What Are We Doing Right Now?
1. Ad Campaign MUST BE IN
2. 50s music profile
3. 60s-70s Hard Rock Music Profile
Disco’s Dead
- towards the end of the decade (70s) people were reacting AGAINST disco because it was so popular with mainstream audiences
- HOWEVER – there were some other strange 70s musical styles that made cool audiences equally frustrated
Adult Oriented Rock – “yacht rock”
- Boring, soft, “nice” maybe sophisticated and maybe a little too gentle for young people
- A number of bands in the late 70s were hitting this market – this market was the older folks who had been rockers in the 60s (Baby Boomers)
- They were tired of disco dancing and they just wanted nice music –
- Radio started hitting this music pretty hard
- “mellow gold”
- this is NOT for young rebellious teens
- eg – Eagles, Toto, Steve Miller Band, Billy Joel, etc
Progressive Rock
- a bizarre, very showy and very ornate kind of complex music that was guaranteed to freak some people out and it attracted a more interesting audience
- music is not necessarily enjoyable, but it is complicated and weird and that appeals to some.
- some of these bands did get popular even though they were weird and their music was freaky – Queen
- some of the weird bands were – Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis, Yes and even Rush
- keyboards, too many parts to each song, songs too long, stage show is lasers and smoke and weirdness and costumes and trippy everything
- kind of acid drenched
- is NOT going to appeal to everybody
- many react against the weird, ornate music and they want something simple and powerful – ESPECIALLY young people, especially young men
The Response to all this soft, mellow, ornate, overdone, corporate money rock was PUNK.
- mid 70s to late 70s a bunch of bands came out that were truly dangerous, nasty, rebellious, stupid, aggressive, dumb, ugly, fun, ridiculous, and full of style and power for young people
- Sex Pistols, The Ramones. The Clash, etc
- This music caught on with some in a hurry because it was different and it was cheap and the opposite – it offended parents, which is a bonus
- Anybody could play it
- Problem – punk got turned into a style too
- Business jumped in and made it a trend – sold leathers, safety pins, chains, hairdoes, everything
A True Alternative Begins in the late 70s, early 80s (actually, TWO of them)
1. Post Punk (which becomes New Wave, which later becomes crappy 80s pop)
- bands like Joy Division, The Cure, Souixsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Duran Duran, U2 – another British Invasion (like the Beatles)
- weird, dark, gloomy sad and interesting music with a lot of style
2. Rap – suddenly, black music gets very new styles and vibes and starts to go into a very odd area
- one of the first rap tunes – The Message by Grandmaster Flash (from Happy Feet)
- and how about Sugar Hill Gang? Rapper’s Delight
- this kind of music was very groundbreaking – shocked people and attracted a new audience to black music – not white people at first
- one of the early bands to cross over into white audiences was Run DMC – why did they appeal to white kids?
- LL Cool J took a while to get to white audiences
HERE is why white kids came to rap – some artists were combining rap and rock and this was the magic key to making white kids like it
After that, they liked it because it was really powerful
Note: at these early days, MTV NEVER played black music or videos – the Billie Jean blew up and they had to play it
- a few hard core rap bands started gaining black audiences and then in the late 8os, they crossed over and started a new trend called Gangsta rap – that leads directly to modern hip hop
- NWA, Iced Tea, Public Enemy, Dr. Dre, Erik B. and Rakim
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