12/9/2023 0 Comments Best easy listening albumsRelated Recordsīefore the soundtrack for The Harder They Come, reggae's success in America was limited to the occasional fluke 45 (e.g., Desmond Dekker's "The Israelites") and appropriative novelties like the Beatles' "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." While the songs on it may have been new to an American audience, some of them had been around for as long as five years - an eternity when it comes to pop music. Beyond breaking ground, it broke records, showing just how far pop could reach: the biggest selling album of all time, the first album to win eight Grammys in a single night and the first album to stay in the Top 10 charts for a year. Its promotional strategy, which led to seven of its nine tracks being released as singles, raised the bar for what, exactly, constituted a "hit-laden" LP. The album's splashy, cinematic videos - from the John Landis-directed short film that promoted "Thriller" to the West Side Story homage accompanying "Beat It" - legitimized the still-nascent form and forced MTV to incorporate black artists into its playlists. The album's nervy, outsized blend of pop, rock and soul would send seismic waves throughout radio, inviting both marquee crossovers (like Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo on "Beat It") and sneakier attempts at genre-meshing. It's hard to imagine the present-day musical landscape without Thriller, which changed the game both sonically and marketwise. Flying the independent Sub Pop logo alongside DGC's corporate shield - and powered by Kurt Cobain's golden scream - Nevermind shuffled the major/indie ecosystem, brought shine to punk and punk to the charts, transmitted a post-feminist sensitivity to the masses, bridged MTV and college radio, provided aphoristic angst for sullen teens to replicate in school notebook margins, altered the way engineers recorded bands and publicists marketed them, commodified discontent, kicked off an archetypal music myth for the late 20th century, spurred an alt-rock gold rush that resulted in hundreds of bands earning record contracts and impacted nearly every sad guitar player that followed. Nirvana weren't the first indie heroes to sign a major label (the Replacements, Tim, 1985), or the first to subsequently hit Number One (R.E.M., Out of Time, 1991), but the Washington trio's sophomore album was the one that forever blurred the lines between pop sheen and DIY pathos. However Artificial Intelligence served as a handy gathering point for some of electronic music's most experimental minds - Aphex Twin, Autechre, Richie Hawtin, Alex Paterson from the Orb - a brainy exercise that spawned what we now know as "intelligent dance music." While AI anticipated the explosive markets for genres like downtempo and trip-hop the blipping, sputtering, ambient worlds of IDM musicians would influence everyone from Radiohead and Björk to Skrillex and Deadmau5. In a world of house and techno driven by dance-floor whims - especially in rave-addled England - Warp Records were driven by the bottom line when they decided to market a "home listening" version of electronic music: Comfortable, older, middle-class types liable to buy an living room record were a more reliable audience for CD sales than trend-chasing kids. Related RecordsĪ seemingly conservative maneuver that turned out to be cutting edge. The album's "pay-what-you-want" offer that allowed diehards, casual fans and curious listeners to put their own value on music was just another step forward in questioning how the music business does business. Ever since In Rainbows arrived in everyone's inbox simultaneously and listeners experienced those torrid first notes of "15 Step" together, many artists have tried to "pull a Radiohead," with Beyoncé and U2 succeeding in delivering their music in a similarly egalitarian manner. The band ended the four-year wait following 2003's Hail to the Thief by announcing simply on their official site, "the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days." With that sentence, Radiohead changed the promotional cycle in the digital age. O K Computer might be Radiohead's best album, and Kid A their most musically innovative, but In Rainbows shook the music industry's very infrastructure.
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