the best songs ever: the lost years

[Eric the Green]

The La Bouche song is c.1995. Good (except for the rap)

[gabrielle]

It would have been pretty cool to live in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s for the clubbing and rave scenes.  In a way, even American grunge got its start over there.  Bands were getting gigs thanks to early buzz from British DJs, and performing on John Peel's shows, long before they became famous in the US.

[gabrielle]

Taking it back to '91 again (since I'm not quite done with that year   .)  The Lords were a bit sleazy, but they had some great beats.  I like the energy on this one.

[Eric the Green]

Some of the best 3T music was from the 2T!

[gabrielle]

Another great album from 1991:  Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes.

[Eric the Green]

I can't quarrel with this choice! Good one. She's obviously a natural talent, and well-trained and inspired too. It's certainly unusual for music like this to chart during the recent 3T.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tori_Amos

[Eric the Green]

Well, some of the best songs from "the lost years" came from earlier years!

This one was a "duet" between the late Nat King Cole (1956) and his daughter, the late Natalie Cole (1991). The song and album won seven Grammy awards in 1992.





I sometimes think that Nat King Cole was the best singer ever.

[Eric the Green]

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole – Over The Rainbow & What A Wonderful World – 1993





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somewhere_...rful_World

Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Israel Kamakawiwo'Ole - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fahr069-fzE

Artist: Israel Kamakawiwoʻole
Album: Ka 'Ano'i
Released: 1990
Awards: Echo Award for Song of the Year

[Eric the Green]

Hymn to Glacier Peak, Symphony #66, by Alan Hovhannes (1992)





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Hovhaness

Comment on this video:
In the 21st century it is, once again, acceptable of composers to write beautiful and spiritual music. See, for example, Ola Gjeilo and Eric Whitacre. Therefore it is high time that Hovhaness be brought out of his undeserved obscurity and be recognized as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.

[gabrielle]

One of my favorite Nirvana songs here.  According to Wikipedia, it was first released on a 1993 AIDS benefit album called No Alternative (I could have sworn I heard it before then).  It has a bit of an early Beatles sound to it--actually a lot of Nirvana songs remind me of the Beatles, I believe Kurt Cobain liked them.  

[gabrielle]

Of course, this was their most famous song, the one that propelled alternative rock to the mainstream.  I've heard it way too many times over the years, so it's lost much of its magic for me, but I remember how thrilling it was at the time.  And the whole album, Nevermind.

Quote:Beck On attending an early Nirvana show: “I have a memory of them coming out and he had his middle finger up, was giving his middle finger to the audience… I’d seen a lot of punk shows and I’d seen a lot of bands when I was younger where the shows were pretty aggressive or confrontational, but there was something completely different about this. I remember he had a smile on his face, there was a kind of playfulness, but it was also a little menacing, and I remember the minute they started playing, the entire audience erupted in a way I hadn’t seen before.”


Win Butler, Arcade Fire “All the sudden the whole kind of social dynamic at my junior high changed where these kind of misfit kids who maybe come from a broken home and they’re smoking cigarettes in the back and they didn’t have money for nice clothes, all the sudden those kids socially were in a weird way on the same level as everyone else… I was sort of like a weird kid who didn’t know where I fit in or whatever and just to have that kind of voice be that big in culture, I feel like that was a magical period of alternative music where we had Jane’s Addiction and R.E.M. and Nirvana, it was like seeing these kind of freaks from all the different cities of North America and you’re like, oh wow.”

Neil Young On what might have happened if he had been able to talk to Cobain before he died: “Well, you know, it’s a hard thing to deal with … I guess Kurt felt too much. I think it’s sad that he didn’t have anybody to talk to that could’ve talked to him and said, ‘I know what you’re going through, but it’s not too bad. It really isn’t bad. Just (expletive) blink and it will be gone. Everything will be all right. You’ve got a lot of other things to do. Why don’t you just take a break? Don’t worry about all these (expletive) who want you to do all this (expletive) you don’t want to do. Just stop doing everything. Tell them to get (expletive) and stay away.’ That’s it. That’s what I would have told him if I had the chance. And I almost got a chance, but it didn’t happen.”

9 Musicians Remember Kurt Cobain Sam Frizell @Sam_Frizell April 5, 2014

[gabrielle]

[gabrielle]

The Nymphs, from their self-titled album of 1991.  This band has been largely forgotten over the years.  Kind of glam, kind of grungy, with singer/songwriter Inger Lorre's bluesy, depairing wail.

[Eric the Green]

Grunge just can't compare with the best songs. Tori Amos? Maybe. "Nirvana?" The [i]real[/i[ music from this period that brings you closer to nirvana is music influenced by those Oriental traditions. Such as new age ambient world music like this: "Dorje Ling" by David Parsons (1992).





I don't think people can settle for grunge, if they really hear music like this.

[gabrielle]

(09-03-2016, 06:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Grunge just can't compare with the best songs. Tori Amos? Maybe. "Nirvana?" 

[gabrielle]

People often have a disproportional fondness for the music of their youth.  I admit I probably do, and I think you do too.  There are actually biological reasons for this--

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-terrible-teens

Quote:Every adult has gone through adolescence, and studies have shown that if you ask people to look back on their lives they will disproportionately recall experiences they had between the ages of ten and twenty-five...

According to Steinberg, adults spend their lives with wads of cotton in their metaphorical noses. Adolescents, by contrast, are designed to sniff out treats at a hundred paces. During childhood, the nucleus accumbens, which is sometimes called the “pleasure center,” grows. It reaches its maximum extent in the teen-age brain; then it starts to shrink. This enlargement of the pleasure center occurs in concert with other sensation-enhancing changes. As kids enter puberty, their brains sprout more dopamine receptors. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter, plays many roles in the human nervous system, the sexiest of which is signalling enjoyment.

“Nothing—whether it’s being with your friends, having sex, licking an ice-cream cone, zipping along in a convertible on a warm summer evening, hearing your favorite music—will ever feel as good as it did when you were a teenager,” Steinberg observes.

[Mikebert]

As Eric has demonstrated, I do not think people become less moved by music as they age.  I am an 57-year old white American Engineer who was entranced by a song I heard 30 years ago.  This song is Shosholoza, a South African mining song FILLED with sociological baggage.

[Eric the Green]

I certainly have been moved by music all my life, as mikebert observed. I am sure the music that made teenagers feel good (allegedly; it seems like it was expressing rage or boredom more often) in these "lost years," would not have made me feel good when I was any younger. But teenagers are more likely to be attached to the music geared to them as teenagers. The need to be cool and be up on what's happenin' certainly is there, and that's part of why I tuned in in 1964. Today's teenagers are more likely to listen to musicians their own age or slightly older, and that has been true before too. It's more expected of teens to groove to music; older people are too often forced to spend all their time working. Myself, I could never be convinced that the American and British pop music of the 1960s was not much better than the American pop music of the 1990s. I maintain there is an objective element to it, and that my opinion is not caused by my age. And I always suspect biological explanations of anything; the differences between ages are also strongly sociological, and also inherent in the music.

The Beach Boys asked "will I still dig the same things that turned me on as a kid" in 1964, and they started their age count at the age I was when I bought the record. Now, I answer that question, yes!

Myself, in the 3T era I was just as keyed in to music as I was in the 2T era; perhaps a bit more. Music has been a big part of my life at all ages. In the 1980s I was moved enough to become more of a musician than I had been, and I started practicing and playing again and hosting a radio show. But it was classical organ music, and the contemporary new age ambient and electronic music, that moved me. I tuned out the commercial and "alternative" pop stuff to a great extent, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. No doubt I missed some pretty good music, but most of the time, what I hear now of it does not make me wish I had tuned into it. My only regret is that I can't do better on recent pop culture questions on Jeopardy. I do like to know what's going on at all times. It's just that a lot of certain genres are not listenable, so that makes it harder. And as I have pointed out, I was just as critical of some of the pop music in the 2T as I was of later stuff. Bad stuff (or at least mediocre stuff) abounds abundantly in pop; that's just the nature of the beast. Vox populi is not equivalent to good taste.

I am glad that I like some of the 4T pop music, and I doubt I would have been moved any more by Justin Bieber's "Pray" had I heard it in 1966, than having heard it in 2012. But, in 1972 I was fortunate enough to hear and buy Meher Baba's universal prayer as produced by Pete Townshend. The music, in short, is the music.

[Eric the Green]

(09-03-2016, 10:49 AM)gabrielle Wrote:

(09-03-2016, 06:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Grunge just can't compare with the best songs. Tori Amos? Maybe. "Nirvana?" 

Interesting lol  A good artist can improve a song markedly!

[gabrielle]

(09-03-2016, 04:16 PM)Mikebert Wrote: As Eric has demonstrated, I do not think people become less moved by music as they age.  I am an 57-year old white American Engineer who was entranced by a song I heard 30 years ago.  This song is Shosholoza, a South African mining song FILLED with sociological baggage.

A very pretty song indeed, but if you first heard it 30 years ago and it has stuck with you all this time, doesn't that kinda prove my point?