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I was watching some old (season three) episodes of The Simpsons earlier, and I was wondering, is there a clear break between "Bartmania" and Homer becoming the main character, or was it more of a gradual thing?
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Dec 2, 2015 00:22
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Wheat Loaf posted:I was watching some old (season three) episodes of The Simpsons earlier, and I was wondering, is there a clear break between "Bartmania" and Homer becoming the main character, or was it more of a gradual thing? It seemed like it happened kind of quick, mostly due to lazy writing/loosing their best writers to other projects. At some point in the mid-late 2000's, they began bringing in tons and tons of special guests and wrote basically the same episode over and over. Intro with no relation to the rest of the story to pad time, Homer does something dumb and Marge gets mad, special guest and Lisa/Bart do something usually mildly related to what Homer is doing, Homer fixes the situation and Marge forgives him. There was some variety in there, but that was the bulk of episodes for a very long time. I haven't seen the Simpsons lately, so I don't know if they changed up the formula or not yet. Homer is probably the easiest character to write for.
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Dec 2, 2015 01:35
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Eh it depends on the Showrunners. The 90s the showrunners saw it as a huge sandbox of writing and they could do any stories with so you have mysteries, adventures, romance, and everything. I always say the Bill Oakley/Josh Weinstein era was my far my favorite. They balanced the crazier stuff with the family stuff that rarely felt forced. And even have the self awareness to go back and say "yea, that was a mistake".
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Dec 2, 2015 01:51
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artsy fartsy posted:For the convenience, I'd imagine. A few years back I downloaded everything I wanted to listen to, now I just subscribe to Google Music which is better than storing actual songs somewhere, and way better than loving with a CD with maybe 2 songs on it that I actually like. Technology caught up with laziness, and also gave me a nice way to discover new music. The other snag was that albums were often just flat out getting worse while getting more expensive. Which made a lot of people very unhappy; why pay $25 to get a copy of an album when you want one song on it? I remember a time when most albums were actually good start to finish. A few songs I didn't like all that much. Then MTV got huge and it was just this massive poo poo storm of "hey we have this album coming out in months and months let's spam this good song from it all over the world!!!" as hype got huge. Then it would come out and be stupidly expensive compared to other albums and...then have one or two good songs on it. The one song everybody wanted and a gently caress load of filler. Yes I'm aware that this is one of the major motivations for downloading. I remember numerous albums that ended up leaving most people that bought them feeling cheated they were so terrible. Granted I was one of those people that gave up on most of mainstream music around that point. Say what you will about industrial music but most of the albums I've heard have been wonderful. None of this "two good songs + 40 minutes of filler" garbage. Occasionally a bad song slips through but, well, like the Primus album says "Hey, they can't all be zingers!" For major labels it's actually very accurate that they take most of the money. It's one of the problems that music had before the internet. Independent bands didn't have very good avenues to release music and recording, printing, and distributing stuff had a huge overhead. This is why getting a record deal was such a huge deal. Granted it also was how people found out that the game was rigged as stuff like payola happened (and is happening again, oddly enough). Releasing an album was, at one point, very expensive so you would have a hard time doing it properly without major help and that help wanted a return on that investment. Of course that major help also wanted to squeeze as much money as possible from said investment and deserves all the hate they get. Shows and merch made bands a decent amount of money but that also had to do with some business savvy. You had to know how much of it you could actually sell and what fans of your stuff actually wanted. Punk rock fans want buttons. Metal fans want black t-shirts. Certain genre's fans want vinyl records. Of course the more you have made the cheaper it gets per unit but you also need to consider how many you'll actually buy. No sense printing 1,000,000 t-shirts to sell 7. As for how big? Well, you'd be surprised how little fame you actually need to make a living off of music. But again that varies, there are no guarantees you can keep it, and the audience also matters. But yeah convenience also mattered. You could download 5,000 songs off of Napster at 3 a.m. in your underwear. When the record store was closed. And might not even have what you wanted. Or exist anymore. Record stores were already vanishing by 2000. It was ultimately a perfect convergence of a lot of factors that sucked lots and lots of money out of music. The internet amplified all of the other issues. Mu Zeta posted:Bands can rake it in if they tour. $25 a pop for a lovely t-shirt made in Malaysia. Touring is actually pretty expensive. Bands tend to have a lot of gear and then you have to worry about comfort and how much more food costs if you can't easily store it yourself. Then there is gas, fixing the stuff that inevitably breaks, replacing cables, fancy stage effects, advertising...that poo poo adds up. It also takes a lot of time to organize it and whoever is organizing it probably isn't working for free.
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Dec 2, 2015 02:42
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Who was the insufferable poo poo band who whined about how broke they were and went begging for money and then it turned out it was because they were paying 6 figures for unnecessary touring crap? I want to say Pomplamoose but it could have been Amanda Palmer too.
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Dec 2, 2015 06:50
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ElwoodCuse posted:Who was the insufferable poo poo band who whined about how broke they were and went begging for money and then it turned out it was because they were paying 6 figures for unnecessary touring crap? I want to say Pomplamoose but it could have been Amanda Palmer too. Yeah it was them. It's important to note one of their members is also the CEO of Patreon.
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Dec 2, 2015 08:46
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I like Sublime 
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Dec 2, 2015 10:02
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The Repo Man posted:It seemed like it happened kind of quick, mostly due to lazy writing/loosing their best writers to other projects. At some point in the mid-late 2000's, they began bringing in tons and tons of special guests and wrote basically the same episode over and over. Intro with no relation to the rest of the story to pad time, Homer does something dumb and Marge gets mad, special guest and Lisa/Bart do something usually mildly related to what Homer is doing, Homer fixes the situation and Marge forgives him. There was some variety in there, but that was the bulk of episodes for a very long time. I haven't seen the Simpsons lately, so I don't know if they changed up the formula or not yet. Homer is probably the easiest character to write for. Mid-late 2000s? That poo poo was happening as early as 1998. whiteyfats posted:I like Sublime They were a solid band to have for certain occasions whose die-hard fans are absolutely insufferable.
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Dec 2, 2015 10:43
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artsy fartsy posted:When I was younger the way we justified downloading was "the label takes most of the money anyway." No real idea how accurate that was, though. As well as that, I often heard a couple of other excuses. One was "It's not stealing, it's making a copy" which I guess is technically true although it opens another can of legality worms. The other one was "It doesn't matter because I wouldn't have bought that album anyway" which I'm not sure would be true if downloading didn't exist in the first place. I dunno, putting aside all the legitimate bullshit of major labels and the mainstream music industry, it rubs me the wrong way that so many people seem to be perfectly happy sticking it to the man by essentially depriving musicians of their livelihood but have zero interest in trying to actually change anything about it. Then again there seems to be a big overlap with the more shameless pirates and the kind of college libertarian who likes to bitch endlessly about the system but doesn't actually want to put in the effort of changing it. I'm happy that most of this is at least somewhat a moot point now since the rise of online music services.
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Dec 2, 2015 13:06
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Yeah it was them. It's important to note one of their members is also the CEO of Patreon. Holy poo poo. I looked this up, and now I hate Pomplamoose even more.
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Dec 2, 2015 14:26
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mind the walrus posted:Mid-late 2000s? That poo poo was happening as early as 1998. I think it's even before that. The Simpsons comes on in, what, 1989 or 1990? And Bart is a hit right out of the gate. He's front and centre on all the merchandise, he's the one provoking the moral panics about how he was a bad example, he's the voice on two Top 10 hit singles, one of which became the number-one song in America for a while ("Do the Bartman" and "Deep Deep Trouble"). Most of the episodes in the first three or four seasons seem to be centred on him as the main character. I guess it must have been gradual as Bart became less and less edgy or shocking; you note 1998, which I think is apposite because it's the year South Park started, and they ended up doing an entire episode about how Bart is kinda passé compared to Cartman, much as the American version of Dennis the Menace was kinda passé compared to Bart. Maybe I'm misremembering and Bart and Homer were always equal, then Homer pulled ahead because he was a more versatile in the long run.
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Dec 2, 2015 16:43
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Nah, Homer became more and more the star of the show as the writers made him dumber and dumber. Also there's the fact that the audience base got older and more relating to the struggling dumb dad and husband over the young bad boy kid.
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Dec 2, 2015 18:40
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There's also only so much you could do with "Bart gets in trouble again" before it becomes "meh, whatever." You can only crank "mischievous" so far before it becomes "literally criminal behavior" and Bart ended up a bartender for the drat mafia at one point. You can crank, however, "incredibly stupid guy who thinks like a dog" as far as you want. All told I think another part of it was that Homer was just plain more likable. He was a stupid, impulsive glutton but was endearing because he'd do absolutely anything for the benefit of his family. Bart just caused havoc and pissed everybody off all the time. In the 90's that made him cool and edgy because everybody was in competition to give the least fucks. Then people realized "let's all be selfish, abrasive jerks" doesn't end well.
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Dec 2, 2015 19:35
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My favorite part of the Simpsons was how Homer would get drunk at Moe's, then come home to beat and strangle his son.
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Dec 2, 2015 19:44
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Roosevelt posted:My favorite part of the Simpsons was how Homer would get drunk at Moe's, then come home to beat and strangle his son. HOMER IS DEAD
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Dec 2, 2015 23:59
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Roosevelt posted:My favorite part of the Simpsons was how Homer would get drunk at Moe's, then come home to beat and strangle his son.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:05
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artsy fartsy posted:For the convenience, I'd imagine. A few years back I downloaded everything I wanted to listen to, now I just subscribe to Google Music which is better than storing actual songs somewhere, and way better than loving with a CD with maybe 2 songs on it that I actually like. Technology caught up with laziness, and also gave me a nice way to discover new music. I don't recall trying to justify Napster to myself or anyone else, no more than we justified recording music off the radio. It was just another music source. We all loved buying music, but when a single costs £4 and an album £15, how much music can a young teenager in 1999 be expected to buy? Even before downloading, singles always felt like a con. £3.99 for one song plus two unlistenable remixes.
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Dec 3, 2015 03:20
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You Are A Elf posted:Holy poo poo. I looked this up, and now I hate Pomplamoose even more. hahaha how is Patreon a bad thing  I don't give a poo poo about pompmoose or whatever, there's finally a service that allows people to directly support creators with minimal service charge overhead and people still bitch?
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Dec 3, 2015 03:51
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ryonguy posted:hahaha how is Patreon a bad thing No it's great, but the guy who is the CEO basically wrote this pages long article about how he lost a couple thousand dollars on his bands tour. And then when you go through the article you realize it's because they just spent shitloads of money on dumb poo poo the entire time, insisted on paying everyone huge amounts of money daily for food, buying huge amounts of hotel rooms and also intentionally not counting any money the band made through Patreon or other sources during the tour. So overall he comes off as a huge entitled rear end in a top hat BEFORE you realize that he's also one of the heads of a hugely successful company and makes tons of money at his day job. https://medium.com/@jackconte/pomplamoose-2014-tour-profits-67435851ba37#.csk125178
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Dec 3, 2015 04:15
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Here's some early 1990s music: Michael Bolton with a mullet in a baseball cap singing a Bill Withers song.
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Dec 3, 2015 15:09
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mind the walrus posted:Mid-late 2000s? That poo poo was happening as early as 1998. Edit: Got it, Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular from 95. Macdeo Lurjtux has a new favorite as of 16:22 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 16:20
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I've never gone back to look, but I've heard you can look up old Usenet archive from the early days of the Internet and there's people complaining about how episodes like "The Front" are the worst ever. I'm pretty sure the original "worst episode ever" joke was made in reference to people complaining about how much of a downturn season five or so was quality-wise.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:41
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El Estrago Bonito posted:No it's great, but the guy who is the CEO basically wrote this pages long article about how he lost a couple thousand dollars on his bands tour. And then when you go through the article you realize it's because they just spent shitloads of money on dumb poo poo the entire time, insisted on paying everyone huge amounts of money daily for food, buying huge amounts of hotel rooms and also intentionally not counting any money the band made through Patreon or other sources during the tour. So overall he comes off as a huge entitled rear end in a top hat BEFORE you realize that he's also one of the heads of a hugely successful company and makes tons of money at his day job. quote:I don't give a poo poo about pompmoose or whatever But pretty sure I misunderstood the poster I quoted in the first place so white noise post ahoy.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:54
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ryonguy posted:But pretty sure I misunderstood the poster I quoted in the first place so white noise post ahoy. quote:We don’t have a label lending us “tour support.” We put those expenses right on our credit cards. $17,000 on one credit card and $7,000 on the other, to be more specific. And then we planned (or hoped) to make that back in ticket sales. $8794 PER WEEK divided by 6 evenly just to make poo poo easy = $1465 EACH PER WEEK. $43794 in wages. For 5 weeks of touring. This is why you lost money, dipshits. quote:Add it up, and that’s $135,983 in total income for our tour.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:25
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So it's like that one scene in the Blues Brothers except on the scale of an entire tour.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:30
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Kavak posted:So it's like that one scene in the Blues Brothers except on the scale of an entire tour. That was one pretty bitchin microphone though.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:39
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Nutsngum posted:That was one pretty bitchin microphone though. I meant the part where they earned $200 and drank $300 worth of beer.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:41
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Horace posted:I don't recall trying to justify Napster to myself or anyone else, no more than we justified recording music off the radio. It was just another music source. We all loved buying music, but when a single costs £4 and an album £15, how much music can a young teenager in 1999 be expected to buy? I had a couple of friends back then who were happy to argue about how it was stealing. Nobody ever convinced anybody either way, of course. But yeah, I perfectly recall the agony of saving up enough money to buy an album and getting major buyer's remorse after the first listen.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:57
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ToxicSlurpee posted:edit: No wait there is more ridiculous than that. I guess 1995 was peak crazy because, well, Primus. I appear to have found this thread several days after 90's music chat  I had an obsession with the popular alternative music that was played heavily on the radio circa 1995 until probably ~2001 for some drat reason. I suspect it was partially because that was when I transitioned from Middle School to High School, and all the wonderful things that went along with that. Of course it might also be because at the time it was gaining popularity and still a bit raw as a format (or at least seemed that way to my 14 year old brain). I'll have to work on compiling some kind of list when I get home. Also, I abhorred that wave of Ska that showed up in 1996 and I'm glad it was just a flash in the pan. Also Sublime has always sucked 
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Dec 3, 2015 20:02
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ToxicSlurpee posted:edit: No wait there is more ridiculous than that. I guess 1995 was peak crazy because, well, Primus. I like the video for Mr Krinkle though, because while it was just as terrifying as the film clip for Wynona's Big Brown Beaver, it was pretty impressive that they did it all in one shot with no edits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOdo7dhvSwg
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Dec 3, 2015 22:38
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Iron Crowned posted:
Fight me irl.
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Dec 3, 2015 23:03
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Scott Weiland's corpse is pretty 90's.
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Dec 4, 2015 16:20
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The other thing with Napster is that my memories of high school in the 90's involved a lot of trading tapes around- CDs were great if you could afford them and find someplace that carried good music, but a lot of us were listening to 3rd and 4th generation cassette tapes of various punk and metal bands and the idea that paying for music was something you automatically did wouldn't have occurred to us, not least because actually finding ways to pay money in exchange for the music we wanted required going to some lengths.
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Dec 7, 2015 19:14
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Pope Guilty posted:The other thing with Napster is that my memories of high school in the 90's involved a lot of trading tapes around- CDs were great if you could afford them and find someplace that carried good music, but a lot of us were listening to 3rd and 4th generation cassette tapes of various punk and metal bands and the idea that paying for music was something you automatically did wouldn't have occurred to us, not least because actually finding ways to pay money in exchange for the music we wanted required going to some lengths. I had a tape that on one side was a 4th or 5th generation recording of Adam Sandler's first CD (without the songs for some reason). I had to crank my volume all the way up to hear it, and for some reason there were a couple spots in the middle that had a few seconds some random rear end oldies. Side B was some kind of Mixtape that had "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap on it, those were the days
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Dec 7, 2015 19:19
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Let's play a fun 90s game listen to Two Princes by Spin Doctors and Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind back to back
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Dec 7, 2015 19:30
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Alaois posted:Let's play a fun 90s game also this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suzwkw0dYmM
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Dec 7, 2015 20:24
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Alaois posted:Let's play a fun 90s game The only way to win this 'game' is to not play.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:17
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Wilford Cutlery posted:The only way to win this 'game' is to not play. What happens if you do? 
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Dec 7, 2015 21:19
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Alaois posted:Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind It was weird how no one really noticed at the time that this song is about taking meth
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Dec 8, 2015 00:30
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Iron Crowned posted:What happens if you do? The game is rigged
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Dec 8, 2015 01:02
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