anyway, my main take on sex pistols: boy band or no? is that you have to come up with a consistent set of criteria that a group meets to be considered a boy band, and the pistols were so inconsistent that it’s impossible to see how you could apply it to the without applying it to basically everyone
the long and short of this is that “boy band” is inaccurate unless you’re classifying most bands before the mid-80s as boy bands or girls groups, and that malcolm mclaren, vivienne westwood and each individual member of the pistols all had entirely different motivations for being involved
fwiw, my criteria is:
1. plays music written by producers/managers/label
2. public/personal life largely controlled by label (this one is subjective, i know, but important)
3. are part of a marketing strategy to sell items other than music
the pistols only meet 1/3 here
I always thought of boy band as"don't play any instruments but all sing in the same vocal range" (which excludes vocal groups like The Four Tops, who have tenor, bari, falsetto, etc).
This is all way complicated.
well, i mean, it’s all contextual, and i don’t think everyone has to have the same definition, as long as one has some kind of definition that can be applied to other groups, but a lot of people just toss it off as a label without really thinking about it
So, taking #1 into consideration, let's bring in some comments by a certain D. Albarn concerning a major star annnnnd would you look at the time; got to log off.
my general feel (while admittedly not knowing a ton about the ROK music industry) is that what i have read sounds a lot like the industry here in the 50s and 60s in particular
I think this. Not having mass media in the 50s my opinion might be skewed. But suicide and eating disorders seem to be a bad by product of said pressures on the k-pop performers. But also could be a by product of a higher suicide rate for South Korea in general. Yikes. Didnt mean to go dark.
It’s ok imo. Pop idoldom has a lot of darkness and downsides, especially for artists/performers! (Part of why I’m kinda curious to look at it through a labor lens haha)
But no need really. When I saw the Pistols in 76 (at one of the Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs - unfortunately I think it was the second one, not the iconic first although I'm not 100% sure) their sound was pretty generic pub rock apart from Rotten's vocals. But a world away from prog...
... which was massive up until then. Steve Jones was doing Pete Townshend windmills! I was surprised that they were more musically competent than the rock press had made them out to be
I mean, when you look at their careers post-breakup, it's clear there was only one member of the band who couldn't really play his instrument.
(Though I've heard Vicious was a better drummer. But I'll leave that assessment to others.)
And of course when I saw them, and when they did for Never Mind The Bollocks, Sid wasn't in the band - it was Glen Matlock, also an accomplished musician. You could argue they were more of a boy band once he was replaced by Sid
I think there's a little bit of both/and going on though. I seem to recall an interview with Lydon where he said the Pistols were intended (by McLaren, I guess) to be 'the Rolling Stones to the Bay City Rollers' Beatles'
i mean, that’s what mclaren had in mind, but mclaren never had a grip on them at all, and the thing that makes it hard to parse is that both lydon and mclaren are and were shameless liars
Can you expand on 3?
And I think you need to draw some distinguishing factor for, say, Miley Cyrus when she was mostly owned and controlled by Disney but obviously not a girl group even if there's a similar thing happening.
so, i think individual performers are a whole different animal, so i’d exclude cyrus. but in general, using the pistols as the example here, it’s true that they were initially concieved (by mclaren and westwood) as a vehicle to market her designs and his shop
My interest in this by the way is primarily in seeing how the US music industry and the various East-Asian music industries manufacture pop groups and very quickly tend to destroy their artists and the sanity of their fans.
i don’t think the US music industry has been able to successfully do it with groups in at least a couple of decades, but everything i read about the south korean music industry sounds like the US music industry in the 50s and 60s
I've always felt kind of bad for Tork out of the four of them.
He seemed to have been a perfectly competent but not astounding folk musician. Someone who might have otherwise had a career as a session or backing musician but never a real solo one, and that didn't quite fit with their success.
I think I read that there’s an only-slightly different universe where he still ended up just as “longtime Stephen Stills collaborator Peter Tork” which is still pretty good as Wiki pages go
Yes—they asserted independence after a couple of albums because, as it turns out, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork were actually quite talented songwriters and collectively they were pretty strong willed
The quality difference between cutting Neil Diamond-penned tunes with studio musicians and at least partially their own stuff with a lot of Nesmith and Tork instrumental tracks was surprisingly small, though definitely noticeable. Which is actually really impressive.
I'm reluctant to even call the Monkees one even though they started out that way, since Nesmith and Tork worked so hard to get out from under it, and really only Jones had the conventional pretty-boy-controlled-by-managers background before joining the group
