My mom talked about staying up late to hear the black radio station because everything on the radio was so boring. She ran away from home to see Elvis!
You live in a different world, with streaming, you can listen to so much music. I can remember before that - we at least had community radio with volunteer DJs who played different stuff but top 40 radio literally played about 40 songs on repeat.
I suppose your grandkids will also consider whatever you think shocking music to be boring too
Same reason as why wheels aren’t very impressive today, but they probably were the shit for quite a while in Sumer back then. Things don’t seem as impressive, or as [any other adjective], when they have been around for a long time and people have gotten used to them.
chuck berry, buddy holly, elvis, jerry lee lewis, johnny cash, richie valens. It was not all unremarkable and doubly so for the time. If you include the ones coming out of the end of the 50’s you got smokey robinson and aretha franklin which have some stuff I just love. Im not a big elvis or cash fan but there are a few songs. One thing funny about elvis for me is I like a lot of remakes of his songs with a bit of modern flare from modern artists.
Everyone is wrong here.
“Groovy” was a term that black people used to describe their music, so when white people claimed Rock And Roll they decided to steal the verbiage too, even if it didn’t really fit.
White mediocrity put on a pedestal. A tale as old as time.
because our tolerance for groovie got higher and higher.
why is an oasis seen as the quenchiest shit in the desert when it’s just averagely refreshing elsewhere?
Throwing some shade at Blur
Liam deserves it. The boggity bastard.
You grew up in a world where Rock’n’Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn’t before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock’n’Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It’s only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It’s not just the quality of the music; it’s the culture and the change within it that came with it. It’s a big package.
I remember listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That’s the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.
When Rock’n’Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium.
You’ve got the right idea, but I’d like to clear up this timeline a little. While LPs and 45s made from vinyl were still new at the dawn of Rock’n’Roll, recorded music had already been commercially available for about 50 years in the form of lacquer and shellac 78s and cylinders. Recorded music sales actually surpassed sheet music way back in the mid 1920s. A lot of the pre-rock recorded music was classical, traditional, or tame popular jazz like foxtrots which, like you pointed out, was a major contrast to Rock’n’Roll in the world of “white people music.”
Another part of what made Rock’n’Roll different from the perspective of commercial success was that it was targeted at teenagers. It was a relatively new idea in the post-war years by companies like Coca-Cola to target products and advertising directly to kids and hook lifelong customers early on.
When Smells Like Teen Spirit came out there was already far harder shit. Nirvana was never heavy at all.
I’m just gonna chime in here and say that around that time I thought Offspring’s Smash was the hardest shit ever
I’m sure there was harder rock in existence. My point wasn’t they were objectively the hardest. It was that our perception of music changes over time.
I remember listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go.
☝️
Those were your exact words…
Your reading comprehension is the problem here, not what they said.
The context of the comment was that rock was something people hadn’t experienced before, and that those perceptions changed with more exposure to the genre.
When they first heard Nirvana, their opinion was that it was hard rock, because it was the hardest rock they had heard by that point.
It’s a subjective recounting of their opinion when hearing something new, not an objective classification of Nirvana as hard rock.
Yes, they are. Me thinking something in the early 90s and it being objectively so at the time are not the same thing. I’ve already let 90s me know that you think my opinion was wrong.
If you think Rock is unremarkable today you’re listening to the wrong Rock.
Because of normalisation. The more you experience anything, the less spectacular it becomes.
Teenage kicks in particular needs something that is amped up from what was before. Hence evolution of music and culture has always been driven by youth and keeps pushing the limits of what is doable and eventually what is normal.
rock and/or roll is still pretty good today.
You need to put yourself in the frame of mind of a kid who up until they heard rock and roll, Laurence Fucking Welk was the grooviest thing they’d heard.
nothing compares to 60s rock, dude##___ except maybe mongolian throat singing
What is your metric for grooviness?
