A Question About Music

[eumelia]

I recently acquired the new Florence + The Machine album Ceremonials. It is very good in my opinion.

But tell me friends, how do you know which if the contemporary artists and musicians you like are popular or not?

I don't watch MTV, my trawling through Youtube is sketchy at best and usually directed towards videos of cute cat or various political gatherings and suffice to say that Israel is so stuck in the 90's that the website selling tickets for the K's Choice tour crashed several times when it opened up for locals to buy (yes, I have a ticket, weehee!). Oh, and I don't follow the charts or the Grammy's unless it's research for something I'm writing that's set in a certain time frame (which means I'm more likely going to be looking at charts from the 60's or the 70's).

We are slightly dated, also the radio is an unreliable source of knowing which acts are popular or not in my opinion.

I'll be the first to admit that my taste in music is terribly banal and ordinary. I have a few bootlegs (that I digitised) of underground queer core songs, but I don't listen to those on a regular basis and I bought the bootlegs in order to support an anarchist collective as opposed to actually liking the music, so, yeah...

It's just that, I read this article about Florence + The Machine and the middle class apathy and I really couldn't figure out what this guy was talking about?

Am I utterly mixed in my genres? Since when is a remixed to death and multi voice track recording considered folk?

I'll admit that I'm slightly dated in my definitions (seeing as I'm an avid Joni Mitchell listener, as well as Joan Baez and Tracy Chapman), but um, am I missing something?

I mean, isn't Florence + The Machine more like Lady Gaga than, say, Suzanne Vega?

Comments

[delight]

IDK, she sure sounds much more like Suzanne Vega than Gaga. I'm a big fan of Welch as well as Vega, and there is absolutely nothing likable to me re: Lady Gaga. Then again, I haven't heard her (Welch's, to clarify) latest album, but there's ... not much if any remixing involved in the F+TM tracks I've heard, and the actual music sounds much, much more folksy. It's not pop. "Pop" doesn't mean "popular" anymore in any sense of the word; it's all down to musical style.

[eumelia]

"Lungs" to me sounded like a hyped up Sinead O'Connor and her style of singing (Welch) reminds me a lot of O'Connor and it's hard for me to classify it as anything other than rock. "Ceremonials" is far more epic sounding than "Lungs", imo.

I love Lady Gaga musically and conceptually and it could be that the author is talking about the concept much more than the actual music.

[ironed_orchid]

Hmmm, there are some Florence + the Machine songs that are performed with just guitar and drums, sometimes other strings, and some which have the full techno thing going on.

Gaga on the other hand, is always full studio pop sound.

ETA: it sounds like he's working with a pretty strict definition of what should count as folk, and it's the bohemian aspect of FATM that he objects to.

[eumelia]

It's true FATM does have some songs that are acoustic, but so does Gaga (I have her albums, I'm a fan). I think they're contextualised differently due to FATM being, as you say, bohemian performance art as opposed to Gaga who is more industrialised performance art.