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Originally Posted by noisereductions
I don't even know what I just walked into. But I love it.
I was never a big Stones fan. I think Sticky Fingers is great sure. But I was always a Beatles guy in the Stones/Beatles debate.
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Same. Definitely same. But, I'm not sure that debate really exists anymore. That was a debate for our parents' generation. The Stones have gone on to live (and limp) trough SO many different variations of the same exact phase since their early late-'69s to early-'70s golden period that they have really botched their chance at having a career comparable to that of the Beatles, who quit almost 50 years ago, after less than a decade, leaving the world with an incomparable legacy. I think for a time, especially as the Beatles were dissolving and after their breakup, the Stones had a shot at being a force of
nearly equal power, but if you look at their careers as a whole, you have 7-8 years of lightning in a bottle that changed music forever and will someday be the subject of doctoral dissertations just as Shakespeare is today (the Beatles), and then you have the ultimate band that didn't know when to quit, and represents the stereotypical arena rock legacy band that can still make money touring, but hasn't released a truly good record since before we were born (the Rolling Stones.)
There is no Beatles vs. Stones except for hardcore Stones fans who think Voodoo Lounge and Bridges to Babylon are, like, classic albums (hah!). I think a good analogy for our generation would be Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam. Does anyone sit around and argue about which of those bands is better and more significant? I don't believe any sane person does, except for our version of those Stones folks... the people who genuinely think Lightning Bolt is great, and have deluded themselves into thinking that Pearl Jam is somehow too good for the dumb old modern world to properly appreciate (not true).
I think there's still a debate about who the most definitive old guy artist of the classic rock era is, but I think that debate is about The Stones vs. Bob Dylan. Both are doing covers albums 50 years after their superiors bowed out and left a permanent mark, and with respect to that debate, Dylan is better.
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BUT my favorite Stones song "Back Street Girl." Ugh. Great song. kind of wrong, but great sounding.
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Mine is *probably* "Play With Fire." It's a weird choice, I know, but it just hits that sweet spot. And that scene in Darjeeling Ltd. kind of cemented it for me. I also really love just a fuck ton of their music from Satanic Majesty's to Goat's Head Soup. It may sound like I'm anti-Stones, but I'm not. I'm just anti-BAD Stones; which is basically all Stones since Goat.
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Originally Posted by noisereductions
Also much as y'all hate Eminem, I think "Toy Soldiers" is utterly brilliant. And I think "Rap God" is probably the finest example of his actual rapping skills.
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I don't totally hate Eminem, and I definitely don't think he's a bad rapper (not that you were insinuating that I felt that way... I know you weren't). But to say he's bad at rapping is just factually and categorically untrue. He's an amazing rapper. He just chooses to rap about the **dumbest possible shit over beats that mostly sound like they came from a child's jack-in-the-box toy. But I like the beat of "Role Model," and I could probably listen to him freestyle all day (as long as I didn't have to watch him... his mannerisms really put me off), and I recently revisited "I Just Don't Give a Fuck" and "Rock Bottom"and there are some decent moments on both tracks.
(** Why people throw tantrums over Kanye's "bleached asshole" line in an otherwise soaring and vibrant song, when Eminem got away with saying the most absurdly disgusting shit about the most absurd things in the most uninteresting ways for the stupidest reasons for so long... is just absolutely beyond me.)
My main issue with Eminem, aside from his entire existence being perhaps the most perverse waste of talent in the history of mankind, is that he always tries to hit the same note. Unhinged murdery dude who has a daughter and is "not afraid" but probably shouldn't have a daughter, and should be afraid. I think a lot of people still believe he's relevant to rap, and that's just absurd. He's never really been relevant to rap culture. He was relevant to rap becoming something white people of the worst kind could appreciate. He was rap's Elvis, it's true, and he became so big standing on the backs of black America. His popularity was always a symptom of casual, culture-wide racism. He never chose to actually take any kind of stand about anything significant, and used his pulpit to make plain white t-shirts super popular.
It didn't have to be that way. He could have, I don't know, NOT rapped about mouth raping Hillary Clinton... NOT rapped about beating up women (at the best of times) and murdering them with his daughter at the worst of times.
But even that was better than when he became the Creed of rap, and developed his god complex and stopped being in on his own joke and started to legitimately milk his celebrity without irony.
ALSO, as I said before, songs like "Lose Yourself" and its malnourished conjoined twin song "Sing for the Moment" gave birth to a kind of bullshit hick-centric pattern in rap-adjacent rock that we're still dealing with today. The overly self-serious autobiographical white guy overcoming odds motif has been used by every one of the worst artists of the era, including Nickelback and Everlast and ugh... Machine Gun Kelly.
He could have been something great, but nope. And yet, people all over the world who are uncomfortable with blackness respond to the praise heaped on Kendrick Lamar by saying, "What a joke! Let me know when he can do THIS" and posting videos of Eminem rhyming "orange bill" with "ignore skill."
Kendrick Lamar is a better technical rapper than Eminem. So was Tupac. Eminem is a has-been whom many dumb white Americans somehow think is still "being."