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Seinfeld Is Unfunny/Music: Difference between revisions
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* [[At the Gates]]'s riffing style has been [[Follow the Leader|copied]] so much that AtG's album ''Slaughter of the Soul'' might seem predictable to a first time listener who's already acquainted with the over 9000 knockoffs.
* [[Barbra Streisand]], [[Cher]], [[Madonna]], ...three leading ladies of the music industry, almost all possessing huge gay followings, who also spent a fair bit of time doing things in the movie biz. Hard to believe they're some of the most innovative girls around, considering (at least in Madonna's case) every blonde pop singer from the nineties onward is compared to them or called their Successor.
* [[The Beatles (
** The Beatles do, for the most part, avert this trope, though - while people may not always recognize today how groundbreaking they are, they continue to be one of the most popular and beloved bands of all time, and their albums continue to sell out nearly a half-century after they were originally released. And every generation of teenagers seems to re-discover The Beatles (see there was the popularity of ''[[Across the Universe (
* [[The Beach Boys]]' "Pet Sounds" used groundbreaking techniques that are so common now listeners unfamiliar with their history might not recognize how revolutionary the album is.
* Memphis power pop band [[Big Star (
* [[Bob Dylan]]. In the documentary ''No Direction Home'', Dave Van Ronk tells a story about "House of the Rising Sun," which Dylan recorded on his (self-titled) debut album. The version he recorded was arranged by Van Ronk and Dylan had learned it from hearing him perform it live. After Dylan recorded it, so many people accused Van Ronk of ripping it off from him that he finally stopped performing it. Later, when the Animals covered Dylan's version the song, the same thing happened to him.
* Boyd Rice. Play an old record by him to someone today and they might think that it's someone trying to learn to make a loop. They might not realize that Boyd was one of the earliest pioneers of sampling and record scratching.
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*** k.d. lang was a bit of an outsider in country music, who was never quite accepted by the Nashville establishment as one of "their own" even before she came out as lesbian; it's not just a coincidence that her first album after coming out was a ''pop'' album rather than a country one.
** [[Faith Hill]]. When she hit it big in late 1999-early 2000 with the massive crossover hit "Breathe", every single female act in the genre was cutting [[Power Ballad|Power Ballads]] with a similar sound and similar incentive to cross over. These attempts usually were met with failure (except for Martina McBride getting a few huge crossover hits -- albeit in 2004, after the craze died down), and what's more, Faith ended up hoist by her own petard when country radio shunned her very heavily pop-influenced ''Cry'' album.
** [[George Strait]]. When he first hit the charts in 1981, he was markedly more country than his peers, most of whom were following the pop crossovers of acts such as [[
** Gretchen Wilson herself seemed to spark not one, but two examples of this: besides being a rock-influenced creation of John Rich, her [[Signature Song]] "Redneck Woman" sparked a wave of spunky women-with-attitude types and anthemic songs about southern pride. The former trope has died down considerably thanks in part to [[Taylor Swift]] and [[Carrie Underwood]]'s death grip on the genre, but the latter is still prevalent.
** [[Johnny Cash]] and other acoustic music in general gets this treatment these days. Most teenagers think singers like Johnny Cash are boring. In his day, Cash was shocking to the [[Moral Guardians]]. These days, the acoustic guitar seen as a starting point for learning the guitar. It's had to imagine what music would be like today without the instrument.
* Dance music. Most of it falls victim to this eventually. Not so long ago nobody had heard of acid house, rave, big beat, gabba, trip-hop, drum'n'bass, jungle... Anything that's new is so easily taken up and copied by imitators that it soon sounds totally conventional and often technologically primitive. (Think of MARRS "Pump Up the Volume", "Out of Space" by the Prodigy, or anything by Fatboy Slim for example).
** Very few people nowadays might hear Suicide or Silver Apples, the two bands that arguably spawned electronic music, and guess that their origins are pre-disco.
* [[The Doors]] are something of an aversion of this. They came from an era when music was populated by bands like The Beatles and The Beach Boys - bands whose music was light and (relatively) friendly. The idea of a band singing 11 minute apocalyptic tracts with Oedipal themes, who also wrote songs about serial killers and who were willing to acknowledge the horrors of the Vietnam War (who also happened to be led by a leather clad poet/filmmaker) was practically unthinkable. Forty years on, although Morrison is occasionally viewed as pretentious, their music still sounds as fresh today as it did then (if it sounds dated at all, that's only because of Ray Manzarek's ballpark-style organ), even if it's viewed as a major influence on many bands since, such as [[
* [[Dr Dre]]'s "Nothin' But a 'G' Thang". At the time, a hip-hip video with low riders, backyard parties and lots of posing in front of the camera was something new and different. Needless to say, it was certainly influential.
* Eiffel 65 sounds a lot less fresh today after thousands of rappers ran the Autotune gimmick into the ground.
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* Gang Of Four's trademark sound to some extent: Starting around the [[Turn of the Millennium]], a lot of post-punk/New Wave-influenced bands like [[Franz Ferdinand]] and [[Maximo Park]] started using minimalist, choppy guitar riffs and stiff but funk-influenced rhythms in a similar manner. This actually led to a resurgence of interest in Gang Of Four (and eventually, a partial reunion), but it also can make their debut album ''Entertainment!'' seem less innovative than it was at the time. The key thing that still sets Gang Of Four apart is that these newer bands usually lack their overtly political lyrics and occasionally ''really'' harsh guitar feedback.
* Grunge suffers from this:
** [[Nirvana]] and [[
** By the time [[
** Even Nirvana, and a number of other popular alt-rock/grunge groups, were highly influenced by [[The Pixies]]. Kurt Cobain even admitted that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was his attempt at ripping-off of a Pixies song. Listen to that song, then listen to "U-Mass" by [[The Pixies]]. The former is a sped-up version of the chorus of the latter.
* [[
** [[
** That title is often given to [[King Crimson]], which just sounds all the weirder.
** It's kind of weird to hear that in the late '70s/early '80s, metal bands like [[
** [[
** A serious casualty of this trope was NWOBHM pioneer Diamond Head. They were barely famous, in comparison to Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Saxon, but their influence on Metallica was profound. Metallica's earliest recordings were covers of Am I Evil, Blitzkrieg and It's Electric. However, Diamond Head never became as famous as the band they influenced, and ended up opening for them at the National Bowl event in 1993, and chose songs covered by Metallica to get accepted by the crowd. However, a relatively subdued performance and Diamond Head not being so famous made them look and sound like a band covering Metallica. They split up shortly afterwards.
** When listening to [[Ozzy Osbourne]] after bands like [[Marilyn Manson]] and [[Snoop Dogg]], it's hard to believe he was at one time almost as controversial.
** [[
* Helmet virtually invented the start-stop metal riff that dominated the late 90's. You'd never know it to hear their successors (e.g. [[
* [[Isis]] and their blend of post-rock and [[Sludge Metal]]. One mixed review of their album ''In The Absence of Truth'' remarked "it's not Isis' fault that they sound unoriginal these days. All you have to do is pick up a copy of Decibel, open it to any page, and you'll find someone counting the group as an influence..."
* [[James Brown]]. The beats and breaks of many of his songs have been sampled or imitated so many times that his music would sound very cliché now, if it wasn't, you know, James Brown.
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* [[Jimi Hendrix]], though to such a minimal extent that it's almost a subversion. He's been copied by almost every rock guitar player who followed ("There are two kinds of guitar players: those who'll admit to be influenced by Hendrix, and liars"), and while he no longer sounds quite as fresh as he did in the Sixties, there's a good fraction of his material that still just sounds ''out there.''
* [[The Kinks]]. Known in America mostly for "You Really Got Me" and "Lola", at the time they were a big hit in the UK, pioneering not only guitar hooks, but intelligent songwriting that would eventually lead to [[Britpop]]. Not to mention their riff for "Picture Book" getting ripped-off by Green Day. The fact that they were [[Banned in China|banned from the America for most of the 1960's]] didn't help.
* [[
** It may seem ''primitive'' compared to the modern stuff, but that's [http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=VXa9tXcMhXQ not always a bad thing].
* [[
* Larry Graham. When he first came out, his bass style of slapping and popping was new and refreshing. Now people (bass players excluded) complain it's boring and flashy.
* [[Led Zeppelin]] suffers heavily from this. In particular are John Bonham's drum beats. (Especially on "When The Levee Breaks") His influence is so pervasive in modern rock that many younger listeners are legitimately baffled as to what's the big deal about him.
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* [[Richard Wagner]] is one of the best examples of this in classical music/opera. There was nothing like what he was doing at the time. He pushed at the boundaries of tonality in a way no composer had done before; he invented the leitmotif (basically, a "theme song" for a character, object or concept), the staple of just about every film score ever; his writings about the ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' (the "total art work" that combined music and drama) had a huge influence on the development of not only opera but also musical theater. But these days, with over a century of increasingly weirder and more boundary-pushing work inbetween, Wagner's work sounds increasingly hackneyed and overwraught. Plus, pretty much every stereotype of opera in general - from fat ladies in horned helmets (though they were winged in the original), to the idea of opera as super-complex and daunting (previously, opera was divided into either lighthearted rom-coms or hammy melodrama) - comes largely from his work.
* It may be lost with newer listeners to appreciate how ''revolutionary'' [[Sly And The Family Stone]] were in the late [[The Sixties|Sixties]], to have a band performing a very raw, Afrocentric, psychedelic, rock-infused style of funk music, with a very radical and countercultural style of clothing and hairstyles, a multi-racial, multi-gender lineup, and very countercultural/socially conscious lyrics for the time period they were popular in. They helped set the direction for much of what black music, and music in general, would follow from [[The Seventies]] onward. The 1971 album, ''There's A Riot Going On'', in fact, was one of the first funk albums to use a (very crude and early) drum/rhythm machine.
* [[
** The ''sound'' of U2, and in particular the guitar work of The Edge, eschewing solos and rock guitar conventions for an atmospheric/rhythmic, textural, chiming approach relying heaving on delay and effects was equally influential, but it's hard not to find an Edge-infuenced guitarist in a rock band (or generally U2-inspired group) since at least [[The Nineties]].
* [[The Velvet Underground]], to a certain extent.
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*** It ''was'', however, certainly a new thing in rock and pop music of the time, to approach the drum kit with ferocity and athleticism, and to use double-bass drums and more than five or six-piece drum kits and multiple cymbals on a pop or rock record.
* The Compact Disc, introduced in 1982, was a revolutionary breakthrough in [[The Eighties]], offering a cleaner, clearer way of listening to music than the vinyl formats of the previous sixty or seventy years. It brought, even in its 8-bit sound, more intimacy and detail, and captured the whole of the record, uninterrupted by record sides or weird formatting like the eight-tracks of [[The Seventies]]. It may have influenced the way new music is recorded, mixed, mastered and produced, as well, as music grew in complexity and digital precision to cater to CD listeners. The 78-minute storage capabilities might have led to longer albums. Nowadays, it (and the mp3) are the industry standard, and the novelty of it seems lost to newer generations.
* The "shock" factor in older music, especially Heavy Metal and Hip-Hop, tends to suffer from this a lot as time goes on. For instance, Screamin' Jay Hawkins (who would be one of the biggest sources of inspiration for [[
** Part of the problem is that Hawkins's most famous song, "I Put a Spell on You," has been covered (and sanitized) so many times, most famously by the Alan Price Set and most notoriously by [[Bette Midler]] for the movie ''[[Hocus Pocus]]''. You need to go back and hear Hawkins's original: radically minimalist, and with [[Hell Is That Noise|random screams and growls that are guaranteed to terrify anyone under the age of seven]].
* Synthesizer and sampling technology, particularly from [[The Eighties]] can count. With modern, increasingly realistic and expressive all-in-one-box digital workstations now the norm, it can be jarring to know that many of the features now taken for granted in newer instruments were once the exclusive property of $5,000 to $100,000+ instruments like the Fairlight CMI, the E-mu Emulators I and II, the New England Digital Synclavier and the Kurzweil 250 thirty or so years ago. Even with the Yamaha DX-7, Roland D-50 and Korg M1 (and samplers like the Akai S900 and Ensoniq Mirage), it was relatively crude technology. Computer software has often taken over for hardware, and things like the $30 Fairlight Pro app are derided as slow and crude, if not amusing for its retro qualities.
* [[Radiohead]]. Their albums "The Bends" and "OK Computer" (along with their breakout hit "Creep") were so innovative that the band's combination of introspective darkness and falsetto vocals were promptly ripped off by massive numbers of alternative rock musicians, most of which went on to massive mainstream success greater than Radiohead had ever had at the time. Frustration with this led to the band's [[Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly]] album, "Kid A." The genre switch worked, and they've been quite successful and critically acclaimed since.
* The arrival of [[Hilary Duff]] on the [[Disney Channel]] (and, to some extent, the rebooted ''[[Mickey Mouse Club]]'' as ''MMC'') led to uxexpected success on the [[Disney Channel]] with the equally unexpected success of her show [[Lizzie
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