This song always reminds me of when my kids were little.
One of those birthday party places with foam pits and jumpy stuff had a light-up dance floor. Much of the time during birthday parties, it was just a grid where kids could hop on the squares to light them up. Every so often, music would start. One of the songs was “What Makes You Beautiful” and the venue always played a montage of Spongebob clips on a big screen when the song played.
I wasn’t familiar with the song at the time, so now my brain always associates it with kids’ birthday parties and Spongebob. Spongebob images quite literally pop into my head whenever I hear that song.
My kids really only listened to the music my wife and I listened to until the reached their teen years. So the listened to 80’s music in my wife’s car and classic rock and Beatles in my car and in the house.
Now my daughter (about to turn 18) is into a lot of current popular stuff plus random 90’s and Billy Joel. My son (almost 16) went from Beatles to Gorillaz to rap (Tyler the Creator) and is now into 90’s stuff from grunge to alternative to metal: Nirvana, Radiohead, Korn, Slipknot, etc. I think it’s hilarious that all his favorite music right now is from when I was in college. He had a big Weezer phase, too.
Though I heard him listening to Louis Armstrong in the shower last night. Odd.
My 22 yo really likes Billy Joel and did when she was a tween/teen and, not that we don’t like him, but she found him on her own, not from the old people around her. She even saw him in concert when she was like 13.
Yeah, my daughter found him on her own, too. I have all or almost all of his albums and have reminded her of that a few times, but she’s too cool to let me rip them so she can have them on her phone, since she has Spotify. We really like his new song and have watched the video together a bunch of times.
I like his new song a lot too. I used to put up piano videos on youtube but haven’t done so since 2019, but lately I’ve been toying with the idea of doing that song as my great comeback. In fact I was playing it earlier today
It really shocks me how much my students are into 90s music and I assure you it has absolutely nothing to do with me playing it in class. Plenty of my students are unironically wearing Nirvana and Tupac shirts in my class among other bands and rappers from that time.
To me, it’s more a representation of how modern pop music hasn’t really done anything to capture anyone’s attention.
The professional gambler Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas in December 1992 with $50 to his name. He borrowed $10,000 from a friend and, over roughly the next three years—after a freewheeling and volatile saga of ups and downs, but predominantly ups—reportedly turned that money into $40 million.
…
Not long after, Karas would be broke, having lost his entire bankroll in a fraction of the time it took to amass it.
There are so few mainstream bands anymore. It’s all individual artists with touring bands. Just took a quick look at the first 50 on the current Billboard Hot 100 - zero bands and rock music is essentially non-existent. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life and my hope is all the young people listening to 90s music are the driving force to bring back the band.
Speaking of Tupac I found out how they did his hologram. They filmed people with similar body parts (eyes, nose, mouth, torso, legs etc) and then just stitched them all together. Seems like it would be easier to do in 2024.
Rick is great at meandering for fifteen minutes and never making a point. The reason there are no new bands is because the crooks who control music don’t want new bands. It’s that simple. Everything else is downstream from that.
My guess would be phones and video games eliminating some of the impetus for organized social interaction required for a band to develop. Then, at the next level, when there is a “band ecosystem,” better bends develop when like the band with a bad bassist knows of a band with only a good bassist. There used to be enough cash floating around the bottom rung where such “incomplete” bands could exist for a while. I see the music industry as largely superfluous. They mine ore when there is ore to mine and/or polish low grade ore (single artists) when that’s all there is available.
I think there’s lots of new bands. It’s just way easier now to release and distribute music on your own than it ever was. So instead of the small number of bands with record deals fighting for and getting a big piece of pie, you have thousands of bands fighting for a tiny piece of that pie.
Getting a big record contract used to be a huge filter to getting exposure.
Haven’t seen the video yet but I suspect it has more to do with bands being more costly and time-consuming to produce than a single artist with a bunch of session musicians who do what they’re told.
