Transferrable poptimism?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

When you start exploring a new genre do you make any assumptions about whether the best-known acts/records/choons in that genre are likely to be the best or not? Do you think, for instance, that there must be a load of obscure better records lurking behind the famous ones that the Real Heads know about?

Of course I think for most people the answer is "depends" - but what does it depend on? For instance, here are two statements someone might make:

"James Brown isn't actually that good - there are loads of other obscure funk acts who are way better than him."

"Incantation aren't actually that good - there are loads of other obscure pan pipe moods acts who are way better than them."

I think statement #1 would raise eyebrows and statement #2 would be more generally accepted as likely to be true.

(I started on this train of thought because I realised when answering a thread on sukrat that for all I knew Merzbow might be a huge noise sell out and despised by all the real noise fans.)

Comments

[koganbot]

Well, "fame" and "better" aren't the only issues here, and the meaning of "crossover" isn't always clear.

James Brown, for instance, wasn't merely making the best funk music of 1965 and 1996, he was making the only funk music of 1965 and 1966, though this is using a definition of "funk" that means "what James Brown did starting in 1965 and 1966." And actually "funk" was in the language both in jazz and soul and meaning other stuff as well, and though I was too young to know what was going on with genre terms (and too ignorant to have heard much James Brown), I think JB was generally classed as "soul" along with a lot of not-as-funky dudes. So in the years when he and his band were inventing funk, if there were loads of obscure funk bands in the of any quality, whether better or worse, I don't know about them. But James Brown took funk to the extreme where it basically was so rhythmic through and through that the pattern of melody on top and rhythm underneath no longer held. And I can imagine someone who basically likes the funk a lot but doesn't want it to outshout the melody, so he actually prefers James Brown right before Brown developed funk full blown, or prefers some not-as-funky funk from Dyke & The Blazers or the less-funky-still performers on Atlantic and Stax-Volt etc., and when Sly and Kool and Earth Wind & Fire and the P-Funk mob all come along, he might prefer them to James Brown for all the melody and guitar solos and rock they added, even if they had to sudbue some of the funk to do so.

And when the Stones and Yardbirds came along in '63 and '64 they were pretty much the only ones who sounded they way they did (I occasionally read attempts to put the Pretty Things in their class, but I've never been able to hear this; and maybe the early records by Them were already being released). But come 1965 there were a whole slew of garage bands that to some extent or other got the Stones and Yardbirds sound, often aping the Yardbirds' instrumentals and the Stones' vocals. And actually I have heard the claim that a lot of the garage bands were better - more desperate or sincere or scrappy than what they were imitating. The Stones and the Yardbirds were more forceful, so I don't go for this argument really, at least in comparison to the Stones, except for occasional one-shots that were up there in quality. (Keith Relf's vocals were a relative weakness with the Yardbirds, so sometimes I'd prefer a Yardbirds' imitation. And when Yardbirds-like drones and crescendos seeped into the Kinks' sound in 1965 this not only made the Kinks better, the Kinks' superior singing and tunes arguably made them better than the Yardbirds, though never as powerful as the Yardbirds.) But I think the real argument is that the whole mess of music, good and bad, the Stones and Yardbirds and Chocolate Watch Band and Remains and Mysterians and Seeds and Electric Prunes and Count Five and whoever was playing the dance in your local high-school gym etc. etc. was a lot better than the Stones and Yardbirds presented in isolated majesty. And also, if we're thinking of musical events rather than timeless sounds that we're now hearing on CD, the bands taking the music into the potentially hostile environments of high schools and local dances might have been more significant than the Stones and Yardbirds playing better in the safety of London bohemia. ('Cept I'd hardly call the life of the Stones in the '60s safe.) Don't know how much of any of this comes across in the grooves of the old records.

I'd say there were lots of freestyle and NY and Miami dance records in the '80s that were as good or better than Madonna, but Madonna - maybe owing to fame and money - was able to do well consistently, rather than just putting out one or two good tracks.