BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Radio & Music >

what's your musical history

  
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:49 / 23.11.01
prompted by something Ty said in another thread about having 'done massive research' into his big thing...

what in the massive history of the development of pop music do you thing is the big stuff: events, names, bands, styles?

would it be Mersey Beat, Skiffle? Beatles? Stones? Larry Levan? The Hacienda? LOuis ARrmstrong? Cabaret Voltaire? Roots Manuva?

what would your musical timeline look like?
 
 
rizla mission
15:03 / 23.11.01
Well the big red dots on my musical timeline would probably appear over Detroit 1968-71, New York 1975-80 & various diverse locations in Northern USA 1986-94.

Hopelessly one dimensional view of musical development, obviously, but there's no denying that those places and periods probably account for something like 2 thirds of my record collection..
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
15:17 / 23.11.01
1967: DJ Kool Herc moves from Jamiaca to the Bronx, NYC, and invents hip-hop shortly thereafter.
 
 
Ronald Thomas Clontle
15:21 / 23.11.01
well, from the 60s in the US, the 'free jazz' scene in NYC and Chicago is a really big deal - Coleman, Ayler, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Coltrane, Davis, Mingus, Taylor...

At the same time, you've got the defining works of Cage, Reich, Riley, etc going on...
the beginnings of electronic experimentation and composition, the introduction of zen and chance to composition...

then there is the entire Motown records/r+b scene, James Brown, Marvin Gaye... and the Detroit proto-punk scene in the late 60s along with the hippies in the West Coast doing full-on psychedelia - all those weird Californian experimental hippy bands like West Coast Art Pop Experimental Band and United States of America. Silver Apples in NYC really make the breakthrough of fusing the electronic experiments with the psychedelic hippy vibe, and no one really catches up with them til the 90s.

God, this isn't even mentioning all of the innovations going on over in the UK and abroad...

you know what? I'm just going to stop here. This is just to big to tackle... just getting through the 60s alone is too much of an undertaking...
 
 
Not Here Still
15:49 / 23.11.01
Big post about musical history generally not being worthwhile just lost; might do it agin when I'm not pissed off.

I'll just name a few inventions for now - the electric guitar; the cross fader and pitch-adjustable record deck; the Akai sampler; and the Roland 303.
 
 
Cop Killer
19:37 / 23.11.01
1963 - 1968, Chicago IL, US -- it was the world capital of punk rock (before punk rock was brought down to bands trying to be the Pistols or the Ramones). Loud, intense, fast raw garage rock (or rawk, if you wanna spell like a moron) came from here and not much else.
1968 - 1972 Detroit MI, US -- MC5 and the Stooges lead a pack of maximum r'n'r (not the zine) simpletons through blistering, fast, raw, blues-y rock that expirements slightly with psychadelia (more so the Stooges and their ilk than the MC5 crowd) that is harder and faster than anything else that came before it.
1972 - 1981 New York NY, US -- From the odd glam rock stylings of the New York Dolls and Aerosmith (yes, Aerosmith, had they broken up after their second album they'd be punk rock heroes too) came a newer more unpolished and shocking form of rock'n'roll from which came the likes of the Dictators (started in 1974, first LP in 1975) and after them the Ramones (started in 1974 first LP in 1976), who many people [and from time to time even myself] call the first punk band, and their album the first punk rock album. Following the Ramones and the Dictators came an explosion of bands: Television, Patti Smith Group, Richard Hell and the Vodoids, the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads (who are one of the more important bands of the last quarter century), Ohio exports the Dead Boys and countless more who I'm forgetting right now. There was no specific New York sound, all these bands had a unique sound that is hard to imitate(with the exception of the Ramones and Dead Boys, but even with these bands, it's hard to capture the true feel of them, or something). Punk gave way to hardcore in about '79, and the DC scene influenced a lot of the hardcore in NY, most notable of these bands is the Beastie Boys, who started off their careers trying to be Bad Brains.

I'll probably do more later.

[ 24-11-2001: Message edited by: Cop Killer ]
 
 
agapanthus
07:31 / 24.11.01
I was pretty much a confirmed sugary pop head as a teenager, Stevie Wonder's funk and balladry tripped my trigger,
"Don't go breaking my heart" Sir Elton John & Kiki Dee is a favouraite from this period, until punk and post-punk started to filter down under in the late seventies.
Australian bands like the Angels, the radiators, were great to get pissed to in the suburban beer barns of my later teen years, soon replaced by a strain of more 'new wave' influenced Aussie pub-rock, such as Pel Mel, Do re Mi, The Models, Hunters and Collectors, Laughing Clowns, Birthday Party. A wild old time of energy, coolness, invention and opening up of the field. In the early eighties in sydney, you could head out on a Saturday night and see three great bands at three different venues.

On the O/S front I fell in love with Talking Heads, The Police, especially the Jam, Gang of 4, discovered Beefheart's Trout Mask, and got gloomily captivated by Joy Division for a spell.
Seeing John Cale live in Sydney, solo, in'83 was an epiphany of the musical power and honesty, beauty and rawness that one man, his voice and guitar/ piano could produce, that I have never fully recovered from.

The mid to late 80s were a dark period, where the buzz and excitement of the post-punk movement fizzled out into shoulder pads and white bread disco. Paul Weller went all Absolute Beginners, and Green from Scritti Politti (i adored their 1st LP) tried to meld (i understand NOW) Derrida with fluffy sugar. The smiths saved me, and made me feel like the shy, sensitive teenager I always knew myself to be. Boo Hoo!

I disengaged from the MTV age of Whitney and Bryan Adams, and found refuge in learning how to play piano, and boning up on the jazz records that my ol' Mum had played when I was just a tacker: Miles, Mingus, Duke, Sarah Vaughan.

I got lost in jazz land till the late 80s until I tried my hand at performing, joining a reggae covers band, learning the double skank, mon, playing UB4O, Tosh and Marley covers, feeling the mojo rise, the bass dance and the boredom, eventually, set in - do you know what its like to skank all night long?

I fancied myself, by then, as a hot jazz-fusion sort of guy,eg Chick Corea in Return to Forever, and enlisted in a rap/hip hop band with some 'shit hot' musos. WE played like Earth Wind and Fire meets Young MC, you get the idea. Another covers band, that was fun at first, but I knew something was missing. I was, still, at heart a post-punker, with a sugar-melody soul.And these Muso cats were mercenary types, who thought an overdriven guitar was 'dumb rock', played by meatheads who hadn't learnt the craft of a Nile Rodgers (Chic)rhythm.

I'll be back.
 
 
A
07:31 / 24.11.01
R
A
M
O
N
E
S
 
 
mondo a-go-go
08:13 / 26.11.01
wow. so none of you think that any music from before 1963 is worth mentioning? at all?

fuuuuck.
 
 
No star here laces
08:13 / 26.11.01
(desperately trying to think about early stuff she likes)

I guess I'd start with Germany in the 1820s because of Schubert's lieder (simple songs with little accompaniment, at least compared with choral and operatic works), which are not only beautiful and relaxing, but could be said to have set the modern idiom of the 'song' as something composed (as opposed to folk music) and something that usually tells a story of love. But I'm bullshitting hopelessly with the last bit - I don't know the history of lieder really, just that I like 'em.

Next I reckon would come the Appalachian mountains just after the turn of the century when (again, I'm guessing - 's difficult to talk about non-recorded music) country/bluegrass styles emerge as a distinct form whereby a mix of old standards and new songs are written/interpreted to be played at celebratory events where dancing occurs. Also people play violins faster than previously thought possible.

(misses out the blues due to lack of interest in beer commercials)

1950s - three people make all the running in the Lovelaces canon. Little Richard for being one crazy motherfucker and for inventing motown style horns, for which the world is still grateful. Also for being the first of many black, gay stars to gain the acceptance of white americans through some weird inversion of their day to day attitudes. Ray Charles for his inspired combining of the energy and pace of roots country music with the emotion and delivery of blues to create something altogether more interesting. And Elvis just for being Elvis.

Mid 60s detroit. Otis, Diana, Marvin, Stevie, Smokey, Aretha. Like I even need to explain this one.

Mid 60s chicago. Okeh! records and the like (much aided and abetted by Curtis Mayfield) produce a chunkier, more forceful version of what's going on in Detroit, with more limited success. The first emergence of regional, more underground versions of a commercially successful style.

1966. Funk is born, or at least named.

1973-1975 Philadelphia. The golden age of Philly Soul. Gamble and Huff can do no wrong as their silky arrangements and general smooth sound provide a glitz and a glamour to black music that was never there before. Philly soul showed that music could make the underclasses impossibly glamorous, should they so wish, and that it didn't need to be all dirty and grimy. Ever since then poor kids have done their best to act rich and smooth, and rich kids have done their best to act poor and scruffy.

1977. The bronx. The usual 'official' date for the start of hip hop. Ten years after he entered the country Kool Herc is rocking block parties and has taken two copies of 'funky drummer' so he can play the best bit - i.e. the drum break, over and over again while some bloke rants down a microphone.

1979-1984. Paradise Garage. Some people say '74-'78 was the golden age of disco, before all the glitz and cocaine fucked it all up. I disagree - the best years were after it got fucked up, once every white racist in america loathed the music with a passion and disco sucks tshirts were all the rage. That's when the love came out. When the only people making the music were the ones who had a real passion for creating this other world that was theirs alone. Arthur Russell, Francois K, Larry Levan and David Mancuso.

Personally I'm more worried about the fact that I haven't got any milestones later than 1984 - what happened?
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
10:03 / 26.11.01
Get some Mahler in yer. Not the abridged versions, not those "oh, look, it's the best-of!" CDs. The whole shebang. Symphony 5 or 6 - they're like a defeated Beethoven, or a not-so-overstated Strauss. For my money, the best "I hate my life, 'cos it's all futile" composer - though Gavin Bryars will occasionally give him a run for his money. Mahler is the composer's equivalent of Morrissey.

Also worth a look: Gilbert and Sullivan's work. Why? 'Cause they're socially-commentative works that remain incredibly accessible, and are probably the link between the opera of yore and the modern, often impenetrable beast of today. Precursor, perhaps, to the soap opera; fluff, but heartily enjoyable fluff with some amazing tunes packed in.

(Dates not supplied as I can't remember them offhand. Turn-of-last-century, pretty much - Mahler's earlier, I think.)

Also well worth a mention: Philip Glass. Often criticised for having a pretty obvious schtick, he's fantastic in terms of riding the space between the atonal and the lyrical; his work was a relevation of rhythmic investigation, and the use of formula and variation in composition. Also notable for reiterating the importance of modern composition through soundtrack work, and his collaborations with Robert Wilson in opera.

Christ. Garbled. More later.

[ 26-11-2001: Message edited by: Rothkoid ]
 
 
Cop Killer
07:02 / 27.11.01
1953 - 1960 -- the southern states of the USA -- the advent of rock'n'roll ("Rocket 88" by a band who I forgot the name of, but they did feature Ike Turner) and Rockabilly (by just about every artist that Sun Records put out [early Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and many others], not to mention the non-Sun artists such as Eddie Cochran ["Summertime Blues" "C'mon Everybody" "Something Else"], Gene Vincent ["Be Bop A-Lula" "Story Of the Rockers"], Mac Curtis ["Rockin' Chair"] and many many others who I can't think of off the top of my head). Also where the triumverate of rock'n'roll (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the aforementions [king of Rock] Elvis Presley) got their starts.

I'll go into thirties and fourties blues some other time, when I can think straight.
 
 
grant
17:54 / 27.11.01
In non-chronological order:

* Anything the Cramps ever covered. The whole vein of American trash culture exposed. (They even did a cover of "Mama's little baby loves shortnin', shortnin'... mama's little baby loves shortnin' bread.")
Their love of noisy, ugly, crazy stuff is echoed a few years later when Malcolm Mclaren lets these snotty, angry kids start screaming into microphones and blasting amplified guitars in his boutique's basement. The Cramps and the Ramones were doing something pretty similar, and doing it first.

* Baroque music. Especially odd renditions of baroque music. Mostly stuff I listen to streaming off the internet - mp3.com has a nice Stylus Phantasticus station somebody set up. It's when folk music started getting set down in notation, when musical forms became fixed into a pattern, yeah, but were also starting to become music in its own right and not either songs of praise or songs for dancing.

* When BB King got off the tractor in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas and headed into Memphis at about the same time Elvis did. This is a holographic journey; a microcosm of the journey of the blues from the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta going back up the river to the electric fantasyland of Chicago. John Lee Hooker did the same journey himself within his own musical career, which is why he's such a great man. You can hear it all. BB King did it in his life, but his style is sort of solidly within the electric, urban genre (although he dips into other genres). He's just more wildly popular, I think. Hard to say who's more important.

* Related musical history note: when the Moors set up camp in Spain and let the natives turn their ouds into guitars.

* When Little Richard taught the Beatles, in his own words, "how to scream like white ladies."
Another holographic moment: recapitulates Elvis taking the black music of his Tupelo childhood (and Sam Phillips' catalogue of black songwriters) and singing it for white highschoolers, recapitulates Irving Berlin leaving the Broadway theater after the night's show ended and heading into Harlem for a long, liquor-soaked jazz breakfast, recapitulates Scott Joplin and Stephen Foster bringing folk songs and whorehouse music into refined sitting rooms, recapitulates the field hands playing their version of the Irish folk songs the indentured help sang, and the white sharecroppers playing their versions of the black field hands' music - which is where country and bluegrass and rockabilly all came from.
There are echoes of this, powerfully, in Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke putting New Orleans on the world musical map after returning from Chicago, and in Jimi Hendrix doing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock.

* Paul McCartney dropping his first LSD to try to talk John Lennon down from his bad trip. Birth of psychedelia. Holographically: Mezz Mezzrow selling grass to Louis Armstrong's band, dodging the long arms of Al Capone's rum-runners and the coppers. Holographically in a different direction: Camper Van Beethoven's willingness to cover ANYTHING, from Frank Zappa to Hank Williams to Russian folk songs.

* Devo deciding to embrace the machine as an artistic statement. This may or may not have happened after Kraftwerk or Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music." It hit the charts and hit them high. Smart people stopped trying to make synthesizers sound like orchestral instruments, and let them sound like freakin' synthesizers.

[ 27-11-2001: Message edited by: grant ]
 
 
No star here laces
05:37 / 28.11.01
quote:Originally posted by grant:
* Devo deciding to embrace the machine as an artistic statement. This may or may not have happened after Kraftwerk or Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music." It hit the charts and hit them high. Smart people stopped trying to make synthesizers sound like orchestral instruments, and let them sound like freakin' synthesizers.

Might also have had more'n a little to do with Giorgio Moroder, Fred Wesley and the JBs, Funkadelic and the like using moogs and other synth sounds in funk and disco records in the mid 70s. Not to mention Lee Perry and King Tubby using simple studio tools to create machine-like effects in jamaican music around the same time. And that's not even mentioning Eric Satie...

Only quibble with an otherwise incredible post - what the music forum should be like...
 
 
Rev. Wright
11:31 / 28.11.01
Early memories of pre teen would be;
2nd Generation Ska music on Two Tone. Ghost Town by the Specials is still one of the best tunes ever.
Somewhere between JMJ and Kraftwerk came Afrka Bambataa, Planet Rock still sends shivers down my spine.
Whilst engaging my elder brothers preference for Regae and Punk (Marley and the Clash) I adopted Electro Hip Hop and New Wave.
We both agreed on Colourbox (later Marrs, Pump Up The Volume)though I continued to eat up Go Go (Pump Me Up) and Jack (proto house)
Hip Hop meant little to me when NWA came to be. (What happened to Peace, Unity, LOve and having Fun?)Hey we still got De la Soul
The late Eighties decreed Pop Will Eat Itself
and everything got messy.
I was buying Depth Charge records at the same time as Suicidal Tendencies, rocking off to the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and digging the social/political awareness of New Model Army. (Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays helped the mushrooms go down in 1990)
This twisted behaviour got me caught in the Industrial scene of Ministry, Front 242 and all that crossover in between. (Goddam I was angry)
Between now and then came DJ Shadow to convert me back to Hip Hop and now UK Hip Hop really body rocks with aware lyrics (check Skitz's album)Much more Depth Charge.
Industrial dance breakbeat became Gabba became Drum and Bass, became breakbeat again, became Big Beat, became Nu Skool, became Break Step....
....Big Phatt 12"s of Dance music
Instead of artists or labels its 3hrs+ in a good record shop and 40+ records later, 'Thank you Mr Retailer I'll take these three, please'
Albums now contain Kodo drummers, Siberian Throat Worbblers and John Spencer Blues

I thank my Brother Simon for an early awareness of music and Hippy Mick for introducing me to Can.
 
 
Jack Fear
16:16 / 28.11.01
ca. 530 BCE: The Greek philosopher Pythagoras identifies the numerical ratios between pitches on a musical scale—introducing the concept of the octave. From this perfect consonance proceeds all our notions of harmony and discord.

1504 AD: Josquin Desprez begins his stint as provost of the local church in Conde, in the Hainaut region of what is now Belgium. He will compose hundreds of works in the following years—motets, masses, and songs that mark the point at which ancient music becomes modern: our ideas of counterpoint, harmony, and chord structure begin here.

1738: The blind harper Turlough O Carolan, the Mozart of Ireland, takes his last drink.

1880: Professor James Francis Child begins his trek across England and Scotland, listening to the songs of old men and women, collecting the lyrics, passed down through the centuries by oral tradition, that will form his ten-volume collection The Popular Ballads of England and Scotland.

1895: Cecil Sharp carries on where Child left off, collecting folk songs all over the British Isles. Unlike Child, he includes the tunes as well as the words.

1914: A Greek ship carrying a cargo of bouzoukis sinks in a storm on the North Sea. Within weeks, bouzoukis start washing up on the beaches of western Ireland.

1933: John and Alan Lomax roam the Deep South with a primitive tape recorder, collecting the music that will develop into the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folksong.

1948: Moses Asch founds Folkways records, issues anything that captures his voluminous interest, and never lets a single record go out of print.

1949: Miles Davis' nonet (including John Lewis, Max Roach, and Gerry Mulligan, among others) begins its residency at the Royal Roost nightclub: the twelve sides cut by this group, which marked Miles' debut as a leader, and his first collaboration with arranger Gil Evans, would be collected as The Birth of the Cool.

[ 28-11-2001: Message edited by: Jack Fear ]
 
  
Add Your Reply