Bob Marley.

[padraig (u.s.)]

Marley is like the Beatles really. If you're into music you have to make a real effort to hear it properly again

John you know I always have a lot of respect for your opinion but come on now. absolutely not.

the idea that one is obliged to make some special effort to "hear" them if "you're into music" is exactly the problem in the first place

if someone loves Legends or whatever more power to them. why do I or anyone also need try to like that thing?

I'm not out here telling people they need to make a special effort to reevaluate disco (even tho it is one million times more culturally interesting than The Beatles)

what is going on these days? first the Doors, now this. someone fire up the Bob Dylan appreciation thread + get it over with.

(tbc I fully support the I suppose inevitable, Dissensus turn to Boomer dad rock - more power to you all)

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

for me personally, to be clear

Steppin' Razor, and Blackheart Man > every Bob Marley song from the post-Tosh/Bunny era

and while I'm at it, might as well

Yoko Ono >>>>>>>>>> The Beatles

and now I'll let luka go back to sipping mocktails by the pool and listen to something that brings uncomplicated joy, a pursuit I fully support

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

also, One Love ))))))((((((

 

[CrowleyHead]

John you know I always have a lot of respect for your opinion but come on now. absolutely not.

the idea that one is obliged to make some special effort to "hear" them if "you're into music" is exactly the problem in the first place

if someone loves Legends or whatever more power to them. why do I or anyone also need try to like that thing?

I'm not out here telling people they need to make a special effort to reevaluate disco (even tho it is one million times more culturally interesting than The Beatles)

what is going on these days? first the Doors, now this. someone fire up the Bob Dylan appreciation thread + get it over with.

(tbc I fully support the I suppose inevitable, Dissensus turn to Boomer dad rock - more power to you all)

There was a Bob Dylan thread here already eons ago.

For the record, my perspective was that John said because there is a sort of cultural inflation of Bob and The Beatles similarly that kind of tokenizes them into a personality accessory, it takes a conscious effort to go back and reappraise and appreciate them sometimes, which is entirely fair. Like I enjoy The Beatles but the perception of Loving The Beatles comes with such a weird irritating banality I wouldn't want to announce it to strangers.

 

[john eden]

John you know I always have a lot of respect for your opinion but come on now. absolutely not.

the idea that one is obliged to make some special effort to "hear" them if "you're into music" is exactly the problem in the first place

if someone loves Legends or whatever more power to them. why do I or anyone also need try to like that thing?

I'm not out here telling people they need to make a special effort to reevaluate disco (even tho it is one million times more culturally interesting than The Beatles)

what is going on these days? first the Doors, now this. someone fire up the Bob Dylan appreciation thread + get it over with.

(tbc I fully support the I suppose inevitable, Dissensus turn to Boomer dad rock - more power to you all)

Well

What I mean by that is that after your initial discovery you just hear Bob Marley all over the place so it becomes like wallpaper. Literally everywhere you go in the world you will hear Bob Marley. Which is a fine testament.

If people just like Legend then good for them, that's great. I think a lot of music geeks kind of got sick of Marley for a while though, and can then maybe rediscover it. Which is what I am doing right now, not having heard the Wailing Wailers LP or Soul Rebels in the entirety previously. (Spoiler - they have some amazing tracks but a lot of it isn't that great compared to other things coming out of JA at the time).

Much of the criticism of BMW on this thread has been "the sort of people who like it" which obviously isn't a reason not to like anything. But there are a lot of them, which means that the music can get over exposed.

There is probably an inverted snobbery going on at the moment, which is I think the hipsters of Dissensus trying to rebalance the cultural snobbery of their youth - Bob Marley not being "real" reggae for example, or reggae for people who cant handle Burning Spear or Ward 21.

 

[luka]

There is probably an inverted snobbery going on at the moment, which is I think the hipsters of Dissensus trying to rebalance the cultural snobbery of their youth - Bob Marley not being "real" reggae for example

that was basically the point of the thread yeah. it seems a worthwhile thing to do to me.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

inverted snobbery

yes that's what I was getting at above, tho I wouldn't have used the word snobbery which implies a disdain I think absent

of course going back and reevaluating things with some distance, fresher ears, a more open mind (somewhat) freed from the hangups of youth, can be very fruitful

what I object to really is this presumed universality of The Beatles, Marley, etc, that there's some obligation to reevaluate them because I guess of their omnipresence

I've heard enough to know it's not for me, plus there's a million far more interesting things to try to cram into a very brief window

if other people want to that's fantastic

 

[luka]

well im the same

i dont like the beatles and would never make the effort to 'hear them'

ive always like bob marley but have basically ignored him recently becasue ubiquity.

 

[john eden]

There’s certainly no *obligation* to re-evaluate anything. It’s just a fun thing to do.

 

[luka]

the way taste covers and uncovers things with time, like a rising and ebbing tide, is one of the most fascinating things about being into music. the way it sounds changes depending on the historical moment you are in.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

of course, that's why I was surprised when you made it sound like anyone who's into music owes it themselves to go back and try like these things

I don't like the Beatles (basically ambivalent about Marley) in the first place so why make the effort

I wouldn't want to announce it to strangers

sure. disco - I'll just stick with it as an example - similarly has a large amount of cultural baggage, if not quite the same, was massively commercially popular and almost universally hated/disdained by critics, and is something I never in a million years would've given any amount of time to as a kid, yet here I am semi-regularly proselytizing for it and that's an effort I'm happy to make, to hear past the cultural baggage.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the way taste covers and uncovers things with time, like a rising and ebbing tide, is one of the most fascinating things about being into music

it surely is

with the internet and the immediately available of all things I do think taste has come somewhat unhinged from time but the cultural metanarrative is still massive

 

[luka]

why does a genre become ripe for reappraisal? why does a particular aspect, or particular aspects, of the music of the past suddenly start resonating in the present? i dont think it's easy to say.

corsepy was saying recently that the '8-s used to be the most unfashionable decade and now it is the most fashionable. but it's more than that. it's that the unfashionable aspects of the '80s became fashionable.
not marshall jefferson, egyptian lover and juan atkins.

 

[luka]

there's a certain amount of swing from pole to pole. reacting to a sensibility which has held sway for long enough to become stifling. but a lot of it is much more nuanced and interesting than that.

 

[CrowleyHead]

I mean genre reappraisal doesn't exist in the 'normal world' to a degree. Disco just conventionally sucks, rock is essentially good, etc. etc. I get what padraig is saying about how these aren't necessities to go about living and thinking for individuals but at the same time there's sort of conventional cultural expectations placed around certain music. Which we're all guilty of, how many times is Corpse gonna presume Beethoven is smart people music when by Classical Music Standards (as opposed to Classical Period or whatever) that's basically saying a Clash song is the peak of music. Not his fault (and not that I just want to tease Corpsey here to illustrate a point), it's just what's in the air. It's not about just baggage about the listeners sometimes, certain music gets weaponized into society and used to stratify people culturally, and that can devalue the music so viciously for someone that it's unfair to the music's strengths and possibilities.

 

[Leo]

been said before and not rocket science but sometimes people who lived through particular eras and trends have a negative perception of them for whatever reasons, whereas a younger person might embrace them because they didn't live through the time and don't have the same exposure to all the associated baggage.

some "older" people have no interest in disco (or yacht rock, or bellbottoms, or square-toed shoes, or shag haircuts, or whatever) because they still carry negative associations from the time but a 22-year old bushwick hipster who's disconnected from all those associations sees the the era/trend through a different cultural lens. in some cases, the young ones might like it on its face, or in the annoyingly ironic "so uncool that it's cool" way, the informed contrarian, etc.

at the risk of getting all retromania (and going further off topic), it's interesting to consider why and when things cycle back to coolness. i used to think the action-reaction pendulum swing was pretty much just time based (20 years seems to be a reliable timeframe) but maybe it's also got to do with people's longing for their youth as mortality encroaches.

in contrast to my theory above, some people who for example currently fetishize the 80s could very well be those who lived through it, have recently entered their 40s or 50s and, questioning what they've done with their lives and their approaching twilight years, pine for signifiers of their youth.

 

[Leo]

i also never thought i'd read a 10-page thread on bob marley.

 

[Corpsey]

edit: too tired today to debate

 

[luka]

edit: too tired today to debate

boring. and also paranoid. we werent guna debate you we were guna applaud you.

 

[Corpsey]

to be clearer, I'm on a drugs hangover, so its a terminal tiredness

i just going to query what crowley said about me and my friend beethoven (who can't even defend himself, god rest his soul)