I had to endure a long playlist of Bruno Mars songs today

[ShortintheSleeve]

I’m with you on most of this. No one will ever convince me that the 80’s wasn’t the most diverse and creative decade in popular music history. Never before and never since has the genre covered so much ground at one time. It was a fantastic time to be surfing the airwaves and television broadcasts. No other decade even comes close.

You could turn on a pop/rock radio station for an hour and hear ten acts that sounded absolutely nothing alike. It was amazing.

My kids (13 and 12) have music they love from every decade since the 1940s (plus some classical music), but especially for my son, the '80s is far and away his favorite. I suspect he's one of the few 12-year-olds on the planet who can opine about his love for John Mellecamp's "Crumblin' Down" or Haircut 100's "Love Plus One," and I'm always more than happy to indulge his request to fire up my 1500+ songs '80s playlist in the car.

 

[ShortintheSleeve]

Tell your wife to check out Kix. They're a great 80s band (still playing, too!) that never got the success they deserved. They're from the area where I grew up and I saw them a few times way back when.

The one band from my hometown (Hagerstown, MD) to make a mark at a national level

 

[sloppychops]

The one band from my hometown (Hagerstown, MD) to make a mark at a national level

Wow, we're from the same hometown! Remember the Olde Mill Inn? Shiley Acres? Concerts in City Park?

Incidentally, my next door neighbor went on to national fame as a saxophonist. He does this Kenny G style stuff that I don't really care for, but he's released multiple albums and has played on cuts by big name artists. He goes by the name Erin Abu (or something like that). That's not his real name though.

 

[ShortintheSleeve]

Wow, we're from the same hometown! Remember the Olde Mill Inn? Shiley Acres? Concerts in City Park?

Incidentally, my next door neighbor went on to national fame as a saxophonist. He does this Kenny G style stuff that I don't really care for, but he's released multiple albums and has played on cuts by big name artists. He goes by the name Erin Abu (or something like that). That's not his real name though.

Small world! I don't recall Olde Mill Inn or Shiley Acres, but I used to go to concerts with my family at the City Park. We'll be heading up to Hagerstown this summer to visit my family, in fact.

 

[sloppychops]

Small world! I don't recall Olde Mill Inn or Shiley Acres, but I used to go to concerts with my family at the City Park. We'll be heading up to Hagerstown this summer to visit my family, in fact.

Well, Kix used to play at the Old Mill Inn pretty regularly. I saw them there when they were called The Shooze, and later as Kix. Shiley Acres was a big field owned by a farmer and they put on day-long outdoor concerts there in the summer.

 

[Blackmore Fan]

Speaking of business owners making good choices, I was out for dinner this week and the hotel had this background music that was just incredibly nondescript but also pleasantly musical and perfect for the situation. You know the Al Green song Tired Of Being Alone? Well it was two hours of songs in that light R&B vein. All of them well constructed, well arranged and played, and ideal as a background to conversation and for helping to create a good vibe. And the weird thing was none of them were hits ... in fact I had never ever heard any of them before. And as soon as the next one started, you totally forgot the previous one!

I went to a restaurant that did something similar. It had a "cowboy" motif, and the music was country. But not a single song of it was a hit, and not a single song was about drinking, cheating, fighting, or anything else that someone or anyone would find offensive.

 

[goport]

My interpretations of Mars' music is that he is too "self-consciously" old-school. He seems to be a great student of Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, perhaps some Prince, etc., and also pretty good at (at least superficially) replicating these. But he doesn't seem to use any of that to take the next step, whatever that might be for him. My favorite thing he's done that I've heard was the first Silk Sonic single, but then I listened to some of the album and thought, "I like this stuff, and they do this stuff well, but I've already heard this stuff done better."

This echoes my thoughts about Bruno to a large extent. The songs, stylistically, are reproductions of artists and eras that pre-date him. It feels contrived, even when it works (Uptown Funk) and that brings out the old fart in me that remembers the originals that inspired it. But I do like the Silk Sonic album. It feels fresh and more of a love letter to the music/era its influenced by, rather than pastiche.