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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3319 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

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Oh ok, where is Rumours on your list? Also I wouldn't put alone above crazy on you, but I would put it above barracuda, although only just. And Heart's self titled album came out in 1985 too, and it's a great album.

Giving sneak previews of the list would defeat the purpose of the slow reveal, so you'll just have to wait to see where Rumours is on the list, if it's even on it. As for Heart, whatever you think of the 1985 album, that was around the point when Capitol wrested creative control from the band, dumping Mike Flicker to bring in hot rod producers like Ron Nevison and Keith Olsen and turning to hook-for-hire songwriters to pen all of the group's singles. They were generic by design. I'm not a huge fan of generic '80s arena rock, but if you're into that sort of thing, I'm not going to criticize you for it.

And yet they remain the only multi platinum woman fronted arena rock band in existence. Whatever, enjoy Rumours.

I'm not sure I see your point. Yeah, they had commercial success, but I don't see what record sales have to do with anything. At a time when they were fading into irrelevance studio execs parlayed their credibility to give them a second life, but part of the process was stripping away what had made them distinctive in the past. I really don't see how they're any different from Jefferson Starship/Starship of this period. Both had Ron Nevinson and Keith Olsen giving them the same slick sound, both had Diane Warren writing hits for them, both bore little to no resemblance, music-wise, to their earlier incarnations that gave them artistic credibility. Heart could have easily had a hit with "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" that wouldn't have been radically different than the Starship version. This is part of what I find so frustrating about what happened to classic artists in the '80s—in a bid to stay relevant, they all succumbed to trends and abandoned what made them distinctive in the first place. It's one thing when the band reaches that point organically, like Genesis did, but it's another when a deliberate effort is made to reduce the band itself to nothing more than frontmen (or women) for the machinations of record executives. This says nothing about whether the resulting product is actually good or not, but merely why I described them as generic (and if they're not, what would be generic arena rock, exactly?). And what's your problem with Rumours?

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