>I was using the
> charts to make my point at the vapid state of rock and roll and the
> music industry in general.
>Though I've gotta say that from a purely musical perspective
> and my own personal opinion, most obscure music is obscure for good
> reason.
> A lot of it is utter rubbish. Most of them couldn't write a
> decent song to save their lives.
Bollocks. OK, it's true of a lot of some cult rock faves, but I've got a
box full of 45s that never hit the charts. Just by the sheer number of
singles stuck out in the 60s, even if all the good ones had hit the Top
40, there would still have been stuff that couldn't make it.
> Yes, any music that you haven't heard could be called NEW music.
> >However
> if you limit what you listen to to 60's stuff (not that I'm saying >YOU
> do), how can we expect good music to be produced again.
Or notice it when it IS?
>Wouldn't it be nice if >you
>turned on MTV or the radio and actually saw/heard something of >value?
Not really - I think MTV, along with music on adverts, music as a
background to extreme sports shows, movie soundtracks that are
compilations of priority promotions - all these have done nothing but
devalue music as something people LISTEN to. MTV = bands making a video
that makes an impact rather than a song. Radio went the same way years
before (DJs castrated with playlists, the priorities set by the
wheedling threats/promises of radio pluggers and the needs of the
advertisers). Was it a coincidence that the mod era of the 60s was (in
the UK) the era of pirate radio, rather than commercial radio and Radio
One? Or that most of the companies making records back then only made
records.
> Something that was of the same artistic merit such as that which >was
> produced in the 60's?
But there is. Lots of it. It just doesn't have the same cultural affect
it did then, and there's so much more crap stuff being heavily pushed -
lowest common denominator shite flogged to the largest audience. And
every time that's challenged - every time something rises up from a
street level enough to start making money, or worse still, eat into the
sales of the big companies, they buy it out (I mean almost all those
obscure 60s labels sold their catalogs on to the big companies).
>Wouldn't it be nice if the two bands you
> mentioned, Embrooks and Conquerors were able to force the general
> >public
> to raise the bar of what is considered good and worthy? The music
> industry puts out crap because we let them.
Well you're the one working in it; I'm the one spending my hard earned
on stuff they're not pushing.
> The industry doesn't >sign
> new bands of any worth because we, the buying public, don't seem to
> care.
Most of the people I work with, who aren't 'involved' with anything like
the mod scene have fairly decent taste in music - you're obvious big
stuff - Beatles, Clash, Nirvana, Motown chartbusters - they just don't
put effort in (like us obsessives) into searching out stuff - things
have to get pretty big before they cross their radar. In the 60s that
was a lot easier to achieve (at least for the white British copyists).
As for whether they were playing contemporary music back then - just how
old was the blues in the 60s? And what about folk-rock (about the same
time that funk was being invented)?
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