Since around the 1940s, I would argue.
Counterfact: Simon Cowell agrees with you Dylan bashers about his voice and guitar playing.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Simon
Fucking
Cowell
All you lot who want pitch perfect singing can load up your auto tuned songs now. I’d rather have music that sounds like it was made by humans.
Next: Neil Youngs falsetto was occasionally a little off key, so he be shite
Dylan’s voice was never fantastic, but he wasn’t really off-key like say, Nick Cave who is a terrible singer.
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Ice cold take: Folk music and folk musicians are all terrible in every possible way.
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idk if telling a dumb story while noodling around on some random instrument is the worst possible type of music, but it is definitely the least sublime.
These posts are from the What are you listening to thread
Nevermind aged well because of the exact reasons the band disliked it: it was super polished and overproduced. As I’ve grown older In Utero has gone from a favorite to kind of a bummer, it’s very obvious Cobain was too deep into his heroin addiction to bother writing songs anymore. Five of the twelve tracks were written in 1990 or 1991 and “tourette’s” is pure filler, so we’re down to 6 new songs written for the album. The majority of the songs either end with or have a chorus of just a simple repetition (“Serve the servants, oh no” “Go away!” “Your adviiiiiiiiiice” “Rape me!” “I miss the comfort in being sad” “I think I’m dumb” “Out of the sky into the dirt” Milk It’s chorus is “doll steak, test meat” “Sit and drink Pennyroyal Tea”) and of course the pièce de résistance:
Those "all in all is all we are"s take up 1:30 of a 4 minute song, Kurt was out of ideas.
Anybody who doesn’t appreciate The Cure is dead inside.
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Long Music Producing Post Incoming:
As an occasional music producer, I’m going to have to fight you on Nevermind being ‘over produced’. That album was slickly produced, not overproduced, in my opinion. That’s why it holds up so well. I’ll give you a different example. The Clash was a punk group that weren’t particularly good players of their instruments. Their first album sounds raw to a certain extent but is still good quality. When you go in and look at the credits, you quickly realize that it was a slickly produced record.
I’ll give you my producing philosophy, which many people who are producers might not agree with. I believe that your goal as a producer should be to capture the essence of the group while making them sound as relatable as you can. I believe that your goal should be to bring the essence of that band up to its full potential without changing who the band is. If you fundamentally change the essence of the band, they can never live up to it live, and it becomes a totally different sounding group. Even if that group would be better as this new ‘type’ of group, it’s not the group and that’s bad producing, in my opinion.
In music history, Nirvana is an interesting case. They were basically a crummy garage band from Seattle whose first album was just hot garbage on a production scale. That was Kurt Cobain’s sensibility. He had no interest in being famous when he was writing music based on his sensibilities. The story about Smells Like Teen Spirit exactly encapsulates that. He was doing a parody of another song, but the producer heard how to make that song really cool for what it was and did that. That’s why it’s so impactful.
So, to me, the worst thing a Producer can do is stamp him/herself onto the record over the band. The best producers bring out the best in what the band is, while being a crucial part of the process to getting the group ‘there’. A good producer is going to find the band’s essence, have discussions about what the band’s music means to the Producer, how the Producer wants to tackle that, and then hopefully get the band on board with the Producer’s vision. In almost all music groups, there is at least one person who can convey the technical of what the band wants and will be able to tell the Producer no to bad decisions that compromise the integrity of the band.
Someone I’ve worked with many times in the past just seems to be allergic to success with his music. Neither of us take a Producer credit on his work, because we’re basically complementary parts and he doesn’t ever listen to me about major production things I want to do that would get him to that ‘people will want to buy this’ level (he has a tendency to overcomplicate songs). The problem with today’s easy access to technology for anyone is that songwriters get very very very attached to their demos. And the demo should generally be thrown in the garbage. The songwriter should also be able to divorce themselves from the material to a large extent, while fighting for the core of the song/style to be conveyed. Unless you as a songwriter are an A+ mixer (very rare for songwriters), you should not be mixing your own stuff. So, there are lots of considerations that go into why a record is produced in a certain way, at least on stuff I do (when I’m given that chance).
Back to Nirvana, think about the difference between Nevermind and In Utero. Cobain was well known, as you stated, to hate Nevermind. He wanted to have the great drummer but the production techniques/feel of that first crappy sounding garage album. So, the band went and got Steve Albini to do In Utero (one of my least favorite alternative music producers of all time, sorry fans). My problem with Steve Albini is that every single Albini record sounds like an Albini record. He presses his production so hard on to the bands that they all just might as well be playing in his band. That’s bad producing, in my opinion. As I said above, it’s not the Producer’s job to stamp themselves on to the record, it’s the Producer’s job to bring the band to its best life in the band’s essence. The Producer very easily can have a stamp on the production that doesn’t feel like it’s the Producer’s stamp, and that’s what I think most Producers should aim for.
I remember seeing the Smells Like Teen Spirit SNL performance, and it was a disaster. The problem with the production on the album was that it was produced like a 4 piece band, but they were a three piece band. This happens all the time in the studio, and you just tour with 4 pieces to recreate it if you are doing certain things that quite obviously can’t be recreated live with 3 pieces (as long as you can put aside your ego enough to do that, which most bands apparently can’t). Doubling a guitar shouldn’t change that feel, but having rhythm and leads at the same time for a single guitar player definitely does. I think more than anything it was probably Cobain kicking against the grain and refusing to do get another guitarist that led them down that path. I’m quite sure the three piece version of Nevermind would not have been up to his standards either. He was a walking paradox.
I’m a fan of both those Nirvana albums. I love the production on Nevermind, and hate the production on In Utero.
I’ll close giving you three demo to producing examples so you can hear whether you think the Producer helped or harmed the records from their demo stage, and I’ll also give my personal thoughts:
Blur (Come Together Demo):
Blur (Come Together Produced):
I think this song is decently produced, but think it falls into the over produced category. The demo is strong, and the essence of it just needs to be captured properly. I can hear exactly how I would produce it (Blur was also a 3 piece with singer who didn’t play), and it’s not this. My main issue with the song is that the Producer didn’t fix what I consider to be playing issues that harm the enjoyment of the song. I’m specifically talking about the bass. I think if the Producer would have turned Alex James’s bass line into a slow walk vs. the fast strumming between beats that it would have been way more effective. They also could have left the guitars as just a counterpoint as opposed to all of the doubling. Have the main guitar on the right or left, and have the ‘trick’ guitar on the other side. With effects pedals the guitarist could probably have carried this off live and given the song the same effect (when I saw Blur in 1991, they were not good live). That turns the song into slickly produced instead of over produced. The essence of the song is still in the produced version, but it’s not the best representation of the song, in my opinion.
The Primitives (Crash Demo):
The Primitives (Crash Produced):
This is a great example of a super over produced record. If you listen to the demo, you’ll hear that their version of this song is basically a punk song with a pop edge to the bass. The Producer clearly keyed in on that bass sound and heard a hit in the song. In this case, the Producer completely ignored what the band was trying to be (essentially a punk band with a female singer) and decided to turn the band into something that could be marketed. This is a great song, and I’m glad the Producer did what he did, but this is a textbook example of over production that nearly completely removed the essence of the band. The dirty guitar retains a little bit of their style, but the jangly guitar is definitely not them (a sound that ultimately came to define the band on future work). This was also a three piece band, and there is no way they could have played this properly live back then. The delay effects on the vocals are also hilarious. The song is so try hard in production but totally gets there. Kurt Cobain probably would have murdered the Producer of this song if he did something similar on Nevermind.
Here’s the full album that first appeared on if anyone wants to see how different the rest of it is:
Blur (Parklife Demo):
Blur (Parklife Produced):
This is an example of hitting all of my producing points. It completely captures the essence of the song, and elevates it. It’s not over produced at all. If Blur were good at playing live (they’re not in my experience) they could easily have recreated this song even as just the three piece plus singer. The mix has some choices I don’t particularly like, but the song gets there for sure from the demo. I would have liked to have heard the horns on both sides as that’s the true elevation of the song besides the bass production and maybe ‘swing’ of the song.
Bonus:
Blur (Popscene Demo):
Blur (Popscene Produced):
I have no idea how they got from point A to point B on this one, but the song that is produced is hiding there in the demo. This was my favorite song of 1992, and I first heard it after that concert I went to in 1991. One of the people I went with had a video recording of a live performance probably on the BBC. It sounded like crap, but I was stoked waiting months to hear what it would sound like probably 3 or 4 months later. The band thought it was going to be a hit. I thought it was going to be a hit. It bombed. It was scrubbed from the British release of the album, and only ended up on the American release. The video is psychotic.
I hope this long post appealed to someone.
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I love Disintegration and a lot of their library, but I can see if your first exposure is to a rapidly aging Robert Smith still putting on a make up you might not get the Cure. And the kids also growing up on dubstep or whatever might’ve not developed an ear for it.
Reposting this from the other thread because I still find it hilarious
Is it cheating to pick Neapolitan?
I’m glad Cobain is dead so I don’t have to listen to any new Nirvana music.
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I get the sense he offended you with his awful take on the Beatles lol.
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^^^ I didn’t think we needed a Dislike button but now I do. Now I know how 6ix felt after my vanilla take.
No one was forcing you. You’re free to hear anything you want including boy band skiffle or atonal street buskers.
Darts and pool should be Olympic sports too come to think of it
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It amazes how something as boring as darts attracts crazy crowds.
I do find farting after throwing your darts so the other person has to fight it off while throwing hilarious.
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Blowing smoke just below the board as you collect your darts was always a Fav because the old pubs that have dart boards are too fusty to smell a newly laid Fart.
You mean Butch Vig or the Andy Wallace mix tweaks, or both? The meme about Nevermind came from Cobain first going with the Wallace mixes but then later preferring the Vig mixes, saying the former sounded like 80s metal. They both sound good imo, just with subjective differences.
That video kinda sucks but it’s the only A/B I saw.
Also,
don’t get me started.