No.101637
Anyone else notice this phenomenon? Basically, a music act makes their magnum opus, goes on tour for an extended period of time, and when they come back they never quite reach the heights of their previous work. They make little to no memorable hits, and the few that do chart are often forgotten in the grand scheme of things.
Metallica
>Releases Black Album in 1991
>Goes touring for 4 years
>Releases Load in 1996
Pink Floyd
>Releases The Wall in 1979
>Goes touring for 2 years, works on a movie the year after
>Releases TFC in 1983
U2
>Releases Achtung Baby in 1991
>Goes touring for 5 years but does release another album in this timeframe
>Releases Pop in 1997
And I'm not really referring to the "sell out" albums. A band or singer can continue to grow stronger even after they have "sold out", case in point R.E.M. who made AFTP in 1992 yet had a string of further successes for many years after its release. I'm referring to the band's definitive album with an EP's worth of chart-topping hits, followed by a longass tour where they seem to have the life sucked out of them, before a new album which is a mere shadow of its predecessor. I could list more examples but those were the 3 I distinctly recall.
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No.101638
I haven't noticed a correlation like this, but then I also think Metallica went to shit after MoP, and although I personally hate it, TFC has many loyal fans. I have noticed that turns of the decade can cause this to happen though (look at the bands that were big in the 80s, for example).
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No.101651
another one is RHCP
>BSSM in 1991
>tours endlessly
>loses guitarist because of drugs
>gets Dave "Jane's Addiction" Navarro
>releases "One Stinking Turd", I mean "One Hot Minute"
Weezer, maybe, though didn't he have to take time off after Pinkerton?
I'm still trying to think of other one.
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No.101665
>>101651
>Weezer, maybe, though didn't he have to take time off after Pinkerton?
Weezer (and Cuomo in particular) lost their edge due to Pinkerton flopping and being panned, not because of touring.
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No.101666
OP here, just remembered another; Motley Crue
>Releases Dr. Feelgood in 1989
>Not allowed to go on tour; instead put through sobriety for 2 - 3 years
>Vince Neil quits in 1992, band restructures
>Self-titled album comes out in 1994 with John Corabi on vocals
>>101638
I think it's mainly due to the tracks that most normalfags associate with a certain act. Guns n' Roses for example is Welcome to the Jungle or Sweet Child O' Mine. Bon Jovi is Livin' on a Prayer. When most people think of Metallica, they think Enter Sandman. They might also think MoP or One. A fringe minority might even think of Fuel. They certainly don't think of St. Anger or All Nightmare Long. These bands continue to make albums that are well-received and create hits as well as tracks the diehard fans love, yet none of it has any real staying power in the public conscious. They're almost disposable in a sense. Short term success that makes little to no difference to the legacy they've already established.
Hell, just look at Motorhead. They made Ace of Spades, Overkill and a couple other tracks, then they fell HARD in the '80s and didn't recuperate until well in the '90s, made it back into the mainstream by producing HHH's theme, then made some solid albums until Lemmy's death, but if you ask anyone up to a casual fan of the band, can they name any of those later tracks? I'd bet they couldn't.
As for TFC, I'm one of those that quite liked it I also liked AMLOR so I guess I'm some sort of freak that doesn't pick sides, only problem is there were just 3 good tracks on there, rest were too slow, emotional and orchestral to be Floydian. Your Possible Pasts, The Hero's Return and Not Now John. Maybe Two Suns at the end of the album too. Also despite listening to it for a long while and enjoying it, you can tell Pros and Cons was largely ripped from The Wall, one of the tracks (Gone Fishin'?) even has an entire chord progression from In The Flesh. Even the opening track sounds familiar; the way he enunciates "crazy" is exactly the same way he says it in The Trial.
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No.101672
This phenomenon is aggravated whenever a band goes on hiatus or completely breaks up and reunites many years later. I think debut and second albums tend to be the best because the impetus behind band formation is so strong. Young people are also more energetic and passionate about whatever it is they want to express. That being said, passion can be rekindled with personal tragedy and near-death experiences but it usually doesn't last longer than one album. Happiness, overuse of drugs, mellowing out with age or plain emotional burnout tend to extinguish the songwriter's soul.
Pete Shelley
>no money for drugs, absolute wreck of a love life
>releases Another Music and Love Bites in 1978
>tours more than before while feeling overwhelmed by the surge in popularity
>releases A Different Kind of Tension in 1979, in his own words it's bad on purpose to thin out the fanbase
>spends the next two years touring and rarely coming off the drugs
>quits the band and runs off with his lover
>releases Homosapien in 1981, a dip in musical and lyrical quality
>breaks up with his long term partner in 1985, the JUST is potent
>releases Heaven and the Sea in 1986, his last good album
>reunites with the band, churns out many albums which all sound like generic dad rock but without a single memorable song
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No.101678
>>101637
>U2
Just Say Bo-No!
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No.101680
>>101637
Load had some good songs but should have been half the length.
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No.101682
>>101672
>This phenomenon is aggravated whenever a band goes on hiatus or completely breaks up and reunites many years later.
There are some exceptions to this. Black Sabbath's 13 being an example.
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No.101690
>>101672
>This phenomenon is aggravated whenever a band goes on hiatus or completely breaks up and reunites many years later. I think debut and second albums tend to be the best because the impetus behind band formation is so strong. Young people are also more energetic and passionate about whatever it is they want to express.
Agreed completely. I've never understood why people are always clamoring for older bands to get back together again when it's doubtful that the quality of new material would even be anywhere near that of their earlier days.
I know it can be a painful fact for artists to deal with, but musicians tend to be peak fairly early on when they still have that youthful enthusiasm and fire burning inside them. How many times have longtime musicians insisted that their upcoming release is the best one they've ever done only for it to be revealed as bland and forgettable once it actually comes out?
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No.101691
>>101638
>I also think Metallica went to shit after MoP
How is this possible when Justic is their best album?
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No.101726
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No.101735
>Prodigy after "The Fat of the Land"
>Nine Inch Nails after "The Fragile"
>Marilyn Manson after "Holy Wood"
>Rammstein after "Mutter"
>Tool after "Lateralus"
also
>turns of the decade can cause this to happen
pretty much, all the above had their heyday in the 90s and very early 00s
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No.101737
You know how they say every year of your life is equivalent to a fraction (i.e. your 25th year is 1/25th of your life), perhaps the same thing should be spoken of when it comes to albums.
Your first album is your entire discography to that moment. There's a famous quote - "you spend your whole life writing your first album, then 18 months writing the second" or something to that effect. That first album is the musical lives of you, and your band members (if they exist) transferred to audio.
Your second album would then be equivalent to 50% of your whole discography; like the son of the original. Third would be 33.3%, fourth 25%, and so on and so forth. Perhaps it could be cumulative as well until the point you'd go over 100%, so the second and third albums together would account for 83.3%, then the fourth, fifth and sixth a further 61%. Each time less and less, until by the point you reach your eleventh album, it's accounting for less than 10% on its own and needs an army of other albums to even stack up against your first handful of efforts.
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No.101826
>>101735
10k Days was a good album though
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No.101840
Alan Parsons Project, now this one's a little more subtle:
>Band release four solid albums in the late 1970s
>Fifth release (Turn of a Friendly Card) is considered a weak link between the first four and the sixth
>Sixth album, Eye in the Sky, is the duo's most commercially successful album
>Pre-emptively release a Greatest Hits compilation in 1983, as if they knew their time in the sun was drawing to a close
>Make five further releases that are utter shit, the fifth released by Woolfson as a solo effort
>Pair embarrass themselves with meaningless solo works for the rest of their lives
I had to do quite some digging, as it doesn't appear they ever toured, but I did find something that could correlate to their downfall; the fact Parsons stopped engineering other artists' albums after 1978 and the fact he stopped producing them after 1979. It was his work with The Beatles and Pink Floyd that made him great, and once he'd grown too absorbed in his own work, he'd lost the knowledge on how to make a sonically-pleasing and memorable album. This was already evident by the time he made The Sicilian Defense to piss off Arista and took 18 months to make their fifth album. Eye in the Sky appears to have been as well-loved as it was because it was an experiment and every track on it was different; sooner or later they would've found something worthy of radio airplay.
If Alan Parsons had kept producing and engineering albums from other artists, he might have produced 10 solid albums for his Project. Because he would have been able to "take notes" from more musically fighting the urge to say "superior" or "advanced" adept acts and adapt them for his own usage, evolving his style as time progressed.
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No.101854
>>101637
Same with The Doors.
THe whole band was fascinating and released great albums then they went popular, started touring.
The fame and bitches went to Morrison's head, became alcoholic and the band went downhill then he died soon after. I'm not quite sure where's the line that seperates the albums because it was ups and downs for the band until it went total haywire.
Same thing with The Offspring:
>Released their first album -> absolute gem, original, a few guys' first experiment as a band making songs about what they want
>next 2 albums go popular
>touring
>forcing out new albums because reasons
>trying to fit in to the late 90's trends abandoning their original style = garbage whining and "hip" music
>today: the whining late 90's style stuck with them and they still force it because money and mainstream fans to appeal to
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No.101862
>>101637
>>101854
I think the biggest problem that nobody talks about is touring as a whole and how much it takes out of an act, physically and mentally. If I was a record exec I'd limit my acts to publicly perform on 10 dates within a 2 month period (so approximately 1 show a week) each year, giving them the remaining 10 months to work on their next project.
You read all these stories about how wrong tours can go. Fights, riots BREAK STUFF, overdoses, and even deaths. A tour bus crash is how we lost one of the greatest bassists of all time at just 24 years of age. And then you look at how many shows these acts cram into their tours, and it's no wonder they deteriorate as badly as they do.
For example, Pink Floyd played 157 shows almost non-stop from September 1987 - August 1988, 3 - 4 shows a week, with occasional gaps in between no bigger than a few weeks. No wonder it took them 5 years to come up with The Division Bell.
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No.101867
>>101862
Interesting. Are there any examples of the opposite effect then, i.e. bands that stop touring but still maintain a level of quality/improve? The Beatles released Revolver, Sgt. Peppers, White Album, and Abbey Road after they stopped, often considered the highlight of the band's career.
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No.101872
>>101862
This, Rush was on tour for 5 years at some time in the 70s and Geddy Lee said they were going stupid from the non-stop shows and stress relievers.
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No.101874
>>101872
tbf Rush were always one of the more consistent bands. lasted for 50 years without break and they only had one or two bad albums.
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No.101875
>>101874
This is true. Shame I'll never get to see them live
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No.101876
I've been listening to some Husker Du the last couple of days. What went wrong there? I mean the last few albums were not too bad. I heard it was sexual tension
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No.101878
>>101854
The earlier efforts had a weird cabaret jazz rock vibe, then the band turned into a blues act, speaking of the Doors
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No.101879
>>101637
Some artists manage to escape this. David Bowie, for example. One of his most famous albums was his very last one.
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No.101882
>>101879
That was after 3 decades of shit/mediocre albums though. That said, his second to last one was pretty good too.
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No.101883
Yes
>releases Fragile, Tales and Relayer in a 4 year period somehow
>wakeman left
>releases Going for the One
>it's shit
>goes on a downward spiral untill they break up
>reanimated as a walking corpse and release 90125 and Big Generator
Genesis
>solid discography right up to the last album
>band finally ends
>cucking all stations happens
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No.101884
>>101882
The Next Day? He made that around the time he knew he had cancer, I think the cancer is what made him pour soul back into his music.
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No.101894
Everything he did after Baal was shit or oblong experimentation for its sake, Heathen was a return to form and Next Day was plain straight art rock shit.
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No.101895
>>101883
Ah, Genesis. That's one I neglected to mention in the OP.
I personally believe it was the Both Sides of the World Tour that finally did Phil in. 13 months, his longest tour both in terms of length and distance covered by far. You can see the effects it had on him as well; he went from looking around 38 at the time of his 1994 tour to about 46/47 at the time of his 1996 tour, and there's only 2 years between them. When he next met the band, he left and went solo.
That said, they did take a 5 year break from Genesis between 1986 - 1991 that can't have done them any good. Granted, they did come back right to #1 with a critically and commercially successful album, but there's no doubt their skills atrophied in that time and you can see the critiques that started with But Seriously begin to widen, and the term "Phil Phatigue" had been coined. Despite running a successful solo project at the same time, Collins and the other three still managed to keep a consistent release schedule all the way through to 1983's Genesis, never taking longer than 2 years between albums. Even Invisible Touch took just 3 more.
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No.101896
>>101883
Yes has had like 150 members over half a century. I’m not sure you can really say that the band has gone up and down. It’s just been many different bands.
Most people who say classic/prog declined in the 80s just don’t like new wave and can’t stomach its influences on all other genres. Yes had some bomb ass shit in later years.
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No.101898
None of those are magnum opus, more like bestseller.
And yes this exists, they kinda burn out and then force themselves to make another hit quickly, then fuck it up
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No.101899
>>101898
The Wall can be depending on who you ask, but you could really say that about any album between Meddle and The Wall.
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No.101916
>>101896
I tend to like both prog and new wave and even new wave's darker cousins goth and post-punk…what band would fit that description? post-punk influenced prog?
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No.101923
Two things:
>"Creative Fatigue and Mainstream Appeal"
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No.102291
>Carcass after Heartwork
>>101735
Nine Inch Nails only actual garbage albums have been With Teeth, Hesitation Marks and Year Zero but the introduction of atticus on the band brought in some great new stuff.
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No.102359
>>101826
Not bad per se, but not in the same league as Aenima or Lateralus (one of the guys who worked on production of it called it "Undertow on steroids").
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No.102360
>>101899
"The Wall" is hard to swallow as their magnum opus except if you're fine with accepting Waters as the central part of the band.
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