Already There wrote:I think Gravity Grave would have been a too interesting choice. I think BSS combines quality with public appeal.
"Too interesting," ha. Since half that list was chosen to prove cred in one microniche or another, they could well have nodded to some top space rock!
mojo filters wrote:As for LAGWAFIS, I'm surprised how many folks prefer the 'Elvis' ending on the new/original version. Whilst the longer live versions that incorporated all the lyrics sound great, now I've got the official record version the novelty's worn off - I much prefer the original release including the extra Spaceman lyrics.
Maybe it's that Can't Help Falling In Love is one of my very favorite classic pop songs, but I think the impact of the Elvis version is much more immediate and the album take is a more mannered compromise. I'm glad to have both, but the album version has been all but supplanted as far as my listening is concerned.
runcible wrote:BzaInSpace wrote:
NIRVANA are/were not "important" - although
they just rock better than any other band from that time. No question.
The records are awesome artifacts of pure mainline rock n' roll.
That's all that matters, the rest of it is fluff for the music press to froth over.
I think they were massively important. My dad has an expression for wine he enjoys but that's about all he can say about it: 'a very good but ultimately unimportant wine' and I think that can be used about a lot of things. But not Nirvana. They became the symbol of grunge and, for me, grunge is the last significant/important thing to happen in rock/pop music. Sure a lot of grunge was recycled heavy rock and punk but it became a genre in its own right and spurred a ludicrous amount of scenes and bands, some good, some not good. Since that era absolutely nothing of significance has happened to music.
I think it's difficult to argue that very much music is "important" in a historical sense as the initial shock of popular music getting more overtly rude and sexualized wore off into the 70s and 80s post Elvis, Dylan, Beatles, James Brown etc. Of course individual groups may strike people of a certain age as symbolic of some feeling they had, or influential on their fashion or whatever, but music is at least as reflective of the times as it tends to be a direct influence on them. Most pop musicians, Kurt Cobain certainly included, are too busy rehearsing and living rock 'n' roll excess to do a whole lot of sophisticated thinking about historical trends and the socio-political scene -- and the thinking that they do is often geared towards convincing listeners and rock journalists that they're deep in order to sell more records and seem "important," whatever that means.
BzaInSpace wrote:'Teen Spirit' is not even one of the best songs on the still amazing Nevermind!
The "importance" thing - possibly a heavy handed retort from me earlier, as I will state that Nirvana were massively important for me and my friends - this was my punk rock!
But this on completely personal level.
But I also think its long-term affect on rock n' roll has sadly been fairly neligible. What happened to a lot of the ideals and even the bands that Kurt championed? A few years later UK culture was fucked up with the whole Loaded/Britpop bullshit which was so far from the kind of attitudes that Nirvana (and others) promoted - and it's still suffers from this IMO.
Apart from (in)directly influencing all-time-great albums from Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Manic Street Preachers (Vitalogy, Alice In Chains and The Holy Bible respectively) the monumental downside seemed to be the rise of a thousand truly horrible frat/skate/shit supposedly 'punk' bands ... I'd rather not name names but you gotta who I'm talking about.
I'd like to see someone take the In Utero sound and really run with it. How amazing would that be...
To me Kurt Cobain was one of the worst offenders in terms of self-promotion via pseudo-intellectual posturing. I'm a big Nirvana fan, particularly of In Utero, but I don't think he championed much besides himself, drug abuse, and various obscure bands that would make himself look like some sort of champion/guru of the underground. It went along with the whole grunge thing of anointed depressed and unstable (but photogenic) junkies as some sort of insightful generational spokesmen rather than some pretty "fucked up children" who happened to make some distinctive music. The trend of fame-hungry drug addicts playing to teenage fans' music tribalism by raising the flag of "independence" and "refusal to compromise" while marketing manufactured slick pop has continued unabated -- as it did before Kurt but that he probably played some minor part in encouraging.
Not that I'd dismiss Nirvana in those terms. In Utero is a genuinely raw & brave record, and Unplugged is a haunting masterpiece -- I even like some of the sludginess of the early stuff -- but I find Nevermind next to unlistenable. The radio-ready sheen is so overpowering, and much of it is just so slick, that I have a lot of trouble understanding how people took it as some fundamental break from hair-metal -- it's gussied up in precisely the same way, and some of the mean-spiritedness of tracks like In Bloom are just a different angle on appealing to insecure pimply-faced 14 year olds... myself among them, at that age.
I think it's a clumsy and poorly produced lunge for stardom that doesn't do justice to the strength of its better songs and sits comfortably next to Metallica's Black Album and whatever else was burning up the charts for the masses in '91-'92. The box set and live versions prove that a lot of that material was really great, but I almost never listen to the Nevermind LP.
Guessed wrote:I think there's a far more focussed "micro" scene(s) happening since the late 90's.
Onset of the internet allows more minute details; no longer are you (certainly in this country) part of the grunge rock camp or the brit-pop/big beat camp.
You can pick (essentially) exactly what you want to hear from your music because artists have disected so many avenues to there ultimate, that if you want something it's there.
Last night I heard a very old style 80's synth pop groove with a very up-to-date black american "slowed/dragged" vocal played over the top. I didn't catch the name of the track but that's not important. What is important is the fact that if you want something now; someone is "probably" already doing it for you.
With "us" being such an idiosyncratic bunch; the mass/mob positioning with one camp or the other no longer exists.
I am both glad and troubled by that.
On one hand it means a helluva lot of creativity floats about on the other a helluva lot of dross.
Yeah the industry has broken into a million tiny microniches serving boutique product to people with specific interests. This can be good, like a lot of the bands that broadly cater to fans of Spiritualized and like-minded groups, but it also encourages a lot of pretentious crap based on "the scene" more than wanting to really be creative. Plus I'd argue it discourages the sort of genre-busting world-conquering greatness that many of the best bands have had in the past, and it helps make the music industry even more of an assembly line.