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Post by pacinoyes on Jul 6, 2017 12:00:57 GMT
Watching the Today Show this AM and the throng there to see him is something like Beatlemania '64 I'm not much into his music (the pacinoyes' cult of punk rock faves is legendary it should be noted).........but he's a real sort of baffling one on the surface. First, he's essentially a folk artist which is hard to sell, he can't sing in a grab your ear kind of way, he's a sorta troll looking dude.......and I'm not saying any of that to be mean, just that he doesn't resemble someone you'd be able to turn into cash...........though he clearly is over several years. Who are some others that you're kind of like head-scratching over their cult of celebrity?
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Post by pacinoyes on Jul 9, 2017 16:55:12 GMT
Agree with your mentions also and what about Jack Johnson as the male version of Calliat.
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morton
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Post by morton on Jul 9, 2017 17:44:18 GMT
Also never understood Mumford and Sons success, they seem like the definition of a band you never expect for super stardom at zll. I never understood Mumford and Sons success either. I could believe they would have niche success, but not be as famous as they are. I would have never picked Ed Sheeran to be as successful as he is now either. Not going by his sound, but his looks. It's just for the pop music industry, it seems everything is so look conscious especially for male solo artists that it's hard to believe that Sheeran was able to overcome that in this day and age. Even in bands that play instruments where some of the members might get a pass for not being conventionally attractive, the lead singer usually has some kind of sex appeal. The same way with boy bands. Sure there's an occasional Danny Wood, but there's at least one Justin Timberlake type of attractive singer and most of the other members are usually conventionally attractive. I guess Sia is another one whose success surprises me. I know she had industry connections before which helped, and she can sing. It's just hard to believe that she could breakthrough at her age in such an ageist industry. I guess her gimmick of hiding her face helped somewhat too. However, as we saw with Lady Gaga, it seems like people get tired of gimmicks pretty fast now, yet Sia is still doing well. Along those lines, Susan Boyle would sort of fit because she broke through much later in life, but in the context of how popular Britain's Got Talent is, and with YouTube and other forms of spreading social media, and how most people probably thought that she wasn't going to sing that well when she auditioned, her success does makes sense even if she doesn't fit the pop diva mold at all. Adele was another one that I was sort of surprised by how big of a superstar she became. I think her face is pretty and girl can sing, but I was just surprised because it seemed like during the peak of American Idol's power, it seemed like the Caucasian women who were overweight would just get blasted by various forums and whatnot. Even Kelly Clarkson still gets that in her career. Plus, that kind of pop diva sound had fallen out of favor in the '90s even those been attempts since then to try to revive it. In fact, Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey probably both have voodoo dolls of Adele since they tried to revive those kind of songs, but never had the success that Adele continues to have.
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Post by cheesecake on Jul 9, 2017 20:47:18 GMT
Yeah, he has a crazzzzzy following. I assume the wholesome, radio-friendly aspect helps a lot. He random cameo in Bridget Jones 3 really threw me.
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Post by PromNightCarrie on Jul 12, 2017 19:10:38 GMT
People LOVE that Shape of You song. I see people who barely speak English and usually only listen to Latin music jamming to that song.
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Post by theycallmemrfish on Jul 12, 2017 20:31:06 GMT
Meatloaf.
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wendy
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Post by wendy on Jul 28, 2017 19:32:33 GMT
On the 20th anniversary of her debut solo album!!!, I think Missy Elliott fits the bill. Image-wise alone, when she came on the scene it was VERY unusual to see a big girl in pop music, especially one wearing baggy mens orange overalls and with fingerwaves instead of a weave... and yet her music was very sexually charged and often explicit (most of her singles are censored versions). I mean in her debut video she was wearing a garbage bag and a strange plastic gold horned headpiece, rapping about weed and making weird noises ("vvrooooommm"), captured in a strange fish eye lens with her face contorting at weird rhythms and expanding with glitchy special effects. In her 2nd video she transforms into a Megaman-style robot and fights in outer space. Her 3rd mostly showcased her and the dancers as puppets/sex dolls. The music itself was also really *weird* at the time, for any genre, with the skittering tribal beats, futuristic robotic sounds, super-filtered harmonies, and lazy-voiced rap flow (which hadn't been heard since Slick Rick). The track she did with Tweet ("Oops!") is still one of the strangest sounding things to become a top 10 hit in American radio history. Who knew she would come to define pop, hip hop and R&B music for the next decade or so and become one of the more ubiquitous figures of early 00s music? All her albums went at least platinum, she was frequently Grammy nominated/winning, had a string of huge chart hits... We also didn't see a lot of women who were writing, producing, singing, rapping, choreographing, AND co-directing videos (Lauryn Hill is pretty much the only other one and they came out around the same time). So that level of creative control was also unprecedented. Re: Ed Sheeran, Is it just because he's ugly? I honestly think he makes the exact sort of faux-earnest, sentimental music that people buy in droves. His poppier songs sound exactly like what's on the radio and pick any of his ballads that follow the same formula that made huge hits for people like Passenger etc. As you can tell i'm not much of a fan. If we call MIA "pop", she's certainly one of the unlikeliest, with her wild oversaturated visual style, off-kilter world music sound, nasally raps and offkey singing, and controversial political bent. Same goes for Bjork, if she's pop then she absolutely fits the bill with all that experimentation. Grace Jones and Erykah Badu too, though some of these acts never had as much commercial success as the likes of Sheeran.
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morton
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Post by morton on Jul 29, 2017 17:01:06 GMT
Re: Ed Sheeran, Is it just because he's ugly? I honestly think he makes the exact sort of faux-earnest, sentimental music that people buy in droves. His poppier songs sound exactly like what's on the radio and pick any of his ballads that follow the same formula that made huge hits for people like Passenger etc. As you can tell i'm not much of a fan. For me, yes, it's because he's not really conventionally attractive at all. It just seems strange to me that he's become so popular since I think most pop stars are vetted, and their image is a big part of that. Maybe Sheeran came at the right time though where there's sort of been a backlash against looks being more than the music (Adele, Meghan Trainor, Sia). I don't think it's a big movement or anything, but it just happened at around the same time. I wonder if it has to do with music videos not being as important as they once were. I mean YouTube is obviously one of the biggest platforms for music, but I wonder if people there are actually watching the videos that much as opposed to just basically streaming them if they don't do Spotify or Pandora. I know that I do that. Sometimes I will watch the whole video, but a lot of times I'll only watch some of the video while I'm busy doing other things. Another thing is that I don't think there's many artists that care about videos like they use to be. Perhaps I'm just one of those people that are remembering the good old days that never existed, but even though MTV wasn't really showing videos for years and years, it seemed that more videos back then were more interesting visually than they are now. Maybe it's a money thing or everything has been done thing, I don't know, but it seems like most videos are mostly the same, and that there's not as much innovation or variety now.
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