Comments by "A.J. Hart" (@cobbler88) on "WatchMojo.com" channel.

  1. Gordon Lightfoot still releases albums too. I guess the rumors of the demise of 70s-style Canadian folk have been greatly exaggerated as well?
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  2. That's weird. I have a style of music that has no audience either. I was around in the 80s. Maybe I should have been on the list too.
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  3.  @deadeye4520  Oh! I caught the "yet" and my statement stands. It can be read in this thread that the "yet" may be the reason the Furs didn't make the list. Accepting that, I can make a similar case for myself. Not only that, but I can use the "yet" to continue to state my case, as I have the rest of my life to achieve "yet."
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  4.  @deadeye4520  Hey! After the week I'm having, the thought that I still have a shot at being recognized as such might be all I have going for me! :)
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  5. Oh, it's still a list. You might not like the acts, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still a list. :P
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  6. I don't know that I've ever written this comment in response to one of these lists, but it's actually pretty solid. I appreciated that it didn't go deeply grunge. But did the 90s actually have an alt scene, as we think of it? In the age of the introduction of online file sharing and explosion of the internet where we no longer had to rely on what top 40 radio fed us, most of this stuff was pretty mainstream compared to alt in the 80s.
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  7. I appreciate KISS, but - like Billy Joel - their music has aged like milk.
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  8.  @anthonysaunders345  The UK has always been considered sort of a weird mixed bag by any American who paid attention to those charts in the 80s. One week The Smiths could be No. 1, the next week it was some Neil Diamond album no one in the U.S. had ever heard of. It's not surprising that there are so many acts that were absolutely huge in UK while here we either barely heard of them or weren't exposed enough to know a Fur from a Bunnyman or to recognize much difference. But back then everything was funneled through the local radio stations. Those gate-keepers are gone now, mostly for the best.
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  9. Yeah, I've seen his "four basic chord progressions" vids. The concept is a little janky and tends to be overly broad. But execs have a much lesser role in determining what gets out there now than they did in past decades when we did not have the Internet and social media. Although actually getting contracts is still ultimately up to labels, they no longer have a stranglehold on whether the public is exposed to the music in the first place.
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  10.  @anthonysaunders345  I can guarantee there are a few thousand of artists working on that, as well as a few deposed A & R guys trying to figure out how to develop the next work-around, then take advantage of it. In the meantime, I can't help but enjoy the fact that artists find themselves forced to tour a bit more these days. They were kind of forgetting the consumer when all they had to do was cut albums.
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  11. That really early Siouxsie stuff sounds so hollow, like early Cure or INXS.
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  12. @Sad Boi We favor actual singing, but we'll settle for whatever is put out there.
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  13.  @presumed_guilty  This is why police don't depend on documentarians to gather evidence and decide what to present to the attorneys. The doc had an agenda, and all you know is what the people with that agenda told you. The omissions and half truths spoke volumes. Take care.
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  14. Actually, blackwashing is much more prevalent than is whitewashing. The main reason (according to anecdotal Hollywood) seems to be that - even though a few folks might grouse a little - the overwhelming majority of white will just shrug and move on with their lives. Cast Tom Cruise as Black Panther and the entire black movie-going population of the U.S. would lose its collective shit. And keep in mind this is over a minor superhero none of them had even been aware of until "Civil War" came out.
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  15. SANNA: There is no such thing as reverse racism. There is only racism and everyone is capable of it. That being said, I'm not sure that swapping out races of characters necessarily constitutes racism. How people react to it, however, tends to be quite revealing about how much they choose to inject race into things.
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  16. AK: There is no such thing as reverse racism. It's simply racism like any other example.
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  17. So rather than actually citing the statistically proveable top 10 Billboard chart-toppers of the decade, these are just an arbitrary list of No. 1s. Got it.
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  18. Mainstream music has declined to the point that those who prophesied that Prince and Madonna were way ahead of their times are being proven correct. We just didn't realize that "ahead of their time" meant that eventually everything would be as shitty as Prince and Madonna dance pop. In another few years, all post-Zooropa U2 will seem palatable as well (and I think I'm being a little generous regarding U2's jumping of the shark).
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  19. - WTF is a "Lupe Fiasco"? - Most disappointing U2 album? Everything after Zooropa, and a few of those before it.
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  20.  @bigsnap1141  Never heard of him. I'm not sure you're really big until people who don't pay attention have heard of you. Kind of like news. Apathy is a great filter. If something's really big, it will find its way to the non-news consumers. :) Plus, who has time to keep track of EVERYthing, right?
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  21. As long as you have people devoted to spending their disposable income on tats, gagues and piercings who can't dress themselves and haven't yet mastered the art of using a belt, there will always be nu metal.
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  22.  @katrinebumaltao7044  I wouldn't doubt the process is more complex than how other commenters have reduced it, but the result doesn't really seem to reflect that. A huge barrier to respect is whether people don't believe that a person sitting in a studio on a computer can't vomit out such songs on a daily basis, and pretty much anything so electronic suffers from that. And don't sell boy bands short. It's not like some pedo gathered up 5 or 6 randos, gave them some lyrics and had them playing malls the next day. Some of those groups had highly choreographed shows. It will die like everything else that in general has no real soul to it because in the end there will be nothing to grab onto or long for. Maybe the true test will be whether it's able to eventually come BACK.
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  23. But whining all the time about it in song doesn't have a long, rich tradition. That's more of a "new" thing that sprang from grunge and bubblegum punk. Maybe - with any luck - kids are growing out of that and growing up. That's not to cast aspersions on the music, but genres like grunge sort of spring up because of a confluence of things - not just on their own because people have tired of Vince Neil.
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  24. Third Wave Ska NEVER had a time in which the genre was broadly popular. For those of you who weren't around, we actually discussed AT THE TIME how we were being fed this narrative about how popular ska was, yet the only examples we ever heard were from No Doubt and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and there's not much "ska" in most of those hits. You're damn near as likely to get as many ska hits to chart in 2020 as you were back in the day. A few of these seem more like relatively short-lived subgenres and spin-offs (brostep, crunk) than actual large-scale genres unto themselves (hair metal, grunge).
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  25. While I can agree that I probably don't need anything new from any of these acts based on what they've been putting out since their heydays, I have to disagree with some of their inclusion based on the fact that only two of them have put out more than two albums in the last decade. The breakdown of how many studio albums each act has put out/plan to release in the last 10 years (2011-2020): 10. Black Sabbath (1 album since 1995) 9. Pearl Jam (2 albums since 2009) 8. Rolling Stones (1 album since 2005) 7. U2 (2 albums since 2009) 6. Weezer (6 albums since 2010) 5. Def Leppard (1 album since 2008) 4. Metallica (1 album since 2008) 3. Bon Jovi (4 albums since 2009) 2. Aerosmith (1 album since 2004) 1. KISS (1 album since 2009) I would only put Weezer and Bon Jovi on this list of offenders at this point. Maybe the others' albums have sucked for the last 15+ years, but at least they're not MAKING one more than every 5 years or so.
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  26.  @HenryFrederick  It was more about being true to the theme of the vid than poking fun. That was just gravy. Not sure what the number of thumbs up has to do with things, especially since they don't display our thumbs down.
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  27.  @arts1721  How do we stop third-wave ska bands? You do the same thing you do with fools. You just make sure they're nonsense is put out there and let the market do the rest.
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  28.  @Egilhelmson  Some of THOSE are actually being pushed out by 80s stuff, I've noticed. But, to be honest, I don't see Bon Jovi stuff standing up as well as that older material. But I've also found that I have a lot of trouble giving full credit to things from the 80s simply because it's what I grew up with, so you don't view "Wanted, Dead or Alive" the same way you view, "Paint It Black."
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  29. YT is not real life. The sooner people come to realize that reality is not reflected in YT and social media, the better we will all be.
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  30.  @alexandriaward5015  That was awesome when they said that. :)
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  31.  @albertshepard4084  It's probably a stretch calling ANYTHING "alternative" in the 90s. By the end of the decade we had online file sharing via the Internet and weren't at the mercy of top 40 radio gate-keepers. Stuff like grunge that would never have charted or received radio play in the 80s was mainstream in the 90s, partly because examples of just about everything were by the end of that decade.
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  32. Except that the MSM will also try to prop up acts that no one really cares to listen to anymore. I can't count how many times Prince, Madonna, U2, REM and even Springsteen made the cover of Rolling Stone long after their actual music sales had dwindled and almost disappeared. Hell, every cover with the actual Rolling Stones on it that appeared in about the last 35-40 years is an example of this. I think both examples are just more reason to not trust what you're being peddled. There's always an agenda.
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  33. So is "The Perfect Storm," but only about 5% of it, so that assertion doesn't carry as much weight as it should. :)
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  34. I would welcome decent metal to return to prominents, but if I do 10 pushups today after having done one yesterday, I can tell everyone I did 10x as many pushups today as I did yesterday. Big increases usually mean the starting point was very low.
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  35. I was working a swimming event with some teen gals from Arkansas who had come to the event to volunteer. I told one of them (age 16) she'd just missed Shania Twain's concert here by a couple of days. She replied, "I have no idea who that is." A 16-year-old girl from Arkansas having no idea who Shania Twain is? Isn't that kind of like saying you've never heard of Jesus?
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  36.  @patrickcannady2066  In all fairness. Dick Clark probably never heard of U2 or Bruce Springsteen. :)
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  37.  @ffjsb  So you obviously not understanding something you read means it's the COMMENT that's stupid? Nnnnno. Maybe just take your seat at the kids table while the grown-ups are talking, okay? You take care.
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  38. I'm not quite sure, but does it qualify as irony or simply promoting a social agenda to choose to do a whitewashing video at a time when blackwashing is more prevalent? Those who have actually burned some calories examining this phenomenon in recent years (specifically substituting whites for blacks and blacks for whites) seem to believe that - even though a few white folks might grouse a little over changing the race of a character - the overwhelming majority of them just shrug off a race change and move on with their lives. At worst they ignore the movie entirely. Conversely, cast Liam Hemsworth as Black Panther and the entire black movie-going population of the U.S. would lose its collective shit. And keep in mind this is over a minor superhero almost none of them had even been aware of until "Civil War" came out. I don't believe that changing the race of a character actually constitutes racism. The promotion of a social agenda? Almost certainly. But not really racism. How people choose to react to such a thing, on the other hand, reveals how much of the world they choose to filter through a racial prism. Oh, and "reverse racism" is no more real than "social justice." There is only racism, and there is only justice. Adding any modifiers to those absolutes results in something less and completely foreign to the concepts those words embody.
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