Silversun Pickups, Smashing Pumpkins, The Beatles, Bob Marley, and Pink Floyd

The answer is you're old.

 

i think a lot of kids see music and rock bands as passe. its not that important to youth culture anymore...too many other options for entertainment. today, video games and iphones are the rock stars.

for that reason, rock stars are definitely not at the level they used to be. and nobody buys albums anymore so they cant live like rock stars either. the money isnt as free-flowing as it once was for them.

and its funny watching rolling stone push the hell out of greta van fleet. they do write-ups on them almost every day. they are so desperate to create the next big rock stars, but this is the best they can come up with??? i used to follow RS on facebook, but i got sick them them talking about those kids all the time so I deleted.

the older i get, the more i go back in time for new music. there is a lifetimes worth of great stuff out there already!

 

Did we just become best friends?

 

Exactly. You get a mortgage, a family and a trick knee, suddenly finding the new hot band isn't on your radar.

But maybe I'm just projecting.

 

Do you know that hit songs from artist like Drake and Ariana Grande are listened to by BILLIONS of people? I think they are more popular and influential worldwide than all the bands you listed, easily.

In today's age of tech, and with simple population growth, more people have access to music than ever before.


Here let me hit you with some bull ****

3.9 BILLION VIEWS

Spoiler

This one's going to hurt you, I searched Beatles by highest view count .... this song came up higher than ANY Beatles song on youtube.

Spoiler

700 million views, the highest viewed Beatle song? Don't let me down at only 200 million.

 

Also water is wet. You weren’t expecting the Beatles to have more hits on YouTube than artists of this generation? This is not indicative of influence.

 

I know.

But what do you consider influence? Is listening and liking an artist influence? Is being an icon all over the world influence? If so I think Drake is more influential then the Beatles are, due to the sheer amount of people who know, listen to him and like him as an artist.

The word influence and this thread topic is just very subjective. I understand what you and OP are saying, MJ, Elvis, and the Beatles... will we have another superstar like any of them? People dress like them, people have walls in their house dedicated to memorabilia, people would follow them on tours, we have museums for them etc...Still, there's way more people who know who Drake is, are wearing his shirts and listen to his music worldwide due to technology.

 

Your comma usage needs serious help.

And I've never heard of Silversun Pickups. But that band's name would go well with this.

 

The answer is in this question. During Tupac and Pink Floyd, they were not clear cut legends of all time. They were simply seen as the best of the best in those specific years, with a tiny tiny minority insisting that they're all-time greats. It's only when they were done that it exploded. Don't be fooled by the narrow scope that documentaries frame their biographies in order to exaggerate what you're watching.

Justin Bieber is every bit as big as Michael Jackson. Carly Rae Jepson sold twice as many singles than the Beatles' highest selling single. So did Gotye, LMFAO, Jay Chou, Robin Thicke and a bunch of other popular people.

Music is huge and the fan base is bigger than its ever been, so there is room for multiple Beatles-like things going on. China alone can spawn a band as big as the Beatles were, even if most of us won't understand a word they say.

 

I think you’re vastly underestimating how many people know who the Beatles are. But regardless of their current level of popularity, the underlying influence of the Beatles in popular music today can’t be remotely understated. From the recording process to song structure. No one will match that level of strictly musical influence.

 

My thought is that back in the day, an artist could be innovative, risky, mainstream, and simply good enough to have a timeless legacy. Nowadays finding something that is all of those is difficult. The quality of mainstream music has gone down since the mid 90s. Most of the popular stuff nowadays caters to the instant gratification required to get a few streams from the mostly young people who have a million other things competing for their time. The music itself will be forgotten as quickly as it was listened to. Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift don't have any songs that will be remembered. There is no Like a Prayer (or insert other Madonna song) that is immortalized.

In the 80s and 90s, I think MTV had a large part to play with elevating the artists. It was a huge pastime for kids who grew up during that time, and was pretty much geared towards elevating artists while providing a visual to go a long with it. I know music videos are still watched today on youtube, but it's just another thing competing with everything else. Nowhere near the influence MTV used to have.

As far as rock music, there's still a good amount of high quality music out there. However, even the most popular one's are nowhere near ubiquitous in the same way as bands like Smashing Pumpkins were. The lack of popularity won't allow them to ever have much of a legacy. A long-lasting cult following may be the best they could hope for.

 

Everyday in the 80's in my Mustang.

 

This post makes me sad. Because it's true.

Even the kids who ARE interested in music aren't learning to play instruments or starting bands....they're skipping over all that hard (and amazingly fun and rewarding) work and just trying out to be the next voice or american idol instead. While their helicopter parents are just telling them how great they are instead of how they can get better.

And yeah, I'm the same way. Too lazy to go out there and try to find new music. My way of "discovering new music" is going deeper into catalogs of bands that I only causally liked back in high school/college.

 

think about being a kid in the 50's compared to now. you had to create most of your entertainment, which was mainly playing outside with your friends. you didnt have all the options you did today. you had a B&W tv with 3 channels vs hundreds of channels and the entire history of film and tv at your fingertips. and then all-of-a-sudden chuck berry, elvis, little richard, ect come along and literally became the PS4 / netflix / facebook of their day. music was how youth culture shared ideas, style, attitudes, ect...rock and roll was the internet of the 50's.

i dont have kids, but when i go over to my friends houses who do the kid is almost always off in a corner by themselves playing on a small electronic device. or playing a video game on a wide-screen tv. being a kid today seems so much more solitary and in a lot of ways, music is a communal, shared thing. so you dont have groups of friends sharing their favorite bands, but instead they talk about video games or netflix.

for me, i know that its sometimes harder to decide what i want to listen to b/c i have access to the entire recorded history of music. when i just had my cd collection or even 15 years ago, my ipod, it was much easier to make that in-the-moment decision of what album to put on. sometimes, i think too many choices ends up leaving you unable to make a decision.

its not entirely hopeless. one way to look at it is that the people who are into being musicians for the wrong reasons will just stick to guitar hero and never actually start a (crappy) band. also, girls rock camp in austin is a great incubator of young people in it for the right reasons. its been around so long now that there are girls that came out of that and are now grown-ass women fronting or in several popular austin bands.

 

Current musicians are more focused on a quick delivery. The work ethic isn't there.

How much work did it take for Pink Floyd to make Dark Side of the Moon?
How much work and practice did the great rock musicians of the 80s and 70s put into honing their skills on their instruments? incorporating new sounds into their music? Touring and making the next album?
How much work did Rush put into...everything?

Think about concept albums like 2112, Wish You Were Here, The Wall...

The last we've seen of anything like this would be some albums in 90's from Nine Inch Nails or The Cure... and even though those are excellent, they aren't really in the same league as the classic albums.

"Albums".... I'm showing my age. Modern musicians don't even deliver music in "albums" any more. Public attention is now given more to solo artists... to single songs... to songs that are written hastily and simply. Such songs existed in the 80s and 70s as well - and those songs faded in popularity quickly, just like the current ones do.

But if that's what modern youth wants. Whatcha gonna do?

I think the funniest thing is... when kids are getting sick of the current crappy pop music, they're doing the same thing we are - going back in time and re-discovering great music from previous generations. My son loves "Do you feel like We Do" by Frampton... and Van Halen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin. My daughter loves "Freewill" by Rush, and Queen, and lots of other 80s and 70s rock. I think this is why 80s music is still incredibly popular and hasn't died off.

 

Truly great rock bands that span (or spanned) decades and built lasting legacies are mostly dead or dying as far as rock music goes. There are some of those acts left but they are approaching the end. And, some of those acts should have probably retired by now but just refuse to give it up as long as they can still do it no matter how old they get. That era is pretty much gone albeit Greta Van Fleet has a chance to build a legacy like that according to some. But, as much as they sound like Led Zeppelin, they may never be able to shake that label and break away from them being a sort of copycat band even with all their talent. I don't see them achieving a level of popularity over decades like that but it could happen. I don't think there is enough of an audience for them at this point.

But, like was said, music still has plenty of big stars with legacies. Unfortunately, they fall into other categories of music such as pop or rap...just not rock. I guess there is a reason most of those big rock acts of old fall under a label of classic rock. That music falls into a period of rock acts from the 60s to 80s. The glory days of those big stadium rock acts are a dying breed and that era won't be repeated. That is where all the truly great rock music came from. And, given just the timing of the evolution of rock music and where the music industry is today, there won't be rock acts achieving that level of greatness again. Those were different, special times. I remember practically being able to see a different big stadium rock act basically coming through town every month. It was just non-stop music and stadium tours by all these great bands. I'm just glad I was around to experience it. That music will never die and always have an audience. But, getting to experience those acts live in their prime is all but gone. It's a modern day rock tragedy.

 

I'm at peace with it. Adapted. I like what I like and don't need for it to be a "thing". Ultimately, the music I like being popular doesn't help me in any way.