2023 Rock & Roll HOF screechfest

Seriously Bubs I will fuck your shit up.

You're right, though, a lot of their stuff sounds a lot like the hair metal of the time. They were just writing much better songs.

 

You listen to the Sex Pistols' album today and read the lyrics and it seems so ... prescient. I will just leave it at that.

 

I accidentally shoplifted a Living Colour cassette in 1989. Went to a Kmart and it got missed on the ring-up.

"Open Letter to a Landlord" was the song that sold the album to me. The follow-up album was crap. However, this song is one of the criminally underrated singles of 1989.

 

Guns 'N' Roses were the perfect bridge between hair metal and grunge. They made music videos sans Spandex and cheek blush and I appreciated it. Living Colour had a couple of badass songs but sadly, couldn't stick.

 

I remember thinking Living Colour would be WAY better at covering Hendrix than they were. Their version of Crosstown Traffic on the Stone Free tribute album was pretty bad, but it was nothing compared to this abomination:

 

God, yes. I remember reading a story on Living Colour in Rolling Stone and it mentioned their "fiery" version of Burning of the Midnight Lamp, one of my top five Hendrix songs. I bought this EP and shook my head at how bad this was. Vernon Reid should have shredded on this one, instead it was just garbage.

 

God Save the Queen (King)....those tourists are money and our figurehead is not what she (he) seems

 

When I was in high school in the late 80s and out late, the local, mid-sized, Upper-Midwest city radio station often played the syndicated Jeff Craig's "60-Second LP" at midnight. For some reason, very clearly remember hearing review for Living Colour's Vivid and was intrigued by this all-Black, heavy metal/hard rock band that had a freewheeling guitarist, a wide-ranged vocalist, some social consciousness in their lyrics and even played damn good Talking Heads cover. Of course, "Cult of Personality" blew me away, as it did many, and it got a lot of MTV play. R&B and early rap were where this 16-year-old white Wisconsinite saw most Black musicians in pop (other than on a Sting or Paul Simon album), so to see Black rock-n-rollers was kind of a shock to the system. At the time, you saw more white rappers than Black rockers. Anyway, that Vivid cassette got a lot of play in my '81 Malibu. Time's Up had some good songs but didn't move me quite the same, and I think things went down from there for the band. I saw them at First Avenue in Minneapolis on their Stain tour in 1993 and recall it as an OK show, but I think by that point, grunge and hip-hop probably squeezed them out more than they deserved.

 

I think he brought up the Bad Brains in the context of identifying actual rockers that could diversify the RRHOF. Though re: RATM, I believe Tom Morello's father was black and Zach De La Rocha is Mexican-American (with some African and Sephardi Jewish roots per wikipedia).

 

Hell, I’d put Fishbone in, too.

 

I saw Living Colour open for the Rolling Stones on Steel Wheels in '89 at the Pontiac Silverdome. They gave them like half the stage to work with and the sound quality was a fucking abomination (part of that was the shit venue and part of that was that the Stones probably didn't let them use the full sound system). Still, they were great. I always liked Glamour Boys and Open Letter to a Landlord better than Cult of Personality. Better melodies.

As someone else mentioned, Corey Glover was Francis in Platoon (as in "It ain't D-E-R-E, it's D-E-A-R. And 'Sarah' ain't got no two R's, King. Damn, you dumb!") several years before Vivid came out. I saw Platoon in the theater at least 6 times as a HS sophomore and knew every line and every cast member and I remember doing a double take when I saw Living Colour on MTV for the first time.

 

At their peak around '85, they were absolutely the greatest live act I've ever seen.