Ahh that's a refreshing simple melody, I'm so glad I came across this.
What an atrocity today's popular music is. Corporate cancer milking teenagers for everything their parents can afford. I used to think It was just me getting older but now, I think today's music actually does just suck.
Turn on popular radio and what do you hear nowadays? emotionless shit where the only thing that matters is that the bass sounds like a lawnmower raping a chainsaw and makes you feel physically sick.
The saddest thing is there are still wonderful artists out there, but they're not given the time of day because they don't fit into this perfect celebrity culture we have. It's a great SHAME.
deathtokoalas
so, you think this isn't emotionless shit? it's some white people appropriating some black music, watering it down as far as they can and turning a profit from it.
you're right about modern radio music being awful. what you're missing is that the radio music you grew up with was just as bad.
AmbiAnts
So you think that this band all got together one night and conspired to water down some black music and make a profit?
I can't say for sure that didn't happen, but I think far more likely that they were just influenced and inspired by blues music. Not sure what you were getting at in your comment but if you're saying that this music is in the same slimey catagory as today's Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber then you're not playing with a full deck.
deathtokoalas
if you were around at the time (maybe five or six years earlier), you know the kind of segregation that existed. the whole movement of white musicians taking up black music was about picking up a style that was very successful in black markets, but that white radio stations wouldn't play because the musicians weren't white. by commodifying the product for a white audience, they were able to open up a whole new audience demographic. this isn't the only band that were doing that at the time, but it's one of the least creative examples.
the technology is different, but i don't hear anything more substantial in this than i do in a miley tune. sorry.
if anything, miley has way better producers.
it's a different target audience, but there's no greater artistic value here - in both cases, we're talking about breaking something artistic down to it's lowest level and mass marketing it as a commodity.
AmbiAnts
So what constitutes artistic value? evidently not a group of white guys singing a watered down black blues song, even though they wrote the song and played the instruments. That's just as artistic as somebody who has somebody else write their songs for them, and play the instruments for them?
deathtokoalas
i think you're being a little delusional in suggesting they wrote this song. it's a traditional blues jam.
Edohiguma
Fun fact: the same "corporate cancer" milked the hippies, too. They even produced the hippie "uniform" that every hippie had to wear to show his "individualism" (hilarious, I know.) It was a big market. And all the popular records for the hippie generation didn't grow on trees either. Someone had to produce those too and production doesn't come free.
Ultimately it's always the "corporate cancer", the "evil capitalists" who produce things and bring innovation and progress, while those who rile against those imaginary evils have usually very little to show in terms of production, innovation and progress. The hippies are a great example. They were great at whining about the system and tearing things down, but they have not produced a single thing worth mentioning. Destruction is much easier than production.
deathtokoalas
the hippies created this. it's their fault. they can't step away from it, now, and say "i don't understand this". sure you do. i'll be damned if i'm going to sit here and let hippies claim they don't understand a culture that pushes sex & drugs as the sole purpose of existence...
see, this is why those zappa records are so historically important. he explains it all, with flair and musicianship.
awillypower
It's the same melody of Matchbox by Carl Perkins
deathtokoalas
and carl perkins was, of course, one of the first white rock musicians to get somewhere by stealing ideas from black music.
1894cossack
I eat trolls for breakfast, with my cherrios.
deathtokoalas
well, eat me then.
Jack Grattan
I just love politically correct historical revisionism.
deathtokoalas
i don't see anything revisionist about it. just about anybody alive at the time will tell what i typed.
Jack Grattan
In his introduction to the Howlin' Wolf biography (a book I'M SURE you haven't read), B.B. King said "They said that Jimmie Rodgers (a white man) was the father of country music, but Wolf and I knew better. He was a BLUES singer, same as us, and a DAMNED GOOD one at that." Please notice that Mr. King said NOTHING about "the white man stealing our music." It's called CROSS- POLLINATION. You, of course, call it theft. Which makes you a politically correct historical revisionist. Case closed.
deathtokoalas
i hardly think that somebody that died in 1935 is relevant in the discussion of white musicians appropriating black music in the 1950s and 1960s, as that black form had barely even developed yet. if that's the best you can do, it's beyond being even a stretch - it's just irrelevant.
Jack Grattan
You know, if you said something about white (and black) BUSINESSMEN ripping off black (and white) musicians, I'd be in total agreement with you. Because that's what businessmen do. BUT NOOOO.....we get the ol' PC song and dance routine from you ONE MORE TIME. I'm sure that your delay in answering was because you had to look up who Jimmie Rodgers was. Now go back to your dorm, PC college boy robot.
deathtokoalas
i'm not sure that you're clear about what segregation means. the idea of "cross pollination" largely erases the entire racial condition at the time. segregation means that whites and blacks did not attend school together, did not work together, did not go to church together, did not live in the same areas of the city and did not attend the same types of entertainment.
under segregation, a black man could not simply buy an opera ticket and watch the show. likewise, a white man could not just cross the railroad tracks and enjoy a blues performance.
it was out of these conditions that you had the mimicry that existed. there was a white audience for rock music, but segregation prevented it from being able to listen to it. the solution was for white musicians to perform the rock music for the white audience.
of course, this started easing in the north earlier than it did in the south, and the segregation was eventually abolished in law if not in culture. but it was a legal reality, enforced by people with guns. "cross-pollination", in the period, was a deathwish.
what's frustrating is not that there was a cultural interchange; it may have even been partly responsible for the civil rights movement. what's frustrating is how much open plagiarism occurred.
but, there's a reason why all the early white rock records were full of covers. young white americans would not have been allowed to listen to the original recordings.
Jack Grattan
I notice that you like Frank Zappa. You do realize that Henry Vestine, the lead guitarist on this "emotionless shit", was the original second guitarist of the Mothers of Invention. Oh, the irony! A little trivia goes a long way, doesn't it?
deathtokoalas
by that logic, wings were brilliant.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i was about fifteen years too old to connect to mcr when it came out. i'm more in the cure/pumpkins generation. sorry.
Jack Grattan
Pretentious Post Punk Pontificator.
deathtokoalas
the pretentious part is really fairly inaccurate. i mean, i get it fairly regularly, but people don't seem to know what the word really means, which is sort of ironic. but i'll wear the other three readily enough.
Jack Grattan
How ironic. And pretentious.
Harry Sowerby
I'm 16 and couldn't agree more. I hate the fake and exploiting "talent shows" that air the same thing every year. What happened to talent? Seems that the industry only cares about how much you don't wear, and how easy you are to brainwash. I'm counting one another true music uprising again, and, thank god, I can see it happening. This is why I'm glad of proper bands being signed to an artist, such as Noel Gallagher; they've played in a band and understand how hard it is for talent to get you noticed. I still wish I was around the 1960s, at Woodstock or Haight Ashbury, listening to the sounds of the free and loving, peace man, I totally agree with you.
deathtokoalas
when you grow up, you'll realize that noel gallagher is a talentless douchebag.
Slightlydelic
At least the bands on the radio in the '60s actually played instruments.
deathtokoalas
actually, the 60s were dominated by session musicians - a lot of it uncredited. the rolling stones, for example, neither wrote nor performed the majority of their own songs. similarly with the beach boys.
Slightlydelic
I'm sure they mimed the instruments on the music videos, but they still played instruments live. If not, they did a good job of acting like they did.
deathtokoalas
there were very few music videos in the 60s. mtv launched in the 80s. a tv was still a luxury item. the 60s are still in the era of radio.
i don't know about live and think it would likely come down to a case-by-case thing. i mean, somebody like hendrix was obviously playing. i wouldn't be surprised to learn that the stones were often lip-synching, but i really have no idea. then, there's stuff like the monkees, who were in fact representative of the norm....
i meant in the studio. the rolling stones were actually noted for their use of talented session guitarists - a list that included people like jimmy page and john mclaughlin. these are the people that actually wrote the early stones classics.
the dominant songwriter and performer for the beach boys was a session musician named carol kaye. this was not known in the 60s. even paul mccartney thought brian wilson was the main songwriter.
it was in fact the beatles that broke this up, despite their own reliance on their own crutches (largely billy preston, george martin and eric clapton). before 1965, session musicians dominated the industry, which is something that traced back to the jazz era. after 1970, that was fairly rare.
and the situation held through the 70s and 80s before starting to turn back to the jazz model in the late 90s.
on that level, the 60s are actually the point in the past most similar to today, because of that shared sort of hybrid state.
Slightlydelic
Oh, I gotcha. thanks
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i'm not trolling; i'm entirely serious, and entirely correct. please don't mistake your ignorance for disingenuity on my behalf.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i don't know even know what the second suggestion means, but i just clearly stated that i'm not trolling. now, you need to understand that.
Jack Grattan
The Stones wrote and played their own tunes. PERIOD. They AUGMENTED some songs with session pros like Ry Cooder and Nicky Hopkins. The Beach Boys WROTE their own tunes, and after '65 utilized The Wrecking Crew (LA session pros) on record. You are, AS USUAL, entirely INCORRECT. Don't they have one of those "History of Rock" courses at that junior college you attend?
deathtokoalas
i've already stated the reality of the situation, and have grown tired enough of gratton's vacuous trolling and badly presented disinformation to outright block him.
i will state again that the stones and beach boys both followed the industry standard of the time, which was to split the process into "writing" and "performing". up until the beatles changed this aspect of the industry, it was very rare for white musicians to write their own music and even rarer for successful black musicians to do so. pretty much the only people that performed their own music would have been unsigned black musicians. neither the stones nor the beach boys were exceptions to this rule.
fwiw, i'm 35 years old and graduated with a math degree from an accredited university in 2006.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i did not remember that - it was quite some time go, and while my memory is quite good it tends to focus on things that aren't entirely irrelevant. i do a lot of posting on this site. that particular comment was rather snide, but consider the context; a few snarky comments does not a troll make.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
sampling is a bit of a double-edged sword. it can be done terribly. but, it's not fair to attack the tool. i mean, at it's worst sampling isn't different than doing a cover. and, if you want to talk 60s music and covers - the reality is that all these "60s classics" are building on existing structures in a way that is no better or worse than the process of sampling is. i wouldn't give somebody like jimmy page any more credit than somebody like run dmc when it comes to actual creativity, it's just that they're stealing ideas in different ways.
i tend to avoid sampling music in my own work. in fact, i don't think i've ever sampled an existing song (although i've sampled sounds from films and video games, which is what "sampling" almost exclusively means in my liner credits. well, that and using a sampler to trigger notes, in which case i'll almost always provide my own samples. the closest i've come to sampling music is cutting out isolated drum snippets and using them to build larger drum loops.). but it can be done with a high degree of creativity. one of the better examples of somebody that used sampling creatively is an act called art of noise. despite their records being 20-30 years old, i think they remain the kind of primary example of what can be done with the form.
actually, that's not true. i have a track called about a squirrel that samples and loops about a second of the nirvana hit about a girl, but you wouldn't be able to tell by merely listening to it.
throughthefire
Too bad her she doesn't have actual talent that can grab attention more than antics that include dry humping 'Beatle Juice,' while trying, and failing miserably, to do an assless twerk.
deathtokoalas
i take it you're referring to miley cyrus. i wasn't arguing that miley is talented - she isn't, i was arguing that she isn't less talented than a lot of the so-called classic rock musicians of the 60s and 70s. time will eventually sort this out, the boomers just need to die first...
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
it's a good point. bowie got paid for ice, ice baby. nobody ever sent robert johnson royalties for the dozens of riffs that page stole from him.
jake pace
look up Canned heats net worth and compare it to any mainstream musician today. That will tell you all you need to know about music then and business now! While some songs now still send a message and can be enjoyable to listen to 99.9% are in it for the money. Back in the day you were popular and broke long before you were famous. Now you are rich as soon as you are popular and famous. The music just doesnt have the soul its a business now, but honestly it can still be entertaining!
deathtokoalas
record contracts in the 60s were notoriously terrible. even the beatles got screwed. it's not like things are better now. while i don't know how many records they sold, i doubt they made any money off of it.
bands like this were primarily interested in the groupies, not the music.)
