Sike, I still like it
Man I’ll never forget how mad I got when I found out that John Lennon was not actually a walrus
Ruined my day when I first heard this about Creedence. Also blew my mind when I found out Elton John didn’t write his own lyrics lol
At least Elton John had a prolonged partnership with a lyricist whom he had good chemistry with and seemed to like on a personal level, rather than just working with whoever the record company sends him, which I get the impression is what happens with Garth Brooks.
Caring about whether a band writes their own songs is very boomer, and mostly came about because of mechanical royalties in the United States.
If the artist themself is a boomer then I think judging them by 'the standards of their day' is at least partially valid.
Perspective: Nobody gave a shit whether Louis Armstrong or the Andrews Sisters wrote their own material. Expecting audiences to value performers who also were songwriters was a boomer phenomenon, starting mid 1960s-ish. That wasn't very long ago, and the technology of audio recording wasn't around for very long before that. But royalties are paid to songwriters according to a legal framework designed for player piano reels, predating all that even.
We shouldn't shame or look down upon in any way those who perform songs written by others, but trying to diminish the value in an artist composing their own work as "boomer" is fucking banal
seriously. it's also ahistorical because there were always pockets of people complaining about this. Punks did it in the 70s/80s. 60s garage rockers did it. I've seen DJs hate on people who don't make their own remixes. You can think it's annoying to complain about, but writing it off as boomerism is so lazy.
So Garth Brooks is a creature of the Nashville country music industry. The Nashville machine has not followed the trend of promoting songwriting bands to anywhere near the same extend as the LA record labels have. Criticizing a country music entertainer for not writing his own songs is like criticizing a magpie for having white stripes. There is indeed great value in songwriting bands. To the artist (or whoever has contracted the rights to the artist's recordings), it means double the royalties. To the record companies it helps diminish the power of ASCAP, which used to function much more like a proper union than it does today. The expectation that a band should write its own songs was first cultivated in the 60s in an audience of baby boomers, using baby boomer bands. It's about as boomer as bell bottom jeans. That doesn't mean it's in any way bad for a band to write its own songs, but division of labor between songwriters and entertainers was the norm before that, and continues to be in many musical traditions.
Perspective: Nobody gave a shit whether Louis Armstrong or the Andrews Sisters wrote their own material.
perspective: the first recorded Jazz album in history was a white band stealing music from Black jazz bands so maybe people should have cared about this stuff earlier.
...unless you consider the ~1915 Jelly Roll Morton piano rolls to be the first jazz recordings. But that's semantics. As jazz became a popular music, the trend of performing popular songs in a jazz style became very common for working bands.
well obviously playing standards has been a big part of jazz (and lots of other styles of music) but i'm just saying there's legitimate non-boomer circumstances in which it makes sense to care about people becoming popular playing music they didn't write.
Yeah but one thing is sone craker stealing culture and other is someonw paying someone else to write them a good song
Think that's bad? The group that made the popular dance version of 'Cotton eye Joe' is from Sweden
I'm not surprised. 60% of pop music comes from like ten guys in Sweden.
See also: Alabama 3 are actually British (Sopranos theme still goes hard tho)
You don't necessarily have to be from the South to be country. Merle Haggard was from SoCal and he was one of the greatest country singers of all time.
Even after the Gold Rush of 1849, it's really only until the Great Depression with the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl for farms in the Central Valley (see: Woody Guthrie and the family of the aforementioned Merle Haggard) that California became the highly populated, urbanized state that it is today.
you could still make jokes about most californians being country hicks in like, the 70s
Sure I guess, but all the songs about the Mississippi river and the Bayou really threw me off
Joggin on the beaches bare
An' I can still hear my poodle yappin'
Chasin' down with home brew
Chasin' down with home brew there
Born in Malibu
Born in Malibu, oh oh
I saw Fogerty play in Golden Gate Park and he mentioned something about it; 'I know we play 'born on the Bayou', but I was actually born right over there in Berkeley'. That was almost all the talking he did during the entire set. He was going through the CCR songs like he was scared that the record company was going to get the rights back at any second.
"Here's one from my latest album..... but don't worry, we'll get right back to the Creedence after that!"
Saw him in a suburban skating rink. It was pretty dire, saw Heart there as well.
lol he's doing a show with the string cheese incident in a few months
They play swamp rock and sing about living in the bayou but the band is from the San Francisco Bay area.
This schtick bothers me a lot less when Primus does it, and I can't figure out why.
I love credence clearwater revival, such a great southern band that make music about living in the bayou!
They're actually Californian
Oh well then I don't like them at all
We're supposed to read this as the content was presenting as Japanese and not that the responder is arbitrarily racist toward China?
Cotton Fields was written by Lead Belly, who was actually from rural Louisiana.
