If you will permit me a little nostalgia trip back to the 1980s.
Life back then seems pretty idyllic to me compared to today. I am sure every generation feels that way but I think it is pretty hard for normal people to argue otherwise.
Girls in my high school didn’t wear pajamas to school and look like they just rolled out of bed. They dressed nicely and did their hair, to a fault if you have ever seen 1980s high school yearbook photos of girls with crazy curled and hair sprayed hair. The haze of hairspray coming from the girl’s bathroom would knock you over and if you lit a match in the hall you could have blown up the building. Guys put a little effort into looking good, hair was feathered and jeans were not ripped because we wanted girlfriends and the girls didn’t want losers.
Were there shenanigans going on? Sure. We did a lot of drinking, but almost no one did any drugs, not even weed. Sex? Oh yeah, there was plenty of that going on but it was almost exclusively between steady boyfriends/girlfriends. There were very few girls putting out to just anyone and the ones that did were not considered girlfriend material.
The music is what I want to talk about. First this little video clip from Billy Corgan, the frontman for Smashing Pumpkins.
The basic gist of what Billy is saying is that it seems like someone decided to push rock out of the way and replace it with rap. He tries to be diplomatic about it and says some great music came from this, I would press X to doubt, but still his main point is that there seemed to be a directed effort to replace rock despite, as he says, rock music still being a huge draw. This is very true.
I’ve been listening to Metallica since the early 80s, I used to have a Kill ‘Em All cassette and owned most of their albums when bands still released physical media. The current band members are all in their 60s and yet they still tour around the globe. After a number of concerts in Europe, they are starting a a series of 24 appearances at The Sphere in Las Vegas that has a capacity around 20,000. They are sold out, every show, including one that is in March of 2027. Concert tickets are ridiculously expensive and yet people are still shelling out buckets of money to see bands that were mostly hot in the 80s and 90s.
Back to Billy Corgan’s assertion. I would say this happened much earlier than he is saying, with the caveat that he is a rock star and I am a racist blogger.
During my high school days in the late 80s, graduating in 1990, for most of that time we listened to classic rock. Getting suited up for football practice and games we were cranking Led Zeppelin and our unofficial theme song was Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog (Now you’re messin’ with a son of bitch…). We went to concerts at the Toledo Sports Arena, a dump of a location that was home to the Toledo Goaldiggers IHL minor league hockey team (several fights a night guaranteed!)….
I saw Ratt and Cinderella in concert there and couldn’t hear anything for a couple of days after. Between that and shooting without ear pro as a kid I wonder why I have crappy hearing in my right ear? We listened to classic rock on 104.7 WIOT out of Toledo and I think just about every car in the parking lots was tuned to that station.
While I can’t pinpoint it exactly, somewhere around the end of my junior year something changed. Suddenly we were listening to N.W.A. and Ice Cube. I had the soundtrack of Colors on tape next to my Metallica and Slayer tapes. Keep in mind my high school had maybe one black student a few grades behind me, the lard ass brother of a former black student who had been arrested for bringing a gun to school after the captain of the football team kicked his skinny black ass. The east end of our football stadium was next to a corn field so especially good field goal kicks would end up lost in the corn.
Why did White kids in the small towns of Waterville, Monclova and Whitehouse, Ohio suddenly go from 70s classic rock and 80s hair bands to rappers from Compton? I can’t really explain it but it couldn’t have been organic. It wasn’t like Easy-E was speaking to my lived experience about being hassled by the po-leece while selling crack or anything. Rap was as foreign to us as Mongolian throat singing but like a switch we stopped listening to Pink Floyd and Zeppelin and replaced them with Run-DMC and all of this happened when great rock was still being made by classic bands and the 80s bands like Guns N Roses.
For sure some of it was the thrill of black “music” in a setting where we never saw black people. Tell teens something is off limits and put warning labels on the package and they will want to check it out. That can explain a little of it but not all of it.
It has continued ever since. There were a couple of rock bands performing at the Super Bowl halftime in the 2010s, The Who in February of 2010 and Coldplay although I wouldn’t call them “rock” in any real sense. In the 2020s it has been Shakira, “The Weeknd” (no idea who or what that is), a bunch of rappers (Dr. Dre, Snoop, Eminem), Rihanna, Usher, Kendrick Lamar and that faggy Bad Bunny. While the majority of NFL players are black, the vast majority of people actually at the Super Bowl are White as is the fan base. I’ve pointed out before that during Bad Bunny’s grotesque performance, the majority of fans in attendance that I saw looked bored and were on their phones.
So why was rock music pushed to the sidelines when it was and remains commercially viable?
I of course have my theories and so do you. Bill Corgan called them “The wizard behind the curtain”
I won’t belabor the point as to “who” the wizard is, the point here is that someone somewhere decided that an enormously popular music genre that with a few exceptions, most notably Jimi Hendrix, was dominated by White men ought to be replaced by one almost exclusively performed by black men.
Popular culture has long been on the vanguard of manipulated social change. We went from Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best to Al Bundy and Homer Simpson. Looking back now Al Bundy was a pretty responsible father and husband compared with what was to come.
It wasn’t like rock music was wholesome, quite the opposite. Foreigner sang “Are you old enough? Will you be ready when I call your bluff?” in Hot Blooded and there were plenty of lyrics that were clearly referring to underage girls. What red blooded American man of my age bracket can forget Tawny Kitaen in those Whitesnake videos?
Still, it was our music and culture, degenerate though it might have been, and it was unceremoniously replaced by black culture that took the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and made it mindlessly degenerate and violent. In rock music women were the object of attraction, in rap women aren’t even humans. Rock talked a bit about fighting but rap glorified murder and wanton violence for the sake of violence.
It is one more thing that was taken from us and we were too young to realize it.
apparently, a few others around here and I; have a few years of “experience” on you… that’s o.k. though, because for all the static folks give our generation; our generation had the best “soundtrack”. And, c’rap’ is not music, by definition music is “melodic” – the spoken b.s. of jungle boogie is not
The first step was to step away from rock that was exciting and had optimism – we’re gonna get some beers and get laid and maybe destroy evil! – and into self-loathing. Then the skip to black music was easy.
And this is why I never took to grunge, and all the whiny “alt rock” that followed it. I wanted feel good music, not faggotesque REM (though they actually predated grunge). My experience in noting the veritable takeover of rap was identical. At first, it was mildly amusing because it was edgy and used lots of dirty words, which had a certain appeal to high school kids (I entered HS in 88, finished in 92, so was right there in the thick of it) and some of it was not badly done, like 3rd Bass and their well known “Pop goes the Weasel” which I found pretty entertaining. But rap utterly decimated rock music, and we have never recovered to where we get “feel good rock and roll” ever since.
Interesting too that John Mellencamp (who despite being a leftist twat these days, still did the best 2 minute intro in the history of rock with “I Need A Lover”, so he gets props from me for that, at least) was interviewed by Joe Rogan, where he asserted the very same notion that some “mysterious force” just decided one day that rock had to be killed off and replaced by nigger noises. That’s not exactly how he said it, of course, but that was the inferred meaning of his remarks, more or less.
Heck, even the pop and soft rock of the 70’s and early 80’s (to include what is now referred to as “yacht rock”) was far and away better music and more enjoyable to listen to than the utter shit we were inundated with from about 1988 onward. If you had musical background like myself, you had to appreciate stuff like the album cut of “Angry Eyes” by Loggins and Messina with the instrumental jam right in the middle of it. We don’t get anything like that now, nor do we get anything that resembles the heights of feel good, top down summer crushing music like we once enjoyed from Van Halen (and even DLR’s early solo stuff like the Crazy From the Heat and Skyscraper albums) or hair metal.
But, there seems to finally be a bit of backlash afoot, or maybe it’s just the exhaustion and exasperation of nearly 40 years of nearly nothing but shite. Younger people in their 20’s have made a big thing out of “reacting” to classic rock (both boomer rock and 80’s rock alike) on YouTube, and most of them I’ve seen do so seem quite enamored of it, compared to the contemporary music that they’ve grown up with. Some of their reactions are quite amusing in their disbelief that music “used to be this good”. Yeah, well, us old farts know a thing or two, and aren’t total morons, you know.
Amen Brother…
Amen for sure! And I love the yacht rock genre. Being a former musician (key player), it’s got some of the best melodic/harmonic production out there.
As for Billy Corgan, I remember him being an asshole back in the day because he didn’t like George H. W. Bush and all the rest of the Republicunts I liked before my dissident turning and shedding of my boomer ways. Good for Billy. I think he understands the (((question))).
Side note for Art: First concert I ever saw was when I was 17 at the Fort Wayne Coliseum. Cheap Trick, Aldo Nova and Saxon. I was fresh off the turnip truck. I encountered a new smell and asked my “buds” what that was. I say that can’t be the case, they’re not allowed to do that here. Man, what a different time and place.
Hell yeah, keyboard player here too. And Aldo Nova? Man, I haven’t thought about them in a minute. Fantasy was their biggest hit, and now I need to go to look at their discography to refresh my memory on their other songs.
Count me as another shameless admirer of yacht rock. Even if I think the monicker is kind of stupid, I guess it fits as a useful shorthand. All that said, I think my favorite band overall is Supertramp. And as a keyboard guy, I always loved the sound of that filthy, chorused Wurlitzer EP. They also made nice use of the Elka Rhapsody 610 string machine for a bit there.
Totally badass dude. I had a Wurlitzer piano and a little Korg synth and we played Fantasy by Aldo Nova in my early band after I graduated in 82.
Supertramp is one band that I loved that I wish I would have seen. We did have a chance to see Yes and do a meet and greet which is one of the highlights of my concert experiences.
Ha! Love this. Listened to some Fastway today . . .
I graduated the year before, also in a Lake Erie rust belt town. There was a brief period of time in 1986 when Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys were in vogue, but it didn’t last long. Everyone (White) went back to classic rock and thrash metal after that. I couldn’t tell you why my experience differed from yours. Perhaps because our school had a black student population in the 10-15% range and most of the white kids had very little truck with them.
David Lee Roth and Cinderella at good ol’ Market Square was one of the best shows I ever saw besides Ozzy/Metallica, Motley Crue/Y&T.
I got chased by Bear Patrol for pissing on the side of the arena during Ratt/Cheap Trick on New Years 1986.
1980s girls are the best ever and Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles has aged well.
This was still rural route farmland in the 1980s, now particle board section 8 to the horizon.
Well, I’d say the usual suspect Canaanite/Edomite children of the devil Judische Parasiten primed your/our collective pumps with rock music, then decided it was time to up the degeneracy with the negro rhyme rhythms. Fast forward to now, and our society is a fucking sewer.
Goebbels had a classic speech called “ The Jews Are Guilty”. I enjoy listening to it from time to time, just to remind me to get any pathetic ideas of mercy out of my head for our adversary the Devil .
Also, you’re hard of hearing in your right ear you say?
That makes you a southpaw, am I right?
Rap “music” ? Never cared for it, and I be just a couple years older than ye. I always saw the timeline as Classic Rock leading into Hair Metal/Heavy Metal leading into Grunge/Alternative and then I basically quit listening to anything new after Layne Staley died.
Those changes in music probably come about more readily when people get tired of hearing the same three songs from every band on the radio over, and over and over.
(I swear to the Almighty I cannot change the radio fast enough when I hear Bonham beating the drum intro to “Rock-and Roll”. And how many times can you listen to “Iron Man”, seriously?)
Now if they play deeper cuts from classic rock albums, I am in. Miss Misery from Nazareth off Hair of the Dog album is a fine example as is Ten Years Gone by the Zep.
These days I listen to German Schlager music and some good ‘ol Rammstein. Sie Deutsch isn’t gonna learn itself.
Funny, seems the older crowd had the same thing happen when they went from some Zep In Their Step to “Disco, Disco Duck” when they needed the crowd to calm the fuck down from the Vietnam police action.
Besides rap, they tried to get the Gulf War kiddies settled down with Garth Brooks and mumble-Grunge.
Even most of the pop music that stars in drug commercials now was better than anything that came out in the last 20 years, because you can make out the lyrics over the synthesizer without autotune.
I’m older than most of you (graduated HS in ’76, college in ’80) and I only remember rock. Even my senior year in college – it was Cheap Trick, the Cars, etc. Then I was in the UK and it was a lot of strictly English bands, and my flatmate’s boyfriend bought Billy Joel’s Glass Houses – until then I hardly listened to Billy Joel. I have never been a radio listener, but I know when I got back to the US in ’82 it was still rock. But I specifically recall that by the time I was first posted overseas with the fedgov in 1985/1986, rap was a thing. I was not yet a full rayciss, but I loathed noggernoise from the getgo – and it just somehow appeared out of nowhere. I still remember listening with friends to the track from the original Top Gun movie, so there was still room for something besides rap, but that was about it. By 1988 and my second overseas posting, it was pretty much all rap.
Domestic FM radio was still golden in 82, we had a local top 40 station, and then a couple of serious rock stations with very wide play lists. Even the “adult contemporary” formatted stations were really just soft rock and pop of the era, and maybe the previous 5-6 years worth of hits that weren’t too hard edged. That held until about 86-87 when format changes began to creep in. Now terrestrial radio is total unlistenable crap. Consolidation under iHeart and ClearChannel utterly ruined it.
I think the change really started in the mid 80s with M Jackson, followed by Prince. That’s when MTV almost overnight went from showing predominantly hard rock and metal acts (Dio, Motley Crue, Van Halen, etc) to MJ, Prince, Lionel Ritchie, etc. Indeed, the benign “soft rock” negroes laid the groundwork for the destructive ones to come. The radios stations followed. Remember this was also a time of radio consolidation. No more home town FM stations where the local DJ picks the songs – now you are paid by ClearChannel and WE pick the songs. The rest is history.
There some truth in that, but MJ and Prince were pretty much doing straight up pop/rock in the mid 80’s. Heck, the Thriller album was partly soft rock and light pop by the standards of the day. Little Red Corvette and 1999 were basically dance club pop rock. And Lionel Ritchie was mostly soft rock post Commodores, with songs that could easily have been done by a White guy, given their musical style. Maybe I’m being too accommodating, but Lionel Ritchie is about the most innocuous black musician of the 80’s, and Smokey Robinson probably had more of an edge than he did (in his heydey).
All that aside, we can probably pin a large part of the credit for mainstreaming rap on Blondie, with “Rapture”, which as the story goes was influenced by their meeting Grand Master Flash in NYC, when rap was still underground in the late 70’s. It then began to make small inroads through the first half of the 80’s, and really exploded late in the decade with the arrival of N.W.A. and 2 Live Crew. And then that dumb bitch Tipper Gore went and put the spotlight on it (Streisand effect engaged) with the whole parental advisory labelling scheme. In hind sight, the better play would’ve been for a whole lot of white acts to co-opt rap, oversaturate it and make it uncool, which would’ve killed it off a lot sooner, in my estimation.
In his defense, “Easy like a sunday mornin;” has got one of the best lead solos ever put on tape. Not showy, just the right tone.
I graduated HS in ’88 down in South Florida and I can tell you exactly when it happened. There were these three Jews from Brooklyn that called themselves the Beastie Boys. I’d hear it from some of my friends car stereos. I thought it sucked. So it goes.
I was always teen listening to WIOT. My long suffering dad called it WIDIOT. Emphasis on the D.
In 88, when I graduated college, there was this new thing called rap. I thought it was just a fad and couldn’t wait for it to end. It didn’t.
Now I’m reading about some cretinous high placed music industry thug called jay-zee, who’s married to that wytte-appropriation chick, and who’s responsible for all the shytte superbowl acts in recent memory. Apparently he declared that rock is dead and must be replaced with this noise. And it’s happening. I mean, they’re even slipping it into country music ffs. Yuk.
Not sure what is to be done about it, just observing.
I have noticed this too. I’m a little older than you but I loved the black music in the ’70s — Spinners, Stylistics, Diana Ross — when it was about making love and getting it on, not killing cops and referring to women as ‘hos’. I live not too far from you in South Bend, and my recollection was things went downhill in the early 1990s, that’s when women and girls stopped caring about their looks and making any effort to look nice. Music trends usually follow around a 25-year cycle and I can’t believe that rap hasn’t died yet. It’s easy to believe that this has all been manipulated somehow. The most head-shaking thing for me is the whole ‘whigger’ thing from back then. Why on earth would you want to mimic a bunch of black losers?
As loathsome as he’s become in his old age, Neil Youngs “Rust Never Sleeps” film did it for me. 11 years old in ’78. saw it at a drive in from the back seat of my cousins Chevelle. When they blasted into Powderfinger and Sedan Delivery, I was ruined. I thought to myself “I can do that!”. 47 years later, my Les Paul is hangin’ on the wall right next to me….
All you people . . . the 80’s? I graduated high school in 1960. What you are noticing is valid. I was there with you, just older, and I saw it too. It sucks. But I also remember hearing the “old fart” music of my parents, Sinatra, Como, Crosby and the like, which was far above the Rock that excited me in the late 50’s in terms of musicianship and sophistication, talent and craft. That music was pretty much shoved aside from 1955 on and it felt like somebody just threw a switch. Singing out, shouting in. Lyrics out, repeated rhythmic phrases in. So, are our choices in entertainment being manipulated? Yeah, probably, and more than we know and less than the manipulators would like. And always diminishing the culture from before. Again, it sucks.
Jeebus! I didn’t think anything but redwoods and sea turtles lived that long! 🙂
you’d be surprised, youngster, ha ha. there’s more than a few of us – and not just here. we might need glasses but we can still shoot.
The quality of the music is reflective of the people that create it.
Rap is crap and it tells you so right in the lyrics and it’s nonexistent melody’s.
The quality of the people is reflective of the things they listen to.
I’ve never considered rap as music, nor have I considered feral negro’s with bones in their noses banging on tree trunks in africa musicians.
The best that can be said about it is semi organized sounds.
Graduated HS in 1972 (School’s Out), have played guitars, basses and keyboards for more than 50 years, possess 18k music mp3 (audio) files (99% rock) as well as 3k music mp4 (video) files and I only recognize one genre of music – stuff that I like. I’m always open to new ideas.
I think we very well know (((who))) is behind the changes to music. This is done for several reasons. To make money by selling us what is new, different, and now the “in” thing. To debase and dumb down white culture and the next generation that would uphold it. To replace whites as the cultural leaders, unless of course they hold the “correct” opinions. And to raise up the garbage races and their habits as what is to be aspired to.
No doubt about that. Especially if one looks who was behind the ascendence of rap, most of the big executives and heavy hitters in the record industry were parenthetical tribalists. Of course, that was the case well before rap arrived on the scene, so the same sorts of people pushed rock and roll in place of the music my grandparents listened to (big band, Sinatra, Bennet, etc.). Each new iteration since then has coarsened and degraded the culture to some extent, but rap was a neutron bomb in terms of it’s cultural impact.