what song are you listening to?.... thread...

[Poopadoop]

Ain't my style of music so I can't really suggest anything (all that comes to mind is wolfmother) but if you're interested I can guarantee thousands of websites that will have great suggestions on exactly this.

Thanks I will check that out.

Tbf, it's kinda hard for a band to directly influence other bands much beyond their own decade. For example, no-one today would try to write a Beatles type song because it would just sound weird, even though they were insanely popular in their day.

The types of bands LedZep influenced for the good were AC/DC or Van Halen because they had songs that were melodic but with an edge. A lot of the bands just mimicked the edge part (metal bands) and that rarely worked imo.

[OngBonga]

The Who are fucking great, so much better than Zepp.

The Real Me is a great song, too.

[Poopadoop]

The Who are fucking great, so much better than Zepp.

I like them better than Zep overall as well. Townshend is literally a genius, if he had someone like Lennon or McCartney to collaborate with he would be put in their class as songwriters (if that makes sense).

The Real Me is a great song, too.

I think stylistically it's just too 'different' for my ears. But the musicianship is outstanding.

Who's Next is their best album imo.

[Savy]

Tbf, it's kinda hard for a band to directly influence other bands much beyond their own decade. For example, no-one today would try to write a Beatles type song because it would just sound weird, even though they were insanely popular in their day.

Nah it's not. To be fair I'd say 10 years after a band is big is probably like the peak time to hear the influence of that music from kids who were young teenagers to being in their mid twenties.

Also you have to remember that parents music is pretty influential on kids, people of my generation will have had parents who grew up at the time of Led Zeppelin and are still really into them.

[Poopadoop]

Nah it's not. To be fair I'd say 10 years after a band is big is probably like the peak time to hear the influence of that music from kids who were young teenagers to being in their mid twenties.

Also you have to remember that parents music is pretty influential on kids, people of my generation will have had parents who grew up at the time of Led Zeppelin and are still really into them.

Mostly I'm referring to the overall sound. A band that sounded like LedZep or the Beatles today wouldn't sell. Of course they can be influenced by them, but they're not going to copy their sound like bands in their own day tried to. E.g., the Beach Boys were pretty much the Beatles writing songs about surfing.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Mostly I'm referring to the overall sound. A band that sounded like LedZep or the Beatles today wouldn't sell. Of course they can be influenced by them, but they're not going to copy their sound like bands in their own day tried to. E.g., the Beach Boys were pretty much the Beatles writing songs about surfing.

I'm not sure you fully appreciate where pop/rock music was before the Beatles and after the Beatles.
The popularization of the 4-piece touring guitar band is almost wholly attributable to their success using this format.
There were 4-piece bands around prior to the Beatles, but they weren't the norm.

Look at the proliferation of {2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drum set} bands out there for the past 60 years.

There's an argument to be made that this is nothing to do with the Beatles directly. The Beatles merely happened to be doing the whole band thing during the era of the rise of electronic music, and somebody was bound to stumble upon the whole "We're 4 guys w/ guitars and a drum set" thing. They happened to be the most popular during that era, and their popularizing the format is coincidental.

IDK. We'll never be able to go back and take away their electricity and see if the genre still grew to be as popular. We can't go back and take the Beatles out of the picture and see if the genre is still popularized by some other group. So we're left with these 2 facts: Before the Beatles, the 4-piece guitar band wasn't really a thing, and in the wake of the Beatles, it's dominating the music entertainment industry on a world-wide scale.

[Poopadoop]

I'm not sure you fully appreciate where pop/rock music was before the Beatles and after the Beatles.
The popularization of the 4-piece touring guitar band is almost wholly attributable to their success using this format.
There were 4-piece bands around prior to the Beatles, but they weren't the norm.

Look at the proliferation of {2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drum set} bands out there for the past 60 years.

There's an argument to be made that this is nothing to do with the Beatles directly. The Beatles merely happened to be doing the whole band thing during the era of the rise of electronic music, and somebody was bound to stumble upon the whole "We're 4 guys w/ guitars and a drum set" thing. They happened to be the most popular during that era, and their popularizing the format is coincidental.

IDK. We'll never be able to go back and take away their electricity and see if the genre still grew to be as popular. We can't go back and take the Beatles out of the picture and see if the genre is still popularized by some other group. So we're left with these 2 facts: Before the Beatles, the 4-piece guitar band wasn't really a thing, and in the wake of the Beatles, it's dominating the music entertainment industry on a world-wide scale.

You're speaking to a somewhat different point; whereas my point was about the music you seem to be saying their biggest influence was that there were four of them who toured as a band, using guitars, bass and drums.

If your argument was that one big innovation of the Beatles was that they were self-contained in the sense that they wrote their own songs, and they were excellent songs, I would agree (though this still doesn't imply the music itself is going to innovative). Musically the biggest in terms of 'sound' was their use of multilayered vocal harmonies, which was a step beyond what others had done before them, and was the part imitated by other bands like the Beach Boys. This refers to their early work mostly as later on they developed much more complex instrumentation and relied less on vocals.

The big innovation of the Beatles (musically) was definitely NOT that they were using guitar, bass and drums almost exclusively. You might as well say they invented the three-chord song or verse/chorus/verse structure. Having guitar, bass drums was pretty much true from the beginning of rock n' roll, regardless of how many of each you had (which basically boils down to how many guitars you used since everyone had a bass and drums. Some focused more on keyboards but guitar/bass/drums was not a new thing at all.

But anyways, back to the point of mine you quoted. If you go back and listen to an early Beatles song, and try to imagine someone reproducing that 'sound' today and thinking it will sell records, it won't be happening (imo). For one, no-one uses the twangy guitar sound these days. For another, the orchestration is very minimalistic compared to today's music which is much more developed in terms of layering. Which is to say, bands today are not trying to copy a sound from a band from 50 years ago. They might nick things here and there but the overall sound is going to be different.

[MadMojoMonkey]

re. Beatles

Your argument sounds like you're trying to convince me that there's great variety in the Taco Bell menu.
You can mash them together however you like, but ultimately, it's all the same ingredients.

Layered harmonies were a staple of barbershop n-tet music, which predates the Beatles in the pop music scene.

My argument isn't that a 4-piece guitar-based pop/rock band was the reason they're great.

My argument is that prior to them being great, this wasn't really a thing. In the aftermath of them being great, they've been copied endlessly.
The entire setup of a 4-piece guitar-based pop/rock band MAY have become popularized w/o the Beatles' success. The fact is that whatever else their impact on pop/rock music, the setup of a 4-piece guitar-based band was copied by thousands of people even while the Beatles were still gaining success. Some of those bands were quite popular, too.

The whole cementing into our culture that 4 guys with guitars and a drum set can be a world class performance group is due to the Beatles' unprecidented success and the success of extremely similar bands which followed the Beatles' professional choices.

[Poopadoop]

....

If you want to argue that what I say is wrong because of something completely unrelated to my point, then I can't respond effectively to that. All I can do is repeat what I said and elaborate on it and hope you understand the difference between what I said and what you're talking about.

My argument was about the music they produced and how it was constructed musically, and not how many people were in the band or how they dressed or whether they made long hair popular or anything else unrelated to the music. I completely agree with you when you say they had a large part to do with a four-pieced rock 'n' roll band being a thing. That still has nothing to do with my point about how they sounded.