Spiritual Antitheses in music.
open/close all folders
Genres
- While similar in principles, "Rock & Roll" and "Rock" are actually quite different. Rock & roll first emerged in North America as a mix of jazz (being basically an evolution of the "combos" popular during the late '40s), blues, R&B, and country & western, with pianos and horns being common instruments alongside guitars and drums. The latter, meanwhile, surged when British artists in The '60s, emulating both American rock & roll artists and home-grown skiffle artists, began to take their cues from the rising "Motown sound" (forming the "beat" genre) and established the standard guitar-bass-drums setup, with pianos being increasingly uncommon and horns going largely unused.
- Progressive Rock and Krautrock were born in England and Germany respectively with the goal of using the new innovations in electric music but instead of iterating on American blues, using both countries' own musical traditions and cultural references to create new kinds of music, as well as wanting to create more complicated and challenging music than the prevailing pop music of the time.
- Punk Rock emerged out of a growing backlash among amateur musicians and music critics in The '70s towards the increasingly dominant culture of celebrity and musical complexity in mainstream rock, especially in Progressive Rock, as well as towards the hippie culture that it emerged from. Whereas prog revolved around lengthy, elaborate compositions that took influence from the likes of jazz and classical music to break traditional boundaries and explore what rock was capable of, punk rock could best be described as "burn it down and start over," featuring terse, simplistic melodies and instrumentals without prog's high level of regard for professionalism. The primary mindset of the two genres were vastly different as well, with every prog band not named Pink Floyd being based mainly around idealistic philosophy and a love of speculative fiction/history while punk based itself on abrasively cynical, countercultural social commentary and a general "fuck you" attitude. It should be noted, though, that the perceived rivalry between the two genres was never anywhere near as harsh back in the day as most modern examinations of punk would have you believe, with John Lydon being a fan of Pink Floyd (his infamous "I hate Pink Floyd" shirt simply being a means of getting a rise out of people) and some prog artists even embracing one of punk's offshoot genres when prog fell from mainstream popularity.
- For a double-whammy, we have Post-Punk and New Wave Music in relation not only to each other, but also their parent genre, punk. Both genres mainly emerged out of fatigue towards the rapidly-increasing cookie-cutter nature of punk rock (an inevitability given the genre's emphasis on simplicity) in favor of attempting to warm back up to the exact kinds of rock that punk rejected (though not to the same degree that fueled its emergence in the first place). However, while post-punk was based more in musical innovation with a noticeably dark aesthetic, new wave gradually moved further into the style of pop rock with a much Lighter and Softer aesthetic than its sister genre. Moreover, post-punk more or less fizzled out in the second half of the 1980s, with it's popularity being supplanted by Goth Rock, the aforementioned New Wave Music and in particular Alternative Rock (which was, for all intents and purposes, the direct daughter genre to post-punk). Additionally, while post-punk was an almost entirely British-dominated movement (with groups like Talking Heads and Devo being rare exceptions), new wave encompassed artists on both sides of the Atlantic.
- Another offshoot of punk rock, known as "No Wave", went even further than post-punk in its backlash against its parent genre. Whereas punk sought to tear down the rock establishment in order to strip the music down to the essentials, No Wave in turn rebelled against punk and rock in general, seeing rock music as a creatively spent force if the new vanguard of innovation was simply Revisiting the Roots. Many bands in the No Wave scene completely rejected the aesthetics and instrumentation of rock music altogether, and drew on a mélange of influences that included punk, funk, jazz, and the blues, which wound up a major influence of Noise Rock.
- Heavy Metal in The '80s inherited Progressive Rock's complex musicianship, lyrics about esoteric topics, and willingness to do very long songs, but in the wake of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal especially, it combined those elements with a far more aggressive sound, darker and more nihilistic lyrics, and substantially louder guitars. In the process, it also developed a ferocious and at times violent
Fandom Rivalry with Hardcore Punk, a similarly loud, fast, aggressive, anti-establishment, Rated M for Manly breed of rock music that appealed to both working-class kids and those who'd grown bored with their Stepford Suburbia upbringing. The punks' disdain for prog's fantasy escapism and culture of celebrity in The '70s transferred right over to metal in the '80s, though whereas the punks saw prog as music for snobbish elitists who were out of touch with people who worked for a living, they saw metal as music for the trailer-trash lowlifes who bullied them outside the club. The metalheads responded in kind, inheriting progressive rock's side of the rivalry as they saw the punks as willing to settle for lousy musicianship so long as it had an aura of rebellion. Over time, however, the two genres cross-pollinated and the rivalry died down, such that the varieties and offshoots of both punk and metal that flourished in The '90s, particularly Grunge and Alternative Metal, wound up heavily influenced by each other. - In '90s Berlin and Europe more broadly, the Eurodance scene became this to the punk scene — or more specifically, two separate punk scenes that had emerged in The '80s and served as the antitheses of one another. When punk arrived in Europe, the scenes in the liberal Western nations generally shared the left-wing, anti-capitalist politics of the genre's American and British founders, but it was a different story in the Eastern Bloc, where the punks were rebelling against communism and as such were often more right-wing. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Berlin, where reunification brought the West and East German scenes together, leading to acrimony and violence as punks from either side of the geographic and political divide found themselves inhabiting the same spaces and concerts. As punk became more associated with political arguments, tribalism, and street brawls than music or rebellion, young people instead turned to dance music's more inclusive, egalitarian ethos of "peace, love, unity, and respect."
- Grunge was this to Hair Metal, especially once it got big in the early '90s. They both had similar root stocks in a fusion of Heavy Metal and Punk Rock, but that was where the similarities ended, right down to the fact that they came about their fusion of the genres from opposite directions. It drove a fierce Fandom Rivalry between the two genres, with hair metal fans seeing grunge (and Alternative Rock in general) as music for dour killjoys and feeling that its rise was killing rock music by sapping its Rebellious Spirit in favor of self-seriousness, while grunge fans saw hair metal as music for mindless hedonists that rock had to be saved from lest it implode in a morass of vanity and debauchery.
- To start, hair metal was descended from the bands of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which was born from metal musicians who took influence from the sound of punk. It was big, boisterous, and fun-loving, associated with the glamorous and decadent Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and its musicians wore flamboyant outfits, played face-melting guitar solos, and sang about how awesome it was to be a rock star. Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll made for very popular subject matter among hair metal musicians, who loved to sing about the good times that came from that lifestyle, often bragging about their drug-fueled exploits that epitomized Crazy Is Cool.
- Grunge, by contrast, was born from punk musicians inspired by the sound of '70s Black Sabbath-style metal, with Black Flag's Darker and Edgier 1984 album My War often cited as a seminal influence. It was angsty, moody, stripped-down, and born in the rainy Rust Belt dump that was late '80s Seattle (a city still in the middle of a painful transition from Boeing to Microsoft), with its musicians playing Three Chords and the Truth, spurning the shredding and elaborate solos of hair metal guitarists in favor of more melodic, blues-inspired guitars, and wearing street and work clothes as a reaction to the self-indulgence of the late '80s metal scene. (The plaid flannel shirts that came to symbolize the "grunge look"? They got those from lumberjacks.) When grunge musicians sang about drugs and alcohol, they did not glamorize them; at best, they took the pain away, and at worst, they destroyed the people who used them.
- And in turn, Post-Grunge was this to the original grunge. While it used a superficially similar music structure, it tended to be less experimental, more polished, and overall Lighter and Softer both lyrically and musically, allowing it to pick up fans who had grown disillusioned with the Darker and Edgier subject matter of grunge after Kurt Cobain's suicide but still liked the sound of the music. Ironically given the above, it was at times noted as having brought influence from hair metal into grunge, if not in the fashion sense than certainly in the sound and the lyrical subject matter, which included many hard-driving songs about living a glamorous, debauched "rock star" lifestyle paired with slower, straight-faced Power Ballads, and in the emphasis on poppier, radio-friendly hooks. Naturally, grunge purists (and hardcore alt-rock fans in general) hated it, and made bands like Nickelback the face of what they saw as a creatively spent North American mainstream rock scene in the late '90s and '00s.
- Across The Pond, Britpop was fed by a similar impulse, born in reaction to the angst and depression of grunge. While both had streaks of Three Chords and the Truth and Revisiting the Roots to them, seeking to get rock music back to what it was in the past before the rise of the sounds that they were reacting to, the influences they drew from were diametrically opposed; grunge was rooted in Punk Rock and Heavy Metal, while Britpop hearkened back to the sorts of '60s and '70s British rock bands that punk and metal repudiated. Damon Albarn of Blur described Britpop as "getting rid of grunge" the same way that the rise of punk got rid of the hippies, while Noel Gallagher of Oasis specifically wrote the song "Live Forever" because he heard that Nirvana had written a song called "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" (a title that was actually tongue-in-cheek) and decided that he wanted none of that. Patriotic Fervor also played into it, as Britpop bands played up a very working-class, "laddish" sense of Britishness in reaction to perceived American dominance of popular music.
- What grunge was to hair metal, adult alternative was to adult contemporary. It emerged around the same time, and for many of the same reasons, as a backlash against the adult pop and soft rock artists of the '80s like Amy Grant, Linda Ronstadt, and Michael Bolton (whose career imploded in a plagiarism scandal), who were seen as overly saccharine and artificial and increasingly came off as relics in the music video era. Adult alternative acts like Counting Crows, Sheryl Crow, and Fiona Apple offered, well, an alternative for people who wanted a more organic, artistically credible, and guitar-driven sound in their music but felt that the more hard-edged rock music of the era was a bridge too far. The rivalry, however, is a lot friendlier than it was with grunge and hair metal, with songs and artists from both genres often coexisting on the same radio stations.
- Emo Music grew out of Hardcore Punk, but spurned virtually all of its stylistic trappings apart from a superficially similar sound. Instead of aggression and anger, emo was built around melody, and wasn't afraid to get quiet. Instead of hyper-masculinity, emo musicians came to embrace a more androgynous fashion sense. The lyrics focused less on political agitation in favor of more personal and confessional material. Many of the first emo bands were started by punk fans and musicians (including Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, who founded the pioneering band Embrace) during the "Revolution Summer" of 1985 out of a growing revulsion with the violence and sexism of the Washington, D.C. hardcore scene, and wanted an alternative. (A similar impulse also motivated the contemporaneous rise of Straight Edge, which became a tendency within both punk and emo.)
- The Post-Punk/Garage Rock revival of the 2000s arose as a backlash against the genres that came to dominate mainstream rock in the late '90s, grunge in the US and Britpop in the UK. Seeing both those genres as creatively spent, stuck in the past, and increasingly hollowed out by mainstream pressure, they instead sought to bring back the energy of what they felt was the last great creative explosion of rock music, the 1970s when the underground was flourishing and modern Alternative Rock was first starting to take shape. Stylistically, it repudiated grunge especially, associated not with Seattle in its troubled post-Boeing years but New York City in the middle of its Bloomberg-era gentrification and post-9/11 attention. As such, while the guitars were crunchy and stripped-down and the bands were playing in converted warehouse venues, the musicians wore more fashionable clothes and embraced the hipster culture and the glamour of rock stardom.
- Much of the music of the 2000s came as a backlash against the industry-led "anti-alternative response" of the late 1990s, but the jazz-pop movement became the most notorious example, seeing itself as more authentic than the bands of the "swing revival".
- The bubblegum Teen Idols of the late '90s got hit with a backlash in the early-mid-'00s the form of a new wave of Darker and Edgier, rock-influenced female singer-songwriters and Pop Punk bands. Avril Lavigne, one of the leaders of this wave, was dubbed by the media as the "anti-Britney Spears" due to her rejection of the heavy sexualization and "manufactured" image Britney and her contemporaries were known for in favor of a darker image and plainer, baggier clothes. Other female musicians to emerge from this wave include Michelle Branch, Ashlee Simpson, and Vanessa Carlton. On the male side of pop music, meanwhile, many pop-punk bands filled the role that the boy bands once did, keeping the Pretty Boy musicians and breakup songs for the Estrogen Brigade but swapping out the glamour and slick dance moves for angsty lyrics and dark clothing. (Pete Wentz, though, saw the rivalry as friendly enough that he even did a parody of a classic *NSYNC video for "Irresistible".) The film adaptation of Josie and the Pussycats mines this shift for its plot, as the titular Girl Group, updated to a pop-punk band, takes over the charts after the villains arrange the downfall of the boy band Dujour.
- Hip-Hop has had a push-pull between Lighter and Softer and Darker and Edgier subgenres. Starting with Run–D.M.C. eschewing the early hip-hop act's flashy stage costumes and florid disco inspired instrumentation to an all-black B-boy uniform and a stripped down, 808-based sound, and then going in waves from Pop Rap to Gangsta Rap and Hardcore Hip-Hop to Glam Rap to Trap Music to Swag Rap to Drill Music. Conscious Hip Hop, Political Rap and Alternative Hip Hop also often coexist with the mainstream, and forms its own antithesis to both ends of the spectrum. It is also not uncommon for individual artists to fit in different niches over the course of their career.
Musicians, albums, and songs
- Pretty common with a New Sound Album.
- U2 described Achtung Baby as "chopping down The Joshua Tree" — instead of anthemic Alternative Rock with political and social themes, Achtung Baby was sharp-edged Alternative Dance scoring introspective lyrics.
- John Frusciante said that his album The Will To Death was essentially the opposite of his previous one, Shadows Collide With People. Whereas Shadows had much time put into its recording (a response to critics saying his previous solo efforts sounded unprofessional) and layered, lush harmonies, The Will To Death had songs recorded in as few takes as possible, and minimal backing vocals.
- In a way, Weezer's second Self-Titled Album (more commonly known as the Green Album) was this to their sophomore album, Pinkerton. Whereas Pinkerton was very dark and personal, and possibly their most complex album musically, Green was light, simple, poppy, and safe. Very few of the songs were personal, and the whole album carried an extremely happy vibe to it. Rivers Cuomo had suffered a Creator Breakdown over the (at the time) poor reception for Pinkerton, and so for the band's comeback he sought to get as far away from it as possible.
- The Cure's Disintegration was intended to be one to the previous two albums, The Head on the Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. The album was a return to the band's earlier darker sound rather than the poppier sound they'd pursued with their previous albums.
- Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come are frequently considered this. Both albums came out in 1959, when the jazz world was overrun with complex Bebop compositions, and both set out to do something different. The similarities end there, though. Kind of Blue is ambient, harmonically complex, and rhythmically laid-back. The Shape of Jazz to Come, on the other hand, is chaotic, aggressive, mostly does away with traditional harmony and rhythms, and focuses on collective improvisation rather than individual solos.
- Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" and Justin Timberlake's "Suit & Tie". Both are hit singles from 2012-13 about clothing and style, but while "Suit & Tie" talks about how the elegant and classy look of an expensive suit and tie is all Timberlake needs to impress, "Thrift Shop" talks about how we spent way too much on clothes and how one's self-confidence can make even ugly clothes from the thrift shop look cool.
- Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" as a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America", originally naming his song "God Blessed America for Me" before settling on the final title. It soon came to be popularized as an "alternative" national anthem among left-wing activists, especially from The '60s onward. While "God Bless America" was rooted in Manifest Destiny, with God personally standing beside and guiding the United States, "This Land Is Your Land" carried a socialist message of America belonging to everybody, especially in two verses protesting income inequality that weren't included in the final version of the song.
- The Chicks and Toby Keith were bitter rivals in Country Music in the early '00s, largely on account of how their approaches to the genre, on top of their politics, were so diametrically opposed. The Chicks were a traditional-sounding group with a heavy bluegrass influence, playing 'classic' country instruments like the banjo, the fiddle, the mandolin, and the guitar, while also fusing their old-fashioned sound with a very modern 'girl power' attitude and liberal politics that caused many people to dub them "country's Spice Girls". Keith, meanwhile, took the Arena Rock approach to country, playing loud electric instruments with production to match, while his politics were big on down-home Patriotic Fervor and saluting the troops. Notably, after the Chicks' careers imploded when Natalie Maines made comments criticizing President George W. Bush and the Iraq War, Keith's career skyrocketed.
- Transviolet's "Girls Your Age" depicts dating someone several years your senior in a bittersweet manner. It's an artificial romance without little basis. Hey Violet's coincidentally similar song "Guys My Age" is the opposite. The singer hates men her age and thinks that older guys are better lovers.
- Talking Heads and Joy Division, two of the main pioneers of Post-Punk, each represented different mainstay facets of the post-punk movement in a manner that would come off as Flanderization had they been formed much later. Both Talking Heads and Joy Division did indeed share some similar traits (a neuro-atypical frontmannote known for his Marionette Motion dance style, a clean-cut image that differentiated them from their punk peers, and an initial start as a standard Punk Rock act), but other than that, the two are virtual opposites.
- Talking Heads best represented the "innovation" part of post-punk, being highly acclaimed for their musical inventiveness and experimentation without excess (the end result of having Brian Eno as their producer for three of their albums) and the huge impact their work had on the music of the 1980s. Their image, however, was unusually upbeat for a post-punk band, and indeed, this is a big part of why they eventually ditched post-punk altogether in favor of Alternative Rock by 1985.
- Joy Division, meanwhile, best represented the "darkness" part of post-punk, being known for their immensely gloomy, ethereal songs and proto-goth aesthetic (try finding a photograph of the band that isn't in heavy-contrast black and white), with the former being the result of lead singer Ian Curtis's massive Creator Breakdown from a combination of depression, epilepsy (at a time when the disorder wasn't widely understood), and marital problems, to the point where he took his own life in 1980. Their musicianship, meanwhile, leaned more towards the minimalistic side, with sparse instrumentals and Curtis's yarling singing voice making their music sound noticeably less dense compared to Talking Heads.note And while Talking Heads eventually abandoned post-punk, Joy Division's successor New Order (formed from the remaining members of Joy Division after Curtis' death) held on to the stylistic hallmarks of post-punk throughout their career, combining it with the then-emerging synth-pop scene to form a sound within which one could still find conspicuous traces of their predecessor.
- Eminem:
- Em's song "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" from The Slim Shady LP is a Black Comedy song about him killing his wife and then driving with his young daughter Hailie to dump her body in a lake, done as a parody of Will Smith's "Just the Two of Us". On his following album The Marshall Mathers LP, he wrote the prequel to that song, "Kim", which ends where "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" began: with Eminem putting his dead wife's body in the trunk of his car. Whereas "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" was Played for Laughs, "Kim" very much wasn't, painting a horrifying portrait of a domestic dispute that spirals out of control and ends with him slitting his wife's throat while screaming "bleed, bitch, bleed!".
- In 2002, Eminem wrote "Cleanin' Out My Closet", a scathing Diss Track to his mother which jabs at her for her drug addiction and abuse of him as he grew up. In 2013, Eminem wrote "Headlights", in which he apologises to his mother for "Cleanin' Out My Closet", saying that as much as she hurt him, she did at least love him and try to raise him as best as she could.
- Bruce Springsteen is arguably the yin to Frank Sinatra's yang. They're both frequently cited as two of the quintessential artists of American popular music, they're probably the two most famous residents of New Jersey in the state's history, and they're both known for their close association with Americana—with many of their songs being devoted to eulogizing the American experience. But Sinatra (whose career began in 1935) is most closely associated with the Greatest Generation and the World War II era, and he was best known for jazz, swing, and traditional pop, since he became popular during the last window of time before Rock & Roll went truly mainstream; lyrically, he was best known for orchestral music that often evoked the hustle and bustle of life in the big city. By contrast, Springsteen (whose career began in 1964) is closely associated with the Baby Boomer generation and the post-War era, and he's famous for freely dabbling in contemporary genres like rock, folk, and R&B; lyrically, his songs are famous for eulogizing humble ordinary people from America's small towns and suburbs, who long to escape their humdrum lives.
- And in turn, Taylor Swift can be seen as the yang to Bruce Springsteen's yin. As noted in this article by Emily VanDerWerff for Vox, both are seen as the "voice of white Middle America" for the respective generations, Springsteen for baby boomers and Swift for millennials, their lyrics painting a portrait of a mythologized Americana that doesn't really exist but which they wish were real. They both started their careers as young wunderkinds (Swift was literally a teenager), and they both started out in "roots" genres before going in a more commercial direction, Springsteen from folk to rock and Swift from country to pop. Their backgrounds, however, reveal the differences between the kinds of songs they write. Springsteen grew up in a working-class household, and his songs were heavily infused with themes of class and poverty, while putting forth a rugged "man's man" image of denim vests and blue-collar jobs down at the factory. Swift, by contrast, was the daughter of a stockbroker who raised her as a Child Prodigy, and her forays into politics usually concerned themes of feminism and social justice, going hand-in-hand with her Girly Girl image and lyrics about romance and breakups.
- Ryuichi Sakamoto of Yellow Magic Orchestra commented on how he and his bandmates ended up being the direct antithesis to Kraftwerk, to whom YMO are often considered an Eastern analog. Both groups were highly influential and early Synth-Pop bands who were at their most famous within roughly the same timeframe (1978-1983) and were known for a very formal style compared to other musicians of the era. However, while Kraftwerk's sound and image in their prime were very methodical and statuesque before shifting towards a more accessible techno direction in the tail end of their career, YMO started off "fun-loving and breezy" (as reviewers put it) before shifting towards an icier and more avant-garde approach, with only a brief respite from this occurring in the form of a J-pop album duology in 1983. Furthermore, while the two didn't exactly become each other with their shifts, their constant artistic cores still remained at odds with one another, with Kraftwerk maintaining a clinical tone in their work compared to the more emotionally expressive YMO (even on their coldest-sounding material).
- Jellyfish's elaborately produced, vintage keyboard-heavy, harmony-laden singalong Power Pop style and sound, which wore its at-the-time unfashionable 1960s and 1970s pop, rock, bubblegum, Baroque Pop and jazz influences on its sleeve (more recent, similar influences like XTC and Squeeze were also influences) went against the grain of what had been popular in 1990s rock, namely Hair Metal and Grunge. Also, unlike those movements, the band built a whimsical, colorful image wearing bright, loud, flamboyant 1960s and 1970s clothing, props, music videos and stage settings (with a certain playful irony attached to it), reminiscent of Magical Mystery Tour or The Banana Splits. They also beared the distinction of having their lead singer/drummer Andy Sturmer play a small kit at the front of the stage while standing up.
- Lyrically, they were also much less dark and less nihilistic (or hid darker themes behind whimsical lyrics and wordplay) than their grunge/alternative rock counterparts.
- Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective can be considered the yang to Kid A by Radiohead's yin. Both Kid A and Merriweather are widely considered the best albums of the 2000's, and are noted for a heavily experimental electronic sound, abstract lyrics, and an emphasis on texture and timbre over traditional melody and straightforward lyricism, while still managing to be accessible enough to draw in listeners. However, that's where the similarities end. Kid A was released in the final quarter of the first year of the decade and features a hauntingly minimalist sound complimented by lyrics about personal crisis and apocalypse. Merriweather meanwhile was released in the first quarter of the final year of the decade and features a mellowly lush, densely-layered sound punctuated by lyrics covering broadly romantic themes.
- In the early '90s, Nirvana vs. Guns N' Roses was one of the biggest rivalries in music, a leading symbol of the war between Alternative Rock and Heavy Metal that was raging in rock at the time. To quote Keith Harris and Kory Grow in Rolling Stone, "Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain were once alike in many ways: two messed-up small-town guys whose lives were changed forever by aggressive, rebellious rock music. But though Nirvana and Guns N' Roses both found fame by blurring the lines between punk and metal, Rose and Cobain found themselves on the opposite side of the rock culture wars of the alternative era." Cobain hated GnR, describing them and bands like them as "cock rock" that had "absolutely nothing to say" and his own music as a rebellion against everything they stood for, while Axl Rose (who had ironically been a fan of Nirvana before then) responded by flaunting his rock star lifestyle while slamming Nirvana and bands like them as more interested in "sit[ting] at home and shoot[ing] heroin with their bitch wives" than making music. Like the rivalry between Toby Keith and the Chicks, their feud was also political: Cobain saw GnR's lyrics and manly persona as reactionary, misogynistic, and homophobic, while GnR and their fans saw Nirvana's comparatively mellow sound and dour lyrics as effeminate. However, the rivalry would die down significantly after both bands fell apart in the mid-'90s, and several of their members are now friends.
- Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and Slint's Spiderland, the two trope makers for Post-Rock that came out in the same year, are like night and day. While both are considered cornerstones of the genre, the two are so starkly different from each other that they inadvertently illustrate just what a nebulous phrase "post-rock" actually is. Laughing Stock is a lush, jazzy record that uses diverse instrumentation and free flowing song structures to create a peaceful, spiritual, faintly melancholic atmosphere. It was made by a British band that already had several commercially successful New Wave Music albums under their belt, and featured over a dozen studio musicians playing everything from saxophone to viola. Spiderland meanwhile is a sparse, cold, eerie record made in a basement by a bunch of Louisville punks (who only made one prior album of little real note), which uses unusual song structures, deadpan vocals, and skeletal production to create an oppressive, macabre atmosphere. If Laughing Stock is a beautiful, Edenic garden, then Spiderland is an old, rusting railroad bridge standing over a swamp.
- "Welcome to the Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance is one to "Bohemian Rhapsody". Both are multi-part rock operas written from the perspective of a man about to die reflecting on his life and what will happen after he's gone. However, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is an unrelentingly bleak song narrated by a murderer on (presumably) death row, who realizes that he had nothing of value in his life to begin with and wonders if it would have been better to have never been born at all. The story in "Welcome to the Black Parade" is much more bittersweet, centering around a cancer patient who defiantly refuses to let the spectre of impending death break his spirit and takes solace in the realization that he'll still live on in the memory of those whose lives he has touched.
- Olivia Rodrigo:
- Her song "Good 4 U" was famously determined to be similar enough to Paramore's "Misery Business" that Hayley Williams and Josh Farro received writing credits and royalties from it. Beyond their similar Pop Punk styles, however, the lyrics paint two completely different portraits of an affair, to the point where "Good 4 U" can easily be read as an Answer Song. "Misery Business" is about Hayley stealing another girl's boyfriend while calling her a slut, while "Good 4 U" is about Olivia telling off a boy who dumped her for another girl. Both songs are even very specific about the fact that the boy waited two weeks after the breakup before rebounding with the new girl. In the mashup that highlighted the similarities between the two songs, Hayley and Olivia sound like they're in the middle of a heated argument.
- Her song "Teenage Dream" is this to Katy Perry's song of the same title. The Perry song is an uptempo celebration of youth and falling in love, with lines like "No regrets, just love" and "You and I will be young forever." The Rodrigo song is a downbeat ballad all about regrets and realizing that you can't be young forever, along with yearning to be taken seriously despite your youth. The Title Drop in the respective songs illustrates it well.Katy Perry: Feel like I'm livin' a teenage dream... Be your teenage dream tonight
Olivia Rodrigo: I'm sorry that I couldn't always be your teenage dream
- Her song "Good 4 U" was famously determined to be similar enough to Paramore's "Misery Business" that Hayley Williams and Josh Farro received writing credits and royalties from it. Beyond their similar Pop Punk styles, however, the lyrics paint two completely different portraits of an affair, to the point where "Good 4 U" can easily be read as an Answer Song. "Misery Business" is about Hayley stealing another girl's boyfriend while calling her a slut, while "Good 4 U" is about Olivia telling off a boy who dumped her for another girl. Both songs are even very specific about the fact that the boy waited two weeks after the breakup before rebounding with the new girl. In the mashup
- The Beatles 1968 song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" is a happy song about a guy who falls in love with a free-spirited girl that takes whatever life throws at her with a smile. He provides for the family, while she stays at home, pursuing her passion of music as a hobby. Directly inspired by it is "Why Don't You Get a Job?" by The Offspring, in which people being breadwinners in a similar relationship grow frustrated with their partners, perceived as parasites, and demand they find a job. It should be noted "Why Don't You Get a Job?" was released thirty years after "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and by the time when one partner with a job being able to provide for the a decent life of a couple or an entire family was becoming increasingly impossible.
- This video by James Parker for The Atlantic has him setting out to find the antithesis to Lady Gaga, and he ultimately settles on Susan Boyle, who had her big break around the same time as Gaga. When Gaga burst onto the scene, she was a young, middle-class American woman who sang dance-pop made largely with electronic instruments. Raised on Broadway musicals and geek culture, her public image was flamboyant, highly sexualized, openly queer, and larger than life, often skewering the conventions of contemporary pop music and celebrity in avant garde fashion. Boyle, meanwhile, was a middle-aged, working-class Scottish woman whose music relied chiefly on her powerful organic vocals. Having come up through her appearance on Britain's Got Talent, she cultivated a down-home image of being an ordinary, frumpy, plainly-dressed, faithfully Catholic woman made good. Oddly enough given all that, both Gaga and Boyle are fans of one another.
- "I'm a Marionette" by ABBA is a complete antithesis to "Thank You for the Music", the two songs respectively serving as the end and beginning of a "mini-musical" from ABBA: The Album titled The Girl with the Golden Hair. Both are told from a perspective of a female singer, but on "Thank You for the Music" the narrator is proud of her role and very happy that she can sing to others, while on "I'm a Marionette" the narrator feels extremely miserable and disdainful of her position, which she compares to being somebody else's puppet and considers a disgrace. What's more, the narrator is implied to be the same girl, just a few years down the road after getting exactly what she wanted.
- In The '90s, Alanis Morissette's creative trajectory was almost the mirror image of Kylie Minogue's. Both were female pop singers from English-speaking Commonwealth countries (Australia for Minogue and Canada for Morissette) who started their careers with very '80s-sounding synth-driven Teen Pop (even though Morissette debuted in the early '90snote ) that caused them to be seen as their countries' respective answers to the likes of Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, only to evolve their sound as their careers took off. The difference was the direction they went in doing so. Minogue, starting with 1990's Rhythm of Love, embraced Electronic Dance Music in the '90s and an increasingly flamboyant and sexualized style to go with it, coming to be seen as a modern-day disco diva and consequently enjoying her greatest success in Europe. 1997's Impossible Princess, her most personal album lyrically, was also her most divisive, though fans have warmed up to it since. Morissette, on the other hand, pulled away from pop music in favor of an Alternative Rock sound and Darker and Edgier lyrics and image starting with 1995's Jagged Little Pill, which quickly made her known for intensely personal, confessional songwriting, and while she enjoyed a measure of success in Europe that Minogue didn't in the US, her biggest market was always North America.
- The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, two of the most notable electronic ensembles of The '90s, and considered the trope codifiers for the popular, yet short-lived Big Beat scene. Despite those descriptors however, both groups couldn't be more different from each other; The Prodigy was brash and chaotic, something that was reflected in their controversial rebellious image at the time and their energetic, gritty rave-inspired sound, which combines elements of breakbeat, Hip-Hop and Punk Rock. The Chemical Brothers by comparison were more laid back and had a more layered sound, as the duo took cues from Hip-Hop and Psychedelic Rock for their music while retaining their dance roots. This is especially highlighted in their most successful albums, the former's The Fat of the Land and the latter's Dig Your Own Hole, both released in 1997.
- Beyonce's cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene is exact opposite of the original song. Original is a song of woman desperatelly begging titular Jolene to not steal her husband from her, while Beyonce's version is a woman confidently telling Jolene she won't be able to come between her and her husband.
