The only Scandanavian music I like is Finnish metal. I don’t think I’ve persuade @JHS to take a listen. (HIM, Sonata Arctica, Apocalyptica and Volbeat are the main ones we listen to. And early Nightwish.)
I hated ABBA when they were coming out with the stuff, but it’s great for aerobics. I only listen to a handful of them really - Dancing Queen, Waterloo, Mama Mia, Take a Chance, Money, SOS and there are some I can’t stand.
I don’t really care for rap and hip hop, but I’ve learned to appreciate it. My son’s best friend’s band raps a lot so I have to listen to him!
I think the take-home here is that a lot of people have a stereotyped and/or dated idea of what rap and hip hop are. There’s plenty that is worth listening to.
Wholesale “it’s just noise” commentary sounds like older generations talking about rock and roll.
I don’t like ABBA but I like a lot of other Scandinavian music, espacially Icelandic music like Sigur Rose and lead singer Jonsi. I like Bjork too. And others.
MaDonna, Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond, country in general, oh I could go on.
Sometimes you only like certain songs. Watched Austn City Limits tonight. It featured The Steve Miller band. Loved some of their songs. Could care less about others.
Stupidest song of all time – Kung Fu Fighting. Just no. I Shot the Sheriff is almost as bad. And Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky is another wretched excuse for music.
Love Michael Franks, though. Different strokes as they say.
I didn’t even know that this is what it was about and it still creeps me out.
People seem to get whipped up into a frenzy when it comes on in a bar or at a Karaoke place. I usually try to escape, but if I get stuck in the crowd, I try to pretend that I’m enjoying it, but I pretty much feel like an alien, observing, and trying not to be discovered.
One former supervisor’s friend was a Royal Marine vet who ran a martial arts studio in NYC around the time that song came out. When he heard it on the radio, he felt it so trivialized what he felt should be a respected that he smashed the radio with his fist when that song came on the radio.
Ironic considering the song itself was meant to pay homage to Kung Fu and martial arts as the singer was himself a martial arts fan.
The popularity of the song in the early '70s was in the wake of widespread anger/suspicion in some communities over police brutality and high-handed profiling due to factors ranging from racism/sexual orientation to just “not dressing correctly”(i.e. hippies, punks, etc). Some of those issues are still in effect in the present time.
While rap/hip-hop has been routinely lambasted for such themes by many, there’s plenty of songs on the same theme in other genres…such as punk rock going back to the '70s.
I shot the sherriff was originally done by Bob Marley, and it was as @cobrat said talking about racism and views of the cops. When Clapton recorded it it lost that meaning I think, and then when every two bit band or high school band started covering it because Clapton did, ugh. Listen to the original by Bob Marley, it might make more sense.
In terms of the song “Kung Fu fighting”, I think it was talking about the whole fad in the mid 1970’s of so called “chop socky” movies, which ranged from the okay to the absolutely horrible (Bruce Lee movies were the okay, the imitators, well…). I think it was more about the movies then trying to be an homage to martial arts…(the best parody of those movies was in the “Kentucky Fried Movie”, “A fistful of yen” lol).
W/re everybody being creeped out by Sweet Caroline: How about that song by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap that was almost as ubiquitous on the radio in the late 60s?: “Young Girl.” Or the Rolling Stones’ "Stray Cat Blues, " explicitly about an encounter with a 15-year-old groupie? Or any number of Jerry Lee Lewis songs involving his intense appreciation of young women in their mid-teens?
@mathmom : Nope. No Finnish operatic death-metal yet. That’s one genre my household has never explored. I do like the Japanese metal group Boris, but never enough to dive into the whole metal world. And I do actually like Wagner’s operatic death-metal.
Cracking up about Kung Fu Fighting…awful. Just terrible. But then again so were my plaid pants back in the 70’s and don’t get me started on my hair in the 80’s.
Funny, I couldn’t repeat any lyric today beyond the title in either Kung Fu Fighting or I Shot the Sheriff, so historic context does nothing to justify the existence of either for me. Just plain bad and deathly annoying tunes that have been grossly overplayed (meaning, more than once).
I thought Kung Fu Fighting was funny at the time, and I still do. In addition to being a novelty song about kung fu, right around the time people in the US started to hear about Bruce Lee, it was one of the first widely popular songs of the style that came to be called “disco.” I’ll admit that I didn’t think much of “I Shot The Sheriff” when I first heard it – the Eric Clapton version from 1974 – but the Bob Marley original makes plenty of sense in light of the strained relationship between Rastafarians and police in Jamaica in the 1960s and 70s.
Over the weekend, I saw the current Richard Linklater film, “Everybody Wants Some,” and after coming home dug out my kids’ DVD of his “Dazed and Confused,” to which the current movie is kind of a sequel. (The protagonist of the new film is clearly supposed to be the younger of the two central male characters in the previous film, four years later. But since they couldn’t use the actor who played a 14-year-old 23 years ago to play an 18-year-old now, they kept all the character traits but changed his name.) Anyway, that pair of films is grrrrreat if you want to remember the hairstyles, clothing styles, and musical styles of 1976 and 1980. The good, the bad, and the just plain ugly, huge ranges of each. Just perfect.
A song I actually liked at the time but listened to it recently and decided that was enough was Paper Lace’s " The Night Chicago Died". The Nah Nah Nah’s get to me now.