Vintage or plonk?
Posted by Steve Turner on 29 March 2008 - 12:35pm.
What ages some music badly whilst songs that have been around a lot longer still sound fresh today? the Beatles, Stones and Simon and Garfunkel all sound pretty good today. Last week a Prefab Sprout song came up on my IPOD and I had to skip it because it sounded very dated. Likewise Prince on some of his stuff. And here is an odd one the earlier stuff of Steely Dan sounds less dated than the Aja era stuff. Is it the production values? The instrumentation? I really dont think it is the songs.
What else sounds dated these days?
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Things which have aged badly...
Slade.
Whereas T. Rex has aged wonderfully.
The '80s
A lot of 80s pop productions sound dated to me - I think due to the reliance on horrible sounding drum machines, sequencers, crappy synthesisers etc. The producer probably thought it sounded very now back then and sounds crap now. mind you i thought it sounded crap then too!
Maybe
but then a great song and performance transcends such things doesn't it?
Like this one:
Beg to differ
WADR this absolutely encapsulates everything I hate about 80s sounding tracks - that horrible drum machine etc. Also it has Prince on it, the consumate 80s icon. To be honest the Artist never did it for me anyway.
A better example (for me) is "Lexicon of love" - it is touch and go with that too, but the songs are so good I can live with the horrid sound.
Another one is "Idlewild" by Everything But The Girl - hideous tinny drum machines everywhere, metallic "pianos" etc. Wish they're rerecord it cos the songs are lovely (all pile in - I know I am in an EBTG lover's minority of one here).
Contrary to a recent Word, "Owner of a lonely heart" is actually one of the worse Yes tracks, not least because of the vile 80s sound of it.
I understand your objections
I still love it though. If it (When Doves Cry) was re-recorded without the eighties additions I think that would spoil it for me, it is what it is. I guess to many this really does sound dated. Of course if you don't like Prince then you'll hate it anyway.
...and yet...
...Kraftwerk (70s and 80s) still sound amazing.
Yes it's true
Certainly to start with Kraftwork would have been using nice warm fuzzy analogue synths which sound so much nicer than that horrid DX7 and Prophet sound everyone used in the 80s. Maybe that's why?
80s production values are a mixed bag...
...it depends on how much they decided to overload with syn-drums, programming and poor keyboard sounds. I tend to find pretty much anything Stock/Aitken/Waterman put their name to totally unlistenable as they have the above sins in abundance.
As for rock albums, I nominate David Bowie's 'Never Let Me Down', Pink Floyd's 'A Momentary Lapse Of Reason', Genesis' 'Invisible Touch' and Paul McCartney's 'Press To Play' (albums which I confess to enjoying but sonically are very dated- far more so than these people's 70s albums). Have to also nominate Phil Collins' 'No Jacket Required' (full of poor, tinny keyboard/drum sounds and programming).
Even an album I really love, like Scott Walker's 'Climate Of Hunter', I have to confess is of its time in terms of production values- gated snare drums, that fretless bass and the occasional whiff of New Age in the synthesisers. Van Morrison's 'Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart' (what's that title about anyway??) and 'A Sense Of Wonder' have a lot of those thin 80s synth sounds too.
Is it just me that's finding some of the Britpop stuff a bit hard to take now, too? I can't put my finger on why that is as the production values aren't especially dated.
It may be
because those artists you mention really belong to the sixties and seventies in terms of their origins - just putting on trendy clothes that don't suit them has proven to be misguided (literally in some cases). Neil Young went down a strange route too in the eighties but came back to his senses with Freedom at the end of the decade. Whereas good songs made by artists that came out of that time still sound right. Something like Soft Cell - Say Hello Wave Goodbye perhaps?
I concur that the fretless bass was a fad in the 80s,
but I think it mainly sounds crap these days because far too many bass players jumped on that particular bandwagon without having the ear, or the accuracy of (usually) left hand, to carry it off.
If you listen to anything Jaco Pastorius did, the man who allegedly took some pliers to a conventional instrument and started the fad in the first place, you can hear why it's a wonderful thing for him to have done. As for his imitators, well, few had the chops to get away with it.
Golden rule
The less production that is involved the longer the record lasts. That's why hardly any of Bob Dylan's have dated.
You're right
and I think it is also because they didn't try to position themselves in time with any trendy technological "latest" gimmicks, so by defn they become timeless. "Axis-bold as love" for example is full of distracting studio trickery like stereo panning etc. Mind you the Hendrix/Beatles etc gimmicks somehow aren't as irritating to my ears at the 80s stuff.
But
isn't every record essentially part of it's time, reflecting the fashionable 'sound' that was prevelant? That's the ephemeral nature of pop. Yet a great song and performance can still sound fantastic decades later, and wouldn't music be duller if it wasn't so clearly of it's time? Isn't timelessness about the song coming through regardless, inspite of pop music's presumed ephemeral nature?
Certain of Dylan's records would have benefited...
from not having been produced at all. For example, "Dylan and the Dead".
Booker T and the MG's
Were essentially of their time but still sound great today as do all manner of songs like The Wanderer, Telstar, Johnny remember me etc. I am wondering if it might be the decade they are associated with. The 80's were a pretty shitty time in this country whereas the 60's are revered (possibly wrongly) in mythical terms.
Nostalgia can play tricks on you too though as witnessed by number of cd's I have purchased through reminiscing fondly about a moment in time only to realise that the world has moved on.
I agree. Depends on your age.
I was in my twenties in the 80s and had a lot of great times out on the town, living it up, as you do. I probably am pretty forgiving of the production excesses of the music from then, which I can appreciate are more trying than from other periods. It is hard remove yourself from those remembered emotions, no doubt, and decide if that song still really does sound so good as you thought. Not that you have to but for the sake of such vitally important discussions as this!
Ageing well.....
A long journey and shuffle has made me think on this, and I think it depends on ones mood at the time of listening, along with the prevailing winds of taste. The 80 as a time period were ever so "dated" until recently, now being re-assessed and unvilified. I think it's true of anything, one or two folk dare to say the unsayable and suddenly it's OK again. After all, look at the efforts of PC and Vulpes to "allow" Supertramp and Gilbert O'Sullivan to be listenable again. (Well, not to me, clearly!!!)
Who
Some of that rock opera stuff sounds really dated to me. Or maybe it's just not very good? It becomes easier to separate the wheat from the chaff over time - or class from dross shall we say.
If you look at movies you could say Brief Encounter has dated badly - frighfully posh accents. Yet to me it's greatness keeps it going. Thinking of The Who again - Ken Russell movies - very dated, but then they are mostly not very good?
Not just the 80's - What about the 90's / 00's ProTools abuses?
I agree on the Prefab Sprout comments, but I think the songs are strong enough for me to see past (or hear past) the production.
OK then - 90's/00's production cliches;
No.1; The "Gap" - ProTools used to gate out everything for a couple of beats before continuing.
No.2; The "Transistor Radio" - That's odd, the start of this brand new recording by sounds really quiet and tinny, almost like I'm listening on an old tranny. I'll just turn it up a bit... ***WHAM - Full band comes in in pristine hi-fi sound.... speaker cones bite the dust ***
There must be more.....
Itching to mention
all that scratching as heard on Portishead Dummy (in a good way) then as a recurring cliche elsewhere.
The first time I heard that going quiet then loud again thing (well, similar)was on Bjork's Debut (Milk Bar) but I understood it was really done in a nightclub by going into toilet then out (more muffled than going tinny in that case). Did become a cliche also though.
Robbie Robertson's first solo LP...
hasn't aged well to these ears. The Daniel Lanois production really dates it.
What once sounded so fresh and modern now sounds quite the opposite.
Squeeze
With the greatest respect to Chris Difford, recent guest on The Word podcast, listening to my recently acquired copy of Squeeze's 'Greatest Hits' has got me thinking about how the production of a song can completely ruin it.
The first 12 tracks, from 'Take Me, I'm Yours' to 'Annie Get Your Gun' are up there with the finest British pop music ever recorded. But then we hit the mid 1980s...
I am fairly sure that underneath the layers of studio trickery and gloss, fretless bass and Collins-esque drums, 'King George Street', 'Last Time Forever' and 'No Place Like Home' are good songs. But boy is it difficult to tell.
I like 'em!
Strangely. The drums thump all over(and sound less Gilson than drum machine, probably, but I can still pretend it's the big fella) , John Bentley, their best bassist of many makes the best of his fretlessness, and the echo adds rather than detracts from Mr Tillbrook. But then I always was a funny boy.
Best album of all however remains Some fantastic Place
Wilder - The Teardrop Explodes
I used to think this album was better than their first. But last time I listened to it, I really couldn't ignore the irritatingly trebly production on a lot of the tracks and the cheapo early eighties synth sounds.