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post your nominee for the shittiest "great" band ever

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TK421

TK421 29

Posted
Posted
17 hours ago, Rimbo said:

I can't argue with that. one of them was one of my roommates my freshman year...

And that somebody is wrong. They're behind Bon Jovi, Poison and Warrant. They're behind Winger.

Ahead of Nelson, though. Eeeeeeeuuuuagh.

There are only two great hair metal bands: VH and GnR. One of these represents the beginning of the genre, the other its last dying gasp.

Def Leppard isn't hair metal and anyone who classifies them as such should be clubbed over the head with a Tannoy speaker. They're NWOBHM goddammit.

Scorpions weren’t hair metal.   More hard rock like UFO or Montrose.  I know their albums could be inconsistent but check out tunes like Animal Magnetism or China White, nobody did stuff like that.  Just saying.....

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26381

Posted
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32 minutes ago, tbone_ said:

Greatest shitty band - Ramones?

The next to last song I ever played with my band in Austin was a punkabilly version of Yellow Rose of Texas. We played it fast. Real fast. Folks whooped and hollered.

When we immediately segued into I Wanna Be Sedated, same tempo, people jumped on the freaking tables. We were nobody. A garage band. But they jumped on the tables.

Posse East, 2000.

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

Posted
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3 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

The next to last song I ever played with my band in Austin was a punkabilly version of Yellow Rose of Texas. We played it fast. Real fast. Folks whooped and hollered.

When we immediately segued into I Wanna Be Sedated, same tempo, people jumped on the freaking tables. We were nobody. A garage band. But they jumped on the tables.

Posse East, 2000.

 

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Rimbo

Rimbo 25911

Posted
Posted
52 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Scorpions weren’t hair metal.   More hard rock like UFO or Montrose.  I know their albums could be inconsistent but check out tunes like Animal Magnetism or China White, nobody did stuff like that.  Just saying.....

You are, of course, completely correct.

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Mole

Mole 4330

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, tbone_ said:

Greatest shitty band - Ramones?

I still think the Replacements are a better choice. They were objectively worse (more shitty) and in at least my opinion they were better (greater). The contrast is remarkable.

I mean, they put this on an album:

 

I can't think of anything the Ramones recorded in the studio that sounds that bad. Maybe Questlove was inspired by the drumming.

But then they released so many great songs:

 

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45887

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The 'mats are my favorite band, despite my user name.  I am one of the seemingly rare 'mats fans who thinks Westerberg's influence dragged them out of the shit into the glory.  His songwriting became magical.  Maybe it was magical to start with, but I couldn't tell.  Maybe too many boners and tonsils, I don't know.  He's a genius.  Tommy's a great bass player.  Bob had some licks.  Chris could sort of keep a beat.  Slim was that dude who was well schooled in his craft and everybody liked.  But Paul was (and remains) a genius.  He is up there with Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards, Elvis Costello (fuck the music critics), Dylan, Springsteen (ha), you name it.

Yes, the 'mats are the greatest shitty band ever.  It's not even up for debate.

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Rimbo

Rimbo 25911

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

You have no idea what "arrangement" is.  This is a pointless exercise, as you're coming at it from a position of ignorance.

Uhm... dude. Dude. I know exactly what an arrangement is. It's exactly what I said it is: Something you do to songs that have already been composed. This is usually someone else's piece, but if you're Gustav Holst, it's your own.

If you're putting together a piece for the first time, you're not "arranging" shit. You're composing it. Sure, for many (but not all; cf. disco/techno/etc) popular forms of music this is less-involved than the sort of full-scale "My God now I have to write the Trumpet 3 part" shit you have to do for an orchestral work...

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45887

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Well, no, not in the pop/rock world.  The arrangement is everything outside the words and melody.  Part of this is because the music is so remedial that we don't want to give the drummer credit for hitting the kick drum on 1 and 3 and the snare on 2 and 4, but more to the point, it's almost always the case that the songwriter delivers the basic structure (including chord progression -- i.e., do I want the G major underneath the melody here or do I want the relative minor?  (Em)) -- but regardless, the song is "composed" in the most elementary sense by the time the band gets around to contributing their parts.

I'm not actually in disagreement as to what an arrangement is in the context of legit music (symphonic, etc.) but it's really not useful in the pop/rock/country world, except in very rare cases.

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Cheeseweasel

Cheeseweasel 26438

Posted
Posted
15 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

The 'mats are my favorite band, despite my user name.  I am one of the seemingly rare 'mats fans who thinks Westerberg's influence dragged them out of the shit into the glory.  His songwriting became magical.  Maybe it was magical to start with, but I couldn't tell.  Maybe too many boners and tonsils, I don't know.  He's a genius.  Tommy's a great bass player.  Bob had some licks.  Chris could sort of keep a beat.  Slim was that dude who was well schooled in his craft and everybody liked.  But Paul was (and remains) a genius.  He is up there with Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards, Elvis Costello (fuck the music critics), Dylan, Springsteen (ha), you name it.

Yes, the 'mats are the greatest shitty band ever.  It's not even up for debate.

100%. Anyone who disagrees with this should listen to all Westerberg's post-mats music. 14 Songs is incredible. 

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26381

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Whenever I hear anything by REO Speedwagon, I feel like I am a small-town girl from Kansas who married the guy who knocked me up, and he joined the Air Force, and now we live in Enlisted Quarters Housing at some base, that if not in Kansas, also looks like Kansas, and my entire life feels as if I'm standing here in the base laundromat, forever folding clothes in a cloud of laundry detergent smell, looking out the window at the brown fields.

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Cheeseweasel

Cheeseweasel 26438

Posted
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8 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Whenever I hear anything by REO Speedwagon, I feel like I am a small-town girl from Kansas who married the guy who knocked me up, and he joined the Air Force, and now we live in Enlisted Quarters Housing at some base, that if not in Kansas, also looks like Kansas, and my entire life feels as if I'm standing here in the base laundromat, forever folding clothes in a cloud of laundry detergent smell, looking out the window at the brown fields.

Aunt Judy?

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26381

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13 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Whenever I hear anything by REO Speedwagon, I feel like I am a small-town girl from Kansas who married the guy who knocked me up, and he joined the Air Force, and now we live in Enlisted Quarters Housing at some base, that if not in Kansas, also looks like Kansas, and my entire life feels as if I'm standing here in the base laundromat, forever folding clothes in a cloud of laundry detergent smell, looking out the window at the brown fields.

And seemingly overnight my legs got fat as hell.

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Al_4_ISU

Al_4_ISU 12451

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Posted

Cosigning all the Mats talk in here.  They aren't my favorite band, but I fuckin' love 'em and agree that Paul Westerberg is a stone cold genius.

CSB time, but my brother is neighbors with the studio director for Minneapolis/St Paul's best radio station (The Current).  His neighbor had a small gathering and invited him over.  Maybe 5-10 people kinda thing.  There was an older guy hanging out, kinda grizzled, who my brother was BSing with (along with the other guests).  When my brother left at the end of the night, his neighbor thanked him along the lines of "thanks for not being weird with Paul".

My brother had been hanging out with Paul Westerberg for the past several hours and had no fucking idea.  He knows the Replacements and would know who Paul Westerberg is in an academic sense, but he's not a big enough fan to have ever figured out what the guy looks like.  I almost broke something when he told me.

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Rimbo

Rimbo 25911

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Posted (edited)
17 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Well, no, not in the pop/rock world.  The arrangement is everything outside the words and melody.  Part of this is because the music is so remedial that we don't want to give the drummer credit for hitting the kick drum on 1 and 3 and the snare on 2 and 4, but more to the point, it's almost always the case that the songwriter delivers the basic structure (including chord progression -- i.e., do I want the G major underneath the melody here or do I want the relative minor?  (Em)) -- but regardless, the song is "composed" in the most elementary sense by the time the band gets around to contributing their parts.

I'm not actually in disagreement as to what an arrangement is in the context of legit music (symphonic, etc.) but it's really not useful in the pop/rock/country world, except in very rare cases.

Fair point; I probably perceive it as being less rare because the prog metal/prog rock/prog trance/outright programmed computer music/etc that I tend to favor, bands like Rush, BT, Diablo Swing Orchestra, etc., or even more popular acts like Van Halen and The Police, do tend to be more set in stone or "composed."  When the guy behind one of the cheese metal bands I used to listen to is now writing classical pieces...

But I also think of "composed" in a much broader sense; when the bass line or drum playing can flat-out make or break a song based on the line they play, I see that as being more compositional than arranged. "Bang a Gong" works or doesn't work if you play the correct bass line; you can't just play the tonic note of the chords. The guitarist can't just strum the chords, either; he's got to do that thing:

Screen-Shot-2018-12-14-at-10-59-18-AM.pn

or else it isn't even the right fucking song any more, ya know?

On the flip-side, Gustav Holst wrote two versions of "Mars," but one of these is merely a concert band arrangement of the original orchestral piece. (There have been other concert band arrangements, but IIRC, he made his own, too.)

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45887

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14 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

On the flip-side, Gustav Holst wrote two versions of "Mars," but one of these is merely a concert band arrangement of the original orchestral piece. (There have been other concert band arrangements, but IIRC, he made his own, too.)

A total tangent but now I'm curious:  just "Mars" or all the other movements as well?

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Rimbo

Rimbo 25911

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5 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

A total tangent but now I'm curious:  just "Mars" or all the other movements as well?

As far as I know, only "Mars." Having played the piece on both a brass instrument and a stringed one, I gotta say... outside of the very beginning, the strings are pretty much there for show.

The rest of The Planets, the strings have a much more prominent role.

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El Diablo

El Diablo 4232

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1 minute ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Different strokes for different folks of course, but I'd take Neil over Geddy any day.  

Absolutely. Neils soulful moaning isn't that bad. I mean, I'd get tired of listening to Geddy a heck of a lot quicker than listening to Neil. I like Young and I like Rush but... there's a line out there and Geddy gets there first.

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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Just now, El Diablo said:

Absolutely. Neils soulful moaning isn't that bad. I mean, I'd get tired of listening to Geddy a heck of a lot quicker than listening to Neil. I like Young and I like Rush but... there's a line out there and Geddy gets there first.

DITTO.  I grew up with Neil and the whole 60's music scene so it's kind of in my DNA. I dig Rush, but can't listen to that voice or Their music for a long time. If I'm road tripping, with the top down, I want Neil in my head most of the trip, and Geddy there for brief interludes.

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EMAWesome

EMAWesome 101

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Posted
On 12/13/2018 at 12:29 PM, ztejas said:

Good lord no. You might as well add The Beatles if we're going to go down that road. 

In fact, I would actually bet more people dislike The Beatles than Velvet Underground. 

Can I kind of like them and still think they are overrated?  (Talking about the Beatles)  I get it, they influenced practically every band that came after them in some sort of way or another.  However there are at least twenty to thirty of those bands I like more than them.  Let's also hold back on calling them the greatest songwriters of all time.  There are at least 400 morons on this board alone, yours truly included, who could pick up a pen and paper and come up with something better than writing "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" 87 times in a row.

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ztejas

ztejas 43411

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1 hour ago, EMAWesome said:

Can I kind of like them and still think they are overrated?  (Talking about the Beatles)  I get it, they influenced practically every band that came after them in some sort of way or another.  However there are at least twenty to thirty of those bands I like more than them.  Let's also hold back on calling them the greatest songwriters of all time.  There are at least 400 morons on this board alone, yours truly included, who could pick up a pen and paper and come up with something better than writing "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" 87 times in a row.

I agree with all of this. They were incredibly influential. That doesn't make their music better than the bands that followed. (Sonic Youth is an example of this imo)

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Damor

Damor 1236

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Posted
18 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

I’ll take back all my suggestions to put Green Day on the list.

 

 

 

Green Day is an automatic channel changer for me, unless I'm having a shitty day and want to groom and give focus to my state of offended surliness.

On a similar but more recent note, critic darlings the War on Drugs.  It's like a modern recycling of the cheesiest over-produced 80s phases of several of the above mentioned (Dead, Springsteen, whatever.).  Quit with the glockenspiel already.

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GhostOfTomJoad

GhostOfTomJoad 9323

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Posted
5 hours ago, Rimbo said:

Your opinions are bad and you should feel bad.

This is gold from the guy who "meh'd" Born to Run. Oh, Arturo, sweet prince of irony.

I love JJ's take on the 'mats. Westerberg is indeed a first rate lyricist. I recently read Bob Mehr's book "Trouble Boys" and found it to be a fascinating synopsis of their evolution as a band. They were every bit great and shitty at the same time. What if Westerberg actually did care enough to give it his all every time?

But to stay on topic I'd agree whole heartedly w/ the OP's offering of The Doors. Jim Morrison reminds me of that guy you meet for the first time at a party. After he's had one drink he says something that catches your attention & makes you think "gee, that's a unique take." After his second a crowd's gathering around him as he prattles on nonsensically. An hour later he's vomiting on the rug & speaking pure gibberish, yelling at anyone who's still listening to open up their mind. Ray Manzarek deserved better.

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TK421

TK421 29

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29 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

This is gold from the guy who "meh'd" Born to Run. Oh, Arturo, sweet prince of irony.

I love JJ's take on the 'mats. Westerberg is indeed a first rate lyricist. I recently read Bob Mehr's book "Trouble Boys" and found it to be a fascinating synopsis of their evolution as a band. They were every bit great and shitty at the same time. What if Westerberg actually did care enough to give it his all every time?

But to stay on topic I'd agree whole heartedly w/ the OP's offering of The Doors. Jim Morrison reminds me of that guy you meet for the first time at a party. After he's had one drink he says something that catches your attention & makes you think "gee, that's a unique take." After his second a crowd's gathering around him as he prattles on nonsensically. An hour later he's vomiting on the rug & speaking pure gibberish, yelling at anyone who's still listening to open up their mind. Ray Manzarek deserved better.

Somewhat agree on the doors but they do have a few amazing tunes - The End, Riders on the Storm, Break On Through, etc.  when they were good they were great but mostly just crap.

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