Why the 80's did suck!

the 80s sucked because creativity ceased to exist except king crimson. plus like another person said it set the standard for the crap of music we have today. so yea the 80s sucked badly

I think Walter was a little less extreme!  'Music finished in 1989' ?  ?  

kingcrimsonfan wrote: the 80s sucked because creativity ceased to exist except king crimson. plus like another person said it set the standard for the crap of music we have today. so yea the 80s sucked badly

Edited by Polo - June 29 2011 at 16:08

At last, this thread welcomes its first trolls! I expected them a bit sooner.

Polo wrote: CPicard wrote: At last, this thread welcomes its first trolls! I expected them a bit sooner. I'm not trolling, I'm just pissed at the kingcrimsonfan saying creativity ceased in the 80's. We don't need another Walter, do we?

Er, Polo, I wasn't talking about YOU. I was talking about... well, someone else whose name doesn't need any introduction.

kingcrimsonfan wrote: Polo you have a point I just realized neo prog took place during the 80s hahaha

TODDLER wrote: The worse thing that could have happened was in the mid to late 70's with Rock music. Robin Trower, Boston, Styx, Peter Frampton and many others dived into the "Stadium Rock" genre. Obviously Peter Frampton was improvising blues, a little Ventures Jazz mentality, and beautiful melodic guitar playing in general with HUMBLE PIE. When he conformed as a "Stadium Rock" artist with his "Frampton Comes Alive" he used a voice box, wrote more commercial music etc.....and became almost a David Cassidy of the mid 70's. How or why would Progressive Rock fans take him seriously? If they remembered his diversity on "I Walk On Gilded Splinters" they might re-consider. During that time he was simply wearing a flanel shirt and jeans. Just a regular guy playing nice guitar with  Rock band. Rock music was more "down to earth" then. Bands like Boston and Van Halen were playing a cheap version of Rock. Although I wasn't fond of the hippie movement....Jimi Hendrix, Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, and a host of others were performing in smaller venues for years. For example they played "The Electric Factory" on the east coast.   The idea of Rock bands reaching out and touching somebody for the sake of art began to vanish shortly after "Woodstock" where promoters like Larry Magid came up with the idea to place acts such as these in stadiums and eventually pour the sugar on top of their music.  The idea came to promoters after "Woodstock" turned out to be a financial disaster. They posed the question......"What if we gambled on the idea again and placed all of these bands in big stadiums to play for larger audiences? Maybe we could repair the mistakes that were made with WOODSTOCK and eventually make ten times more profit from Rock music. This is when everything in rock began to go straight to hell. Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones used to dress in fashion but the attitude was different. To me they were the honest "Rock Stars". They experimented with music although it was not Prog......the elements were more dominet than what Robin Trower and Boston would reveal in their music. Rock music just wasn't the same after that. Prog was going strong in the media and the underground prog was truly creative, but Rock Music was now contrived. No one was doing a "Electric Ladyland" or a Magical Mystery Tour and NOT just because the 60's were gone. It had little to do with that aspect. The industry just didn't allow mainstream Rock to be extremely creative. So you had ELP and YES who were creative , but in Rock you had garbage like FOGHAT which was the son of Savoy Brown, SLADE, JO JO GUNNE and tons of bands who were not a representation of how "Rock Music" was once creative before. It just became progressively worse. Humble Pie included a diverse guitarist, harmonica playing, acoustic music, while VAN HALEN featured a simplistic kind of ROCK that was obviously cheap and contrived. Even Deep Purple lost it on "Stormbringer". YUK!

In some ways, Woodstock itself facilitated the making of rock as something too larger than life.  The Beatles-led rock invasion was more about songwriting but Woodstock put the focus on showmanship. It worked because the first movers get to do the most original and creative things so we had a dazzling display of talent in the late 60s and up to the mid 70s. But the well was bound to run dry and it eventually gave way to that boring thing like arena rock.  Thus, some of the seeds for the things that went wrong in the 80s were sown long before and it was more the abundance of talented musicians working in rock (then being the cutting edge music of the time...at least Fripp said so in interviews, don't know about members on this forum) that kept it going.  The holistic approach of the Beatles had already disappeared and once people like Fripp moved from the limelight (or whatever semblance of a limelight he enjoyed), things were bound to get stale.


Edited by rogerthat - June 29 2011 at 20:17

Warthur wrote: If anything, the 80s were great for music *precisely because* you had a market for alternative music developing where small independent labels were more and more able to compete with the big boys.

harmonium.ro wrote: Another way to look at the indie scene that started in the 80s is that in the 70s the same artists wouldn't have needed to become "alternative" to something reach the market (a market).

harmonium.ro wrote: Another way to look at the indie scene that started in the 80s is that in the 70s the same artists wouldn't have needed to become "alternative" to reach the market (a market). Accessible pop and sophisticated experimentalism coexisted. IMO it's all down to the change in paradigm that happened in the industry, not to the creative changes.