Calling all "newbies"

He won’t name one. He senses the onslaught.

Karen Carpenter. One of the best singer/songwriters in any generation. Neil Diamond. Also one of the best songwriters ever. Have you ever actually listened to a Beatles song. I wanna hold your hand yeah yeah yeah?? PULEASE!!!!! My 5 yo could write better lyrics than that. They didn’t start writing good music until Rubber Soul. Better singers Well there was Sinatra and Marin, those guys could sing. Aretha?? I would take her any day. Overrated, the Beatles, yeah just a little.

The Doors.
James Taylor.
Bob Dylan.
Jimi Hendrix.
Janis Joplin.

… and some phat beats.

not that I hate rap, but.. no, no rapping or “phat beats” are required.

none of yours were highly rated… (at least not as astronimically high as the ones on my list)

so, they might not be that great.. they might not be as good as most people think they are, but not the most overrated of all time.

It’s not just bands that suck.

you need to take into account how much people fawn over and worship them vs their actual level of talent/quality/listenablity.

thus, a band like Metallica who is extremely highly rated (many people follow them religiously) and they deliver a very high level of quality/listenablilty…. they might be “over rated” to some, but the difference in their rating and their listenability is not as far apart as the bands i’ve listed.

who is “blind faith”?

If I don’t know who they are, they can’t be “over-rated” because I know a s***ton about rock and roll bands, and I’ve never heard of them.

See…

if their “rating” is low…. and they suck… they might be given more credit than they are due, but the fact that they are not highly rated disqualifies them from the list.

Beatles rating = 1,000,000,000,000
Beatles listenability = 50

Blind Faith raiting = 1000*
Blind Faith listenability = 2*

(*That’s just a guess, for and example.)

You see the difference in ratio?

BF is over-rated, no doubt.

But, the Beatles are waaaaaaaaaaay more over-rated.

we are not talking about which great bands are recognized by “rolling stone” as the the most influential..
when you are growing up.. there are, more than likely, 2-3 bands that you thought were the reason for rock’s existence..
list those, please..

I’m hitting a hard reset.

Maybe it’s just fast footwork…as, to me,

This discussion on music has gotten pretty fascinating, really, as there are just so many definitions of “best” or "top. To me, mainly, when I say top bands, and it took listening to a Santana song to make it hit (and, embarrassingly, he should have been at the top of my list), a top band is band that does some (more than one, and preferably, a handful) over-the-top tunes. Tunes that make your blood boil when you hear it, makes you spin like a top, make you gibber with awe….and write gibberish like this. And, it’s almost always the ones that grab me the first time I hear it and don’t ever let go.

By that defintion (and I’ll give a few examples):
Santana: “Smooth”, “Persuasion”, “Jingo”, “Hope you’re feeling better” and LOTS more

Savoy Brown: “A hard way to go”, “It’ll make you happy”, “Time does tell” (it’s a bit long), “Stay while the night is young”

Stevie Ray Vaughan: “Crossfire”,

John Mellencamp “Cherry Bomb”, “Paper and fire”, “Pink Houses”

Los Lobos: “Hurry tomorrow”, “La Venganza de los Pelados”

The Hollies: “Bus Stop”, “Stop stop stop”, “Carousel”

Los Lonely boys: “Senorita”, “Heaven”, “Tell me why”

Blind Faith: “Sea of joy”, I should really take these guys off of the list as the song I was actually thinking of was “Badge”, but that was Cream!

Rolling Stones: “Can’t you hear me knocking”, “Monkey man”

Then, there’s the classification that seems to have started this whole discussion. In my mind, this is a totally different type of band. This is a band that, extremely consistently, put out hits. Maybe this was a sign of the times. If you were going to buy 12 songs at a time, most people preferred having a majority of those songs to be good. Honestly? I can’t of one song of the Beatles that I would classify as over the top. BUT, they were almost all good and appealed to the mass of a generation. The only two bands that ever did that, in my opinion, were Elvis and the Beatles. I don’t know if the Beatles followed their generation or the generation followed the Beatles but, wow!, it really was something awesome to live through. They were just hitting the Ed Sullivan show as I was about 10 and I rode that wave for what? 10 years? 15?

Anyways, I can’t even think of a lot of bands that the majority of people would even know who they are but the ones that, for me, put out consistently good songs: Goldfrapp, Sade, Beatles, Maroon 5, Katie Melua, CCR, The Beach Boys.

Goldfrapp, CCR, Maroon 5, and The Beach Boys blow me away because they do both the do songs. I didn’t list any of the three above because I expect everyone knows The Beach Boys, Maroon 5 and CCR and there are few people who would really enjoy Goldfrapp, to my utter astonishment. And, that brings me to the weird thing about tunes, which is how a song can really suck but you heard it in some special setting or something and you love it for life. I know some of the songs I like, from a rational perspective, seriously suck. And, of course, then there’s just preferences. I’ve gone waaaay Chill and mellow. Which is where Goldfrapp comes in.

The other thing that dawned on me during my pondering here is the fact that rock singing, basically, sucks. Most of the singers in rock are horrible. And, sorry crescendo, but I think this is true of Chicago, also. This is another place that the Beatles (and the Beach Boys, actually) could sing for real. And, in both cases, their harmonies are awesome.

So! We finally found something to replace TOP for a little while. And, I must say, I am enjoying this a lot more than TOP. I swear, the whole time we were discussing TOP, I felt like someone was pulling my chain. And, yes, HooahSaint, maybe I’m being paranoid, again, but, I ran that into the ground and came up with….nothing. Trying to grab some air in your hands is easier than pinning down anyone as to any real arguable advantage, in points, to TOP.

This does not meet Plague’s request, so I’ll try that separately and, hopefully, not as long.

I’m not at all a fan, so I do not apologize for not spelling it wrong.

I’d love to see Pink Floyd. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alive during the era in which I’d prefer to see them. Moody Blues…….

I’ll buy for Chicago any day of the week. There are few groups that can orchestrate music as well as them. They are all super pros at what they do, and have a plethora of quality music. Vai and Satriani are more than shredders, they’re virtuosos. Okay, maybe Vai is. Satriani’s like “Staples” in regard to shredding.
Yeah, he sells that.

they were the Jethro Tull of their time

Hahahahaha! Their first album was ok.

First show ever. I was 15. With our all jeans outfit, Kodiak boots and a doobie for twelve, we thought we ruled rock and roll that night. I’ll never forget the Montreal Forum roof almost getting lift off at “too carry on”.

Come sail away, come sail away. Come sail away with me!

Shoulder shrug on U2. Rush, overrated? I can hardly think of any other group that deserves their success more. Tom Sawyer is definitely played too often on the radio, but regardless, it’s a really awesome song.

Yeah, Yes>Genesis. Genesis was really good, though.

over them all, esp. Fly by Night, Farewell to Kings was good, during the 1982 Moving Pictures tour, I went to the bathroom for “Tom Sawyer”. Sooooo
played.