USCHO Music: From Queen to The Beatles to Lady Gaga

Kepler · 2025-10-07T04:47:06-0500

Slap Shot said:
Your stubborn defiance makes one think more.

The list of artists both musical and cultural from the full span of the past 60 years that would cite them is vast and undeniable. Also easy to find. I'll leave it at that because you're either trolling or out of your depths.

You are merely demonstrating what I said: the Beatles are incredibly influential, and they influenced many better bands than they. That alone makes them a very important band, and puts them in the HOF. They are influential because (2) they were original and created a unique voice, and (3) they were a supernova of financial success. Those are the second and third reasons why bands form. They are the model to emulate both for being a creative force and making a shit ton of money.

For (1), the most important reason bands form (by lightyears), their track record was nothing special. Even Lemmy cleans their clock in that department, and Lemmy ... ew!

Yet the trained consumers cannot bear to be reminded they aren't The GOAT, because their GOATness has nothing to do with them as a band, it was manufactured by their manager and their label and their marketing and multiple generations of cynically laughing music industry worker bees who rode that gravy train. The Beatles are Reagan: extremely important in history, but not in and of themselves. The career-long slime trail of their fawning sycophants has bespattered music criticism ever since. The fact that that cadre are the absolute epitome of Boomer self-absorption is just the cherry on top.

The Beatles as a band are totally fine, admirable, a solid A, and among the best 100 or so rock bands of all time.

"The Beatles" as a supposed emperor head and shoulders above everyone is and always was a profiteering fraud. Not by them -- the Beatles themselves escaped the con of Beatles Exceptionalism, because they were legitimate creators, not the baskers who came after and are so insecure they cannot allow that music has no Greatest Ever, because it is a circle whose center is everywhere.

Now prove you are the better man and just let it go. Opinions can't harm you. I understand that this is an eggshell psyche for a huge number of Boomers but for those who came after, and I assume you are among them, the stakes are zero. Just walk away. It is fine to disagree. What is lame is when someone says "many pies taste good" to keep screaming "NO, MOMMY SAID MY PIE IS THE BESTEST!!!"

Kepler · 2025-10-07T05:01:12-0500

SonofSouthie said:
NEW YORK (AP) — Five years after their influential drummer and lyricist Neil Peart died of glioblastoma, the Canadian band Rush have announced a reunion tour.

On Monday, Rush co-founders Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson revealed a 12-date, seven city tour is scheduled for summer 2026, kicking off in June at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles — where the band played their final show in 2015.

The reunion tour will end in Cleveland in September 2026. They’ll also hit Mexico City, Fort Worth, Texas, Chicago, New York and Toronto.

Taking Peart’s place is celebrated German composer and producer Anika Nilles. She has previously toured with Jeff Beck.

Never heard of her. She's great. That song sucks but just watch her skip through those signatures like Coltrane on Giant Steps.

I hope she's a Marxist.

FadeToBlack&Gold · 2025-10-07T14:37:24-0500

Rather than let you two try to repeatedly get in the last word, let's get ChatGPT's take!

Generated in the style of Robert Christgau (because who else?):

The Beatles — “Favorite Band Syndrome” (Imaginary LP, 2025) — B+

Fifty years on, they remain the safest answer to a question nobody’s grading you on. Every dorm-room critic keeps them in rotation because they invented everything, which is both true and exhausting. “Hey Jude” still swells like a civic anthem, “Tomorrow Never Knows” still blows minds that haven’t met Aphex Twin, and yes, Ringo still counts. But loving The Beatles in 2025 is like majoring in oxygen — essential, overexplained, and not exactly cutting-edge. Call it a nostalgia for consensus: people miss when pop music felt like world peace was just a hook away.

Pick hit: “Self-congratulation disguised as cultural literacy.”

A few other hypothetical gems:

Radiohead — “Permanent Anxiety” (Imaginary LP, 2025) — A-

The world’s most self-important introverts keep proving that existential dread can be monetized if you set it to 5/4 and whisper about capitalism. Every grad-school philosopher with a turntable calls them the last real band, which mostly means they’re still grading themselves on how well they suffer. Thom Yorke’s tremolo remains the voice of modern unease—angelic, alien, occasionally allergic to choruses. For all their laptop paranoia and syncopated despair, they still manage to make alienation sound expensive, and that’s no small trick.

They’re right, of course: the world is ending. They just want you to admire the EQ curve while it happens.

Pick hit: “The Sound of Disassociating in 7/8 Time.”

Taylor Swift — “Life of a Showgirl” (LP, 2025) — B

Pop’s reigning confessor turns the stage into a therapist’s chaise and the spotlight into an x-ray. “Lift of a Showgirl” isn’t about taking the sequins off — it’s about discovering what happens when the costume has its own agency. She still writes choruses like closing arguments, each one a shimmered rebuttal to every man who thought applause was affection.

The production glows with just enough vintage warmth to feel analog, like she recorded it to reel-to-reel just to prove she still knows what real "Wood" sounds and feels like. (Don’t worry, she does.)

If Reputation was her trial by tabloid, this is her Vegas residency in self-possession: choreographed, self-aware, and occasionally hilarious in its precision. She’s not dropping the mask; she’s reminding you she designed it.

Pick hit: “Standing O (ver You).”

Soundgarden — “Elegy in Drop D” (Imaginary LP, 2025) — A-

Seattle’s most architectural doom merchants always knew grunge was too small a box to die in. They made Sabbath sound literate, Zeppelin sound unionized, and angst sound like a graduate seminar on entropy. Chris Cornell, the last golden throat of the analog age, could croon or detonate at will, the kind of singer who turned pain into a physical frequency. The riffs spiral downward like a man building a staircase in hell just to admire the acoustics.

It’s heavy music for people who overthink transcendence: cerebral sludge with immaculate grooming. You don’t headbang to Soundgarden so much as contemplate gravitational collapse and call it catharsis.

Pick hit: “Black Hole Sonata (Op. Drop D, No. 4).”

King’s X — “Faith, Groove & Physics” (Imaginary LP, 2025) — B+

Prog without the pomposity, metal without the misogyny, gospel without the altar call — King’s X were too sincere for the cynics and too weird for the believers. Dug Pinnick’s basso-profundo could shake drywall, and Ty Tabor’s harmonies could patch it afterward. They fused Beatles harmonics to Texas humidity and ended up inventing the kind of hybrid only musicians worship. Critics called them underrated; audiences proved it.

They’re the sound of three men trying to solve theology with a drop-D riff and a major-seventh chord. Admirable? Absolutely. Marketable? Never. But in a better universe — maybe the one they keep harmonizing about — King’s X would’ve been the house band for Heaven’s dive bar.

Pick hit: “Dogman’s Epistle to the Tone-Curious.”

Slap Shot · 2025-10-08T14:26:07-0500

More from Ren. This guy is seriously a renaissance man.

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USCHO Music: From Queen to The Beatles to Lady Gaga

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