Please go find them yourself.
Headliners are Radiohead, Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar. If any of these bands(?) were playing in my backyard would I bother to look out the window?
There are certainly plenty of acts.
Are any of them good?
Are any of them rock ‘n’ roll?
How many of them do you know?
My over/unders are zero, one and three.
Wasn’t Coachella originally an alternative rock festival?
Does music suck today or what?
Just for laughs I looked at a list of the best rock albums of 2016, and listened to seven songs by seven bands. This is the only one I didn’t skip. The singer doesn’t whine! Almost!
I dunno. The Coachella stuff reminds me of riding up to Lake Tahoe when I was a kid, and there were always signs that Robert Goulet and Totie Fields were going to appear at Harrah’s Club, and thinking, “ick.”
30 years later i drive up and the signs are for Santana and Bob Seeger. Ick redux, or did we just get old like our parents and what kids like makes no sense to us, even if it speaks to them?
If the kids were doing something different and we scorned it, the crabby old man criticism might be valid. But they’re not doing anything different. Everything I hear positively invites comparison to other, better songs. Furthermore, I know a lot of kids – our house has always been open to the friends of nine children – and they are always asking to be turned on to old stuff they don’t know, in very different genres too. It’s been a long time since the last Next Big Thing. If it ever comes I doubt it will come from the U.S. or England, but from some remote outpost if there is such a thing anymore. It has to be a rebellion against the cultural hegemony of Our Generation, not a derivation.
Completely agreed, Gene. Last band I discovered doing something very different and very good was the Queens and that’s a long time ago. And it still was very within the borders of traditional rock ‘n’ roll.
Therein lies the problem – very different is often just boring or unlistenable and most listenable popular stuff today has been done before, just way better.
I still find very derivative, very good new stuff occasionally though.
Will post my best album of 2016 soon.
That band above is kinda rehashed soft/loud grunge mixed with shitty pop-punk. Not awful, but I ain’t running out to buy it.
Again, I dunno. My dad was raised on Mozart, and my mother grew into adulthood on the Big Bands. They thought the awful “bee bop” music of Chuck Berry and the Beatles my brother and I loved was atonal dreck. And, that it wasn’t music any more than an abstract Picasso was art to traditional artists of the time.
So, I think that factors in a lot.
That said, if Steve can list his favorite album of 2016 that is one more album from the year than I can even name.
I know the Stones had a new album, but i could not name the title, and I sadly could not be less interested in their releasing an album of blues standards. Just like I am not interested in an Eagles reunion (not that I don’t like the Stones or Eagles,,sorry Lebowski).
But, I would like to think there is some new clever slant and/or interpretation of music a la Elvis and the Beatles and Louis Armstrong that is out there still. We could use it, and we would be due.