I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of blood and gore from minds profound

April 8, 2011 3:26 AM

Geoff Barrow of Portishead calls "Top Post-Punk Artists as Determined by RYM Ratings" an "amazing musical journey." But that's far from the most interesting list Rate Your Music user Goregirl has created.

As her name implies, she specializes in lists about horror films, but also lists about women in rock. Enjoy!

Horror
Goregirl's Guide to Horror, Sci-Fi Thrillers, and Exploitation Films
Giallo Fever: For When The Doctor Calls For A Sleazier Breed Of Thriller
Holiday Horror: From New Years to Halloween to Christmas and Everything In Between
The Birds and the Bees...that want to kill you! Animal Horror Films
Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children: Evil Killer Kids in Film
Body Horror
Cannibal Films

Women in Music
Electric Lady Land: Guide to the Women of Electronica, Electroclash, and Trip-Hop Music
She's Got Stories to Tell: The Guide to the Women of Folk Music
All That Jazz: Guide to the Women of Jazz/Easy Listening/Tropical Music
Sweethearts Of The Rodeo: Guide To The Women Of Country 'N Western Music
Get Into The Garage: The Guide To The Women Of Garage Music
I Am Disco: Guide To The Women Of Disco Music
She Rides On Her Own Path: Guide To The Women Of Alt-Country Music
Funk That: Guide To The Women Of Funk Music
There's A Riot Going On: Guide To Women In The Grunge/Riot Grrl/Alternative Music Scene
Don't Misbehave In The New Wave: Women in the New Wave/Post-Punk/No Wave/First Wave of Punk Music
Lady Sings The Blues: The Guide To The Women Of The Blues Music

And finally, two of my personal favorites:
BIZARRE!!! The Dead, The Criminals and The Strange tales related to Films and Actors
BIZARRE!!! The Dead, The Criminals and The Strange tales related to Music and Musicians

posted by waitingtoderail (41 comments total)

I should say, "lists about women in music," obviously.
posted by waitingtoderail at 3:31 AM on April 8, 2011

I remember in the early 90's my brother returning from the US with the news that people thought the Cure and Depeche Mode were cool.
It was as though He had told me they were cannibals or something.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:13 AM on April 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

Heavy on the industrial. goth, and new wave; rather light on the post-punk.
posted by 3.2.3 at 4:33 AM on April 8, 2011 [5 favorites]

No Replacements on the first page? Can't take it seriously.
posted by jonmc at 5:09 AM on April 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

Replacements are listed as alternative rock, power pop, and punk rock, not post punk. Genres are voted on by the sites users.
posted by waitingtoderail at 5:28 AM on April 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

That's the only list which is based on the site's ratings. All the others are her own selections.
posted by waitingtoderail at 5:29 AM on April 8, 2011

The Residents, who formed in 1969, and released their first recording in 1972, are apparently "post-punk".

I never would have guessed.
posted by idiopath at 5:35 AM on April 8, 2011 [7 favorites]

Her 70s music list is fucking amazing.
posted by unSane at 5:49 AM on April 8, 2011 [3 favorites]

This is a fine list, and one I'd readily trot out when told that all '80s music was shit. The 80's were a deceptively layered time period, with the sublime interleaved with absolute bullshit. The turn towards the authoritarian and the utter domination of the mainstream eventually drowned out the independent subcultures, until they came roaring back in the '90s.

I hope they come roaring back again, this "hipster" shit's getting old. (I do like the bicycle culture thing they have, tho - so easy to find retro-grouch gear these days! But overall it's a little too monolithic for my taste.)
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:58 AM on April 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

These lists are awesome, especially the last two. Looking forward to exploring these more.

Can someone explain RYM to me though? What is it? I think the M was for music?

I am old. :-/
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:08 AM on April 8, 2011

Japan is all kinds of wonderful.
posted by swift at 6:11 AM on April 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Is this just a list of bands with quick, tossed-off descriptions? How is this 'an amazing musical journey'? Am I missing something?

Yeah, I got the same feeling... an excuse to try to categorize bands - "Oh this one is a little bit more C86, this one is a little bit more industrial, this one is kinda hardcore". Often, her descriptions use the word "apparently", which suggests she hasn't actually heard them.

That said, that is a list of a few hundred bands I'm going to go check out for some missed gems...
posted by Jimbob at 6:13 AM on April 8, 2011

The Residents, who formed in 1969, and released their first recording in 1972, are apparently "post-punk".

Yeah, that too. "Post-punk" is kind of a weird genre to decide has an end (1985, apparently) but no beginning.
posted by Jimbob at 6:16 AM on April 8, 2011

The horror lists are gems. Always looking for good horror lists.
posted by fleetmouse at 6:17 AM on April 8, 2011

post-punk is such a weird term be applied to such a wide range of bands. It seems to have come to mean "artful punk", or more specifically, "considered music produced by ill-prepared musicians" to distinguish it from prog rock. So the Residents start at the same time as prog rock, but are too amateurish to be considered prog rock, too oblique to be considered punk. And yeah, it seems to not be applied to anything in the 90s, though the continuum between 80s post-punk and 2000s post-punk revival is easy to trace. It's like if the last 30 years of hip-hop were called post-funk.
posted by bendybendy at 7:21 AM on April 8, 2011

Can someone explain RYM to me though? What is it? I think the M was for music?

It stands for "Rate Your Music," but the site has expanded to include movies as well. All the genres, ratings, and reviews are crowd-sourced. There are charts for top albums, singles, EPs, movies, both overall and by year.
posted by waitingtoderail at 7:21 AM on April 8, 2011

"considered music produced by ill-prepared musicians"

people trying to do more than bash out rock 'n' roll, even if they don't have the training to do much more than that.
posted by bendybendy at 7:38 AM on April 8, 2011

It's a post-punk list, not a drunken bar-rock list

I believe the Replacements are categorized as "punk" on RYM.

Though she's not using RYM's genre list as a criterion, though..., so it is subjective in one large aspect. Ultravox?

It seems more like "80s post-punk" than "post-punk." Where are all the new bands? Interpol, the Strokes? I'd be surprised those bands don't rate higher than Icicle Works (though I love Whisper to a Scream).

Oh ...

Artist's material only counts that is up to the year 1985, anything after doesn't qualify...

I was doing good up until the 200s and then I was mostly lost. I admit that the first page sent me straight back to 1985. I'm not sure it's a wonderful journey, but I am nostalgic now.

The main problem here is that the Internet is TEEMING with such good lists. Last.fm kinda does it by nature. Here is Last.fm's post-punk list (sorted by # of plays, I would assume). They only list 100, though, so you will have heard of them all.

The other problem is that some of her lists are far too comprehensive without much context. I like women. I like disco. But I'm not gonna wade through all that muck to find 1-2 good artists I haven't heard of.
posted by mrgrimm at 8:08 AM on April 8, 2011

post-punk is such a weird term be applied to such a wide range of bands.

You're off your rocker here, per the Internet. Or tell it to Wikipedia. Or, as mentioned, Last.fm. Or Pandora. Or Rhapsody. Or Shuffler.fm....
posted by mrgrimm at 8:14 AM on April 8, 2011

Replacements are too heartfelt and sloppy to be post-punk. I thought post-punk was more angular and inhuman.
'at least in dying you don't have to go through New Wave a second time'.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 9:04 AM on April 8, 2011

Oh, you're discussing genres in this music thread? Sorry, I'll just step back out. No, no, go ahead, I just have to ..... yeah ..... sorry .... no, I just have to be ... somewhere else ....... yeah .... bye.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:25 AM on April 8, 2011

My favorite is post-hardcore, which seems to cover everything from emo (both kinds) to At The Drive In to most modern punk.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 9:34 AM on April 8, 2011

"My interest in electronic music came from Depeche Mode, for sure. For me they were like the Beatles of the eighties, with electronic instruments. It was one of the bands responsible for making electronicmusic popular. In '81 and '82 they had lots of four-to-the-floor stuff, ten or eleven minute mixes of tracks, and they were the first to do it. Daniel Miller was doing techno in the early eighties too, and he, of course, signed Depeche Mode to his Mute label. You can mix those records with techno tracks. In the beginning people complained about Depeche Mode. They said, 'They don't play the music how it sounds on record.' But after a while people understood it, and Depeche Mode need to be credited with helping this music find popularity." --Ricardo Villalobos
posted by jcruelty at 10:20 AM on April 8, 2011

I have the feeling that "post-punk" is taking on the catch-all label that "indie" did at the end of the nineties, as "music which I like" (or maybe "music which I don't feel belongs to a genre that it would be uncool for me to like"). It's similar to using the term "postmodern" to mean "everything that happened after Modernism" - a very broad and consequently rather useless category.
posted by whir at 11:32 AM on April 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

My favorite genre is "music". Fuck all the haters.

or something
posted by owtytrof at 1:06 PM on April 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

Awesome post. Thanks a lot.
posted by dobie at 1:13 PM on April 8, 2011

My top five genre names:

1. New Wave of British Heavy Metal
2. Power Violence
3. Electronic Body Music
4. Hypnagogic pop
5. New Weird America
posted by soundofsuburbia at 2:04 PM on April 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

How about fictional music genres?

My favorite has to be the specific strain of Finnish metal know as dead girlfriend, but then I also love to get down with a little Orange Jumpsuit.
posted by mrgrimm at 2:32 PM on April 8, 2011

I apparently listen to either Orgcore or Gainsville folk-punk
Psychobilly is another fun one.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 2:56 PM on April 8, 2011

When someone added a slap bass to it, it became Psychofunkabilly.

Or did we just invent the name, and wonder what it would sound like? I'm not sure.
posted by benito.strauss at 3:07 PM on April 8, 2011

Yeesh. Could the descriptions be any more inane?

"Experimental, jazz, post-punk, noise you name it, they've got it. Think Chris and Carla!"

LOL. Chris and Cosey, yes. Chris and Carla, no.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:57 AM on April 9, 2011

Her 70s music list is fucking amazing.

It's just the sitewide 1970s chart, shuffled slightly.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:07 AM on April 9, 2011

And, yeah, personally, I think of 'post-punk' as the term applied to the diverse sounds of actual, mid-seventies punk once 'punk' came to mean something much more narrow and specific in the eighties.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:25 AM on April 9, 2011

When someone added a slap bass to it, it became Psychofunkabilly.

Or did we just invent the name, and wonder what it would sound like? I'm not sure.

I can't decide if this would be awesome or horrible. Or Thriller.

A guy i know who used to lead Sydney's best psychobilly band now has a project with horns. That could get into psychofunkabilly.

There's also a new band, Graveyard Train, who combine psychobilly with country. Or maybe they just bring psychobilly back to rockabilly's roots.

ohhh 'cowpunk' is another fun name.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 8:27 AM on April 9, 2011

I was really kind of hoping people would look at all the lists, I only used the postpunk one because of Barrow's comments. These lists took a lot of work on her part, I really don't get why people have to be nasty. Does it make you feel superior? Glad you can shit on someone else's work and feel better about yourselves? Christ I hate people sometimes.
posted by waitingtoderail at 6:02 PM on April 9, 2011

Sorry this didn't go the way you would have liked, waitingtoderail. (My last post didn't go the way I'd hoped, either.)

I checked the first link, started reading the groups, and just found my self thinking "Yup, they're good. Oh, yeah, they're good too. Hey, first album I ever bought (Remain In Light)". Maybe it's because I'm in my 40s, but most of the groups were what everyone I knew was listening to for the last three decades.

I think the problem is that all you can do when confronted with a huge list like this is either think "I know them" or "I don't know them". There's too much there -- you can't figure out which unknown ones to go check out.

Regardless, there is some AMAZING music there. And seeing Clock DVA mentioned in the list finally drove me to track down an old 'ZBC song of theirs that I loved ("Tick tick tock, I am the kitchen clock"). Turns out, it wasn't Clock DVA, it was this song, by this weird little Ministry side project. So I thank you for that.
posted by benito.strauss at 3:03 PM on April 10, 2011

By the way, what's your favorite band?
posted by whir at 1:07 PM on April 11, 2011

These guys. Why do you ask?
posted by benito.strauss at 6:30 PM on April 11, 2011

By the way, what's your favorite band?

That's always been an agonizing question for me. For 1984-1986, it was almost certainly The Smiths (but what about Prince, who both was and wasn't a "band"?), and 1992 was all Nirvana, and 1997-2000 was a lot of Radiohead.

But my favorite? ... when the gun is applied to my forehead, I have to confess it's Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:51 AM on April 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah, The Evolution Revolution were good. But you have to admit that they were just a dumbed-down popularization of The Nairobi Trio.
posted by benito.strauss at 6:32 PM on April 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also, for the period of 1995-early 96, the holy quartet was: Ween, dEUS, Built to Spill, Archers of Loaf, and Spoon. Late 96-97 was Sleater-Kinney.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:39 AM on April 13, 2011