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rghammo

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Posts posted by rghammo

  1. After being slightly nice to contemporary country music I switched over to the CMA awards a bit last night and frankly I am sorry I said ANYTHING nice about these guys. Everything I saw and heard was dreadful.

     

    And how did you feel the last time you watched the MTV music awards? Popular music is pretty bad, on the whole. That is true for all genres.

     

    I'm not sure if it was always true though. When I think about what music I listen to from the '60s and '70s, most of it was popular then (e.g. Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones). (There are obvious exceptions: Big Star). But, I'm too young to say that back in the good ol' days the rule was that good music made it to the radio while now it is the exception for good music to make it to the radio. I don't really know if there has been a decline in the quality of music on the radio and if so, when it happened. I think the radio plays a very different role in today's music industry than it once did.

     

    I must need to go to graduate school to study the music industry because I think these are all fascinating questions.

  2. There are going to be counter-examples to anything but in general, there is some point when it became the norm for rock musicians (certain sub-genres excluded) to write their own stuff. The question to me is why and why didn't it happen in country music.

  3. If I had to credit one band/artist, it would be the Beatles. Dylan was coming from a different tradition, one where singing your own songs was more common than in the mainstream music at the time. The Beatles on the other hand started out as a typical mainstream product and evolved into something entirely different. I feel like they raised the bar (in many ways other than this as well) and forced other bands in the mainstream to start writing (e.g. The Rolling Stones) and forced new bands that would come along after them to write. This is obviously an oversimplification and it didn't occurred as any sort of big bang, but I really believe the Beatles were the driving force in the movement to writing your own stuff.

  4. I don't think it has anything to do with "quality" however you define that. I was cross-checking the Billboard 200 with AMG to see if the claim seemed true using the most popular stuff right now (seems so) and the rock albums that are popular are just as crappy (with some exceptions) as the country (as are the rap/hip-hop).

     

    I really think it has something to do with traditions (as markosis mentioned) and rock music evolving along a different path than country music. If you look at the two genres 50 years ago, I think you would find a similar (and small) likelihood of a song being written by the artist performing it in both rock and country. But, something seems to have happened along the way that caused rock artists to start writing and and country artists not to (on the whole).

  5. What bands had long delays between their first and second albums? The Stone Roses are the first example that comes to my mind of a band having a "hit" with the first album ('89) and then taking forever to release the second ('94). I guess a better example would be Vashti Bunyan ('70 to '05) but I really have in mind bands/artists where the first album had some measure of success.

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