It was mega. Seriously, it was everywhere. One of the biggest selling albums for 1980 in the UK and the US. It wasn't my cup of tea, tbh. But, jeez, it was SO successful.
It really does. I don't wanna go on and on about it. Other people can speak up for it better than I can. But it was really significant. The dividing line between Michael with J5 or Jacksons and Michael on his own ...
Depends on a few things. OTW homages disco, but it's a lot deeper than just disco. Real musicianship is in this record; it's so much more. And it's so consistent too; most artists strive to reach this peak; MJ basically got it on the first try and then just celebrated until the 90s.
True, 'Disco' just went on as 'House' and even 'Techno' and it served as one of the pillars of early Hip hop too
To be fair, the snobbiness isnt entirely unwarranted. After the death of grunge, rock and metal was just never able to recoup the same amount of mainstream appeal that they had in the 70s and 80s as rappers, boy bands, pop princesses, and then eventually EDM and house music started to climb the charts in the 2000s and 2010s. A lot of metalheads feel like they've essentially been blackballed by the mainstream music industry, and while many have basically embraced becoming more of a counter-culture, many do resent other genres of music for replacing them, especially in the U.S as rock and metal still has somewhat of a decent sized following in Europe and South America.
They are also the people who looked down on music fans of different genres and laughed with anyone who was into disco or soul music. But in the end it was all insecurity, they were afraid of women and they couldn't dance so they turned into rock fans and listened to bands with angst ridden lyrics.
For the most part regular heavy metal has never had mainstream popularity in the USA. It was glam metal bands like Def Leppard, Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Mƶtley CrĆ¼e, Warrant, Cinderella, Poison, etc. that got Top 40 airplay and had the big sales. The rock music press tended to put it down calling it "hair metal" or "metal for women" because of the power ballads & pretty boy singers. Or that they used makeup.
According to the Rolling Stone magazines of the world, it was grunge that made glam metal obsolete practically overnight, not hip hop. There was a documentary on VH-1 called Metal Evolution that pretty much said the same thing. The early 1990s is when the few hard rock acts that still sold started to cut their hair like Bon Jovi & Metallica. Mƶtley CrĆ¼e fired Vince Neil and got John Corabi as their lead singer and changed their sound,
Except it was. It was quite normal.
There's always a d*ckhead somewhere. Doesn't mean all rock fans are equally d*ckheaded.
I can't comment on Belgium but that's not the UK. Lots of appalling racism, sure, but not everyone.
Pretty much all US-originated styles of music are a mix of African/black and European/white music. I like to visualize it as a spectrum, with classical music on the most European end and traditional African music on the most African end.
But what about the black composers of Classical Music? And obviously there are white Africans, they just don't seem to be talked about much.
Production wise it's very late 80s but all of the melodies are timeless and great. And sonically so many of the sounds are interesting and unique.
I'm referring to music styles, tropes, and compositional techniques that originated from Africa and Europe, respectively. Black composers of classical music are still composing in a style of music that is European, just like the fact that some Japanese people have made western-style rock music doesn't make rock a Japanese genre, and George Harrison writing all those sitar/Indian pieces doesn't change the fact that that it is Indian music. It's not about the race of the individual writer/performer, it's about the culture that the style was developed in. Most of the jazz community is now white, that doesn't change the fact that jazz originated with black Americans.
That's what I meant by dated sounding. Most of what dates music in the pop/rock genres is the production/instrumentation/arrangement. Granted, there are some exceptions to this, for example, Alice in Chains and other 90s grunge bands used dissonance and unusual intervals in a unique way (you could play "Angry Chair" with gated reverb and 80s synths, and it still wouldn't sound like 80s music, for example), but if you remixed "Off The Wall" with the production of "Bad", it would sound late 80s, and the same is true vice versa.
Well I was just confused by you saying black and white in connection with African/European. Though I understand now you're just making it easier to relate them for the audience reading this.
Well, it's kinda just like Xscape, always the biggest go to. They contemporized, 80s, 90s, 2000s songs, to sound late 2010s. To varying degrees of effectiveness. I think a lot of MJs songwriting is flexible in this way.
Thanks
I much preferred Michael to Xscape, Michael actually sounded like an MJ album, Xscape didn't.
Agreed.
I think it could be easily contemporized if you gave it a different arrangement/production. Speechless is the most timeless thing on Invincible
That and Whatever Happens. Too compressed though.
It's on trend for Invincible era stuff though, it tricks my brain. Michael feels like half hearted MJ. Too many clunky spots still to me.
There's some weird effect on Michael's voice in WH, though. It almost sounds like Teddy Riley pitched it down or put some weird formant shifter on it.
I didn't like most of the Timbaland remixes. I liked LNFSG, APWNN, and Xscape a lot.
