Does anyone else find the baby boomer/rockist myth about how Elvis and Chuck Berry saved us from a world of boring, sappy music to be complete bullshit?
Try and listen to 50s R&R nowadays, it sounds like awful noise that's aged about as well as sour milk. At least the traditional pop that preceded it had melody, actual lyrics that made you feel something (as opposed to WOP WAM BAH BAH BAH BAH YEAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!) and real singers.
Yet for decades, boomer faggots like Christgau and Rolling Stone Magazine have sold you a bill of goods about how amazingly great R&R was because they lost their virginity to it. Like, it would be if I praised 1920s jazz and said ragtime was shit.
Agreed, R&R is a meme. Especially when people try to make out it's the source of what we listen to now. 2017 pop, indie and hip hop has no more to do with that shit than it does the stylings of Mr. Darrin and co.
Colton Sullivan
>Especially when people try to make out it's the source of what we listen to now
After 60+ years of course the influence will be a little diluted.
Leo Ward
>he listens to contemporary pop, indie, and hip-hop pleb
Jason Brown
>Like, it would be if I praised 1920s jazz and said ragtime was shit. Rag ain't shitty, but jazz is easily better. youtube.com/watch?v=AeBn_TZ4Iak
Daniel Brown
Christgau was probably right when he said that younger generations will be more likely to regard Year Zero as 1965 rather than 1955.
Andrew Lee
I blame the "awful noise" on the fact that most of those artist didn't have access to HQ recording studios in LA or New York like the established trad-pop stars.
Logan Peterson
It's HOMEOPATHIC.
Nah, he was just hoping that something still relevant happened when he was young. Year Zero now is 1986 - that's when Frankie Knuckles' Your Love came out.
Lincoln Jackson
Woman love hey, hey, hey hey
Benjamin Stewart
Never heard this myth but Rolling Stone has never done shit for early rock music.
Ian Martin
Pop music as we know it today took shape in the 50s, as arrangements gave way to the idea of a song being based around effects and textures. But not until the Beatles did the album replace singles as the center of popular music.
Jayden Green
But neither of those statements bears any relation to how pop music works now. The first statement is like giving the Wright brothers credit for the space shuttle, and the second hasn't been true since 1977 - what did you think the point of punk was?
Colton Powell
>Pop music as we know it today took shape in the 50s >But neither of those statements bears any relation to how pop music works now
Both of these statements contradict each other and make no sense.
Jackson Clark
I think that rock n roll definitely played a big part in terms of how up beat pop music has been since then. The closest equivalent was the rhythm section to the kind of shit flappers used to dance to, but that stuff's sound itself wasn't as energetic and visceral.
Daniel Richardson
Big band swing was dance music alright, there was plenty of beat to that, unfortunately drums couldn't be recorded prior to tape, so studio recordings of big band tunes necessitated the drummers playing on wooden blocks instead.
Ryan Morgan
youtu.be/Vv-LAbMbEn4 i feel like if Sup Forums was around back in 1957 you'd be defending this.
Eli Green
>I think that rock n roll definitely played a big part in terms of how up beat pop music has been since then The charts in the early 50s were dominated by slow, saccharine pop and love ballads with zero beat, kids couldn't dance to it. See here, the Billboard Chart for 1954, just before the rock explosion. This is pretty blah stuff on here.
Kevin Hernandez
>Try and listen to 50s R&R nowadays, it sounds like awful noise that's aged about as well as sour milk.
Says you. I'm listening to it right now and I think it's a GLORIOUS noise.
Jayden Campbell
It was a generational shift in a rather major way, singers from the big band era were rapidly driven off the charts from 1955 onward.
Jace Roberts
Lyl Christgau despises Pat Boone.
Jordan Allen
And OP clearly thinks Christgau is wrong.
Brandon Perry
I don't think tape recording was regularly used at all until 1952-ish.
The idea of the artist writing his own songs didn't really happen until the 60s either although Chuck Berry always did it.
Henry Jones
Why is this still being debated?
Christian Nguyen
So did Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly....
Logan Fisher
That was in of itself a significant move away from the old days of singers performing Tin Pan Alley standards. And during the early 50s, Mitch Miller and his people at Columbia reshaped the pop song as something based on textures and effects rather than arrangements. Songwriters would also write songs geared towards a specific artist, while in the Tin Pan Alley days, pop standards weren't designed around any singer in particular.
John Peterson
There is some mythology there, the rock and rollers didn't hate traditional pop like you've been led to believe, that was after all the first music they were exposed to as kids. Elvis thought rock and roll was kiddie stuff and you had to eventually grow up and sing standards like Frank Sinatra. The Beatles just couldn't understand why he rejected his rock and roll past in the 60s-70s to become a Vegas lounge lizard.
Blake Butler
But there weren't any less songwriters writing for other people in 60's.
Isaiah James
The second statement contradicts the first because it was a reply disagreeing with it and the other statement contained in that post. The statement itself makes perfect sense - pop music is nothing like it was in the 50s.
Jack Cooper
What extraordinary pseudoscientific bollocks.
What extraordinary anachronistic bollocks. They did dance to it.
Adrian Myers
>But there weren't any less songwriters writing for other people in 60's
No but they would work with a specific artist and write songs for him/her, which wasn't how it worked in, like, the 1920s.
Ian Martinez
>What extraordinary anachronistic bollocks. They did dance to it.
Anyone with a beat you can dance to, but a lot of that pop shit from the 50s had no beat at all.
Jordan Ross
That's because you're scared to disagree with your parents and grandparents. But for people who have sex, it's museum stuff.
The thing is... that's really interesting. He seems gay, in the modern sense, and weirdly animated. He looks neurotic, like a forerunner of David Byrne. The beat's both too slow and too fast. It's too fast for Boone, but too slow for rock 'n' roll. It's clearly the halfway house of an apartheid culture, which makes it MORE uniquely and pugently OF 1955 than the original. Oddity is exciting. Unfamiliarity is exciting. This is odder and less familiar than Little Richard's recording, which is so familiar to us, it's like hearing the start of Beethoven's 5th - oh, Tutti Frutti, yeah, classic.But this is a man going berserk with what he's unable to convey or contain, like a censor driven mad by the very pornography he's preventing us from seeing.
I'm going to listen to the whole Pat Boone one now.
Jaxon Rivera
I don't know what my grandparents listened to and I could care less if they'd agree with. Also, you to be trying to discredit this bullshit mythology while pushing some of it yourself. There was a lot more to listen to in the 50's than just rock 'n' roll. It would actually be much safer to assume my grandparents were not listening to it.
Why do you keep reposting the same bullshit? Nobody needs to read babby's first rock 'n' roll chronicle every fucking thread.
Luke Myers
Sexy record.
Christian Thomas
Yes, but the baby boomers will have you believe that everything that wasn't rock 'n' roll was literally Hitler.
Michael Jackson
>This is odder and less familiar than Little Richard's recording Only because Little Richard's music has aged better. Pat Boone was not odd to kid's in the 50's who grew listen to rat pack bullshit.
Logan Miller
It does but the song has a very big band kind of sound to it that was pretty tired and played out by the mid-50s, the kids were looking to something new and exciting. The novelty of rock and roll and especially the electric guitar were major factors.
Most of the early rock and roll performers were also very young, teens-early 20s mostly and kids could connect with them better than Doris Day who was old enough to be their parent.
Chase Edwards
rock and roll created the first youth subculture.
Joseph Morales
What baby boomers? You sound like there's a grand conspiracy keeping today's youth from listening to Paul Anka. No one listens to that shit because it sucks.
Luis Carter
Not really, that happened in the 1920s but the Depression squelched it and it didn't come back until the postwar years. Rock and roll was however different for its explicit focus on teenagers while prior pop music was targeted at young lovers in a more generalized way.
Sebastian Hernandez
>I don't know what my grandparents listened to My grandfather had a bunch of Ernest Tubb 78s, I kind of have an idea of what he listened to.
Sebastian Nguyen
Further proof against OP's claim that people like early rock because of their grandparents.
Parker Rodriguez
Yes well, my grandparents were in their mid-30s when Chuck Berry was a thing, they were a whole generation older than those fans.
Brandon Adams
No, it's less familiar because we haven't heard it, and it's odder because it has specific musical and performative characteristics that aren't part of rock 'n' roll's norms in general or of the incessantly played Little Richard recording in particular.
I listen to a lot of traditional pop, I've even watched one of Pat Boone's late fifties movie vehicles, and it's still odd, because it isn't quite that either. It's fast in a really odd way. It is like the jazz played in countries that outlaw jazz, or Afrikaaner country music, as a form specifically informed by conservative social pressures that is still trying to at least allude to the illicit forms it can't reproduce. Far more interesting to hear something like this than to hear Little Richard's recording for the hundredth time - the relative merit of their versions isn't the question here, the question is how interesting the experience is.
Gabriel Bennett
Nope.
Nope.
The baby boomers who turned the fifties records into a canon in the sixties. No, nobody listens to those records because A: they're too different, and B: they're constantly shat on by self-serving propaganda.
Jaxon Butler
>I listen to a lot of traditional pop
It's very weird, almost dream-like in its quality, very melodic but no hooks and usually not any beat.
Gabriel Rodriguez
Where did OP say that?
Sebastian Ward
This is it, it's a whole different world, flowing, lots of imagery in the lyrics, a big emotional range.
Levi Williams
>The baby boomers who turned the fifties records into a canon in the sixties
Boomers were small children in the 50s, they weren't the ones listening to Elvis back then.
Charles Hall
Well I guess it's not in the first post but I'm assuming this and OP were written by the same person.
Sebastian Miller
But at the same time, it also puts you to sleep so I can appreciate why kids sought something more lively.
Christian Watson
They didn't, they were *sold* it. How capitalism works is, entrepeneurs spot potentially fillable gaps in the market before consumers do. This idea that rock 'n' roll was neccesary is Whig history - everyone in history wanted to be like us and was trying to work out how to get to where we are. Not so. Nothing about our lives was neccesary, inevitable or even positive, it's just some shit that happened.
Aiden Mitchell
You're wrong, OP was reworking some things I said yesterday. Once I noticed that this thread was happening, I came in to take part, but it's not my thread. I'm interested to notice that there are more people arguing from a position similar to mine than there were yesterday, when I was mostly defending my position single-handed. People turn things over in their minds like this all the time on Sup Forums of course, it's the advantage of anonymous image board culture - there's no loss of face in changing your mind.
Julian Campbell
>This idea that rock 'n' roll was neccesary is Whig history - everyone in history wanted to be like us and was trying to work out how to get to where we are
It was though because fast, danceable music was in short supply after big band swing died out. Jazz postwar devolved into self-indulgent noodling while mainstream pop was slow, gushy ballads. It's no different than how disco had to fill the void left by rock having ceased to be danceable in the mid-70s.
Brayden Butler
And rockists hated disco too, they threw a huge temper tantrum over it.
Ian Stewart
Christgau exemplifies here the closed-mindeness of the rock generation.
Also, his "the problem is usually obviated by the beat" is disingenuous - the problem is obviated by the fact that rock critics feel uneasy about condescending to rural black mass taste, whereas they feel fine about condescending to rural white mass taste.
Evan Lee
Their own damn fault. I mean, you can't exactly dance to Pink Floyd--Animals.
Julian Gutierrez
This is not how life works, kid. It's not how capitalism works, it's not how time works, it's not how people's tastes work. You're thinking in cliched phrases that are VISIBLY taken at second hand from what people have told you.
There were hundreds of danceable mainstream rock records in the mid-seventies that weren't disco. People don't RESORT to music to fill holes in their lives, they branch out because they actively like to hear new things. One day, you'll be old enough to get into a club, and you'll understand.
Josiah Hughes
Which came out about three years into punk. Also, most of the rockist attitude was homophobia and racism, the latter of which is intrinsic to rock - after all, rock was in large part a mobilisation of country musicians to prevent white kids from having to buy RnB records for the beat.
Robert Reed
Meh. I'd disagree. Taking a wild song and neutering does not make it interesting to me. Your previous comparison to censorship isn't even accurate either. Pat Boone was just doing these songs in the only way he knew how. He was even adverse to wilder sounds. Pat Boone is the one that gave Jerry "the Phantom" Lott a record deal resulting in one of the most manic things to come out of the 50's.
>Taking a wild song and neutering does not make it interesting to me.
Then you're a boring person. It's 2017. Tutti Frutti is Beowulf. It's ancient, foundational, it hasn't changed, it's familiar. Here's a totally variant version nobody looks at much except in exerpt, made according to the codes of a vanished culture. How is that not more interesting? You're saying you find listening to the same record for the hundredth time more interesting than listening to a different one for the first time. That's conformism in a nutshell, and everything rock 'n' roll was supposed to be against.
>Pat Booone knew no different >Pat Boone chose to sound like this
Pick one.
De facto censorship is literally the only reason Pat Boone's version exists. If you're going to be the spokesperson for the old fart's version of pop history, at least LEARN the history.
Jackson Baker
Also, you do know what a comparison is, right? You are capable of some degree of imagination, surely?
Easton Brown
Pat Boone's version came soon after Little Richard's version so to someone my they they are both ancient. Pat Boone's isn't different enough from the original for it to sound new especially when he's doing it in a style that is inherently boring. 50's pop.
>Pat Booone knew no different >Pat Boone chose to sound like this I pick both. Pat Boone only knows how to makes songs sound tame. He chooses not to attempt a less clean cut sound because it would make him look more ridiculous than he already does. That's why he left that business to Jerry Lott.
Joshua Hall
It's a question of how many times you've heard it, not its chronological age. You'd rather repeat an experience you've had before than have a new one. Also, the style is not that of traditional pop completely, as I've already said - it's a weird style that tries to use an adaptation of the traditional pop sonic language to convey something it can't - it's both censored and allusive to the censored material.
Are you completely devoid of intellectual curiosity? I mean, do you not think at all when you listen to music?
You can't pick both. Try referring to what the people involved said about what they were doing. He was uncomfortable with Tutti Frutti as a song, but did it because he was asked to.
Christian Sanchez
I'd hardly consider a cover a version that barley deviates from the original qualifies as a new experience but even if it did, new experiences are not always interesting. What's so hard to understand about that?
Jordan Evans
>barely deviates
You've just said several times over that it travesties the original, now you're saying it barely differs. The lyrics, arrangement, tempo and performance are all significantly different, how is that barely deviating?
Justin Anderson
>Also, most of the rockist attitude was homophobia and racism
Jason Hall
What's hard to understand is that you'd bother to try to counter my clearly imaginative and intelligent comments with "blah, thinking bores me" and an irrelevant pop trivia fact about how he signed another guy who was wilder.
Owen Ross
It was. "Disco Sucks" was a directly homophobic rallying cry.
Rock is racist, in thousands of ways.
Andrew Richardson
>Paul is producer Paul McCartney, whose distaste for messages is well known. Yet his album certainly has thrust and shape, and it dovetails perfectly with What About Today? If Streisand, the only important traditional pop singer the under-thirty generation has produced, is paying her tribute to the mainstream music of her contemporaries, then McCartney, the most fluent if not the most profound genius of that music, is paying his to traditional pop. In his purposely slight way, he succeeds. Streisand fails.
>By conventional standards--that is, by Streisand's own standards--this cannot be the case. Her record has to be superior merely because she possesses the better instrument. Mary's soprano is lissome enough but almost devoid of color or dramatic range, and for Barbra that is what vocal music is all about. Even more than her predecessors, she is not so much a singer as an actress, turning each song into a little playlet--or rather, since hitting the notes is important to her, a little operetta. Every song is a new role, and her natural mode is the tour de force.
>It is this very conceit that rock has striven to destroy from its inception. The rock singer may play-act, but never so frankly or variously: His concern is image rather than role. Like the blues and country artists who were his forebears, his aim is always to appear that he is singing his own life--not just recalling his own experience in order to enrich a song, in the matter of Frank Sinatra, but singing his own life and preferably his own composition. To a sensibility accustomed to this conceit, the histrionics of Broadway nightclub pop seem absurdly corny, no matter how "sophisticated" the approach, and the audience for such transparent dramatics seems positively innocent in its eager suspension of disbelief.
Owen Thomas
All I said you was he neutered it. You said Pat Boone was interesting because he seems gay in the modern sense. Well Little Richard seemed gay in today's sense, yesterday's sense, and tomorrows sense. And that's why it's more interesting. I'm going to bed.
Sebastian Bell
>Rock is racist, in thousands of ways >genre of music invented by black people >also one of the greatest metal frontmen in history was gay
Brandon Johnson
I would say it was more of an urban vs rural/suburban conflict. Disco was mostly an urban scene (for that matter, so was punk rock), Saturday Night Fever after all was set in NYC. Kids out in the suburbs in the 70s didn't listen to the stuff, they listened to AOR and got extremely butthurt at the rapid and total takeover of the airwaves by disco post-SNF.
Thomas Morales
"Poor Presley. He wouldn't have been anything at all without the songs that Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller wrote for him, or for that matter the black blues musicians whose music he stole. Consider that his single biggest hit was a cover of a Big Mama Thornton song. I know because I had the 45 from Peacock Records long before Presley came out with his version. When I was in high school, everyone was in love with the guy but I never could stand him. And then he became a fat, bloated drug addict who died on the toilet. How sad."
Daniel Richardson
Was there ever a time when Frank Zappa didn't say something desperately and pathetically edgy?
Ryder Nelson
>Then you're a boring person. It's 2017. Tutti Frutti is Beowulf. It's ancient, foundational, it hasn't changed, it's familiar. Here's a totally variant version nobody looks at much except in exerpt, made according to the codes of a vanished culture. How is that not more interesting? You're saying you find listening to the same record for the hundredth time more interesting than listening to a different one for the first time. That's conformism in a nutshell, and everything rock 'n' roll was supposed to be against.
Gavin Hall
>Then you're a boring person. Chuuni faggot.
Lincoln Green
No, I said something much more interesting than that. Why do you bother posting?
David Powell
I said this: >The thing is... that's really interesting. He seems gay, in the modern sense, and weirdly animated. He looks neurotic, like a forerunner of David Byrne. The beat's both too slow and too fast. It's too fast for Boone, but too slow for rock 'n' roll. It's clearly the halfway house of an apartheid culture, which makes it MORE uniquely and pugently OF 1955 than the original. Oddity is exciting. Unfamiliarity is exciting. This is odder and less familiar than Little Richard's recording, which is so familiar to us, it's like hearing the start of Beethoven's 5th - oh, Tutti Frutti, yeah, classic. But this is a man going berserk with what he's unable to convey or contain, like a censor driven mad by the very pornography he's preventing us from seeing.
I'll only add that it seems obvious to me that a man who, among other things, accidentally seems gay, is obviously more interesting than a man who seems gay in a way that hasn't changed its meaning in sixty years.
Brody Long
That was true. The record industry after Saturday Night Fever massively over-invested in disco artists/records, only to have it spectacularly backfire when this 5 minute fad came crashing down on them.
There was one early interview with David Lee Roth from 1978 when he talked somewhat nervously about disco and said "Van Halen makes rock and roll you can dance to." He sounded as if he was genuinely terrified that rock's days were numbered and disco was here to stay.
Ian Cooper
I give Christgau credit, he never jumped on the disco sucks bandwagon like most rockfags at the time.
Jeremiah Sullivan
So fucking slow, not upbeat enough
Aaron Gomez
The crucial thing is that he knew disco was already halfway through its life by the time Saturday Night Fever was made.
Charles Morris
But that probably had to do with his urban NYC background and interest in black music.
Blake Morales
This is like complaining that Elvis raps too slowly. You're comparing one music to another on purpose to pretend that the other was neccesary, because that's the narrative. In fact, all musics are neccesary, and none are. All happen because someone wants to make them happen, none happen because some tide of History or the People demanded them.
Eli Allen
>>also one of the greatest metal frontmen in history was gay If you're talking about Rob Halford very few at the time knew. You know why? Because it would've been an outrage.
Jeremiah Perry
So did the Bee Gees. Spirits Having Flown is noticeably absent of dance tracks because they wisely knew that disco was a fad nearing its expiration date. Unfortunately, record company suits didn't know that and instead decided to ride the Titanic to the bottom.
Owen Anderson
You're not even listening to music honestly, you're focused so much on being a snowflake that you're obsessed with the most banal, uninteresting subjects for being just a little different to what everyone else has overlooked, and you champion that for the value of... being different? Wow! Man this is so different it's amazing! Wait, you don't like it? You're boring dude! Owned!
Adrian Rodriguez
Ah but even in late 70s NYC, normalfags mostly listened to AOR and punk rock was as much a subculture there as it was anywhere. As I said, the record industry and radio stations overdid it with disco very fast and pissed off a lot of rock fans in a huge way.
Brayden Stewart
Music should not be danceable. There is no surer route to plebbery.
Mason Johnson
The disco boom probably had to do with it being a singles format, which rock in the 70s was not. A singles-based genre of music lends itself better to radio play and thus $$$.
Nathan Lewis
Could it be that the user you're talking to is genuinely curious about music?
