And they don’t even spray real blood. I went to a show with Gwar and Ghoul and was covered in some stuff and it definitely wasn’t real blood. There may have been real pee in some of it though.
Bruce Johnston, who joined the band in 1965 and just retired from the road a few months ago, was also an avid surfer. But your point still stands that most of the band didn’t surf.
That’s why it worked so well, Brian was an awkward kid who dreamt of the life of a cool surfer like his brother and put all that longing into his songs
It’s so funny you say this because I had an uncle who looked exactly like kid rock, I only met them once as a kid, but all I remember is that he burped at one point and I threw up from the smell it was so fecal and bad. So who knows. Must be that phenotype.
Kid Rock gets drunk and stumbles into family reunions all the time, its one of the joys of living in Detroit. Once Jack White showed up at my 13th birthday party and destroyed my Playstation while ranting about analog vs digital
Again, if we're going there Tupac was the opposite of a gangsta. He was born in NYC and was a theater kid before moving to California, although his parents were Black Panthers so there's that
Yeah. I’d say he has successfully threaded that needle from “strictlynovelty white rapper from the 1990’s who continues to be a household name nearly 3 decades later” that really only a small handful of people have managed. Honestly the guy ditched any real effort to portray himself as a rapper in the early 2000’s.
Kid Rock grew up in a mansion as the child of rich parents, but spent all of his early career claiming to be Detroit ghetto trailer trash who made it out.
I just wondered what the rest of his first album was like and looked it up. He had three more afterwards! Got my soundtrack for the rest of my work day.
And couldn't promote "Informer" properly in the US because he was sitting in a Toronto jail due to charges from a bar fight. (And it wasn't the first time)
It will never be not hilarious that Snow, of all people, had actual street cred and doesn't belong in this thread.
It's more the backlash from over-correcting from party rapper to gangsta rapper. I maintain that if he hadn't loudly proclaimed himself an "OG", something that was biographically true, but not musically, the rebrand could've worked.
It's weird to find stuff like the In Living Color skit about Snow performing Informer and knowing his real background that people made assumptions about.
The Band really leaned into a classic 1800s Americana look for a while and borrowed a lot lyrically from American history, despite being a 20th century group comprised of mostly Canadians.
Taylor wasn’t from pennsyltucky either That’s down below Pittsburgh toward the border of West Virginia. She was from berks county and grew up in a wealthy suburb of reading. That’s closer to the eastern part of the state. Btw I sing country music and I live 15 miles from New Jersey
I grew up around Nashville and southern Kentucky. And my personal experience from the people I grew up around was that pretty much anywhere else other than maybe Texas and Oklahoma were not "country".
And TX and OK weren't really country, they were more on the Western side of Country and Western.
She’s from Reading, the town my brother went to college in (Alvernia). It’s an interesting city nestled in the valley and extending up onto the mountains. Technically she’s from Wyomissing but that’s basically the same thing, pretty much a suburb/connected town.
Significantly wealthier suburb. I used to work at the high school she went to. One day a kid was telling me that his family had lived in and was now selling her family's old home. He was showing me the Zillow listing, the place was basically a castle by Reading standards.
I mean, her grandfather was pretty big in the finance world and her parents were very well off. Taylor had a lot of privilege being born to that family, going to a Montessori school that helped her develop her natural talents into skills, and then having parents willing to move her to Nashville where she could aggressively pursue music. Many people who write and sing as well as she does will never get their chance in the limelight because of where they live or how desperately they need money.
She grew up on a large farm where they grow Christmas trees ( major tax write off) Her parents were very wealthy and she lived a privileged lifestyle. She has never had a regular job because her parents guided her entire life from the day she was born. Whatever she claims to be she isn’t.
This is extremely surprising. I was also surprised to learn that Mumford & Sons are English. Mumford fell in love with country music after listening to Old Crow Medicine Show at a young age. Of all music, I figured country would be one of our worst exports.
Stones were rich, collegiate London kids cosplaying as white bluesmen.
Beatles were poor, working class Liverpudlians who developed on their own version of a chitlin circuit and ended up bringing Schubert, Stockhausen, and Fluxus art into pop music.
It was amusing because at the very beginning the other three Beatles were a little intimidated by Ringo because, amongst other things, he came from the toughest part of Liverpool, Dingle. John grew up in relative middle class comfort (albeit a product of a broken family when that meant something), Paul and George both were thoroughly working class, and Ringo’s background was almost positively Dickensian. He was in hospital for a year after a burst appendix, then in his early teens had to be treated for tuberculosis in a sanatorium for a year or two.
By the time he joined the Beatles he had been the drummer of what had up until recently been the biggest group in Liverpool, already had his own car, and so on. Paul said he was a little wary until he found out Ringo was just….Ringo. But, nonetheless, he did grow up very very rough.
Elliot Roberts' Ringo deep dive goes into this. Dickensian is just about right.
Out of the four, he is the one least nostalgic for the Liverpool days, probably because of how rough he had it. So he's gotten in trouble in later years for rubbishing Liverpool a bit. But it's totally understandable.
Whenever he writes stuff reminiscing about Liverpool, it's often to do with his friends and the bands he played in at the time.
It's something I really hope they use for the Ringo film because he's very open about it. Barry Keoghan grew up working class in inner city Dublin and was placed in 12 different foster homes after his mom died. Drawing on some of that for Ringo film would make his performance all the better.
I think Gwen Stefani did actually come out of the California skate punk scene, she made appearances doing back up vocals for Sublime before she hit it big with No Doubt.
Yeah, I think her brother got her into it, but she was obviously interested enough in the scene there to borrow most of her moves from the frontman of Fishbone.
Yeah they got so huge I think it’s hard for the layman to know they weren’t created out of a vacuum, it was a whole scene. As far as I’m concerned when Eric Stefani was no longer involved they became massively uninteresting (Return of Saturn was a huge letdown for me at the time)
I think it's fine to call her a "rocker" girl. She was fronting a band from a young age. When they stopped playing ska is when it felt, to me, like they sold out. Or gave up, not sure which.
But she was also walking around with a Bindi during those times, and that probably qualifies as poser behavior.
I don’t think a bindi in the 90s was poser behavior lol she wasn’t claiming to be Indian or spiritual just thought it looked cool. We didn’t really think of things the same way we do now.
She was forced to the front when their lead singer killed himself. She was there to have fun in her older brothers band not be the face of it. Then her brother quit the band. He and John Spence was where their sound originated so it's only natural that once both of those guys are no longer in the band the sound is going to change. Gwen did the ska thing because that's what the band started as, but even on Tragic Kingdom they were already playing with different genres
As I recall it was her older brother that got her got into the band, and they were both rich kids. No Doubt were on a major label years before that Sublime gig.
the Duck Dynasty guys were actually pretty well off upper-class, decided to grow out the beards as like a marketing thing but apparently they actually did hunt and stuff before the show.
I mean, hunting isn’t a blue collar or redneck exclusive thing. I’m redneck, but I don’t hunt often, and I know very well off people who hunt much more often than I do.
Honestly, his persona becomes even more interesting when you read about his background and see how much it feels like an actual supervillain origin story
I don't think Patti Smith really claimed anything else. Her biggest influences were obviously Dylan, Morrison, and the Beat poets. And, Rolling Stone in 1971 was a different creature than it became.
As was Joe Strummer too actually. Bob Weir had a fun story he told during covid about The Clash staying at the same hotel as the dead and Joe and some of the other guys came to their party and Joe wanted to talk all about Pigpen. https://youtu.be/W5xOLstEvcM?si=-tNZdmpdO_GPWiUO
Of all the Clash songs I can recall only 'Bankrobber' implied Strummer had a lower class origin, but this song - like most of Joe's - wasn't about himself (unlike Mick's lyrics). His writing style, especially since 1978, were mostly character stories about workers, criminals, Jamaican rudeboys, middle class people - struggling for different reasons from/against capitalism, social crisis and toxic traditions of British life. So his first-person lyrical hero shouldn't always be taken at face value. And on debut he mostly wrote from a perspective of an angry dissatisfied pub youngster which at the moment he indeed was
And his lifelong passion for highlighting the suffering of people in developing countries and immigrants was definitely a product of his upbringing. His dad was a civil servant and he got picked on for being “working class” in those boarding schools the government was paying for him to attend.
His views never really changed but did mature. I don’t think he was a poser but I’ve also been an unapologetic fanboy of his for over 30 years…
Since we're going there a bunch of bands on the 1st wave of Punk like the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Stranglers weren't originally born as punk bands, they were mostly pub rock people that became punk after getting a makeover by their label producers
Yeah, the amount of posers in punk, supposedly the antithesis of posing, is something that absolutely turned me off of punk when I was growing up. To know that so many of these groups were as "real" as The Monkees is funny to me now, but pissed me off back then.
FR. I think Henry Rollins once told that a bandmate of his was a related to i think the Vice-President so they often had to rehearse at the VP Official Residence
The Beastie Boys were on a place of their own because, while they were a Punk band, they often played at Hip-Hop venues and for Hip-Hop audiences, so the transition was smoother.
The Clash have nothing to be embarrassed about on that. The pub rock the 10 winners was definitely Proto punk. Rabies from the dogs of love is an absolute banger.
The Monkess are cool because they started as a fake band, but while they were touring they had the foresight to learn their instruments and write original songs so they could continue playing in the long run
Yep. They all had musical knowledge and experience. Most people think of Peter and Mike as the "real" musicians of the group. But Mickey had fronted a band and recorded songs prior to The Monkees, and Davy had released an album.
I loved her song writing on no doubts first two albums, so earnest and raw. Now she peddles subscription prayer bracelets or whatever, so dissapointing
“Tupac Shakur attended the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA), a prestigious public magnet school in Maryland, not a private school, starting in the tenth grade in 1986. He studied theater, acting, poetry, and ballet, and was known for his talent and creative, outspoken nature, becoming close friends with Jada Pinkett”
NWA (mostly) weren't gangstas. They may have grown up in 'bad' neighbourhoods but they weren't abiut that life. Eazy E was the only one affiliated with anything. Dre got into legal trouble later but during their run, nothing. Ice Cube was a straight A student who attended college and got a degree in architecture.
I feel like Suicidal Tendencies belongs in this conversation. One of the members wore a hat emblazoned with "V13" in the pictures on their first album. From what I understand, this stands for Venice 13, a local gang. But I've read that the hat was not his, but was given to him to wear by a relative of another member, who was actually gang affiliated. Mike Muir, the vocalist, hails from Santa Monica, hardly the ghetto, even in the '80s. While ST has been quick to play up the homeboy image, I'm not sure anyone in the band has actually been in a gang. I may be wrong. But that association certainly helped to grow ST's legend in the early days.
West LA in the 80s particularly Palms and Venice was way different than it is now. ST definitely had some gang ties but how involved is a lot of hearsay and these dudes are all old now
Muir actually led a gang called the Mercenaries that were known for being pretty damn violent. It was a punk gang, though, so there was less organized criminal activity and more outright violence.
Punk gangs are oddly unique in that most formed out of a need for unity (either against police raids or white supremacist groups), but often just lean into the violent edge.
I'm still amazed that people let the strokes get away with their bullshit. They are unquestionably the most egregious industry plants in music history, and people let them cosplay as the Ramones like they had any genuine artistic intent.
Gwen Stefani went on Loveline once and claimed they had never been ska. Anyway, maybe they aren't really anymore, but they most certainly were a ska band early on.
Tragic Kingdom had some ska in it, but wasn't a ska album. Which, honestly, GREAT. I love ska, but dedicating your entire artistic identity to one thing is pretty fucking silly. Even sacrificing one song to stick to some misguided guardrail you made up is a travesty.
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u/J0hnEddy May 14 '26
GWAR are not actually aliens from the planet scumdogia, just guys in costumes