Hype Backlash in Music

A lot of my friends on a country music board are wildly into Sara Evans. I like most of her songs, but I don't get her as an artist. She seems to vacillate between twangy, old school country stuff like "Cheatin'" and "Suds in the Bucket", 100% pop-country like "Backseat of a Greyhound Bus" (admittedly my favorite of her singles) or "I Could Not Ask for More" or "Slow Me Down", and middle-of-the-road genericness like "A Little Bit Stronger" and "Perfect". Her output is just so schizophrenic that I don't get why my friends, who are super picky in general, absolutely adore everything she puts out. Again, I like most of her songs, but a coherent artist she is not.

For the longest time, DJ Shadow was this for me. While I'm a bit softer on him now, I will admit that the only track I can remember from Endtroducing... is "Midnight in a Perfect World."

Pavement basically were less...angsty than the Grunge bands of the day. Well, that and the fact that the lyrics were kind of unique (at least in the US; The Fall influenced them, btw).

I will never understand the heaps of praise The Killers get. There's nothing unique about them or their quasi '80s sound, and Brandon Flowers can't shut up for one second about his high school girlfriend breaking up with him.

Album-wise, Dragon Force's The Power Within was underwhelming and does not deserve the 80% it has on Metal Archives. The reviews there give me the impression that the reviewers were paid to praise it.

For the life of me, I just cannot get into Lana Del Rey. She is just obnoxious and overly melodramatic to such a degree that I can't stand it. It just doesn't work well for me. People tell me that she's doing a character or adopting a persona in her music, but I say nuts to that. Plenty of artists manage to do that while still writing legitimately good music. (To say nothing of the fact that she's probably very responsible now for a whole generation of teens completely misinterpreting the relationship of the main characters in The Great Gatsby now...)

How about a pre-rock example?

I've never been able to understand the whole adoration for Frank Sinatra. Certainly, I can understand his importance in history. But I still have no idea as to why he's one of the few pre-rock singers to have a massive following. (4 million likes on Facebook!)

Why the hell should it be him who still has this massive following? No idea. Maybe it's because I never liked swing. Maybe it's because I can't listen to him without the image of a crappy Vegas lounge singer in my head.

But the fact is, once you get down to it, there isn't much besides the Rat Pack image that should keep him this popular.

If you had to make me choose... I'd pick Bing Crosby (especially in his late 20s sides with the Paul Whiteman orchestra) any day. Great singer.

Does Eurovision as a whole count? I just don't see why I should care at all.

I have absolutely no bloody idea why Muse are adored as much as they are. See, I ran into them because a lot of people claimed they were some insanely awesome combination of Queen and Rush, so I gave a few of their songs a good listening to... and I was really underwhelmed. Nothing about them screamed genius or even all that catchy. So I tried looking for that one really great song they had to have made that would surely make me at least respect their efforts... nnnnope. Never could find such a song.

What I think really hit me hard about them was the very reason I checked them out in the first place: their supposed similarities to Queen and, to a lesser extent, Rush. What, you do a handful of piano driven songs in your primarily-rock oriented discography, throw in a couple of simple multitracked guitar harmonies and suddenly someone's just like Queen? Same thing with Rush, really: plenty of bands experiment with long songs that are split into various parts. That's hardly what made Rush, well, Rush. But I digress, I think you understand at this point.

Dir en grey. The band has great bass and drums but dear god their music past the single Jessica is border unlistenable. Kyo's screams are border unlistenable and the brickwalling hurts my ears.

I hate Mick Jagger's awkward, breathy vocals. I can understand the praise for the Rolling Stones, but I just don't like them. However, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band always seemed like a crappy mock-up of all the great classic rock bands. They just suck, in my opinion. I don't get why people like them.

I'm surprised no one mentioned this album. Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica"! How do some people tolerate this headache-inducing trash? Not even The Shaggs were this annoying.

Perhaps because Captain Beefheart meant it to be made exactly that way. Then, some people got it (like Matt Groening) and admired his (and the band's) daringness.

Most indie rock nowadays sounds boring and samey to me.

I'm also not too big on some country music before 1965 or so. There are just way too many songs that all sound the same and feel like they have barely any instrumentation or melody. A few still hold up amazingly well — most of Marty Robbins' catalog, for instance — and some manage to be enjoyable because they sound so old-school (Hank Williams), but a lot of it just blends together for me.

The Japanese death/doom band Coffins.

"We're basically Cianide and DDT with way more boring songwriting and an infinitely more obnoxious production combined with third rate stoner doom riffs here and there to draw in the Southern Lord crowd."

You know, I get why people like Daft Punk but I still think that overall, they're really overrated in general. Like hell, even Homework itself is a really overrated album. I mean, shit, Exit Planet Dust came out 2 years before it and it was honestly a more interesting album (also Dig Your Own Hole like 3 months after Homework.)

Personally, I love Daft Punk, but I'm not too into Homework beyond "Da Funk" (the title track especially annoys me). I don't think it's a terrible album, but Discovery is better by miles.

Homework had a title track?

Whoops, I meant "Teachers".

I don't understand all the hype of Arctic Monkeys' latest album AM. The supposedly psychedelic album shows the energy they lost which they possessed in their first few albums. The instrumentals are murky. The melodies are forgettable. The vocalist sings even more subduedly than he ever did.

edited 19th May '14 8:40:36 PM by tropeslave

Here's an odd example.

When I was younger (I'm 23 right now) I listened to "Dad Rock" like Led Zeppelin, his favorite band. I had their 4th album on my MP 3 and in my alarm clock CD. I was a big fan of it. However, today I don't really like it that much anymore. It's true that every member is among the greatest in their field, and their songs are still good, but I'm not really loving it like my dad still does.

Point is, Dad was around when the band broke up and had experienced their last albums firsthand, and he still loves them. I didn't , and I got over them. Is there a trope like that?

Oddly, unlike other Dad Rock bands, John, Paul, George, and Ringo had a much stronger staying power. Maybe it's because I've known them longer than Zep, and that they were ment for a different audience, but it's strange. I even think the rest of the British invasion Big Four are dated by comparison. What's that deal?

edited 24th May '14 4:16:21 PM by Smasher

I don't think they're that bad, and they're definitely not Southern Lord bad (I don't think all bands with stoner/southern riffs are necessarily aiming for that sort of crowd, but I know how you feel about even the more respectable old school sludge like Eyehategod and Grief), but they have to be one of the most boring live bands I've ever seen.

For me, it has to be Deathspell Omega back in around 2007. I've heard so much praise for their work even from people who's tastes align with mine, but all I got was boring black metal with tech-death sensibilities.

edited 24th May '14 6:03:29 PM by supergod

Seinfeld Is Unfunny?

We've got a thread for that in Yack Fest (that I'm surprised is still open, given the general "no complaining threads" policy we have).

Personally, I like all of the "big four" you're alluding to (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who, and Zeppelin, right?) with the exception of Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. I could never fathom why they are praised to high heaven in this day and age - their music is seriously dated and isn't really timeless at all. I could understand their respective popularity bubbles when they were still doing music and stuff, but I can't make sense of why people think they're musical geniuses and the like. Okay, whenever you call pop / rock musicians "musical geniuses" you're almost always embellishing a little, but you get what I mean.

Minor unrelated thing, but I think Seinfeld Is Unfunny is both a confusing name as well as an incorrect one. I could elaborate but, well, this isn't the thread to do that in