WoW. That’s two of the most influential and successful acts of all time. The Beatles owned the 1960’s, amigo. They changed popular music. Elvis changed it all before them. The very first Rock Star. Perhaps time has faded their impact.
Just my opinion, but in the interest of discussion: 4)The Ramones - overhyped garage band
3)Poison- should be sending Motley Crue their residual checks
2)Neil Young- owes his fame to Lynyrd Skynyrd
1)Kanye West- ego is not a talent, his “music“ isn’t either.
This post was edited by Don Barzini at September 21, 2018 2:29 PM MDT
I agree with your list whole heartedly. I won’t take away from or diminish what the Beatles and Elvis accomplished. I’m just not a fan of either‘s music. I do like a handful of Beatles songs, but give me The Stones, Zeppelin, and The Who.
This post was edited by Rizz at September 21, 2018 7:08 AM MDT
Someone once shared with me their "Best of" compilation of Led Zeppelin. I so enjoyed all of it! And I was pleasantly enlightened - - more-than-several songs I discovered were Zeppelin songs. So often I like songs but never know the names of the songs or the artists. I think "Kashmir" is simply out of this world.
This post was edited by WelbyQuentin at September 21, 2018 7:08 AM MDT
The best has great social commentary and awesomely complex rhymes and rhythms, but that's the world's top - a minuscule fraction of the whole.
The biggest problem for me is that they usually recite too fast - can't understand a word . When I try to read the texts, its often just as incomprehensible because of the jargon.
Definitely in the current music world I'd include Camila Cabello.
This song, hands down, could be possibly THE worst song and WORST singing I've heard in at least a decade. Irritating to the point of anger for me -- especially at the 0:55 seconds mark! Terrible to me!! :)
EDIT: He** - - I just listened a bit again -- it doesn't strike me so bad as it used to. Maybe I'm just used to hearing it.
This post was edited by WelbyQuentin at October 3, 2018 11:34 PM MDT
Interesting - lyrics not dissimilar to punk rocker Ian Drury's - "I'm sick and tired of taking drugs and staying up late" or that old disco hit, "So light another cigarette and help me forget why I came" - that theme of bohemian life - addictions to drugs and sex.
Almost a Kate-Bush-like melody.
Her voice is on pitch and on the beat.
But it's the video part that really doesn't work. The start is way too slow - predictable and boring. The images typically sell the singer as a sex object - standardised tropes. It could be so much more interesting if the visuals illustrated the content of lyrics.
This post was edited by inky at September 21, 2018 9:03 PM MDT
I probably need to give Cabello more of a chance like you have. I almost am considering deleting my answer here. :)
What you say is probably true - - but I simply can't get beyond that terrible-to-me "whispering/screeching/high-pitched squealing" she does at the 0:55 seconds mark. She loses me completely at that point. :)
Without the Beatles, there would have been no Stones, Zeppelin or the Who, likewise no Pink Floyd or Jefferson Airplane. All acknowledged their debt to the Fab Four, they were the most influential artists in the history of recorded sound. You can't overrate a band like that.
U2 are savagely overrated. They were tolerable, once upon a time.
While I’ll never ignore the achievements of The Beatles, I don’t care for their music. It’s about personal taste. I don’t think their music was good. This is why I feel they’re overrated. I find it hard to believe other huge bands and artists wouldn’t have mad it without The Beatles. I understand that argument to a point, but it doesn’t mean other artists wouldn’t have been successful. Rock music was dying at the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Then the grunge music scene exploded. One could argue Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and Stone Temple Pilots saved rock and if it wasn’t for them rock would be dead now.
This post was edited by Rizz at September 21, 2018 7:10 AM MDT
Jimmy Page categorically stated that without the Beatles, Zeppelin wouldn't have happened. Mick Jagger said the Stones wouldn't have been as good - might have made it in the UK but wouldn't have had the balls to try across the pond. Roger Daltrey said that Sgt Pepper's was the concept album that led to Tommy and Quadrophenia. The Beatles weren't a rock band. They weren't a pop band. They weren't a folk or skiffle band, they were eclectic and you can't put their music in a box. They took rock and roll and scouse skiffle, shook them like a dog shakes a rat and produced a plethora of entirely new genres. Pop. Psychedelia. Heavy Metal (Helter Skelter and Revolution 1 are unquestionably metal songs, George built the fuzz box to produce the distort and overdrive effects in his garage, they didn't have pedals back then. Greenbaum tried to do something similar but never got it quite right, which is why his Spirit In The Sky has feedback issues throughout). Some of it didn't work, more of it did. Liking it or not is a matter of personal taste - but if not for the Fabs, Pearl Jam et al would have had nothing to save, rock would have died twenty years before Eddie Vedder got his first pair of long pants.
Any "study" that even mentions the Beach Boys is immediately suspect - classic plagiarists who stole all of their early stuff from Chuck Berry (the Beatles also covered Berry's material, but never claimed to have written it). Brian Wilson never did anything original until Pet Sounds. Neither did the Beatles "emerge" in 1964, they'd already been setting England alight for two years before heading across the Atlantic.
I do think having to be "original" just ends up being a stumbling block. They aren't allowed to take anything from anyone else at all? Not even two nots? What does it matter how "original" it is as long as we like it?
"Overrated" by whom? Just what have you accepted as your authority for how music is rated? Because popular music is very much based upon individual enjoyment at the time and the place I would really think there can be no authority besides what we happen to enjoy.
The Beatles were very distinctive in their time in their sound, in their synthesis of different styles (as the gentleman above has noted) and in that they wrote their own material. I was about six when they became popular so was only vaguely aware of them. People my age got more into what came along a few years later like The Monkees, The Rascals, Motown, Rolling Stones and harder rock (which I never much cared for). But don't know how anyone could say "rock would have died" because as long as people want to move it will be there.
Perhaps because I grew up in NJ I gravitated more to soul music and that kind of genre than rock. Kool and the Gang (a NJ group), he Spinners, Motown, music we could really move to. The first album by Phoebe Snow (another Newjerseyite) is perhaps the most perfect and meaningful popular record ever made - for me. People like Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy were more meaningful to me than all those groups mentioned most of which I have never heard of. But its like talking about apples and oranges - whether you like U2 (who I have heard of) or Kitty Kallen or Willis Jackson. Best musician of all of them was perhaps Percy Faith whose music I learned to like after he was gone. Oh I have never been one to have to "rock or die".
Don Barzini 