You're kidding, right? Sade is "lounge", borderline elevator music.

I was torn between Achtung Baby and Loveless, but I settled with the latter because it was more influential.

that's how i feel about "blue lines"
listen to "your love is king" really loud on a good system.

i think i'm gonna do that right now.

thought i admit the 80's sax shit could stand to go.

I have heard it on some really good systems. Don't get me wrong, I (heart) Sade, and have her first (and possibly second) album(s) on vinyl. It's just that, when I'm even slightly in an "alternative" (meaning musically) mood, I can't touch the stuff.

It's just that, when I think 'nasty funk', I think George Clinton, Massive Attack (they have some of the most awesomest basslines), and perhaps Gary Numan (yes, really). I do not think Sade, even when someone post-hypnotically suggests it to me. She's just not. She's more akin to Steely Dan than anything else (whom I also [heart]).

It's the only shoegazer album remembered by who? My mom? I see plenty of mentions of Slowdive, Kitchens of Distinction, Moose, Lilys, Swervedriver, and others around here and on other boards. I'm listening to Pale Saints as I type this.

You forgot to not forget Catherine Wheel, Ride, and Lush.

I should point out that I've never heard of Moose before.

How can you say it did? What exactly did it change? Are you suggesting that before MBV there were no bands that centered their sound around sheets of guitar squall? MBV weren't far removed from what Mission Of Burma had already done years earlier (and MoB weren't the first - but I'm going with them 'cuz I can't remember the others offhand). MBV may have changed your perception of music - and that's great if it did - but, seriously, let's not continue to overstate their place.


You're mixing up "changing" with "influencing." The Pixies were a pretty major influence on a lot of bands - probably even moreso than MBV - and yet nobody's claiming the Pixies "changed music" (at least, I hope they're not). You're blinding yourself with your own hyperbole.

I was trying to sum up a response to this particular idea and you did it perfectly. "Changing" and "influencing" are two completely different things. I think Nirvana changed music only with respect to having a specific shift in record company's perspectives of what was popular and what should now be marketed i.e. grunge and flannel were now "in" and big hair was "out". Was it Nirvana that changed music or was it simply a matter of dollars and cents with executives forcing the change and knowing which was the wind was blowing.

As much as I love MBV they didn't change music at all. The real world, outside of the music geek circle, has no idea Loveless even existed. And, as Rads pointed out, others have basically done it beforehand.

I love Nevermind, but people like Miles Davis and Bob Dylan changed music, Nirvana did not.

If you'll re-read my post you'll see Nirvana is the only band I specifically questioned as influencing anyone.

My larger point is that it takes a very indie-centric point of view to argue importance as a reason to favor MBV, Massive Attack or Primal Scream over Richard Thompson. MBV is an important indie artist. They have had a tremendous impact on indie music. I don't doubt that they've influenced lots of bands that you and a few thousand other people (which includes me) like. Its bs to say that they changed the face of music in general though.

Edit: Just noticed Radcliffe's post. As usual, he said it better than me.

Yes, that's more or less exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying, there may or may not have been bands that may or may not have been basing their sounds around sheets of guitar squall, but after they heard (and fell in love with) MBV's Loveless, they threw out whatever album they were currently working on, and said, 'we're doing this. We're combining ugly and beauty and ethereal vocals and going completely over the top with the whole wall o' noise concept'.

I'm not saying they weren't first, but that album was the knee in a paradigm shift that continues to reverberate today. You may not listen to that kind of music, but it still exists -- not just here and there, but as an entire genre. I mean, just go over to yahoo groups and look up the Blisscent group, and look at the list of band names that are still currently in production. Just because Slowdive are no more, and Lush are no more, and so many other bands are no more, doesn't mean that there aren't hundreds of band still following (or trying to) in MBV's footsteps.

"...those three bands..." included MBV as one of them.

And I'm not even going to argue the more or less than Richard Thompson thing. To me, he sounds more or less the same as most other singer/songwriters, so I don't see how he changed anything, much less influenced anybody.

I see what you're saying with influenced vs. changed, but the two are not mutually exclusive. Someone like George Martin or Hendrix did both. I can see how Richard Thompson may have influenced hundreds, maybe thousands of artists, without changing anything, but to truly change someone at their core -- that's more than influential.

Again, just because you don't like them, or don't listen to them, or don't listen to the bands that were influenced by them -- either fully or partially -- does not mean that they don't exist. You don't get to play them down, not to an audience who know better.

Id argue a lot of people heard it indirectly via Siamese Dream

That or Sugar.

That's a pretty good argument.

Ultimately this whole thing seems pretty subjective and is kind of boiling down to generational bias. Of course it's easier to point out Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix as changing music given the amount of hindsight. In recent years, Nirvana's influence on musical trends has been very visible, but that doesn't mean it will have many lasting effects beyond commercial trends.

Would you say that the Velvet Underground changed music? The 13th Floor Elevators? The Modern Lovers? The New York Dolls? These could all be a matter of debate (I don't really care for 13FE, myself), but they're undoubtedly considered hugely influential. It's only after several years of hindsight that their contributions can be really put into perspective, and even now none of them are necessarily household names.

Maybe MBV changed music or maybe Massive attack did. Maybe neither. Reducing someone's perspective on this as "indie-centric" is a little short-sighted, I think. Many mainstream trends distill from areas outside the mainstream, and it can take a while for that to happen. Couldn't someone claim that punk was never a fully mainstream phenomenon (at least in the US) before Nirvana?

Good point Drinky - influence and importance can only be judged retrospectively. Thats why the Pazz & Jop/whatever other list was posted seem different from what youd expect looking back now.

And BeeOks posts in this thread are, well, "ridicules".

You say you get the influence vs change argument but its not clear to me that you do... I'd argue that only a small handful of artists "changed music" in the last fifty years. Dylan, James Brown & Chuck Berry come immediately to mind. I'd have to really think about who else might have in the last fifty years. I don't think any of the artists Drinky mentioned "changed" music. To "change" music in my mind you have to do something that's really original and revolutionary, and have it be something that enough people notice and care about. I don't think you need the benefit of time to appreciate how revolutionary Dylan, JB and Berry were. If anything time tends to obscure a bit how much of an impact they had. To say an artist is influential, time helps...if you need time to say whether they changed music or not, then they didn't.

And stop turning this into me being against MBV...I'm not. I never said they weren't influential...I never said they didn't belong on anyone's top 10 for that year. I was objecting to the hyberbole that MBV or any of the bands that Bee Ok mentioned changed music and to Bee Ok's trying to argue that objectively everyone should agree that they have more of a place on that list than Richard Thompson. Everyone has a right to their own opinion.

you sure they weren't hearing richard thompson ?Ironically, here's Bob Mould's Influences

Aside from 'Shoot Out the Lights' I'm not familiar with his solo stuff...but, I remember reading one of Bob's great plans which was to have have MBV at one end of a field and have Sugar at the other. The plan was to have a sort of sonic mind meld or something. Either way, I would have attended.

What the fuck? I sure have been a thorn in your side splates as of late but this makes no sense. Sure my posts should of never made it the Internet, let alone this board, because I was in a very illegal state of mind and the reason for them being so out of whack. Thus the reason for most of my post from the last 24 hours being a bit over the top. Either way I started them off like typical fanboy-ism but I was able to back up what I was trying to say. Not put, as elegantly as most posters on this form but still was able to prove my point somewhat. What the hell is ridiculous about that?

Excellent thread, BTW, and reasons why Obner is a great board!

Possibly, but Hendrix' impact was immediate. When he toured the UK in the late '60's, all of who would become the British rock guitar gods saw him and had their ears opened. Page, Beck, Townsend, Clapton, etc.--before Hendrix showed up, they were doing nothing but re-hashing American R&B and blues. It may have been Townsend or Page (I forget which) commented on seeing Hendrix, "This man is going to put us all out of work."

I would say the NY Dolls were the same, not musically, but attitudinally. You can find their musical strains in lots of precursors (in practically the entire Detroit scene), but these guys showed that you can take a minimal amount of musical virtuosity and marry it with a "your face, my fist" attitude and obliterate the boundaries of what is acceptable. These guys took their drug-fueled drag spectacle on national TV in the UK, doing more than anyone else on the planet to lay the background from which "punk" could erupt.

I'm wary to give much credit to Nevermind for re-writing the music scene in 1991. Being in the right place and the right time is pretty damn helpful.

Nirvana didn't kill poppy hair metal and all it's Aqua Netted glory. That honor can be placed at the feet of such turn-of-the-decade powerhouses like Nelson (even your mom thinks they're cute), Tesla (covering Five Man Electrical Band--apparently Brewer & Shipley were too stingy with their licenses), Mr. Big, Winger, Extreme, Trixter and 70s shit-rock retreads like Damn Yankees (the Nuge & Tommy Shaw together at last!) and Bad English.

Rock music had constricted its balls into skin tight pleather pants for long enough and was ready to let them bad boys hang low again. That 80s lipstick metal scene was scary and dangerous to the general populace in 1981 with Motley Crue with ripped clothes and big hair and tattoos and fire and shit, but by 1990, songs like "To Be With You" and "When I See You Smile" were hummable by the housewife set.

It was time for rock and roll to scare your parents again. I was a few weeks shy of 15 when Nevermind came out. If I remember correctly, Badmotorfinger came out earlier that year. When these first popped on the scene of the 8th-9th grade cafeteria, people were just buzzing over the new sound. It was different. It was loud. Most importantly, it was dangerous and would terrify the elderly. It would make your parents yell at you to "turn that shit down!"

However, without all the prissy monster ballads shit sashaying out of the radios those days, I'm not so sure it would have been such a big deal. I have always been fairly lukewarm about Nirvana, but I don't dislike them. I also wasn't heavy in the Hairspray scene, for it did absolutely nothing for me. The closest thing to that genre I ever owned was Living Colour. Rather than choking down the Poisons and Warrants, we moved over to Public Enemy, Ice-T, NWA, Slick Rick and 2 Live Crew. Now that shit would piss your parents off.

Also, GNR was the only heavy hitter with a release 1991: Use Your Illusion I & II. Motley Crue, Poison, Warrant, Bon Jovi and Cinderella were all between albums, which provided a nice big void for the much-needed new style to step into.

I just find it funny that you expect your favourites to be way up the list in a critics poll. Hell i prefer MBV over most of those, and Primal Scream are one of my favourite bands, but srsly in 91 the critics were obviously prefering other bands. Who gives a fuck though?

1. Slint - Spiderland
2. Nirvana - Nevermind
3. Mercury Rev - Yerself is Steam
4. Throwing Muses - The Real Ramona
5. Talk Talk - Laughing Stock


Best year of the last 20 years.

It was close between Blue Line, Loveless and Spiderland but Slint wins out for me.