I wanted to explore this, it seems like it mostly happens in classic rock. I like it because it’s like the group delivering a thesis statement for the content of their music or their intended commercial trajectory.

I think it works even better when it’s done by a band later into their career, like they’re reflecting on the culmination of their work. Can people link me examples? I’d love to see if this has happened more outside of the rock genre

Off the top of my head:

Bad Company (debut album)

Black Sabbath (debut album)

Damn Yankees (debut album)

Blue Öyster Cult (11th album)

Dimmu Borgir (8th album, black metal)

Run the Jewels (debut album, rap)

Eyes of Noctom (debut album, black metal, fun fact: this is Nicholas Cage’s son)

Highwaymen (debut album, country)

  • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Self-titled albums were a big thing in the sixties, when the record industry was still starting properly. David Bowie’s first two albums are both named ‘David Bowie’. With some artists, it’s a bit difficult to track all this crap, since vinyls were basically issued whenever anyone was at the factory and not when the artist had a particularly artistic vision.

    Weezer had a gag about it, putting out seven albums named ‘Weezer’ over thirty years, the latest one upcoming in a week.

    Songs are different, of course, but the reason you see them in classic rock is probably because those dudes are old.

        • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          You know seem to know a lot of lore about the music industry. Do you have any documentaries you’d refer me to? I’d like to learn about all the weird ways industry has shaped art like that. One that caught my interest years ago was Barely Sociable on youtube made a 80 minute one about payolla.

          • pet the cat, walk the dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Unfortunately I’ve learned about it in snippets of Wikipedia articles snatched here and there. So can’t point you to any particular doc as the source of truth.

            With Youtube, what worked great for me is looking through the recommendations on any good video, and saving promising ones in a ‘watch later’ playlist — or rather a dozen of such playlists per topic. I now have a year or two worth of videos saved this way.

  • Hexanimo@kbin.earth
    0·
    3 months ago

    This doesn’t fit the prompt in a technical sense, but does so thematically:

    The band originally known as Imagica changed their name due to overlap with another artist. For one week they went by Nothing and Nowhere (shared with their first album and a track that would appear on a later album) before settling on their current name, The Birthday Massacre. The Birthday Massacre was the original third track of the Nothing and Nowhere LP, but was renamed Happy Birthday during the band’s final name change.

    • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I like it a lot though. Going to listen to more of them.

      edit: Fuck this is really good. It goes so well with retrowave and some goth music I’ve collected from lemmy.

      • Hexanimo@kbin.earth
        0·
        3 months ago

        Oop, I am bad at checking replies.

        Yeah, TBM is criminally underplayed. If they hadn’t shown up on a Pandora station for me some 15 or so years ago, I don’t know if or when I would have encountered them. Glad you’re enjoying them! They have a really unique sound that scratches an itch in my brain that no one else really does.

        I’d be happy to trade music recs as I’m big into retrowave and some goth as well.

        • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Hell yeah, it blew my mind that album that Happy Birthday was on was from 2002. At that age I would have had no idea music like this existed, I can’t imagine how I would have reacted.

          Sure! The band this reminds me the most of is Gunship. But also this group called Your Inland Empire got posted to c/gothindustrial and they fit the sound pretty well.

          I’m open to any more you’d recommend 🤘

          • Hexanimo@kbin.earth
            0·
            2 months ago

            Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if my life trajectory went slightly differently if I discovered them back in 2002 as well.

            Love Gunship, been a fan since their eponymous album (though no such track yet, haha) and I’ve been listening to Unicorn pretty regularly since its release.

            I haven’t heard of Your Inland Empire, but I like their sound from the track you linked. I’ll have to check out more of them.

            I don’t listen to The Midnight a lot, but they are what immediately come to mind for retrowave with vocals.

            Since we’ve only discussed artists with vocalists, I’m not going to go too deep into non-vocalist solo artists but I love darksynth, so I gotta give shout outs to Pertubator and Carpenter Brut who are the goats of the genre and have several tracks with featured vocalists. And a much more obscure darksynth artist without vocals I am going to recommend is Orax’s Love Kills the Demon as it emotionally vibes closer to TBM than a lot of other things for me.

            A bit more mainstream, Shiny Toy Guns has some similar energy to TBM, more so on their first and third albums, though I guess they’ve been on hiatus for 10+ years now.

            Let me know if any of this tickle your fancy. I didn’t pick out any real goth stuff, but I should have been asleep hours ago, ha

            • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              I love Perturbator and Carpenter Brut. That Desire song is new to me though, I haven’t heard anything of theirs be so chill before. Also reminds me I’ve been meaning to watch that Angel Egg film

              These are all great! My favorite was the Midnight Sun one but I’m going to be exploring them all a lot more. I liked how quintessentially 2000’s that Shiny Toy Guns video was. So thanks for showing me more stuff 😀

    • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I like this vibe. Shoutout to music videos that are just the band members goofing around doing stuff that they construct to give a short narrative.

  • SandLight@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    They Might Be Giants have a self titled track (but not album) included in their third album Flood

  • Cardigans@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Slave to the System by Slave to the System on their album Slave to the System.

    I thought this was the tackiest shit ever when I was younger, but looking it up now I guess they were a super group so the very on-the-nose-ness of it feels a little bit less bad. I have no idea how I came across the album but I listened to loads of random music.

  • scytale@piefed.zipEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    This one is the other way around: Planet X. When Derek Sherinian was kicked out of Dream Theater, he wanted to create something that would be better, so he released an album titled Planet X together with Tony Macalpine and Virgil Dontai. It was so good and built up a fanbase that they then formed a new band called Planet X and released 3 albums in the next couple of years.

    • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Ooh, that should have been obvious. Iron Maiden was always a bit of a blind spot for me but that song inspired something:

  • eupraxia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    glass beach - glass beach (from “the first glass beach album”)

    from the chorus:

    In here, you’ll be okay
    And when your heart breaks, I’ll be beside you
    So please stay here with me
    Breathe in like waves on a glass beach

    fuckin incredible song, album, and band. glass beach has sadly disbanded but their vocalist has a new project called “you are an angel” with another self titled song that I can recommend too.

    • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Oh hell yeah, I wish I had known about that Rammstein one long ago. I need to catch up with their music. The video was adequately sexually charged and disconcerting for what I would expect from them

      • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        adequately sexually charged and disconcerting for what I would expect from them

        Sadly this seems to apply in the worst possible way to Till Lindemann on a private level as well. 🤮

        • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Indeed. One of my favorite people said that there’s something more deeply wounding about sex crimes when they’re perpetrated by people from countercultural and alternative art movements. Like a huge thesis of counterculture is that there should be nothing to fear in the darker aspects of the human experience. But then a guy like Till or Manson or Victor Salva will fuck it all up. They reinforce the cultural narratives about fear of the other, social hierarchy, and the invincibility that their fame earns them.

          Those ones really fuck me up

          • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Yup.

            Another issue I have is when artists make art about the fucked up sides of human nature, and you buy into it and think they are brilliant for portraying it. And then you find out that nope, they’re just giant creeps who tell on themselves. It makes it pretty much impossible for me to enjoy their art after.

            I believe, in some degree, in separating the art from the artist. I can listen to the Beatles even though Lennon was a wife beater, though the line “I used to be cruel to my woman I’d beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loves” hits a bit harder than it should. But when the art mirrors the artist it becomes impossible. The jokes of Louis CK would have aged a lot better had they not all been about behaving like a total creep. With Rammstein I can’t help but feel that the trademark uneasiness is just Till telling on himself, and I feel like a gullible idiot for using to enjoy it without realizing it wasn’t an act. Like the joke was on me.

            • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
              0·
              3 months ago

              That’s EXACTLY what it is. Like, oh you weren’t portraying anything artistically this is just how you live.

              Same, I like to think I can and prefer to appreciate art sperate from the artist’s private lives. But that’s the kind of transgression that rewrites and recontextualizes the work. Also that Louis CK shit is wild because if you listen to him talk about it afterwards he still doesn’t really understand what went wrong with what he was doing. Now that I’m thinking about it this might have been why I never checked in on Rammstein after the last time I heard they were still making music

  • ThomasWilliams@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Big in Japan were not from Japan but they were big in Japan after they released their single “Big in Japan”.

    • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Wow search engines kind of hate them. Interesting case of normative determinism though and it looks like they all went on to be in other more famous acts.