Most overrated Band ever? | Page 27 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

vonbontee said

…not that it wasn’t an interesting read! And I agree that the RYM “best ever” rankings are heavily skewed towards recentisms. (There’s no way in hell that “Aeroplane Over The Sea” is the eleventh greatest album of allfucking time.) But I was born in the ’60s like Clerefor’s father, so I understand the resistance to newer sounds…

Yeah, technically the highest rated album over a thousand votes is Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady with 4.34 stars, but in the overall list it appears on #41. Not that it is my favourite album but it could take the place instead of OK Computer, that has a lower rating.

vonbontee said
  Which 70s band is the equivalent of Coldplay? Hm…The Alan Parsons Project? 

Yes yes. Had to look it up but you nailed it

I dunno, I kind of like GVF. I mean, I don’t love them, but they’ve got some nice songs, and I’ve seen them play live and they’re pretty good. Don’t get me wrong, I get your point, but sometimes I just don’t understand why so many hate them to the degree that they do. I honestly don’t even bring up that I like them because I’m afraid people will ridicule me for it sometimes.  

I get you. It’s just that the people that defend Greta Van Fleet from the accusations that they are an uncomfortable rip-off vibe will go to the extent of saying that “Led Zeppelin stole, so it shouldn’t be a problem that Greta steals”, when it’s nothing like that. That kind of comment eliminates any type of context to the situation. Zeppelin, if they happened to steal a riff or chord progression, they would improve it, and polish it, and make it different and fantastic. Greta seems that they are only imitating the part of the “stealing”, and not the part of “recontextualization”, “innovation”, and just having a style of their own in general.

And the fact they denied it and accepted it in the past, seems like they are only starting to realize they have a hot potato on their hands. And it’ll blow up and they will fade into obscurity, because who in the next few decades is gonna want to hear a lesser version of Led Zeppelin instead of the actual gods of rock that inspired those cutely bland imitations of their work? And the other option for them is to start changing, and remember the past as “that dark Zeppelin era”, but the real question is: are they capable of changing? If you judge by their imitation of Zeppelin… I don’t think so. I don’t think they are talented enough or creative enough to make something by theirselves before they fade. Greta to me is just a waiting room until they change or disappear, but it’s been three years since they’ve started and they still sound the freaking same. No band has got such a slow self-discovering process. GVF in general feels just like a stolen self-discovery process in the attempt on not ever have to try and fail in be theirselves.

That being said… Nobody should shame you for the tastes that you hold, or laugh at them, or try and humiliate you because of them. That’s just disrespectful and overall being a jerk. If there’s an argument on the music alone, I’m no longer with you, I have problems with Greta, but people shouldn’t jump to attack you personally just because they don’t have the same opinion as you. Keep in mind anyone who does that is not worth paying attention to.

@vonbontee 

To be fair, 2,000 to 4,000 votes is not a low number of votes. If the most rated album has 50,000, that means it’s a 4% to 8% of the most voted album of all time. I would say is a decent number. Albums with less than a thousand votes start to be less recognizable.

Also don’t you mess with In a Silent Way on my watch

QuarryMan said
To me the difference between Led Zeppelin and Greta Van Fleet is that while both are guilty of plagiarism, at least Led Zeppelin were innovative in what they did. They took old, largely acoustic blues and folk songs, and then electrified them, practically helping invent an entire genre in the process, and influencing hundreds of music to come after them.

Not to mention that the musical landscape under which Zeppelin forged their inspiration and style is very different from Greta’s, and the way of acting on it means a big deal. What I mean is how can you accuse Led Zeppelin of stealing as if it was this unforgivable crime, when Robert Plant and Jimmy Page had a strong bonding with the African-American world of BLUES? Folk and blues during the 50s and 60s, and any artist related to that lineup (Howlin’ Wolf, Fats Domino, B.B. King, Robert Johnson), they all “stole” music. The difference is there was such a carefree attitude towards songwriting within the genre (mostly attributed to rejection from white labels), that most songs were just slight variations on older songs, and the original source was never attributed because among fans and artist was it either from the Chicago scene, or Mississippi or New York, they all just played either this old, author-less music, or variations of songs from their fellow contemporary composers. It’s kind of like opera: in the immense world of opera, the singers don’t try to sound understandable, because all of the spectators know the scripts already. My point is blues fans during the 50s knew their s**t. Blues had such a strong following that compositions were no longer a matter, everybody knew who the original was, either that or it was considered a “lost song” or an “ancient folk tune”. Page and Plant were among those spectators.

Led Zeppelin was formed under that mindset. They didn’t care about copyright, and labels, and credit, they just wanted to play blues and rock and roll like their idols. Where did their idols get their music? Other musicians. So Zeppelin was just playing by the only rules they knew. And they did it better than anybody: in the generation of black musicians that invented rock and roll, a good artists was considered good by how much he could add to the compositions he borrowed. Only with Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry is when original compositions started to be the norm. Zeppelin was just a little behind on that. But LZ were the best at grabbing songs and making them their own, transforming them into their own gritty, powerful rawness of an aesthetic.

Like, if you think Led Zeppelin cheated their way to success, then try making Led Zeppelin I & II out of the original sources. It is the way they assembled what they borrowed what made them so unique in the first place. Nowadays it would be the exact equivalent of sampling.

For example, people accused them from stealing Babe I’m Gonna Leave You from Joan Baez, when it wasn’t even hers, it was an older folk song (Wikipedia says “written by Anne Bredon in the late 1950s”, whoever she was). So to both Baez and Zeppelin the song was just… like free of use. The music they imitated would the equivalent of me remixing a christmas carol and people accusing me of plagirizing. I’m not saying all of those tuns were author-less, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t have given credit. My point is I excuse them because they didn’t do it out of evil, they did it because is how they were taught, and they just were late to catch up to the 70s, were everything was owned by labels, and stealing a riff was a crime punishable by death. They were just ignorant of the rules, that’s all. And they did catch up eventually; Physical Graffiti and Houses of the Holy are pure original compositions, you can’t find any pseudo “rip off” on those two albums (in my opinion, their best two as well).

Greta Van Fleet seems like the result of knowing you don’t have to steal, and doing it anyway, trying to follow 1950s rules sixty years later, and not even following them right. They have the whole textbook backwards. If Greta truly wanted to be like Zeppelin, they should borrow melodies and change the sound, not borrow the sound and change the melody. That to me completely demolished any possibility of being particular. And GVF’s lyrics are painfully wannabe Plant, that’s another thing that bugs me about them. Like, you could make a Led Zeppelin rip-off but still add it new things like a space aesthetic ala David Bowie or Spiritualized, or you could turn mix it with that old circus vibe, Sgt. Pepper , Frank Zappa. But their lyrics just have the same topics and Zeppelin-isms, you know, Greek and Nordic mythology, apocalyptic erotism, Tolkien, and all of this qualities that were purely born from Plant’s personal interests, and the boys on Greta are desperately trying to imitate.

Dingle Lad said [Pink Floyd] are as boring as watching wallpaper.

Okay, let’s everybody just calm the f**k down.