Music and Musicians discussions! 😀

I like one Nirvana song but I don't think they're an overrated band, I get why they went over big with a specific generation, and why they were so admired. But it's like Tupac, I can't stand hip hop and his music makes me want to break the stereo its coming out of, but I get why he was an icon, he did music that resonated with those in the inner cities, like Nirvana did music that resonated with many in gen x. Overrated in my book would be Fleetwood Mac and KISS. I never understood the KISS obsession, they were HUGE, they actually outsold the Beatles and had a party to celebrate that fact. They had some fun songs but it was pure fluff, and the costumes were cool and all and the mystique behind not knowing what they really looked like, that was kind of cool but music wise, nothing outstanding.

These days there's a band called Ghost, they're doing the same thing, the singer is in full makeup, and the rest of the band wear masks and robes, but many think they know who the singer is. Its harder to get away with that kind of mystique these days because of the intenret, KISS didn't have to worry about people leaking pics of what they really looked like to millions via the internet, Ghost does. So what Ghost does is they claim they change vocalists on every album, and they may have at one time but its pretty obvious its been the same for the last few. The band sounds great but the lyrics are crud, its just overly satanic stuff, kind of like what King Diamond lyrics.. but King Diamond's vocals annoyed the hell out of me, the singer to Ghost has a good baritone vocal style.

Lyrics don't have to be overly deep to be good, but it helps to have memorable lines that just hook the listener. One of the lines from one of their songs goes something like this, 'It's okay to walk away and live to love another day. This is not a fairytale this is life and sometimes life fails'. It isn't super deep but it kicks all those Disney cartoons in the a*s because they make love seem like a fairy tale that lasts forever, and he's saying, to the woman the song is about, it isn't a fairy tale and in life, things fail. Like I said, he wrote some good stuff, nothing outstanding, usually it was about love, climate change, or how we live in an overly violent country, but again, he didn't start touching on some of those things until the band got away from the major label that wanted them to go on about popping cherries.

My favorite lyricists would have to be Robert Smith, Andrew Eldritch, Peter Steele, Jani Lane (later in his career), Ville Valo, and Shirley Manson, I mean Vig and the other guy wrote a lot of Garbage's songs, but she wrote quite a few later in their career, very well written, usually dealing with female empowerment. Taylor Momsen is getting close to making the list, she's still rather young but her lyrics continue to get better, so if the next album is as solid as the current, she'll probably make the list. She's also been writing lyrics since she was like 9 years old, her parents actually sold some of her songs to adult musicians, of course it went into her "trust fund" or whatever.

So many bands, so many lyricists, its hard to pick just a few but there are bands that have done more for genres than others, the Runaways, they may have been kind of iffy sounding, but they opened the door for women to do more aggressive rock bands, well the Runaways and Siouxsie Sioux get credit for that. Shirley Manson credits Siouxsie Sioux, others credit Joan Jett, who was in the Runaways, but whatever.. I'd say all of the above.

He was good at metaphors, and while it isn't technically a werewolf song, a lot of people to this day think it is. There's tons of fan made Underworld tributes with that song, so unless they think the werewolves and Selene are intimate, they still think its a werewolf song. It has a werewolf vibe to it and there's a novel called Wolffile or Wolfile that is long out of print, but it goes into a werewolf that likes what that song is about.

Anywho, Peter... I still miss the guy.. he was f'in cool. Met him once but he was such a jokester, and he loved the women, but he treated them with respect,

A few songs on Bloody Kisses were snarky but still dark, but October Rust was their Disintegration, it was dark as hell except for Wolf Moon and My Girlfriends Girlfriend, the rest was all down on how fickle women he's been with were, and the follow up was even darker, it was all about family he's lost, except for maybe two songs about his sex life again. This is a band that on their first album, he went on about a fantasy of killing the woman who cheated on him and her lover, with a jackhammer, and he also attacked certain welfare recipients, but I agreed with those lyrics because he after the ones who are druggies, they shouldn't be on welfare. In short, the band was pretty dark but he'd make the lyrics snarky at times, or he'd lean on gallows humor. But most of the songs were still serious. As for sound wise, they were like Black Sabbath meets the Sisters Of Mercy.. that's the best way to describe them.

He also was in a band called Carnivore, it dates back to the eighties, but it is very misogynistic lyric wise, lots of songs about rape and violence. But again, he respected women, his issue was with the PMRC, the PC police, and he'd hate the cancel culture, he felt artists should be able to write whatever they wanted and he went out of his way to piss off anti first amendment idiots.

As for how I met him, and have met and been friends with other musicians, I used to do PR for indie goth/rock bands back in mid 90's when the internet was just catching on with the mainstream. I'd promote bands with fancy websites and put up interviews, and talk to club owners, and blah, blah. I quit doing it because I wasn't making jack and the goth scene has a lot of f'in drama, but Type O, despite being a metal band. I didn't do PR for Type O though, they already had Roadrunner backing them and a great PR team.

Manson's whole shock value stuff doesn't appeal to me. Dark or edgy lyrics doesn't automatically = "bad" lyrics to me, but sometimes it doesn't even sound like they're trying to say something or tell a story admist the shock. The music doesn't really appeal to me either, personally. Granted, Manson wasn't near as edgy as some of those black metal bands in the beginning of the genre. Mayhem especially, wooie, that band has one of the most messed up histories ever.

I'd have to replace "is" with "was". Danzig was awesome but his vocals went to hell and after the 4th album and he lost Chuck and John, they played a big role in the music being good, Eerie not so much. But the first four, or four and half, albums were solid and I listened them to nonstop. I'd say he was the "Price Of Darkness" in metal and not Ozzy, his music was darker, cooler, and better, but people love Ozzy, even though his family treat him like trash and make him like a wuss. Can't go around calling yourself the prince of darkness when your wife and kids bully you all day. Man, his wife is a piece of work, what a $#%.

Greg Lake has a good view and attitude about being sampled by a popular contemporary artist, he actually played live renditions of POWER (The Kanye West track that samples 21st Century Schizoid Man) at some of his concerts. I like the way Kanye uses a lot of the songs he samples in his work, contextualizing or playing on the concepts of the original track as he sees them. The Entire "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" album is a concept album giving an introspective look on both the glory and dark side of being rich and famous, with the track "POWER" regarding the ability to use fame to influence the world and the at the time very recent 21st Century, when being famous makes you more powerful than ever, and that he sees himself as his own 21st Century Schizoid Man. It's a very creative way of re-contextualizing the sample.

However, the sample of Steely Dan's classic 1976 ode to 60's LSD Kingpin, Owsley, Kid Charlemagne, on his song "Champion" is an even better use of it. It's a really cool story about how he got permission to use the sample too. As recalled by Donald Fagen in a 2012 interview on being sampled

"Kanye actually sent us a sample of his tunes... And frankly, Walter and I listened to it, and although we’d love some of the income, neither of us particularly liked what he had done with it. We said ‘No,’ at first, and then he wrote us a hand-written letter that was kind of touching, about how the song was about his father, and he said, ‘I love your stuff, and I really want to use it because it’s a very personal thing for me.’ My mind doesn’t work like that—I would never use someone else’s stuff if I was writing something personal, but I guess that’s how he was thinking about it. It was such a good letter that we said, ‘All right, go ahead.’"

The sampled line is "Did you realize you were a champion in their eyes", of course in the original song referring to Owsley being the champion of the 1960s LSD drug trade, but in the context of West's song referring to his father, and how West saw his father as a Champion throughout his life. It was also a song his father played a lot as a child, adding more reason for Kanye's personal choice to sample the song.

As a big fan of Steely Dan and King Crimson, and more recently Kanye, I think it's very cool to see someone creatively take a lyric or melody from an older song out of context and then add it with new context into their own work, and I don't really see it as a way of making music to look down upon. Of course, said samples being used legally and with permission. It's also a way of artists alluding to older artists that inspired them, you'd be surprised by how many rappers are actually big fans and very knowledgable on 60s-80s music, that kind of knowledge is required to know what you want to sample when making a track. Kanye has also sampled Black Sabbath, the Diamonds are Forever James Bond theme song, and Otis Redding to name a few more artists I've recognized sampled from just listening to his music. I'd say it makes listening to Kanye's music even more of an enjoyable experience when you recognize the source material he's sampling.

Another song reference from his work I like is "Blood on the Leaves", more so a reference than a sample. The song, among quite a few others by him and a lot of hip hop music in general, tackles the issue of societal and systemic racism and what remnants of it are still seen today, particularly in the prison system. The title and chorus line are a reference, keen ears will notice, to the classic haunting 1939 eulogy "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday. A haunting song about the ghastly imagery of the hanged corpses of black people adorning the trees of the South, "Southern trees bearing a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood on the root". Once you realize the reference it's a bit of an obvious connection to why he references the song, of course implying that despite all the progress made since Ms. Holiday's 1939 history making tune, the stains of blood still remain on the leaves.