more aggressive and louder version of rock n'roll, so it wasn't really that much of a transition from the earlier blues and soft rock.

To me, rap and hip-hop are not a transition, they're a new form and they have no musicality. There's no melody, mostly beat and rhythm. (Sounds like something the big band fans might have said about rock, right???) And I can't understand a word they say, both because I've never been good at understanding lyrics, and because they talk so damn fast.  People may like it, but to me it's not what I call music.

[nofi]

when i was a kid my mom always had pop radio on when dad was at work. thank god! pilgrim, your observation about instrumental music was right on. but how could you of all people forget the ventures.

[Granny Gremlin]

Ask that relative of yours who all those early rappers listenned to.  Chances are he/she won't know or have a ready answer.  Be prepared (google it).  It`ll be funk, soul, and classic rock.

From there it's easy enough to point to Walk This Way and Bring The Noise to show how one could not exist without the other (rap kept the phrase 'rock out' but morphed it into 'rock the mic') and even things like Rapture and The Magnificent Seven to show how Punk Rock and Rap/Hip Hop are actually twins - born at the same time in the same city with mutual respect and even some overlap.... then show them this (argued by some to be the first punk band):





Don`t do this to win; do it to expand both your horizons.

[nofi]

westen44. responding to something you posted in a less than shiny, happy way is not putting my nose in your business. one you post something in a public forum its out there for the world to respond to. i don't think you would lasted very long at the old dude pit.

[uwe]

No, but then The Dudepit wasn't exactly a role model in treatment of posters voicing opinions that for whatever reason displeased someone or the powers that were there at the time. We had and have no intention following these footsteps here, commendable as many things were there, the "ganging up"-thing wasn't among them. I'll never forget my first experience when I innocently voiced - as an owner of these beasts - that the history of rock'n'roll would not need to have been rewritten, had 8- or 12-string basses never been invented. A bunch of King's X'lers and Cheap Tricksters went directly for my throat and when I added that I had no recollection of the 12 string bass playing any role in "I want you to want me"'s radio success (not that you could even discern it on that blurry and echo-y Budokan recording), it got real frenzied. Some people can't handle the truth.

[uwe]

Two observations:

- The British Invasion in the US in the 60ies was by any standard more successful than the one in Arnheim in 1944. That said, the Waffen SS would have probably preferred The Beatles to British paratroopers.

- Of course Rap and Hip-Hop is music and it has left a lasting imprint on other forms of music. The way the drums sound and the patterns they play today even on New Country recordings has a Rap/Hip-Hop influence, just as the drumwork of Disco in the 70ies crept into how, say, AC/DC used the drums in their music. Punk brought prominent bar-chording back into music (at the cost of riffs that had dominated it for much of the early 70ies) and you can still hear that today with bands like Green Day or Jimmy Eat World. Reggae spawned syncopated rhythms and if there had been no Bob Marley, there would have been no Police and Police's influence grew branches into the strangest places, be it Canada (80ies Rush) or Ireland (U2). Nirvana/Soundgarden - no, I don't like them -, but their non-traditional approach to harmony and where chords are allowed to go can be heard in so much commercial music today, not just with Nickelback.

To a ghetto kid today, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five is a more relevant cultural influence from the past than Sgt. Pepper, with me it's the other way around. But while I'm typing this, my office stereo blares "Sons & Lovers" from Alcatrazz' second album (featuring a then little-known guitarist named Steve Vai), so don't believe what I say.

And I never bought into the theory that music today is less elaborate than it used to be. The focus of what parts of the music are elaborated and emphasized just changes over time, that is all. I find drums and vocals too loud in a lot of modern recordings, my son and my significant other always complain that Ian Gillan's vocals are buried in the mix on DP recordings (when Ian Gillan pushed the fader up once in the studio in the early 70ies, Blackmore pushed it down again and snapped: "Who do you think you are, f***ing Tom Jones?!")

The influences of the British Invasion are alive and well, I assure you, just listen to how backing vocals are employed today, but so is the influence of funk, R'n'B, rap, hip-hop and drums'n'bass. I listened to Parliament (Funkadelic) intensively for the first time comparatively recently - that music wasn't any less intricate than, say, a Jethro Tull record and I was amazed how many things I heard that have become staples in modern music.  And it's all intertwined anyway: No Beatles, then no Sly & the Family Stone, no Sly, then no rap and hip-hop like we hear it today.

Don't!!!
Push me ...
'cause I'm ...
Close-to-the ...
Eeeeeeeedge ...

I hated it when it came out - has it had a lasting influence? Darn right it has and I like it today.

That study is bonkers, it's like asking whether mankind owes more - Creationists can tune off now -  to reptiles or to amphibians in its evolution. The answer is that we wouldn't be there today in the shape and form we are if either one of them hadn't existed.





Free your mind and your ass scales will follow.

[Dave W]

These "academics" chose the data to fit the answers they wanted.

[Dave W]

No, but then The Dudepit wasn't exactly a role model in treatment of posters voicing opinions that for whatever reason displeased someone or the powers that were there at the time. We had and have no intention following these footsteps here, commendable as many things were there, the "ganging up"-thing wasn't among them. I'll never forget my first experience when I innocently voiced - as an owner of these beasts - that the history of rock'n'roll would not need to have been rewritten, had 8- or 12-string basses never been invented. A bunch of King's X'lers and Cheap Tricksters went directly for my throat and when I added that I had no recollection of the 12 string bass playing any role in "I want you to want me"'s radio success (not that you could even discern it on that blurry and echo-y Budokan recording), it got real frenzied. Some people can't handle the truth.

Not too long after you joined the Pit, Dude sent me  one of his nastynote private messages threatening to ban you because you had said something about his pal Rudy Sarzo that he didn't approve of.  It was something unoffensive, you wondered why he still spoke with such a strong accent after being in this country so many years.

[uwe]

I almost immediately regretted that comment - Sarzo's Spenglish eeza indeeda 'orribla (I have an interview CD from his Whitesnake phase), but as a Cuban immigrant kid he probably spoke Spanish in the Cuban exile community all the time and my comment was smart alecy and patronizing about someone I have no idea of what access to better language education opportunities he had.

To this day I feel guilty about it when Herr Sarzo is mentioned anywhere, so companero Rudy, if you read this, never mind your accent, you looked and played hot with Quiet Riot (and with your naturally dark hair as opposed to the bottled blond look in WS daze).

It's one of the examples where Herr Hornung should have kept his Über-mouth shut for once. 

[Pilgrim]

when i was a kid my mom always had pop radio on when dad was at work. thank god! pilgrim, your observation about instrumental music was right on. but how could you of all people forget the ventures.

I didn't fergittum. I just kinda lumped them in.  Surf music was kind of a tangent that didn't make it onto the "family" listening stations much, at least in the small markets where I lived.

I remember going to the supermarket and checking out the bins with 33 RPM LPs in them and finding these one-off cheapo records with titles like "Sound of the Drags" by The Blasters...and similar recordings that were obviously put together quickly and were destined to be the only time that group showed up on vinyl.  I think I still have one or two of them.  Probably had some people playing on them who later were better known.