A Conversation for Ask h2g2

Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 41

hygienicdispenser

Vastly over-rated? Paul Weller and Morrisey. They've both done reasonable stuff but nothing to deserve the adulation they receive. Especially Weller.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 42

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

@Sho:

Lou Reed:

Well you may know the bit from Trainspotting:

'All the Velvet Underground's solo stuff was shite.'

'Some ae Lou Reed's stuff wis no bad.'

'Aye - but no bad's no good enough.'

Well...maybe. If we take post-VU Lou Reed as separate (while acknowledging the Velvets' greatness, right?) then I'll admit there's a case for prosecution. But in his defence:

- Transformer

- New York

- Songs for Drella.

And you gotta admire the chutzpah of a man who played 'Metal Machine Music' live in its entirety. smiley - laugh


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 43

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

@hygeinic:

So why is it that Smiths lyrics keep leaping unbidden into my head?

I'll tell you what you are. You're just a jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place!


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 44

hygienicdispenser

I sometimes have the lyrics to Agadoo leap unbidden into my head. Doesn't mean it's any good.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 45

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

"Beethoven. I still think the man is incredibly good, but could have done with a good editor" [Vip]

He would never have tolerated any kind of editor. His "Andante Favori" is extremely self-indulgent, with at least six endings and a refusal to call it quits. He threw temper tantrums if anybody dared to distract him during his piano recitals. Apart from that smiley - winkeye , I think he *is* very overrated. Alas, the patina of generations of adulation by critics has settled over his symphonies. Wagner's comment that the Ninth Symphony was "a tragic but necessary mistake" doesn't get much attention nowadays.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 46

Orcus

The Stones surely did stop about 30 years ago. They haven't actually made a new song since then at least.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 47

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

"All opera. Mozart" [Hoovooloo]

All 400+ years of opera? Isn't there even one that you sort of like? Just curious. smiley - smiley

Ah, Mozart. Thirty-five short years on this planet, enduring shortsighted bosses like Archbishop Cooloredo, shivering in the cold while waiting for his aristocratic employers to let him in for his recitals. Do you know what effect the cold has on the desterity of a pianist's fingers? It's not pretty.

Well, here's the thing about Mozart: he didn't *know* that he wasn't going to have a long life. What musicologists call his "mature" works would be regarded as "early" works had he lived to be sixtyor seventy. So, yes, much of his symphonic output *does* deserve to be called overrated. Again, he wrote almost 50 symphonies before dying at 35. Brahms, who wrote four, didn't write his *first* symphony until he was about fifty.

So, yes, people expect too much from a young Mozart, and pretend that they see greatness where it probably wasn't present. I think that that has more to do with us than with Mozart himself.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 48

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

"Why did nobody say 'Bob, you write some good lyrics, and you're OK with an acoustic guitar... your voice is a bit whiny and nasal but people seem to not hate it too much... but for the love of Bod, put DOWN the harmonica and back away from it and never, EVER pick it up again.'" [Hoovooloo]

I agree completely. Thank you for that! smiley - biggrin


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 49

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

In my opinion, the most overrated musician/composer/showman of our time is Andrew Lloyd Webber.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 50

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

Well there's a certain degree of objective evidence on one side of the argument...


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 51

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

"All opera. Mozart" [Hoovooloo]

All 400+ years of opera? Isn't there even one that you sort of like? Just curious. [paulh]


Now...I personally don't like opera. But in this case I'm quite prepared to entertain the notion that it's me that's wrong. Various people who I respect insist that opera is good - not just good but *very, very* good.

My best guess is that I don't like opera...yet. But maybe I'll get around to liking it some day.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 52

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

"My best guess is that I don't like opera...yet. But maybe I'll get around to liking it some day." [Edward the Bonobo]

That's fine, Ed. People who live in English-speaking countries don't have more than a handful of operas in their own language to appreciate. If you asked an Italian-speaking person, the reaction might be different.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 53

toybox

Is the text really that important in operas?


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 54

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

Well I think the main problem with me is that I don't really like pre-20thC classical music. My entry point would possibly be 'Peter Grimes' or 'The Death of Klinghoffer' or some such.

Since I'm currently reading Doris Lessing, I'd quite like to hear 'The 'Making of the Representative for Planet 8'

I'm not so keen on tunes you can hum. smiley - smiley


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 55

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

"Is the text really that important in operas?" [Toybox]

I was going to write a long post about this, but here's my point in a nutshell: opera is a hard enough sell without having linguistic hurdles to scale. Handel, great though he was, never could interest the masses in Italian opera in English-speaking England. Benjamin Britten wrote English-language operas, but he was no Handel. So, the U.K. is not exactly a hotbed of opera interest, but Italy may well be.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 56

quotes

Frank Zappa? Impossible to overrate. Even if you don't like the music, his legacy as a pioneer is second to none, and he's been ahead of the game in so many things it's hard to know where to start. How about the 'mash up'? He was doing that in the mid 70's. Or multi-tracked drums? And influence...I take it you've heard of Sgt Pepper? Well Paul McCartney is on record as saying it was the Beatles' "Freak Out" (Zappa 1966).


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 57

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

Hmm. But then there's a school of thought that Sgt Pepper is overrated. Surely the cognoscenti go for Rubber Soul?

I haver between finding The Beatles overrated and not. I get fed up of people lauding them as the bestest and onliest band ever...but then I hear some of their stuff and think 'Actually...that's rather good.' But I certainly think they're at their best when they're reining in the experimentation a bit. Boundaries! Boundaries!

In fact...one reason I like them is because they were *not* the unique innovators some believe them to be. They started out playing white boys' version of R&B and then became part of the interplay of music in that period. Music is at its best when everyone is ripping one another off.


A couple of years ago I found myself drinking (etc) with some Norwegians. The bar was playing some really cheesy Norwegian folk-pop. Then The Beatles came on.

'I'm from Liverpool originally, so for me this counts as folk music. I WIN!!!'


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 58

Edward the Bonobo - Gone.

>>Is the text really that important in operas?

I believe there's a school of thought that says if you could understand what they were singing about you wouldn't be able to take it seriously. smiley - smiley

In general I have no problem with music sung in a language I can't understand. However - it would be nice to think that an English libretto could combine well with the music to make something greater than the sum of their parts.


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 59

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

"I [hover] between finding The Beatles overrated and not. I get fed up of people lauding them as the bestest and onliest band ever...but then I hear some of their stuff and think 'Actually...that's rather good.' But I certainly think they're at their best when they're reining in the experimentation a bit" [Edward the Bonobo]

I have a CD of the soundtrack for "Yellow Submarine." I treasure it. Anyway, we all have our guilty pleasures. smiley - smiley I've known a fair number of musicians. They need to earn a living, just like anybody else. Whether they play their own music or somebody else's the bottom line is that they need their audiences to enjoy their performances on some level. Some of us might scratch our heads when we hear things that musicians/compoers of earlier centuries came out with, but chances are they needed to please the audiences of their times.smiley - smiley


Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?

Post 60

Vip

I used to get annoyed that John Rutter was so overwhelmingly popular, because I found a lot of his music quite trite and not that deep and interesting. Then, one day, I twigged that he wrote music specifically to be just that, because a) it sold well and b) most church choirs these days can't sing anything complex - they just don't have the numbers and rehearsal time to do it. So he writes for his (paying) audience, and then occasionally lets rip on something bigger and deeper.

There's a composer up in Yorkshire called Tim Knight who writes for a similar kind of audience, because he's run enough parish choirs to know that they need things that can be sung by ordinary people, not trained singers.

smiley - fairy


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