Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day (or Columbus Day, depending on where you're reading). This post about the triumph of poptimism originally ran this summer for paid subscribers.
And a congratulations to those involved in securing the release of the Israeli hostages taken two years ago. I hope they are received safely and can recover from their ordeal.
Matt deserves a day off, but the demos demands more content.
A perfect opportunity for a natural experiment. Every federal holiday, AI can write an article “in the style of Yglesias” on a seasonally appropriate theme — food security on Thanksgiving, immigration on Columbus Day, defense policy on Memorial Day.
Over time, we can watch the essays improve and joke about the withering of the Anthropocene Substack economy, when things like human seasonal rhythms still mattered.
I was probably more embarrassed to really like pop music in say 1999 than I was to be bisexual. Through most of the 00s the contents of my iPod was a deeply held secret.
I feel really grateful for the poptimistic turn in culture. It’s probably gone too far and I wish we could have a mainstream rock music scene back. I have a deep affinity for the whole run of rock music before it became a niche genre that’s really hard to interpret. It’s sad to me that I do a huge project on music for black history month and almost no kids like rock music. Jimi Hendrix is never liked for instance. But compared to the insanely insular culture of the before times it’s so liberating.
I am fascinated by how what’s older does on streaming. On Spotify, Hendrix and The Who are listened to about 1/4 of the Rolling Stones. The Beatles are listened to about 25% more than the Stones. Queen has 50% more streams than the Beatles (!!). Nirvana is slightly more than the Beatles. Pearl Jam is less than half of the Beatles and Nirvana. Radiohead is between the Beatles and Queen. Prince is 1/3rd of the Beatles and 1/5th of Michael Jackson who is over 25% more than Radiohead .
Jay Z has more streams than the Beatles but less than Radiohead. 2Pac, Dr. Dre and Biggie have somewhat less than the Rolling Stones but 3x The Who and Hendrix.
But someone with new releases like Eminem has 50% more than Queen, as does Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter to use contemporary examples.
But how do you explain stuff like Creedence Clearwater Revival being 1/3rd more popular than the Eagles and with more streams than the Rolling Stones? Fleetwood Mac is more popular than all of them, the Beatles and Radiohead? Very interesting.
I don’t know all the dynamics on this. Queen was so elevated by the movie. Fleetwood Mac definitely got elevated somewhere on TikTok.
My basic experience with actual kids (6-10 year olds) is the kind of death knell is being really guitar forward. A total inversion from my youth. A lot of them love old music Jazz does really well, Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin both consistently get a lot of love, Motown, and early hip hop. But anything that has really guitar led music and unclear lyrics seem incomprehensible. I don’t know how well this tracks onto the streaming numbers.
I'm going to go out on a limb, maybe controversially, and say Queen is just better music. My take on the Beatles and the Stones are that they were pioneers but are over inflated musically by virtue of being early adopters. Way better stuff came after.
I don't disagree with anything you've said on the thread, but anecdotally, among my older son's peer group which is elementary school, there is a lot of burgeoning interest in Metallica. Maybe a rock contingent will come back. Though they also seem to like and respond to plenty of hip hop and pop type music. I suspect that the days of strongly identifying with a particular genre of music have passed.
Yes! Thank you! There is at least one other person who agrees with me about the Beatles being overrated. Everyone else, feel free to pelt me with rotten produce.
People should like what they like but this is wrong.
The Beatles wrote an astounding number of great songs in a very short period. Two comments to demonstrate their towering greatness: 1) the guy who wrote Here Comes the Sun and Something was the third best songwriter in the band, and 2) I saw Colin and Brad (from Who’s Line) do a live show. One bit where they have an audience member onstage involves asking them to pick a Beatles song and they said they pick the Beatles because everybody knows a Beatles song.
PS I’m not a big fan of Queen and think they’re overrated so hey, to each their own. Carry on!
I'm used to being a minority on the Beatles and my musical taste generally. While corporate lawyer by day I'm still an unapologetic metal head by night. No one wants me in charge of the Playlist, save maybe a handful of close friends who I've helped bring to the dark side, and I accept that.
I have seen some Metallica interest among musicians but not so much just ordinary kids. Like people who play the guitar really like them.
I have a deep obsession with pop songwriting which keeps the Beatles very high on my personal list but I can see it if you’re more interested in the sonic part of music which is most people.
Yea Metallica was also an entry level for musicians when I was a kid. They were part of what got me into guitar, a hobby that sadly hasn't really survived me becoming a dad, beyond the occasional nursery rhyme when they were babies. Maybe when they're older I'll have a life again and be able to get back into it.
My son's group seems to be the athletes and they are open to rock. But again, they'll also listen to rap and pop. I'll hear them do Master of Puppets or Enter Sandman or something but then go to Thick of It by KSI.
The thing that is funny to me about this is that many of those rankings make sense to me personally (e.g., I definitely prefer Michael Jackson or the Beatles over Prince, CCR over the Eagles, etc.).
The interesting thing is that CCR was over almost as fast as Hendrix was and ended up dwarfed by the Eagles ongoing success, I think CCR are viewed as something of a footnote critically, but now seem to be outdoing bands that were more successful or have had more critical cred.
Have we just run out of new ideas for music genres? Growing up in the 60s-80s we had the 60s with all its genres, then progressive, metal, disco, classic, and early punk in the 70s. The 80s with new wave, punk, surf thrash, et al was a blast along with continued new stuff from 60s,70s bands. Then the 90s came along with grunge, which seemed short-lived, and rap/hip hop. And there it has remained stuck, not that there isn't always new music in the back alleys but as a cultural wave rap/hip hop is still what I hear blasting out of kids cars these days. And tattoos (one writer thought the tribal-esque music and tattoos were a subconscious rebellion to the technology age). So maybe poptimism has taken up the slack in the musical void? But I could just be cynical and aging---music is still wonderful but it shares the spotlight with more NPR and other talk radio, well, just silence and birds singing.
No, I feel bad for my teenage kids. Every genre they listen to is totally comfortable to me, and I would have listened to it with my friends back in the early 90s. Even the rap (which scandalized my parents’ generation with how different it was) is totally familiar and comfortable to me, if a bit more interesting and less gangster.
This generation hasn’t had a musical break from its parents generation. In some ways I’m happy about that (I can go to music festivals with my teenage daughter and enjoy myself) but in other more profound ways it’s very sad.
This suggests to me that your kids aren't into death metal or heavier duty forms of dubstep. (Which is fine -- both genres are literally unlistenable to me -- but they definitely don't resemble anything I can remember hearing in the early 1990s.)
As someone on the younger side of the SB commentariat, my parents cannot stand drum n bass, which is probably my favorite genre of music. Because the median SB reader is an old millennial, they don’t have Zoomer kids or siblings and aren’t really in a position to know that much about people in that age group.
On Tibet, I remember being at college - this was probably 1992 or 1993 - and I went to a talk with a visiting scholar who had recently returned from China who had spent some time - at some risk to himself as this wasn’t long after June 4- with Chinese pro-Democracy activists. He told us that when he brought up the issue of Tibet with them, their response was on the lines of “Tibet? That’s ours!” The implication being that even if the pro-democracy forces in China had triumphed (and of course they didn’t) that would not necessarily have been great news for the Tibetans.
Columbus Day has always felt like a coastal-only holiday in my experience. I don’t think I’ve gone to a school or held a job that gave the day off as a holiday.
I feel like this underexplains some things. Indie rock and pop weren't the only two contestants. There used to be plenty of very popular poppy commercial rock out there (Duran Duran, Guns n Roses, The Scorpions, The Go Gos, The Bangles, you name it) and now there isn't. Commercial music has won out over gritty music in lots of eras. That doesn't explain why rock as a form has disappeared.
As somebody a bit older who was into Alt Rock it seemed like the writing was on the wall by the early aughts. Alt rock only made sense as a slightly edgier and more expermental off shoot of a popular rock genre.
By the aughts more or less popular rock music had collapsed, with Indie/Alt as a last vestige. There's now as much indie pop as indie rock, if not more.
A link to the comments when this post ran back in August. https://www.slowboring.com/p/postcards-from-the-wrong-side-of/comments
And a congratulations to those involved in securing the release of the Israeli hostages taken two years ago. I hope they are received safely and can recover from their ordeal.
Matt deserves a day off, but the demos demands more content.
A perfect opportunity for a natural experiment. Every federal holiday, AI can write an article “in the style of Yglesias” on a seasonally appropriate theme — food security on Thanksgiving, immigration on Columbus Day, defense policy on Memorial Day.
Over time, we can watch the essays improve and joke about the withering of the Anthropocene Substack economy, when things like human seasonal rhythms still mattered.
"The logic of the ad-supported web inverted this."
So what you're saying is you sold out and decided to frame the article around Taylor Swift.
I was probably more embarrassed to really like pop music in say 1999 than I was to be bisexual. Through most of the 00s the contents of my iPod was a deeply held secret.
I feel really grateful for the poptimistic turn in culture. It’s probably gone too far and I wish we could have a mainstream rock music scene back. I have a deep affinity for the whole run of rock music before it became a niche genre that’s really hard to interpret. It’s sad to me that I do a huge project on music for black history month and almost no kids like rock music. Jimi Hendrix is never liked for instance. But compared to the insanely insular culture of the before times it’s so liberating.
I am fascinated by how what’s older does on streaming. On Spotify, Hendrix and The Who are listened to about 1/4 of the Rolling Stones. The Beatles are listened to about 25% more than the Stones. Queen has 50% more streams than the Beatles (!!). Nirvana is slightly more than the Beatles. Pearl Jam is less than half of the Beatles and Nirvana. Radiohead is between the Beatles and Queen. Prince is 1/3rd of the Beatles and 1/5th of Michael Jackson who is over 25% more than Radiohead .
Jay Z has more streams than the Beatles but less than Radiohead. 2Pac, Dr. Dre and Biggie have somewhat less than the Rolling Stones but 3x The Who and Hendrix.
But someone with new releases like Eminem has 50% more than Queen, as does Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter to use contemporary examples.
But how do you explain stuff like Creedence Clearwater Revival being 1/3rd more popular than the Eagles and with more streams than the Rolling Stones? Fleetwood Mac is more popular than all of them, the Beatles and Radiohead? Very interesting.
I don’t know all the dynamics on this. Queen was so elevated by the movie. Fleetwood Mac definitely got elevated somewhere on TikTok.
My basic experience with actual kids (6-10 year olds) is the kind of death knell is being really guitar forward. A total inversion from my youth. A lot of them love old music Jazz does really well, Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin both consistently get a lot of love, Motown, and early hip hop. But anything that has really guitar led music and unclear lyrics seem incomprehensible. I don’t know how well this tracks onto the streaming numbers.
I'm going to go out on a limb, maybe controversially, and say Queen is just better music. My take on the Beatles and the Stones are that they were pioneers but are over inflated musically by virtue of being early adopters. Way better stuff came after.
I don't disagree with anything you've said on the thread, but anecdotally, among my older son's peer group which is elementary school, there is a lot of burgeoning interest in Metallica. Maybe a rock contingent will come back. Though they also seem to like and respond to plenty of hip hop and pop type music. I suspect that the days of strongly identifying with a particular genre of music have passed.
Yes! Thank you! There is at least one other person who agrees with me about the Beatles being overrated. Everyone else, feel free to pelt me with rotten produce.
Glad I'm not the only one that's spent decades taking heat about this.
People should like what they like but this is wrong.
The Beatles wrote an astounding number of great songs in a very short period. Two comments to demonstrate their towering greatness: 1) the guy who wrote Here Comes the Sun and Something was the third best songwriter in the band, and 2) I saw Colin and Brad (from Who’s Line) do a live show. One bit where they have an audience member onstage involves asking them to pick a Beatles song and they said they pick the Beatles because everybody knows a Beatles song.
PS I’m not a big fan of Queen and think they’re overrated so hey, to each their own. Carry on!
“PS I’m not a big fan of Queen and think they’re overrated so hey, to each their own. Carry on!”
Wasn’t Queen considered super cheesy, even at the time?
I'm used to being a minority on the Beatles and my musical taste generally. While corporate lawyer by day I'm still an unapologetic metal head by night. No one wants me in charge of the Playlist, save maybe a handful of close friends who I've helped bring to the dark side, and I accept that.
I have seen some Metallica interest among musicians but not so much just ordinary kids. Like people who play the guitar really like them.
I have a deep obsession with pop songwriting which keeps the Beatles very high on my personal list but I can see it if you’re more interested in the sonic part of music which is most people.
Yea Metallica was also an entry level for musicians when I was a kid. They were part of what got me into guitar, a hobby that sadly hasn't really survived me becoming a dad, beyond the occasional nursery rhyme when they were babies. Maybe when they're older I'll have a life again and be able to get back into it.
My son's group seems to be the athletes and they are open to rock. But again, they'll also listen to rap and pop. I'll hear them do Master of Puppets or Enter Sandman or something but then go to Thick of It by KSI.
The thing that is funny to me about this is that many of those rankings make sense to me personally (e.g., I definitely prefer Michael Jackson or the Beatles over Prince, CCR over the Eagles, etc.).
The interesting thing is that CCR was over almost as fast as Hendrix was and ended up dwarfed by the Eagles ongoing success, I think CCR are viewed as something of a footnote critically, but now seem to be outdoing bands that were more successful or have had more critical cred.
Have we just run out of new ideas for music genres? Growing up in the 60s-80s we had the 60s with all its genres, then progressive, metal, disco, classic, and early punk in the 70s. The 80s with new wave, punk, surf thrash, et al was a blast along with continued new stuff from 60s,70s bands. Then the 90s came along with grunge, which seemed short-lived, and rap/hip hop. And there it has remained stuck, not that there isn't always new music in the back alleys but as a cultural wave rap/hip hop is still what I hear blasting out of kids cars these days. And tattoos (one writer thought the tribal-esque music and tattoos were a subconscious rebellion to the technology age). So maybe poptimism has taken up the slack in the musical void? But I could just be cynical and aging---music is still wonderful but it shares the spotlight with more NPR and other talk radio, well, just silence and birds singing.
No, I feel bad for my teenage kids. Every genre they listen to is totally comfortable to me, and I would have listened to it with my friends back in the early 90s. Even the rap (which scandalized my parents’ generation with how different it was) is totally familiar and comfortable to me, if a bit more interesting and less gangster.
This generation hasn’t had a musical break from its parents generation. In some ways I’m happy about that (I can go to music festivals with my teenage daughter and enjoy myself) but in other more profound ways it’s very sad.
This suggests to me that your kids aren't into death metal or heavier duty forms of dubstep. (Which is fine -- both genres are literally unlistenable to me -- but they definitely don't resemble anything I can remember hearing in the early 1990s.)
As someone on the younger side of the SB commentariat, my parents cannot stand drum n bass, which is probably my favorite genre of music. Because the median SB reader is an old millennial, they don’t have Zoomer kids or siblings and aren’t really in a position to know that much about people in that age group.
As a college-aged person, my understanding is that the gap that you are imagining has largely been filled by various subgenres of electronic music.
Rap/hip hop is not one genre but many.
On Tibet, I remember being at college - this was probably 1992 or 1993 - and I went to a talk with a visiting scholar who had recently returned from China who had spent some time - at some risk to himself as this wasn’t long after June 4- with Chinese pro-Democracy activists. He told us that when he brought up the issue of Tibet with them, their response was on the lines of “Tibet? That’s ours!” The implication being that even if the pro-democracy forces in China had triumphed (and of course they didn’t) that would not necessarily have been great news for the Tibetans.
Yeah, looking at the history of China doesn’t lend very much hope to the idea that they’re going to be ok with spinning off various conquered regions.
You hear that, Ton? I said: “In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero - end of story!” Heh heh
Columbus Day has always felt like a coastal-only holiday in my experience. I don’t think I’ve gone to a school or held a job that gave the day off as a holiday.
I feel like this underexplains some things. Indie rock and pop weren't the only two contestants. There used to be plenty of very popular poppy commercial rock out there (Duran Duran, Guns n Roses, The Scorpions, The Go Gos, The Bangles, you name it) and now there isn't. Commercial music has won out over gritty music in lots of eras. That doesn't explain why rock as a form has disappeared.
As somebody a bit older who was into Alt Rock it seemed like the writing was on the wall by the early aughts. Alt rock only made sense as a slightly edgier and more expermental off shoot of a popular rock genre.
By the aughts more or less popular rock music had collapsed, with Indie/Alt as a last vestige. There's now as much indie pop as indie rock, if not more.
Happy Italian American Heritage Day from New Haven!
Was surprising to me that New Haven County east to Providence is the most Italian place in the US.