Great Songs That Couldn't Be Made Today

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, July 18, 2026 14:03
VIEWED: 1575
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BRENDA

Saturday, May 23, 2026 11:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Quote:
Oh, I think we all know has the music industry has changed over last decades. But it's not only music producers that can dumb down a singer or a musician. Managers play a huge part in things too.

At the end of the day, they do it themselves. That's just the way their bread gets buttered. Keep your integrity and struggle for the rest of your life, or sell out and have some really great times and maybe a really easy life if you're not absolutely terrible with money. I think that's a pretty simple equation for most people who are lucky enough to be presented with it.

That's what I George Michael's was singing about in Freedom...

Official Music Video:

Lyric Video:

Interestingly enough, I think that is an example of a song that I think could easily get made today, yet I'm surprised it got through the various censors and corporate filters it would have needed to in order to get out to the public at all back when it was made. And this has nothing at all to do with the fact he was gay. Other than certain lyrics like "didn't we, boy" that pop up from time to time, there doesn't appear to be any correlation between the exclamation of "FREEDOM" and anything to do with gay culture, whatsoever. Either it was about his personal experiences with other boys when he was younger, or perhaps he is quoting a gay and rapey executive with power and how he was talked to by some big shot back in the days when you couldn't even talk about that stuff. Or maybe it was just a happy lyric talking about friends and that was just how he talked to all of his male friends. The addition of those lyrics is incidental.

90% of the dummies out there never learn a single lyric of any song outside of the chorus. Most of those that do only ever bother for songs they really like. Easy to hide a song like this and the implications behind it by putting on full-blast "HEY AMERICA! GEORGE MICHAEL IS GAY!" and getting everyone to mistake this early attempt at whistleblowing the industry as a pride anthem or some nonsense instead.

Today it doesn't matter because everybody knows about all of it but barely finds the time to care at all. We all get outraged about something for 10 seconds and then it's off to the next thing to be angry about. Maybe George proved that I'm wrong and it didn't matter 30 years ago before the internet was even a thing.

Because I think this song was actually a cry for help that fell completely on deaf ears by his fans, the public in general and everyone close to him in his real life.

An admission that despite all the fame and the success that he was a joke. A pawn. A tool for somebody else who has spent his entire career "taking the knife as well", whenever choosing not to question anything buttering his bread made him do.

I'm really surprised that some corporate suit didn't find a way to bury the idea of this song with George in that casket.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Sure some singers/musicians do sabotage themselves. Not saying they don't. Drugs, booze and easy access to it has brought down many a artist.

I love George Michaels' "Freedom". I've got it on tape somewhere. It speaks to me in a lot of ways. Yeah, I think it could me made today as well.

That's like the Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan show all those years ago having to change a word in one of their songs. Song was "Let's spend the night together" to "Let's Spend some time together." I always find that funny but that's the world back then. People flipped out at Elvis for getting up on stage and swinging his hips ar

SECOND

Sunday, May 24, 2026 6:21 PM

The Soundtracking of America

Music made sense when the world did. Now the sense is gone, but the melody lingers on -- everywhere. We live surrounded by music, from torch songs at Starbucks to the Beatles in the elevator, and the barrage may be turning our minds to mush

By J. Bottum | March 2000 Issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bottum_(author)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-soundtracking
-of-america/378052/

. . . music stands fairly low on the traditional list of devices by which we try to understand human experience. Who ever learned anything from music except the emotional power of music? It's a thin rather than an intellectually thick art form, and a people that takes music as the highest expression has cut itself off from narrative, epic, allegory -- from the explanatory arts that could put to any use the emotions music represents.

. . . Music is not culture. It's the mist that plays above culture. A people that takes its music as fundamental art -- as we have taken music, making the all-penetrating surround of recorded noise the single most apparent fact of American society -- has mistaken the foam for the sea. "I am fond of music," Hermann Hesse observes in his novel Demian, "I think because it is so amoral." Hesse was right about music's genuine amorality: in a culture organized around good thought, music will express the moods fitting that thought, whereas in a culture organized around bad thought, music will express the moods fitting that, too.

But what happens in a culture without thought, a culture with expression but nothing to express? The way we listen to music re-creates, more than anything else, Hesse's Glass Bead Game: a complex and sophisticated rite filled with delicate connections perceived by its priestly scholastics, lacking any meaning, and consuming the culture's intellectual and emotional energy. All that remains is ironic incongruity and the decadent moods that can survive irony: memory and desire -- or, rather, nostalgia and concupiscence, the feeling of memory without anything to remember and the arousal of desire without any object of desire.

It seems a cruelly small profit on our enormous investment, our vast sophistication, our wiring of the entire nation for sound. Everyone I know adores music, as I do. But our elevation of a secondary art costs us something. Music cannot build a culture, and in America today music is in the way -- keeping us from the higher arts that could aim at a unified idea and a public metaphysics, a purpose and meaning for our all-encircling noise.

Read the entire article, without being a subscriber, by clicking in the Firefox browser on this link https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-soundtracking
-of-america/378052/ followed by toggling reader view with the F9 key followed by reloading the current page with the two key combination Ctrl+R

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

BRENDA

Sunday, May 24, 2026 11:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Soundtracking of America

Music made sense when the world did. Now the sense is gone, but the melody lingers on -- everywhere. We live surrounded by music, from torch songs at Starbucks to the Beatles in the elevator, and the barrage may be turning our minds to mush

By J. Bottum | March 2000 Issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bottum_(author)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-soundtracking
-of-america/378052/

. . . music stands fairly low on the traditional list of devices by which we try to understand human experience. Who ever learned anything from music except the emotional power of music? It's a thin rather than an intellectually thick art form, and a people that takes music as the highest expression has cut itself off from narrative, epic, allegory -- from the explanatory arts that could put to any use the emotions music represents.

. . . Music is not culture. It's the mist that plays above culture. A people that takes its music as fundamental art -- as we have taken music, making the all-penetrating surround of recorded noise the single most apparent fact of American society -- has mistaken the foam for the sea. "I am fond of music," Hermann Hesse observes in his novel Demian, "I think because it is so amoral." Hesse was right about music's genuine amorality: in a culture organized around good thought, music will express the moods fitting that thought, whereas in a culture organized around bad thought, music will express the moods fitting that, too.

But what happens in a culture without thought, a culture with expression but nothing to express? The way we listen to music re-creates, more than anything else, Hesse's Glass Bead Game: a complex and sophisticated rite filled with delicate connections perceived by its priestly scholastics, lacking any meaning, and consuming the culture's intellectual and emotional energy. All that remains is ironic incongruity and the decadent moods that can survive irony: memory and desire -- or, rather, nostalgia and concupiscence, the feeling of memory without anything to remember and the arousal of desire without any object of desire.

It seems a cruelly small profit on our enormous investment, our vast sophistication, our wiring of the entire nation for sound. Everyone I know adores music, as I do. But our elevation of a secondary art costs us something. Music cannot build a culture, and in America today music is in the way -- keeping us from the higher arts that could aim at a unified idea and a public metaphysics, a purpose and meaning for our all-encircling noise.

Read the entire article, without being a subscriber, by clicking in the Firefox browser on this link https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-soundtracking
-of-america/378052/ followed by toggling reader view with the F9 key followed by reloading the current page with the two key combination Ctrl+R

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

SECOND, I like being wired for sound and have grown up with pretty well any genre of music you can think of.

So drone on about music being nothing and just an emotional roller coaster. I don't care.

Here's another thought on your tirade about music being the "opioid" of the masses. Eons ago a simple drum beat could convey messages. And depending where it was being sent from could be heard a mile or so away. Those messages could have been good hunting, fire is coming, the enemy is coming and do you realize who the enemy was it was the white man. Oh, sorry. I should have qualified that by adding in colonial times and later.

BRENDA

Sunday, May 24, 2026 11:42 PM

Though SIX, I've never been fond of Bob Dylan but yeah he never sold out. Another one that I don't think sold out was Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie travelled around the US during the Depression singing. Rode the rails as they used to say. He finally I think recorded a few albums. They should be around to this day.

BRENDA

Monday, May 25, 2026 2:45 AM

I wonder if "Revolution" could be remade today. It was and is heavily political. Gotta love the Beatles.

BRENDA

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 4:14 AM

Probably couldn't do "Every breath you take" by the Police. Too stalkerish.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 7:07 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Probably couldn't do "Every breath you take" by the Police. Too stalkerish.

Yeah... That's a great example.

My god man. That one probably should have come with a warning.

How many kids you think grew up listening to that and thought it was normal behavior? Sounds like a love song until you really pay attention to the lyrics.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 7:10 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Though SIX, I've never been fond of Bob Dylan but yeah he never sold out. Another one that I don't think sold out was Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie travelled around the US during the Depression singing. Rode the rails as they used to say. He finally I think recorded a few albums. They should be around to this day.

I think I heard from my uncle though that there was actually some controversy with Bob Dylan and that a lot of his fans said he sold out when he started playing electric guitar.

Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

BRENDA

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 10:02 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Probably couldn't do "Every breath you take" by the Police. Too stalkerish.

Yeah... That's a great example.

My god man. That one probably should have come with a warning.

How many kids you think grew up listening to that and thought it was normal behavior? Sounds like a love song until you really pay attention to the lyrics.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

I know and even for the 80s it should have come with a warning.

Don't want to think how many kids that could have screwed up.

It took me a bit to see where Blair was going. He HATED that song. His law career was spent helping women and children get out of some bad, bad situations.

BRENDA

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 10:05 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Though SIX, I've never been fond of Bob Dylan but yeah he never sold out. Another one that I don't think sold out was Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie travelled around the US during the Depression singing. Rode the rails as they used to say. He finally I think recorded a few albums. They should be around to this day.

I think I heard from my uncle though that there was actually some controversy with Bob Dylan and that a lot of his fans said he sold out when he started playing electric guitar.

Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

Ah, geez. We think it is ridiculous now but to the hippies that would have been the ultimate sell out. I mean how could he have given up his acoustic guitar for electric.

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