paddy0091 Free Member
There are many, but a couple immediately come to mind:
Frank SHOUTY Turner. Thought I’d heard the back of him until he appeared on 6 recently.
Frank Turner is great live, he tours relentlessly, apparently he’ll be playing his 3,000th show as a solo artist in February next year, which equates to about 150 shows a year. I think he’s put the effort in for the level of success he has.
Frank Turner’s a funny one, he’s not done a really good album since Love Ire and Song and he’s released some absolute crap tbf, but he’s absolutely superb live. And not just one-note superb, he can get you kicking in heads at a full band punk rock show or he can make you cry with a solo acoustic set. And like CHrisL says, nobody can say he doesn’t do the hours.
I’m still more of a metal guy, and succesful metal’s weird… Because every town of more than about 100000 people has at least one better unsigned metal band that are better than the most succesful metal bands in the world. You have to be a weird mix of solid and competent, but also completely unchallenging, to be a big metal band in 2024. You have to have singles that people listen to for 10 seconds and say “oh yeah, it’s exactly like an mid-album forgotten Machine Head song from about 2002” or “I’m actually pretty sure this is Alice Cooper?”. Or you can be symphonic of course. Meanwhile, actual great metal music is still under every stone and just totally ignored while people buy ****in Asking Alexandria records.
chakapingFree Member
Well the Beatles had their moments, but it’s not difficult to make the case for them being overrated.
In 7 years or so of being active they had ‘their moments’? Jeez, I wish I had the occasional moment at any point in my life. 😀
Ash. not great songs and the lead singer can’t actually sing.
Is this the answer to a different question? They had some success about 25 years ago and then disappeared so successfully that when I’ve seen them live nobody knows who I’m going to see, never what they play. I like Ash, and saw them on my birthday once for an awesome gig – the birthday celebrations may have helped – but to describe them as strangely successful when they now play small local venues is odd.
Ah, middle aged men complaining about ‘music these days’.
‘music these days’ being music from decades ago plus Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, both having being around long enough to register on the elderly radar. 😀
“ dismissing Taylor Swift as untalented or that her success is unwarranted.”
I’m not saying she is untalented – she clearly is very talented in lots of ways from music to singing to business and marketing. And actually I don’t think her success is unwarranted – she’s clearly figured out exactly what a large portion of the target population wants
It’s the bland saccharine pop that I don’t understand it. It’s kind of the beige background music that I’d have thought kids would be railing against.
So anyway on the talents or otherwise of Game O’Thrones’ ginger minstrel, he’s clearly super able at writing songs that millions of people like and I don’t, but find myself humming them. He’s also obviously super talented at the people stuff and making his way in a difficult industry. And he’s good enough at guitar looping to keep an entire backing band band on the dole or stacking shelves .
All this stuff is a lot harder than “shredding”, which is actually not all that difficult anyway. Which sadly brings me to this video, which I watched all the way through….
…so you don’t have to. I was pretty sure it would contain tell tale evidence of guitar twiddliness but to my surprise no, despite significant temptation to to put a foot on the monitor he remains strictly rhythm, he doesn’t want to make you cry or sing. Just buy his stuff.
And now I’ve got that bloody darkness song in my head. And didn’t he do something with bring me the horizon too?
Anyway, as any musician knows these differences between genres are barely skin deep. It’s all got the same harmonic and rhythmic DNA, just dressed slightly differently. As Louis Armstrong said when asked if he liked folk music, it’s all folk music, he ain’t never heard a hoss sing.
@johnx2, thanks for that, that’s a genuinely good guest appearance.
Sheeran’s another funny one, the guy’s hugely talented and seriously hard working, and built a career the oldfashioned way, but at the same time, he’s smart and figured out what he does that’s most bankable/most loved. So basically his career progression has been huger but boringer. That always seems a shame, I sometimes wonder what he could have produced otherwise, but who can fault him? There’s probably another parallel universe where he’s still out there playing 3rd stages at festivals and King Tuts Wah Wah Hut and an occasional high profile support, collaborating with grime acts I’ve never heard of… and David Ford became a megastar instead.
This could be a different person entirely… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV0TJZ7Kp40. And then you look at the stuff he’s written for other people, it’s fairly ridiculous.
OK Coldplay now. I’ve sinned, I learned to play a Coldplay song, I didn’t even like it but I did. And it was quite confusing in a what key is this in sort of way. Once I’d worked out what the key was I knew why I wasn’t particularly fond of their sound which I found a bit dreary, it’s in the chord progressions. To their credit its different, clever even and done well, and if other people like it that’s good.
I sometimes wonder at folks who profess not to like the sorts of music that thousands, sometimes millions of others really really like and whether they ever think to themselves “I wonder if its me that has the shit taste in music?”
Or popular doesn’t necessarily equate to good. Just look at what is popular on TV. Easily digestible, inoffensive and simple stuff. The same can be said for some, not all, popular music. The best music for me is normally the stuff that doesn’t sound the best on first listen or generally has something to say. Most pop is designed to be the opposite of that.
Bear in mind that music doesn’t play that big of a part in some peoples lives either. Especially as they age. So they will literally listen to anything that is fed to them through their listening medium of choice. People that are actually in to music in a big way and not just as background fodder tend, in my experience, to move further away from the mainstream. Still appreciate a good pop performer/band/song but are more choosy.
Sometimes you get fantastic crossover. I think Ren’s Sickboi is a great recent example. Number one album and a solid all round piece of work with no duff tracks and a lot to say.
Loads of people like beans on toast. Some people don’t like it, obviously, and it’s actually a pretty bland thing, but no one goes “eugh, god you like beans on toast, how boring and unimaginative of you, you must be the kind of person that doesn’t really love food”
Not all music is fine dining. Some music is beans on toast music, and people may well like it because it’s simple, familiar and easy to musically digest, and who is anyone to tell them they’re wrong?*
*well, knobby music snobs, obviously but that’s all they are
Not a Coldplay fan but you know what? Fix You is one of those perfect songs. It’s not especially smart, it’s just build on a theme, but when that ringing guitar comes in I want to wave my arms in the air. The vocal’s weedy but it’s built exactly to fit Chris Martin’s voice so it works. It even manages to avoid overstaying it’s welcome, just goes “right that’s as far as we can go with this” and stops dead. And on the album it links perfectly to… uh, whatever it is before.
Music critique can be more objective than just not liking it. Watch a few Rick Beato things on YouTube where he goes through the top 10 downloaded singles for example. He is able to critique the singing ability, the song structure and imaginative use of chords and keys (or not).
So this thread would be where the singer is not great, the songs are not great technically but a lot of people love them. Groups like the Beatles are really not in that category whether you like them or not.
I tend to prefer music which is more complex (Radiohead, progressive death metal etc,.) and rarely like ‘pop’ music but I also listen to EDM which can be very simple because I like listening to it.
yep dull as ditchwater – but this is a taste issue rather than ‘they shouldn’t be popular’ As many have pointed out, lots of people like bland.
Mumford and Sons is another band I personally don’t rate that highly – its just one song/tempo repeated isn’t it? But plenty of people like them so who am I to judge.
But judging is fun! I don’t think this thread was intended to be a serious critique of the finer points of musicianship and songwriting. There are people on here that take every single thread seriously 🙄
I was genuinely absolutely staggered to hear that the most bedwettery of bedwetters (stand aside Snow Patrol) – Keane – had just had to cancel a gig at the new, cursed Co-op Live venue in Manchester.
Hang on a minute… WTF?!! Keane can sell out a 23,000 seat arena?!! 😳
I thought they’d just had one single and then melted back into obscurity, only to be occasionally played on Radio 2, the place where all bland music goes to die?
When I’m in charity shops looking for CDs (yes I’m sad like that), scanning along the rows of dross and then suddenly I see the Fiction logo…breifly I’m like yeah a Cure CD! Bloody Snow Patrol, its always Snow Patrol!
