The Chatterbox, Random Music Discussion

Couldn’t find another place to mention the playlist some co-worker started, including Don’t Stand so Close to Me, Staying Alive, Toxic, Bad Medicine by John Bon Jovi, Harder to Breathe...

I’d throw in Bad Blood, Die Young, two songs named Fever and a song by Lady Gaga called The Cure.

"Infected" by Bad Religion comes immediately to mind.

Throw in all the tracks with "Sick" in the title, "Sicko Mode", "Down With the Sickness", "Sick, Sick, Sick", "I'm So Sick", etc.

Also, there's at least couple of songs titled "Virus". The Thunderstone track even specifically describes a scenario where carelessness leads to the collapse of society, even if it is technically about a computer virus rather than a biological one.

So it's more subtle, but I've noticed that, except for a verse that heavily implies radiation as the cause, "We Will Become Silhouettes" by The Postal Service now sounds a lot like someone self-isolating and/or living in a state that's on lockdown. Especially:

I've got a cupboard with cans of food

Filtered water and pictures of you

And I'm not coming out till this is all over

I wanted to walk through the empty streets

And feel something constant under my feet

But all the news reports reccomended that I stay indoors

Edited by MikeK on Apr 20th 2020 at 10:45:11 AM

Then there's Alice Cooper's Poison:

"I wanna kiss you but your lips are venomous poison, your poison running through my veins"

How about the Dead Kennedys' Government Flu?

I've also felt Nine Inch Nails' "Every Day is Exactly the Same" in a completely new way recently.

So I was wondering, is it possible for a song to convey a message if it's totally instrumental or has no vocals? I dont mean to set a mood, but a message that the writer is trying to say.

I think it really depends on how you define 'message' and 'mood.' I feel like a lot of Ravel's music is good at conveying a very clear image and story (which maybe goes beyond 'mood' but doesn't fit 'message') without having any vocals. If you specifically mean political message, the only thing I can think of is postcolonialism in music. The choice of what instruments to include and what Western or traditional rules to follow in music can certainly send a message.

Edited by indigoJay on May 16th 2020 at 8:29:44 AM

So I've been noticing that for the longest time, the most succesful artists in pop (and rap for that matter) music are solo artists (looking at the Billboard charts here and it's mainly solo acts). Why arent there many pop groups out there anymore (obviously for rock and metal, there are still more groups than solo acts, but that's a different genre)? Do artists find it easier to do music on their own?

Most pop artists are discovered and managed by producers. Pop music's main strength is perhaps the ability to adapt to various musical trends, sometimes in a very short timespan. It's hard to do that with a full band, unless it's a boy band/girl group with all singers. So instead producers take someone who can sing, maybe play guitar or some other popular instrument, and hire session musicians to record as required. Besides, pop also involves building an image, and that is also easier to do with one person front and center. That's why pop bands with rigid line-ups usually reside in indie pop where they don't have to follow fashion that much and can choose how to manage their stuff.

This. It's not necessarily that artists find it easier to make music on their own, but managing an individual is far easier. The off-mainstream music scene is still chock full of pop groups.

I was going to put this in the US Politics thread, but figured it might work better here, the New Radicals are reuniting to play the Inauguration:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/new-radicals-reunion-biden-inauguration-parade-1115838/

At the same time that's very cool but also realizing that New Radicals haven't been a thing for 22 years makes me feel very old.

Alright I want to ask if anyone has any knowledge of translating Japanese. I want to look into the lyrics of two or three t+pazolite songs to see what they are exactly about (I have an inkling from the PV of one of them and some Youtube comments, but I kinda want to dig deeper into them)

I apologize if this is the wrong place for such a query.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 19th 2021 at 11:23:42 AM

The new Weezer album is kinda their take on Baroque Pop, so I've been diving into that genre a bit lately. I mainly just made a Spotify list of individual tracks that fit the genre, but sometime soon I want to re-listen to Odessey and Oracle, Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina, etc. The former has always been a "summer" album to me, but it's cold enough here that I could listen and wish it were summer.

I have this weird concept for a band/album that I suspect hasn't really been done: Make up a Fake Band where the backstory is that they had their heyday near the end of one decade and then were spending a lot of the next decade trying to play catchup with different trends/production styles because of Executive Meddling, then have the only album be a supposed Greatest Hits that runs chronologically. I specifically thought of this while trying to listen to all the studio Cheap Trick albums, so yeah, let's say the first five tracks are power pop/arena rock, then you get a Power Ballad, a couple stabs at New Wave Music with a bunch of synthesizer overdubs, a Glam Metal track or two, etc. Closest thing I can think of is the This is Spın̈al Tap soundtrack, which not only pretended there was a whole fictional discography, but gave them in-universe Early-Installment Weirdness where they were a Rolling Stones-esque blues rock band ("Gimme Some Money") and a psychedelic pop band ("Listen To The Flower People") before finding their identity as hard rock/ heavy metal.

Daft Punk have called it quits after 28 years.

Addendum: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Feb 22nd 2021 at 7:35:14 AM

RIP.

noooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo

I'm here to post an announcement that over in the Trope Repair Shop we're overhauling some of the music genre and index pages. If you like talking about what counts as what genre, we'd love your input.

So, I've been listening to mainly albums from 2003 for a while, Todd in the Shadows just covered St. Anger for Trainwreckords, and this caused me to notice 2003 is the year with the most "trainwreckords" to its name so far (St Anger, Madonna's American Life, and Jewel's 0304). It's also the year Liz Phair released her self-titled album, which was critically reviled at the time for being mainstream pop-rock instead of indie. Was there something about the musical climate that year that made all these established acts more apt to put out uncharacteristic albums? It does seem like a common thread in all of them is trying to chase trends ^note St. Anger doesn't seem like it was aiming for "hits" exactly, more like trying to keep up with younger metal bands - the detuned riffs, absence of solos, and even the infamous "sewer pipe" snare tone could all be read as an attempt to be more "Nu Metal"

Edited by MikeK on Mar 25th 2021 at 6:30:00 AM

Recently, my playlist have been exclusively playing hinayukki songs on repeat, because she's by far the best Vocaloid composer I know.

She's mostly praised for how realistic she manages to make the Vocaloid voicebanks sound, but I'd also like to comment on how seamlessly she is able to have multiple vocals (including Self-Backing Vocalist) to create harmony and chorus effect, which is hard to pull off even with human singers.

I've heard other Vocaloid songs attempt the same, and many of them just sounds painful...they sound like unwanted echoes coming from poor audio feedback, or like those bad mashups where the sounds just clash badly with one another even though the vocals are technically singing the exact same thing.

Edited by Adept on Mar 29th 2021 at 12:02:15 AM

Has streaming killed the idea of the Greatest Hits album? I mean, several huge acts from the previous decade have enough songs to fill a hits album (Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande are the first ones to come to mind), but would they sell when people can just make a playlist of their favorite songs?

I feel like it probably has. In fact, maybe the only thing keeping it afloat post-filesharing was the practice of recording a couple new tracks for a greatest hits.

I'm listening to full studio discographies of different bands lately and it's putting odd parallels between the careers of otherwise unrelated acts:

Devo and The B-52s: idiosyncratic guitar-based debut ^note Are We Not Men? / self-titled quickly followed up by an album that's generally considered good but "more of the same" ^note Duty Now For The Future / Wild Planet, albums with mixed reputation among fans due to increasing use of synths and drum machines ^note Freedom Of Choice through Oh No!, Mesopotamia through Bouncing Off The Satelites, Dork Age ^note Total Devo and Smooth Noodle Maps / Good Stuff... Although the comparison kinda falls apart because this same era of B52s also produced Cosmic Thing, one of their most commercially successful albums with their two most famous hits, long period with occasional live performances and the odd soundtrack appearance but no new studio albums, followed by a "comeback" album around the end of the 2000s that attempts to capitalize on New Wave Music / Post-Punk revival by marrying their signature style with more modern production ^note Something For Everybody / Funplex . No B-52s equivalent of Dev 2.0, but maybe Disney should have approached them and had B-52.0's instead? The idea of a preteen doing Fred Schneider's schtick is oddly hilarious to me now.

For a more unlikely pairing, The Clash and The Beastie Boys: Started out punk rock before expanding to increasingly eclectic influences, had a big hit with a Misaimed Fandom ("Fight For Your Right"/"Rock The Casbah"). Sandinista! and Hello Nasty have a similar vibe to me - unexpected guest vocalists, some songs are immediately recognizable as their signature sound while other tracks you'd never guess were by the same band, in general no two tracks sound alike, biggest weakness is its length. Thankfully there's no Beastie equivalent of Cut the Crap.

Edited by MikeK on May 16th 2021 at 6:46:28 AM

Do you think an instrumental could stand a chance to be a big hit again? The last instrumental to even get much substantial radio play was Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen's rendition of the Mission Impossible theme (to tie into the 1996 movie), and some more adventurous Modern Rock stations did give Duel of the Fates (from the Phantom Menace) some airplay, but those were both in the 90s and neither was exactly a top 10 hit.

"Sandstorm" did well in Europe despite barely cracking the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. However, that also was around the turn of the millennium.