Your bottom ten worst artistes of all time

There are only two kinds of music. Good and bad. I like the good variety

Michael.

 

You're right. They did. All the early stuff was great, I don't even mind the first couple of albums with old billiard ball head on vocals, but Abacab was the last great album. As for his solo albums, the colour of his face on the front of No Jacket Required resembles a stop light for a reason!

 

yeah,spookily,i threw on Lamb Lies Down On Broadway for the first time in about 25 years,and i loved it,very interesting music indeed

 

So far it's been a pretty mixed bag. Have to agree with the boy/girl band stuff being generally awful. Most manufactured pop is disposable for a very good reason. Simply Red, Oasis and a clutch of the stadium divas Maria Whitney and (god preserve us) Celine - you're all rich enough now so bog off.

Biggest disagrees go to Floyd, Queen, Madonna, Smiths. How anyone can deny the genius of Bjork and Portishead is beyond me

So what's left is:

The Coral - what a huge disappointment

Lighthouse Family - another name springs instanly to mind

Atonal orchestral music - you know the stuff where it sounds like the orchestra got kicked down a flight of stairs. It's often described as 'challenging' which is posh speak for "we don't really understand it either but some reviewer in an arts mag said its good and we are too gutless to express a different opinion"

Heavy weight female opera - it just hurts my ears - pure torture.

Lots of the 'same song/different artist' gangsta rappers and R&B soul boys like Keith Sweat - yeah, sweat like you stink.

 

I have to counter some of the replies on this thread with regard to cover versions.

I am a firm believer in originality. When a respected artist covers a song the floodgates open for those with lesser talent to do the same, mostly with disasterous results. I made an analogy to car design and someone mentioned VW Beetle and the New Mini as examples disproving my analogy, to mind mind they reaffirm my belief especially the new Mini which I truly regard as a disjointed heap.

Reworkings, covers, reinterpreation all much the same thing...theft of an original!!

Jazz Standards and Classical ARE different as often they were created to be played by someone else at the express intent of the creator, for example Gershwins stuff. Orchestal pieces are obviously open to diiffering versions with no definitive interpretation.

I feel that the piss poor state of much modern music is due in no small part to the lack of original ideas by those involved, I cite The Darkness as a great example of what I'm on about, The songs are original but the idea is as old as the hills and bereft of originality.

I understand that many of the comments here reflect the appreciation of a cover version or two, but were you cheated? Who's to say that given the motivation to write a original song for the album the artist involved wouldn't have come up with something you'd like even more rather than the easier option of a cover...

At school if you copied anothers work and put "bells and whistles" on it you were still a cheat, even if the person whos work you copied didn't mind.

 

Bee Gees

come back and sing when your balls have dropped lad

 

Joolsburger, standards only become standards, in any genre, because lots of people cover them. Otherwise they wouldn't be standards.

Think of bluegrass and blues music of the 20s and 30s. Covers and variations of that music have been an essential part of the development of all kinds of musical genres. Most contemporary popular music has its origins here.

Think of reggae. Lee Perry, Coxsone Dodd, produced many different versions of the same song by different performers. The results are generally great.

In the classic era of pop and soul music hardly anyone wrote their own material (think Brill Building, Motown, Philadelphia, Stax), in-house song writers wrote most of it. Lots of great performances came out of that process.

Plenty of truly great singers are not much cop as songwriters, after all.

As has been said, cover versions don't have to be the karaoke nonsense that passes for pop music nowadays. It's possible to both cover a song and make it entirely one's own. Somebody like Aretha Franklin built an entire career out of doing that, and I'm very glad she did. She's no less an original for singing other people's songs, after all, she sings them better than virtually anyone else can.

-- Ian

 

I see...Hmmmmm.. This bears more thought, perhaps I'm coming round!!!

OK then I say crap covers only!!! I am prepared to change my mind...

 

Queen and Genesis. Okay they're later was really crap. But the early stuff by both bands is amazing! Queen, Queen2 & Sheer Heart Attack are all great albums, as is Trespas, Nursery Crime and Foxtrot.
Queen were good 'til Freddie Mercury cut his hair and grew that stupid 'tash Genesis were good until Phil 'ugliest man in rock' Collins took over and started adding reverb to all the instruments.
Reverb for that matter is what causes shit music, all 80s stuff with "powerhouse" reverb drums is awful, oh yeah and music that is manufactured to be marketed to a particular audience has to fit in here somewhere.
Other than that I like everything.

 

Poor quality sound (so presumably the 'emotion' and 'tune' has gone missing?) and only a snippet, but who can say that this isn't a fine song?

http://www.hmg.hu/rock/progressive/music/Genesis_Turn It On Again.ra

 

Absolutely. Dusty Springfield is one of my all time faves and I don't think she ever wrote anything and of course the King is another case in point (although it has to be said he was responsible for some of the worst tosh ever recorded as well).

 

The modern cover of Mad World isn't bad, but the original's spooky synths make for a far more compelling listen.

Sinead's Nothing compares... doesn't count as a cover - Prince wrote it for her, and (I believe) never performed it, so technically it's not a cover. As Chesney Hawkes' The one and only isn't a cover, but written for him by Nik Kershaw etc.

Impro Jazz isn't music IMHO so it doesn't count.

Classical - I might be bored to death by most of it, but I can see where people are coming from when they say it, like film scripts, isn't really covers. Shame that music from someone who's been dead for 300 years still costs more than something by The Beatles or Nirvana or whatever these days though...

Romeo and Juliet is an excellent reworking of the play - the movie is so different but totally excellent. Believe it or not - I never actually read R&J (I have the complete works in an old 1800s volume with handcut pages, but find I'm a bit rusty on Shakespeare-speak having only read a few of the plays), so I didn't know how the film story went either. I was on the edge of my seat - one of the only films I've ever seen that's TOTALLY gripped me for the whole length. Even Jude couldn't do that - and that's an excellent "cover version" of the book!

 

Not true - Prince did it himself, but Sinead's version is better.

 

Hi,

Markus is right. Also The Family also did it in 1985 on their album, "The Family".

SCIDB

 

Yeh. The Family were on Prince's Paisley Park label and I think this track was written for them, there's is the first version. Sinead's cover was some 5 years later. I'm not sure exactly when prince himself recorded it.

 

Regardless of whether Sinead's version is a cover or not - it makes me want to self-harm.

 

Total pants, in no particular order:

1. Cliff Richard
2. Val Doonigan
3. The Nolan Sisters
4. Status Quo
5. Daniel O'Donnell
6. The Smiths
7. Sheena Easton
8. Lulu
9. Steps
10. Kenny Rogers (and all feckin' country & western pap)

Any loony dat likes any of that shit, feel free to check out a head docta

 

Not if you buy Naxos versions at £5 each!
And don't say that to someone who has to clear music for film or tv! Costs a small forune to clear anything by the Beatles. That's why you hear so many covers of Beatles songs on tv programmes cos you're only paying the publisher and the cover "artiste". Better that than lining Michael Jackson's pocket some more (he owns the copyright!)

 

...but since it's mostly infinitely more valuable, the VFM is through the roof

(and 'classical' CDs are mostly full i.e. 60+ minutes - and mostly over 70 - rather than the pathetic 40-45 minutes that seems common on 'pop', unless of course you get that fashionable label ECM - high price, seems typically 35 minutes)

 

Yeah, but 45 minutes of energy over 60-70 of boredom sounds like VFM for me

There is the odd bit of classical that I can listen to all the way through, but most of it leaves me cold, I'm afraid.