Sucks or overplayed?

Yes, another pop music thread, but discussion of Frampton and MMMBop got me thinking about songs and bands that are pretty much universally hated these days. Some of them are legitimately bad or annoying, but did anybody really hate Hootie & the Blowfish the first 100,000 times they heard Hold My Hand?


I actually think MMMBop was a decently fun pop number, especially for one written and performed by young kids, but was probably the most over-exposed song of all time. I still love Hootie. I don't get Stairway to Heaven backlash. But Nickleback just plain sucks.

 

Someone in radio maybe can answer this for me. I know stations aren't supposed to get paid for playing a certain song, although it does happen. But do stations also have to pay the music label for the rights to play the song, or do the stations just play whatever they like and the label just benefits from the airplay?

Because, for the life of me, I can't figure out why the heck radio stations play the same 30 or 40 songs in rotation hour after hour, especially in this day and age when there is so much more music available.

 

I think Hanson is unfairly lumped with some of the boy bands. They write most of their own music, play their own instruments and while they really only have one big hit, it's not like most one-hit wonders who you never hear from again.

I don't hate Hootie, but when he blew up there was the sense of "How in the fuck is this the most popular band in the country right now?"

 

The Wall Street Journal had a great article about this a few months ago -- Radio is becoming more repetitive because people want it to be more repetitive. As soon as you hear a song you don't recognize, you are more likely to switch to something else. It's a really interesting article. So radio stations keep playing the same songs over and over again so you don't accidently get exposed to something unfamilar and change the channel.

http://online.wSportsJournalists.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303754404579313150485141672

 

Radio, hell we can do a whole thread on radio..., I'll go a step further - when you have corporate clusters in every market with their various formats (country, sports, righty talk, AC, CHR) you would think they would have one station that at least was interesting, geared toward that particular market, where you had actual DJs who played music they chose.

 

We have two modern country stations here - both corporate, not local. It's amazing the number of times you can flip from one to the other and hear the exact same song. I know they're working on the same playlist, but it's got to be pretty small given the number of times they overlap the same songs.

 

I don't have a subscription, so I can't read it. Seems like an interesting premise, although I wonder how many times do they get people changing the station because they hear the same stuff on every two hours.

 

I should chime in about Hootie, since I'm the one who weirdly dragged the band into a discussion about Peter Frampton. The point was Hootie was a middle of the road band that could best be described as The Michael Stanley Band of South Carolina THAT HAPPENS TO INEXPLICABLY HAVE THE 16TH-BEST SELLING ALBUM OF ALL TIME.

Certain albums capture attention without being groundbreaking or even novel. That amuses me. Not in a degrading way, just a fascinating way. It wasn't a slam on Hootie, a perfectly cromulent band.

 

Ugh, I remember when that Hootie album came out.
I disliked it from the get-go, but it was impossible to avoid the songs on that album for about a two year window.
I rapidly transitioned from dislike to hatred.

 

Hootie is a great bar band. No shame in that. I'd rather hear every Hootie album twice before I'd go to one Dave Mathews show.

If you're a band and you grind for a long time, and suddenly you catch fire are briefly the biggest thing in America, good for you. You music may not be for me, but I wish you all the spoils of success. And Daruis Rucker seems like a pretty nice fellow in the end.

If you're a manufactured "band" sprung together in a lab by some coked up producer, and you become the biggest thing in America for a spell, well, I'm fine with the scorn.

 

Raises hand.
One station here plays Billy Joel every morning on my drive to work. Usually Piano Man. I used to love that song.
Now ...

 

Hootie and the Blowfish is the Mark Rypien of bands.
Not the worst ever, not the best, but for that one moment in time they were goddamn incredible.
Hootie had Cracked Rearview. Rypien had the 1991 season.

One of my regrets in life, too, is not having seen Hootie play. It was fall of '94, first semester of college, right before "Hold My Hand" started dominating radio for the next year. They played a small show at a local bar and I probably could've gone for about $10. A few months later they were the biggest act in America. Would've been a cool "I saw them when..." story, but of course I had no idea who they were at the time and I didn't go.