Yep!
You were getting agitated so I tried to bring the emotional temperature down!but I take your word he is a levelheaded fan and not someone like me who sometimes is easily butt hurt
If it got any kind of writeup in a mainstream magazine, it was probably Billboard. But all of their reviews are short. Rolling Stone would do a review if it was Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye. Also the J5 would be considered a teenybopper or bubblegum act and RS didn't do a lot of coverage on that. It's not like they would spend a lot of space to review Donny & Marie records either.
They'd be in Tiger Beat.If anything could be said to do that, it was hip hop. Hip hop is still mainstream today in the USA, when grunge fell off long ago. Rock music in itself is not really as much of a thing with the younger mainstream audience, it's not on current Top 40 radio. The last really popular rock act was probably Foo Fighters, a band that has a member of Nirvana. Hip hop is mainstream music, it does not have to crossover like R&B artists did. R&B as a genre never crossed over, just a small percentage of R&B artists and some songs. Like Cameo is considered a "one hit wonder" on Top 40 pop radio, but they had many R&B hits, most of them many years before Word Up. The Isley Brothers are probably the only act in any genre & on any chart to have a hit single each decade from the 1950s to today. But other than a few songs like Shout, they are not that well known to mainstream audiences. Ernie Isley is rarely, if at all, put on a "best guitar" list. They don't have the huge money making tours today like the Rolling Stones & Paul McCartney.
I did find this from the LA Times. Just one short paragraph which is what I would expect. @Agonum and @filmandmusic probably shouldn't read this, lol. Step away now, guys!
There were loads of UK pop mags around back in the day which might have run a tiny review but no way to track that stuff down now. PopSwop had him on the cover loads but did they run a review? Can't remember.But all of their reviews are short. Rolling Stone would do a review if it was Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye. Also the J5 would be considered a teenybopper or bubblegum act and RS didn't do a lot of coverage on that. It's not like they would spend a lot of space to review Donny & Marie records either.
Now that makes sense.
Exactly so. I don't have a problem with grunge. Some of it was decent. But it does get exaggerated.
Only 4 songs. Music and Me. All the Things You Are. ODIYL. We're Almost There. Not sure if any of them qualify as hidden gems but I love them.
Quest completed, temperature is down.
Fabulous!
Why would you even post such a half-arsed effort? Awful, awful... and the language is to hell, too.
Bc me and DD were musing on when / whether M&M would have been reviewed at the time. Tbh, I wouldn't have expected it to get any reviews outside of the weekly pop mags and, even there, it's quite likely the album wouldn't get reviewed, just any singles lifted off it. The review is typical of its type. What's interesting to me is the dismissive sexism in the piece. The predictable way female teenage fans are just disregarded. But I did warn you not to read it.
Which is also interesting to me. This is the LA Times. Can't be much of a publication if this is typical of the writing style. I was a bit surprised by that.
Terrible, terrible…
See, I disagree with this. I don't think he says that. He says:
But it's subjective. I'm not keen on the record myself.
I guess we'll have to respectfully agree to disagree on this. I like the review and think it's fair. It also makes me pause and reflect which is the main thing I want from a review.
He’s saying that Michael’s voice lacks joy and optimism in the majority of the album; only when singing the title track is he (Michael) able to connect with what he’s singing. That’s just another way of saying that the vocals, overall, isn’t good enough. And that’s where, in my world, he lose his credibility.
the way the transitions somehow tie together in cohesion. it’s part ballad and part upbeat, both tender and soaring. it’s funky and groovy, yet quirky, colourful and innocent at the same time. all the things that Michael was also worth noting that it was one of the few originals on the album. I think it would have been so much better if they had writers to create songs specifically with michael in mind.The albumism review declared it to be 'instantly forgettable' and claimed it adds to the unbalanced nature of the album. It was that weird review in the LA Times that praised Johnny Raven.
I just listened to it. It is a really weird song. Just ... bizarre. I don't know if it's any more inappropriate than some of the other songs he did at that age. Although, I do know what you mean and quite a few songs from back then, I just can't listen to them. But JR is a weird, weird song.[ ... ] I feel that ‘johnny raven’ was inappropriate and immoral for Michael to sing at any age, but especially at 14/15 years old.
That's it. That's the one! I was a bit 'meh' about the others on your list (sorry!) but this one? Mind blown.
Well, that's society in general. Rock critics usually put down whatever is popular on Top 40 radio. It's been said that whatever is mainstream popular on Top 40 & Adult Contemporary radio is mostly because of the female audience. If you look at old footage of old hard rock, progressive rock, & heavy metal concerts, the audience is primarily white males. That stuff got little if any Top 40 airplay. But if you look at what the critics called "hair metal" to put it down, there's more females in the audience. Those acts like Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, & Def Leppard sold a lot more than the regular heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden. The glam metal bands had "power ballads" that appealed to female teenagers & young adult women and the glam metal bands were played on Top 40. Also the regular metal bands & prog rock bands often had Dungeons & Dragons type lyrics that had little appeal to mainstream radio listeners. It was females who intially made Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, & The Beatles really popular. It was a white male DJ at a rock music radio station who started the "disco sucks" thing in the 1970s. Disco appealed to men & women of many ethnicities, straight people & homosexuals, not just mainly straight white guys like rock did.
The Jackson 5 and many other child & teen entertainers of their era and before performed in bars, clubs, & strip joints (Etta James, The Quarrymen/Beatles, George Benson, Steve Winwood, Sammy Davis Jr., etc). Richard Pryor & Billie Holiday grew up in brothels because their mother/aunt ran them. That's also the era when the mafia ran a lot of the entertainment in the USA. So whatever the song topics were is pretty mild compared to what they were around. Many people don't pay attention to the lyrics of songs anyway. If they did, they wouldn't use Reasons by Earth Wind & Fire as a wedding song or a dedication to their girlfriend/boyfriend.I feel that ‘johnny raven’ was inappropriate and immoral for Michael to sing at any age, but especially at 14/15 years old.
There's another song called Brandy by The O'Jays that a lot of people think is about a woman leaving, but it's really about his pet dog that ran away.Yes, I know. Doesn't stop me getting hacked off about it, though.
Well, mostly but not always. Depends on the artist / band.
I know. I was at those concerts, lol.
Depends on the radio station or the DJ. Album tracks did get played, even on Radio 1. Bob Harris, John Peel to name just two. They played album tracks or singles that weren't expected to go high in the charts. Daytime playlists did centre around the Top 40, sure, but there were various places where you could pick up other stuff. Pirate radio wasn't so ruled by playlists, thank god. Later on, there were more radio stations so it got better quite naturally. It was never perfect but nothing is.
Bon Jovi, for sure, it was mostly women down at the front of their gigs but, overall, I'd say their audience was pretty evenly split female - male.
Is that relevant, though? Lyrics don't figure largely for lots of people, anyway, so the content doesn't always matter that much. Black Sabbath's Paranoid isn't exactly a cheerful ditty but it got to No.4 in the UK.
I agree which is why I don't think Dungeons and Dragons type lyrics matter all that much to a radio audience.
oh sure, but there was sexism in the disco scene also. It's everywhere. Doesn't matter how inclusive a genre is compared to the next one, there are always problems. Which doesn't surprise me but it's annoying. Disco wasn't perfect, in this regard, any more than punk was even though both genres were challenging the tired old norms (allegedly).
I’ve told you to give Forever, Michael a serious chance on several occasions, haven’t I?[…] Every single thing about [Take Me Back] is sublime. Which is no surprise, looking at the songwriters. I'm fairly sure I haven't listened to this one before. It didn't sound familiar to me at all. But I have it now. Very happy!
All of his Motown albums were sandwiched between Jackson 5 albums. This wasn’t anything unusual for Motown at the time.
I don't know how UK radio works. But mainstream females in the USA tend to be into romantic songs. Which is why adult contemporary music was so popular in the USA and so was instrumental smooth jazz like Kenny G over straight jazz. It's no accident that teen idol artists usually sold more to teen girls & young women. That's because they sang love songs and/or were good looking. They didn't sing fantasy story lyrics like the prog rock bands or have 10 minute keyboard solos. You think Michael Bolton would have been popular as he was if he sang songs about Lord Of The Rings?
Similar to the US in many ways but also very different. We never had all the separate stations for different genres that the US had. The UK just wasn't big enough for that. I prefer our UK way of doing it but that's probably bc it's what I grew up with. It's different now, anyway, with so many new stations, online stuff etc. It's changed massively in the last 25 years or so. Everything is much more fragmented than it used to be.
Yeah, I was always glad we never had that in the UK. We had all the different genres all mixed up together. Much better, imo. And although rock music is my thing I never felt we needed a separate rock station. The provision that we did have seemed fine to me. It wasn't that hard to find stuff you wanted to listen to.
It was the same in the UK but there were always exceptions. Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone. Bohemian Rhapsody. Voodoo Child (Slight Return). Papa Was A Rollin' Stone. Hey Jude. Those are just the obvious ones that popped into my head. It was absolutely standard for those songs to be played in full even on daytime radio.
I'm familiar with the album although turns out I hadn't listened to Take Me Back. I'm not keen on the album, tbh. Apart from TMB, I've got We're Almost There, which I love, and ODIYL, which I adore, and that's about it. The rest I don't really like or, at best, I'm lukewarm about them. Michael's solo Tamla stuff isn't for me. Ben. Music and Me. Maybe GTBT. That's about it.
I'm not sure that would work in the USA. There's too many different kinds of folks from all over the world. A large part of the United States used to be part of Mexico. So there's a lot of people here that speak Spanish. There's radio stations that play music in the Spanish language, which also include Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Domincians, etc. People who listen to country music might not like alternative rock or jazz or underground music. Some people only listen to gospel and not secular music, so there's gospel radio stations. There's talk radio for people who are into that, which are usually about sports or politics. There are some college radio stations that will play music from many random genres, even ones that have little or no airplay on hit radio like blues, polka, babbershop quartets, tango music, & also what is called "world music". But college radio operate on listener pledges, not from running advertising for companies like mainstream commercial stations do. College radio does not have as many listeners as a Top 40 station & mainstream R&B or country stations.
No, I understand all of this. I wasn't suggesting this would work for the US. I simply meant that, as the UK is so small and we had a different system, I'm really pleased. Bc the radio I grew up with, everything being all jumbled up together, it was brilliant, it really suited me. I know why the US had the system it had, I'm just glad it's not my radio 'culture', if I can put it like that. Mainly bc I'm used to what I grew up with, as I said. I'm also glad I'm not growing up with UK radio today. It's too fragmented for me. Then again, radio is quite niche these days since many people prefer to stream stuff. But I have issues with that as well, lol.
