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| re: Bands trying to sound like themselves on new releases - Culture Bully | |
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Rupert 11:32 pm UTC 11/30/08 |
| In reply to: | Bands trying to sound like themselves on new releases - Culture Bully - Rupert 11:30 pm UTC 11/30/08 |
| The second part - whooops The evidence of this becomes fairly obvious after turning to the local radio station and listening to “Paradise City” for the 10,000th time. Fans who strictly enjoy Classic Rock really aren’t looking for anything different. About a month ago my thoughts on Metallica’s Death Magnetic drifted towards a similar subject, “Funny then that one of the main criticisms of Death Magnetic has been that it is self-plagiarizing, a term that could equally apply to a band like Slayer. It hasn’t though, primarily because Slayer has pretty much stuck with the same formula from the get-go; likewise, no one’s criticizing AC/DC for sounding too much like AC/DC with their new release, are they?” And the reason very few fans are criticizing AC/DC and Slayer is because for the most part those bands are still releasing music that rings true to what fans want to to hear. So it’s not that we (I include myself in this, as a fan of Classic Rock) want to hear “Paradise City” played on the radio again - it’s just that the song is something comfortable and a station might risk losing listeners if they played something unproven. Additionally, there’s a good chance that these bands might not want to be experimental. Maybe, just maybe - they’re happy recording the music they are no matter what the listener wants to hear. Those factors combined make it almost a sure thing that successful Classic Rock bands will always sound like successful Classic Rock bands. > Some observations which which come from the Culture Bully > site. > > About two years ago a friend and I dug into eleven of the > year’s releases by Classic Rock bands, the conclusion > being that the bands who sounded most like themselves > tended to release the better albums. On one end of the > spectrum was Meat Loaf’s god-awful Bat Out Of Hell III > (which sounded little like Meat Loaf but more like a > nü-metal rock opera) and on the other was Neil Young’s > Living With War (which sounded like Neil Young). After > listening to the various albums by Bob Seger, Elton John > and Peter Frampton among others, it became fairly apparent > that if the music sounded like one would expect it to it > would, at the least, be tolerable. And the more the music > diverted from the framework of Classic Rock the worse it > was. The biggest mistake that a band like Cheap Trick can > make is to not sound like Cheap Trick, and the biggest > mistake a band like AC/DC can make is to not sound like > AC/DC. > | |
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