You know, I’ve not done a post like this in a while, and frankly I’m in the right mood for it now. It all started with a conversation at work, where I was somewhat castigated for daring to not like Pink Floyd. As if we can’t all have different opinions.
Needless to say, like many others, there are various bands I simply Don’t Get. Here are ten of them, there are probably more, but these are ten that are seemingly treated with the utmost reverence for so many.
Obviously: each to their own, and as always, these are my opinions. Which so-called Sacred Cows you can’t stand, I’d love to hear about.
This is the band that started the thinking about this list, and I sometimes feel like I’m totally alone in not caring one jot about this band. I’ve tried listening to them, many times, I’ve listened to many friends extolling the virtues of this album or that album, and all I hear are dull, overlong, proggy tracks that simply don’t click with me at all, with an overblown sense of purpose and seriousness that frankly I’m surprised hasn’t been parodied more.
Yeah, alright, so Phil Collins is hardly a sacred cow nowadays, but Genesis certainly appear to be, most of all in their seventies heyday. Another band with unbelievably overblown concept albums and seemingly never-ending songs, after Peter Gabriel jumped ship (into a fascinating and never dull solo career) they became a pop-rock band with great videos…and well, little else. As for Phil Collins’ solo career, is there any other artist who perhaps accurately sums up the fatuousness and greed of the eighties in the UK?
I’m with The Dude here. A band who released albums that inexplicably sold in their millions, one song among a few others that will never fucking go away (Hotel California), and possibly the most nakedly “for the money” reunion of any band.
Aside from the Black Album, which admittedly as stadium metal goes is pretty solid, I can’t actually think of any Metallica songs I actually like. Elder metal statesmen who have, from what I can tell, effectively kept much of their reputation for twenty years based on that album (see also Slayer, to a lesser extent) – it sure as hell can’t be for anything they’ve released since, nor for their fighting against the tide of digital music in the most boneheaded way. Actually, that latter point is very important, I think: they acted like fucking luddites in that “battle” – when instead if they had thought a bit, much like the wider music industry at the time, actually – there was a genuine chance to connect with their audience, instead they made criminals out of them. Ironic, I guess, that they are now on Spotify after all…
I’m sorry, but cool stage outfits do not automatically make great songs.
I have never understood why Goths hold Wayne Hussey in such reverence. A poor-mans Sisters of Mercy, with none of the intrigue – and none of the tunes, either.
Having offended a few goths, let turn my guns on an indie band many of my friends seem to love. But why? Martin Rossiter’s Gene always seemed to be aiming for sweeping grandeur, with a biting undertow (like The Smiths, perhaps), but I found that it always rather grated, falling rather short of the heights it was aiming for and instead sounding really quite mundane. (Gene’s appearance in this list was down to their appearance in the NME’s “Ultimate Britpop Playlist“. Yes, and I know the NME are hardly on the pulse anymore, but…)
Daisy loves these guys, but for me they were always a duo that I never got into. Mrs Robinson I discovered through the Lemonheads’ early nineties cover, and listening a bit further turned me off pretty much entirely. Whimsical folky stuff, I guess, was never my thing. On the other hand, I was introduced to Paul Simon’s solo work by my dad in the eighties, and still listen to the worldly brilliance of Graceland regularly.
My stepmother used to adore this act, so I had probably be careful what I say here… but really, they never did anything for me. Their populist disco material always seemed a bit naff, to me – there was far more interesting stuff out of that time (Chic, for a start, whose unbelievable peaks in the late 70s formed the bedrock of much early hip-hop and dance music, and indeed still does), and the material before that is just rather forgettable. Different strokes…
No student room when I was at Uni – and probably for years before and since – was without a picture of Bob with a spliff, or some variation on this, and as soon as anyone chose to “smoke”, it was time again for Bob Marley to be put on the fucking stereo. For a singer so political, and so energised, it all seems such a shame he is known to most younger people more for the fact that he liked to smoke a spliff. Either way, I never did get into reggae, so his music does absolutely nothing for me, I’m afraid…