You say you want a musical revolution. Actually, have three Pop music history has been marked by three distinct revolutions over the last 50 years, according to data-crunching boffins. Three epochal years – 1964, 1983 and 1991 – marke, the greatest upheavals in musical tastes, according to Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London, based on an analysis of more than …
We've got a method - and by golly we're going to apply it to something!
Not even airplay is immune to manipulation. You'll find the same track played on multiple radio channels at the same time on consecutive days in exactly the same way you hear the same adverts on multiple channels at the same time. Its almost as if someone... paid for it to be there. Its so blatant, that I doubt even the request shows do more than pick the people who want the tracks/artists they want to play anyway.
Metal, which is basically 50/60's rock and blues with more speed and a shit load of overdriven guitar. 30 years at the metal mast, don't get me wrong I'm a fan of anything decent like Emperor, Suno))) and Skeletonwitch but I'm under illusion where metal's roots are. I was brought up listening to Cliff and the Shadows, The Ventures, Stones, Floyd and Buddy Holly, I can see almost direct lines running back to those 60's bands.
@Amorous Cowherder
I would add a few to the list... Tad, The Melvins and Mudhoney. I was never a fan of Husker Du or Pixies, but was exposed to a lot of Sonic Youth and may have seen them? The 80's were a long time ago!
However, your list has my favorites from the era. Great picks!
So the punk concerts I bounced ( door security not pogoing) at in the South Eastern UK from '76 on wasn't punk and the thousands of fans weren't punks?
Who'd have known?
Incidently Siousxie from the Banshees was hot and a nice girl to chat to.
+1 for Siouxsie. A class act, and now I am an old geezer to my kids (i.e. 40+) I have passed on the story that Hong Kong Garden was written in response to some nasty racists hassling the owner of the takeaway in the town where Siouxsie lived. Doesn't matter what you look like, my dears, so long as you have as much class as Siouxsie and Budgie.
"1983 when electronic bands [started using]... (synthesisers, samplers and drum machines)"
The use of synthesisers and mellotrons (An early type of sampler) were well established in Prog Rock bands (Pink Floyd, Yes etc) by the early 70's. I think the study is showing an American bias.
This work seems to identify not the first pioneering use of musical styles, but the first widespread adoption. Yes, prog-rockers were pioneers of synth sounds but you wouldn't say that the early '70s charts were characterised by that sound.
Likewise, hip-hop and rap arguably started in the 70s, but it didn't start gaining a foothold in the charts until the early 90s.
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I was a UK session keyboard player throughout the '80's. DASH and PCM recorders for multitrack and mixing down didn't become widespread until the late '80's. For me, the major changes around 1983 were, in descending order:
1. Widespread adoption of digital signal processing, especially the replacement of plate, spring and echo chamber with digital reverb (AMS and Lexicon); digital delay (AMS); harmonising (Eventide); and upper harmonic enhancement (Aphex, some of which tended to be added at the mastering stage);
2. Widespread use of triggered drum samples (usually in an AMS) to replace bass drum and snare drum sounds, resulting in a very consistent, not to say oppressive, drum sound;
2. Widespread use of the Solid State Logic mixing desk, which had a characteristic 'shiny' sound to its EQ and mix bus compressor plus gates on every input channel, used along with AMS reverb to create the Phil Collins gated reverb drum sound;
3. Widespread availability of digital synths (Yamaha DX7, PPG) and cheap analogue/digital hybrids (Roland Juno 60) having a very different, thinner,singer and more middle sonic signature than earlier synths;
4. Drum machines (Linndrum, Oberheim, to a lesser extent Roland TR808);
5. Low-bit samplers (Fairlight II; Emulator, etc.).
Blimey, those were the days. I find it all pretty well unlistenable now. I much prefer the sound of "Kind of Blue'...
BTW, I spent Autumn 1983 touring Germany and the UK with Hot Chocolate. Best band I ever played with, with the best band leader and front man. Errol RIP.
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SOME of us discerning listeners in the USA were already well aware of those bands in the very late 60's and early '70's.
How about Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, early Genesis, Yes, Rick Wakeman, Strawbs, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Moody Blues, Gentle Giant, Kansas, Procol Harum, King Crimson, Eno & Fripp, Zappa, Jethro Tull, Van deGraf Genrator, Can, Caravan, Curved Air, Camel, etc, etc. The list is too long and these "boffins" are anything but boffins.
Still some of the best music ever produced and makes most of today's popular music look like the derviative excrement it is. Seen alot of these on the septugenarian tours and the youth of today that hear these bands are just blown away at how good they are. When I tell them these are 50 & 60 year old bands, they can't believe it.
I think the study is showing an American bias.
RTFA. The study tracked changes in the music in the US Billboard Top 100 chart. It's not "showing an American bias" - it''s about popular music in the US.
Similarly, it's not about what was "well established" in particular genres. It's about what was in the Top 100. And while Pink Floyd, for one, were indeed both successful and influential in the US (Dark Side of the Moon will apparently be on one of the Billboard charts until the heat death of the universe), such successes were not sufficient to define the overall shape of popular music in the US.
It's a shame1 the study is unrelated to your concerns, but them's the breaks. You're welcome to do your own statistical analysis of other musical trends in other places.
1Not really.
... ant it was not the always highly overrated Beatles and Rolling stones to introduce it (especially the Beatles with their lame ye-ye sound). They were not a music revolution, but a 'behavioral' one. They understood that looking like idiots, and acting like idiots, would have paid much more than their music in years when young people wanted to 'feel different' and break with the 'old ways'.
From a musical point of view, other artists were much more innovative than the easy sound of Beatles (moreover, usually badly performed), and the repetitive sound of Rolling Stones. But on stage, they were the 'revolutionaries' people looked for regardless of the music. Perfect 'products' for the times. The same 'game' will be repeated often in the following years with other singers and groups...
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Sister Rosetta Tharpe was rocking by the 40's. But as people point out it might be better to describe a musical genre as beginning when the mainstream start to notice - though this can leave you with the impression that the music industry actually helps musicians which it patently doesnt.
"based on an analysis of more than 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100."
Having lived and listened through the entire period I recall several "upheavals". "Dead Skunks in the Middle of the Road", "My Ding-a-Ling", "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" ... Bit like determining the eating trends of a city by looking at the fast food wrappers in a landfill.
I tried to like it, but ultimately I could not shake the impression that it is the type of music someone without talent can make.
One of the reasons I learned to use Adobe Audition & Audacity is so I could cut rap pieces of perfectly good songs.
The best example I can think of is "Dirty Harry" from Gorillaz. Suddenly it is a good piece of music.
Also my daughter asked me once to give the treatment to one of Katy Perry's songs "Black Horse".
I'm not alone on this, plenty of people do that online these days.
Depends on the rap genre as to whether talent is required. There's pop-rap (which the article is talking about that has virtually no redeeming features), all the way through to the talented but lower selling artists who are effectively putting poetry to beats, people such as Dälek - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXgM9T4mFbQ
Oooo, I thought I was the only one to open up the old audio editor (WavePad, in my case) and cut offending bits. Not just the rap, if I don't like it, but what I consider really dumb bits in an otherwise brilliant song. For instance, the little 'recitative' (if I might call it that) towards the end of Garbage's 'Why do you love me', which suddenly stops the song, contradicts it completely, and isn't good. >snip< perfecto.
"A lot of hair metal and stadium rock, like Bon Jovi and Bruce Spingsteen, came into the charts, and they had a bigger share of the overall charts," Mauch added. "But then rap and hip-hop came in. I think hip-hop saved the charts."
...but then again I grounded out on the late 80s at some point and am still stubbornly trying to pretend that there's no such thing as "Dubstep"
If that was in 1991, then I guess Napoleon XIV must have been some sort of visionary? That came out in 1966 and although the wiki link doesn't mention it, I recall reading that he was denied composition rights (iirc) because it didn't have any of the usual elements of a "song", most notably not having any "notes" (no pun intended, it's all just glissando with no fixed stops). I think that the link here might explain that in point 5... he lost certification from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
Also, while I'm talking about pre-dating, how about Blondie (Rapture, 1980) and Gil Scott-Heron (TRWNBT, 1970) as rappers/proto-rappers? And obviously there were tons of electronic artists before the 1983 cutoff (like Bruce Haack, but many before him, too). Less eclectically, Telstar was a massive hit in 1962...
I always thought that music from the mid-1950s onwards roughly seemed to have a 6-8-year cycle in the UK:
1956 - Elvis Presley and rock (ok, Haley and Rock Around The Clock was 2 years earlier)
1963 - Beatles (which morphed into the later hippy stuff)
1971 - Glam - Bowie, Bolan etc.
1977 - Punk
1983 - Synth-based stuff and new romantics
1991 - Hip-hop etc. by which time I had pretty much lost interest in the charts due to old age, senility or getting married (I forget which)
That's about it although you forgot american black music (blues, soul, funk). For the kiddies, altough I doubt there are many on this site, I suggest you check out the documentary "Dancing in the streets" from the BBC. Great way to understand the evolution of popular music from 1950 to 2000.
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