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What's a song you enjoy listening to from a genre you don't?
It can be a silly song once in a blue moon or one you'd still listen daily. No one can say no to Rasputin's disco groove.
It can be a silly song once in a blue moon or one you'd still listen daily. No one can say no to Rasputin's disco groove.
Hardware store by weird al Yankovic
(Lyrics video)
Definitely one of those silly songs that's just good. No idea what the genre is though.
Me,Me,Me!
S3RL-MTC
(Top one has a lot of videos deconstructing it and the bottom One is whimsical hentai memery)
Dvorak-New World Symphony
(A classic orchestra-type song)
Well, Wikipedia calls it a "list song."
I am slowly realizing that I have missed far too many Weird Al songs that came out since I got the box set in 1994.
Ode to a Superhero.
This made me think of Ode to the brain for some reason. Maybe in the mash up genre? It just gives me frisson.
I like Iris DeMent's Let The Mystery Be for some reason. I mean it's good but I'm not a fan of the style (or the lyrics for that matter).
I really don't like hiphop/rap usually, but songs from The Avalanches like Frankie Sinatra are fine, I actually like what those styles add to that song.
What do you like about this song that you don't usually like about hip-hop? Or vice-versa?
The only thing I can think of is that it's probably not the focus of the song; it's actually got interesting music in the background as opposed to the 'pretty much just swearing a lot while some repetitive beat plays in the room next to the recording room' style that I usually hear with rap songs.
Ah! I got it back to front -- culturedleftfoot asked more eloquently what I wanted to ask.
Rap being 'pretty much just swearing a lot' is a pretty common and glib reduction of an entire culture of music that's existed and evolved and established itself for decades now. Like all genres, hip hop has its exploiters. The Ramones singing about sniffing glue was wild in the 60s, popular music will always evolve to be as edgy as it can within reason. Besides, it's not like Danny Brown's verses in Frankie Sinatra is G-Rated.
The Avalanches's plunderphonics is derived from Instrumental Hip Hop, so maybe try some more of that, you might enjoy it. I recommend seeking out Nujabes, a late japanese producer that samples jazz and classical pieces. MCs do occasionally feature in his tracks, but it's usually pretty soft on the ears if swearing is what turns you off.
Maybe try something from Common, almost famous for being a soft rapper, but his lyrics do what lyrics should, paint a picture, tell stories, put forward questions to the listener.
If you enjoy those, explore a little more, you might find there's more to a genre with origins rooted in the struggles of young men and women who might fall on harsher language as a necessity to survive in less-forgiving social circles.
You might also like The Roots. Start with Things Fall Apart -- if you're feeling that, you'll like pretty much everything from them. @TooFewColours mentioned Common, who has also done a lot of work with them.
Did you mean the rapping isn't the focus of the song? Not sure how much I'd agree with that, but I guess the vocals aren't necessarily mixed into the forefront as much as they could be.
I won't dispute that there's a lot of the kind of music you mention in the mainstream (because rap is the new pop [edit: and therefore lots of rap is designed and marketed for lowest-common-denominator mass consumption]), but there is so much more to hip-hop than what you seem to give it credit for.
What 'styles' do you mean?
hiphop/rap
I can't think of many genres that I actively avoid. Instead I can think of songs that got me into a genre, which might be a decent alternate way of framing your question.
bootleg the damn thingwait for the Hulu release, of course. This song really sent me down a rabbit hole of French Canadian folk, which led to brushing up on some French pop.Chris Thile (the mandolin player for Nickel Creek), has a knack for really excellent cross-genre covers. Here’s his rendition of The White Stripes’ Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, which is one of my favorites (both the original and his cover).
Chris Thile might as well be a genre all to his own at this point. His collaboration in Goat Rodeo Sessions alone is a mindfuck, Quarter Chicken Dark is something they performed in a Tiny Desk Concert, and the very idea of a song played or written in 13:8 annoys me in a good way. To your point, he had been doing collabs with Edgar Meyer for a while at that point, and he continued to do so after, as well as a bunch fo other artists.
He is actually frustratingly well positioned to be a good host of the show formerly known as Prairie Home Companion. Guy has connections to a half dozen genres of artists at least.
Oh yeah I fully, completely agree. Chris Thile is spectacular! Punch Brothers is AMAZING, I’ve seen them live... I think four times? Maybe five? Every time they knock us out of the park. Chris Thile even signed my mandolin in college!
What really kills me is that, while I do love almost everything he puts out, one of my favorite songs of his is still Ode to a Butterfly, which he wrote when he was like 16. He’s just been a musical force of nature for basically his entire life!
I just started listening to the Katamari Damacy soundtrack lately too! Do you have any suggestions as to what I should listen to next?
Depending on which direction you want to go from there...
As close to Katamari as reasonably possible
More Chiptunes please
_ensnare_(This rabbit hole can go deep; Super Meat Boy, FTL, Super Hexagon, Risk of Rain, Crypt of the Necrodancer--and of course UNDERTALE--, all have high energy, Chiptune driven soundtracks that I still bring out to jam with years later)
More (modern) Jazz!
(This hole can also get very deep when you start breaking away from covers of songs and into more stuff like Django Reinhardt or Caravan Palace, alleged father of gypsy Jazz as a genre and a French electronic jazz band, respectively. And I should also mention that this direction also brings up the sort of stuff I was getting into with the French Canadian folk exploration I referenced in my main comment.)
Wow, thanks! I'll definitely be trying all of those out soon! I'm always looking for new stuff to listen to, so you've definitely given me a lot to work with.
SHINee - Lucifer.
I don't listen to K-Pop. The only reason I even know this track exists is because this was the track a girl I fell in love with presented to me soon after we met.
I'm having trouble answering this. Maybe Michael Jackson's Man In The Mirror? I generally don't like listening to pop music but I do recognize there's good and bad in everything, and I'm really amazed at how he was able to make pop music with substance in his heyday. You look at other big singles like Heal The World, Earth Song, They Don't Care About Us, Black or White, and he had people singing about real issues. Funny thing is, most people would probably agree the actual stances he's taking are hardly offensive or controversial, but I imagine if he were around to release those songs nowadays he'd probably have people yelling to keep politics out of his music. I could totally see a Laura Ingraham segment telling him to shut up and sing.
I don't really know of any subsequent pop artists making anything with any kind of comparable social commentary, with the possible exception of those coming out of the rap tradition, but that could largely be because I don't look out for it.
Edit: I guess Beyonce's been doing it recently.
Xenophobia by Bill Sutton
It's a silly song, but I enjoy listening to it every once and awhile
Orville Peck - Turn to Hate
I'm really no fan of country music, aside from dabbling in a couple bluegrass groups, but goddamn am I addicted to Orville Peck lately. It's basically old school country meets The Cure (or, as my mother put it, sad gay cowboy music), and it's just so catchy and haunting.
Church music isn't my thing, but Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah will always shake me.
Not to say there aren't churches that have used this song, but I definitely wouldn't put Hallelujah in the genre of church music. It certainly draws from religious themes and allusions, but there's a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty in the lyrics, and in my experience that sort of thing generally goes over like a lead balloon in a church setting. I would think Hallelujah fits more in the Folk or Americana genre.
I find it a bit funny when I hear it mixed in with shopping-mall Christmas playlists. Leonard Cohen is, like... famously Jewish.
Yeah I figured that was probably the case because of his last name and the fact that all of the allusions are from the Tanakh without any NT influence, but I didn't know enough about Cohen to be sure, and I didn't want to assume.