Music - Over the weekend,

Music - Over the weekend, Infinite Monkeys focused on music.

RobbL Monkey asked:

Here's a challenge for those of you who can even listen to hip-hop long enough to compare it to real music. Name the hip-hop equivalent of these records:

1. The Velvet Underground - "Loaded" (i.e. the "commercial" album by a critically acclaimed band that you really liked the best, but told everybody you liked "The Velvet Underground and Nico" because it was cooler to like that record)

Easy: A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory.

2. The Clash - "London Calling" (i.e. album by a previously good and critically acclaimed group that was now "firing on all cylinders")

Too simple: It Takes A Nation of Milions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy. It's an angry, acidic, eclectic classic. R.B. compared it with the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks..., but NWA compares better with the Pistols; NWA and the Pistols were creations of mad impresarios (Eric "Easy E" Wright and Malcolm MacLaren respectively) while the Clash and Public Enemy were much more organic creations. And Professor Griff is the hip-hop Tony Grimes.

3. R.E.M. - "Murmur" (i.e. debut album that caught everyone off-guard and effectively started a completely new "scene")

Again, easy: LL Cool J's first album, Bad. It marked the commercial divide between old and new school.

4. The Beatles - "Let It Be" (i.e. absolutely wretched excess that effectively ended the career of a previously magnificent group)

That's the problem with hip-hop; artists never really get to develop their careers to the point where they actually have anyplace to fall to. Maybe the Run-DMC album where they tried to go Gangsta, and failed miserably - the name eludes me, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Although Snoop Dogg is showing signs of having a "Let It Be" in him.

5. Joy Division - "Closer" (i.e. album by a group that everybody pretended to like, but were actually complete crap, unless you were one of the five people on earth like Paul Morley who had some kind of gnostic experience causing them to worship Ian Curtis as the new messiah of rock)

Anything by Digital Underground, in my book.

In the meantime, R.B. Monkey had an interesting potpourri of opinions about a lot of music. He was doing well, until he hit this part:

I might be able to go on with the rest of my life never having to hear "Walkin' On Sunshine"

Step off, dude. While WOS got overplayed pretty drastically, Katrina and the Waves were an amazing band. The worst thing about "Walking..."? Its runaway success meant that a lot of people never even heard their real greats - "Red Wine and Whiskey", "Going Down To Liverpool" (forget the Bangles' cover, the original was better), and a slew of good, greasy power pop that owed as much to the guitar of Kim Rew (formerly and currently of the Soft Boys) as to Katrina Leskanich's voice.

Kids today. Sheesh.

Posted by Mitch at October 27, 2003 10:01 AM