the best songs ever: the lost years

[Eric the Green]

(09-02-2019, 04:36 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(09-02-2019, 04:14 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I'm glad to rediscover this one from 2006, which won an Academy Award for "An Inconvenient Truth," the only documentary ever to win an Award for best original song. "I Need to Wake Up" has the musical qualities so lacking in the music of those of her contemporaries who indulged in heavy-metal screaming and screeching. Melissa Etheridge demonstrates in her songs the musical skill and soulful competence that reminds me of The Who, and of JB at his best, as in "Pray." I have to tag this one as one of the best songs from late in "the lost years." She is a borderline BoomerXer, and certainly shows in this song more than the cynicism attributed to Xers.
https://youtu.be/JUVqUz8m2PQ

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


This song also reminds me of this fine movie song from the same time period, from The Ultimate Gift, which the artist said was inspired by her desire to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

https://youtu.be/-aZ6C1S8K-s

Hurricane?  Oh yeah, Ole Dorian is spinning around Mar-a-Lago Club, West Palm Beach Fla.  Hurricane Dorian should be renamed to Hurricane Trump because he's been very hard on the forecasters because he was supposed to peter out in the Carrib, and didn't, meandered off track a bunch of times and is now stuck over the Bahamas. So, hurricane Trump is just stalled out, probably playing some golf with a few feeder bands. We'll have to see if he wants to visit Disney;and or will go fishing.

Oh, and dropping a nuke isn't a very good idea 'cause the fallout will go round the round the storm's rotation and hurricanes will take that extra heat as a nice snack. 

ring around the stormy, pockets full posey
the storms will still mosey,
nukes ashes, nuke ashes
from the hurricane outflow, they all fall down  

Round and round, ah yeah, let's have it.  A song for today!

Our music director at my Unitarian-Universalist church introduced me to this early-3T song from the new agey culture of the time, and he performed his own arrangement of it. There may be a connection to this later Ratt song. This Shadowfax song "What Goes Around" below is performed in a style I like better. The Ratt song is performed in the typical heavy metal with the guitar style I don't like, but is not as bad as some others in that style. It has its moments. This Shadowfax song from 1986 bears resemblance to Sting/The Police in "Every Breath You Take," a fine song and huge hit from 1983.





As for anger, when I speak about angry, I mean the style and not the subject matter. Of course there's a time for anger, but that does not mean there's a time for lousy style-- at least in my way of hearing music. Sorry gabrielle that I don't relate to 3T pop/rock styles very often. People like different things. Some decent songs do break through the screams and screeches, in my opinion, but nothing comparable to the great peak of pop around 1966. 

However, although I say this, that does not mean there weren't also pop music and songs from the 1966 period that I consider just as trashy as those from the 3T, or today! I claim that my taste is not tied to my age or the time I grew up. I am not a herd conformist, and when music from my youth was trashy, I did not go along with my peers. For example, in 1965 one of the biggest hits of the year was "Wooly Bully". NOT in my list of favorites! Big epic fail! The same goes for 1966's mega-hit "96 Tears". Never made it with me, and still doesn't. I didn't go along with the crowd. Or 1964's epic tear-jerker "Last Kiss." No tears jerked from me. And no interest from me in 1970s bubblegum or disco music. It was FM for me. But NOT "Free Bird!"

The greatest expression of "anger" in pop/vocal music may be by what Time Magazine just called America's greatest songwriter. It's high up on my all-time Top 400-plus. Now this is just as angry, without the need to scream and screech. Pure epic poetry and musical grandeur, and more feeling in the vocal. He knew his songs well, because he was an artist and a poet. This is from the late 1T, an era of much humanitarian awareness under JFK, and fear of nukes after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And still relevant today.