The defining sounds of an era....
Isn't it odd how many of the sounds which for many of us define an era are often its most annonying ones?
I was musing on this the other day, along with congratulating myself for organising my life so that I can spend hours pondering this nonsense.
The 50s
Endless orchestras and whitebread choirs added on to perfectly good black recordings by people like Nat Cole.
The bass vocal on doo-wop records.
The 60s
Endless whitebread choirs and orchestras added on to perfectly good black recordings by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke.
Fuzz guitar..not a bad effect, but often used to tasteless excess by hamfisted amateurs.
The 70s.
Flute, not the fun type Ian Anderson one, but the schmaltzy one which suddenly started appearing on Motown and West Coast records.
Guitar harmonies, a la Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy.
"Funky" Octave bass lines.
Syndrums
The 80s.
Fretless bass.
Linn Drums.
Gated drums.
Yamaha DX7 (Especially that "Woop Woop" sound beloved of Bush and Gabriel)
Chorused, flanged and echoed guitar, pioneered by Andy Summers but brought to its dunder-headed and overused nadir by Mr The Edge.
Sequenced bass lines.
Sequenced anything.
It's clear that the 80s reigns supreme for annoying sounds, but what were the defining sounds of the 90s and will they be just as irritating?
- More from shane pacey.
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your post made me think of this
(well, the first 20 seconds of the above clip anyway. that's XTC's "The History of Rock 'n' Roll". the rest is another XTC song, "Your Dictionary", and entirely irrelevant to your post).
bass vocals on doo-wop records?
Aw, come on. The ridiculous bass vocal is the best part! Well, even better is a ridiculous bass vocal when the lead singer does a ridiculously high falsetto part.
Frank Zappa got the hilarity of doo-wop down just great on Mothers Of Invention's 'Cruisin With Ruben And The Jets'.
Anyway, I recommend a track called 'I' by, I think, a band called The Velvets.
Ray Charles and Sam Cooke?
Which records are you talking about? I can't think of any where choruses were added afterwards. And I can't think of a single Ray Charles record that turned out other than the way Ray wanted it. He owned the masters, after all.
Ray wanted to make country records just like Sam wanted to make pop records. The implication of your point is that this was somehow exceeding their remit. And that if they hadn't done so their records would have been more "black".
Ray may have said he wanted them..
...but that could be historical redefinition.
You can't tell me that "I Can't Stop Loving You" and "Georgia On My Mind" to name but two wouldn't be improved by the swift removal of those awful choirs.
The truth remains that those effects were mainly the result of pressure from white producers.
Sam Cookes worst records were produced by Hugo and Luigi.
"More Black"? No, just more bearable.
Strings and big backing vocals have been used beautifully on black records since The Drifters early Atlantic sides.
90's and 00's
The ridiculous overuse of ProTools, in particular the "make it sound like a badly tuned transititor radio" effect
The ProTools "Hard Stop" where everything just stops and goes to complete silence
(Garbage and Nine Inch Nails are some of the main offenders)
Digital Vocoder abuse
Cher holds a lot of responsibility.
I agree...
The abuse of many Protools plug-ins, and the almost unlimited number of tracks available have made records from the mid-90s on cluttered, busy and noisy.
The 90s just makes me think of
that annoying piano sample/riff that seemed to be on every blooming pop and dance song all through the decade! You know the one... "Pling-plonk plink-a-plonk plink-plonk..." over and over and over.