I wouldn't call Queen "shit", but I would say they have a very high percentage of mediocre or bad tracks for a widely revered rock band.
If somebody wanted to get into a musical subculture that'll make it harder for them to get laid, I'd definitely suggest progressive rock.
I've found most prog band's discographies to be extremely front loaded. A band's early stuff will be boundary pushing, but still with a decent amount of pop sensibility that causes them to find an audience in the first place. Then later on the band will run out of ideas and then decide to make a "challenging" record that turns out to be pretentious noise that. This trend can be observed as early as 1969 with King Crimson. Their first one was legitimately really neat.
You're right, Combat Rock is way better. Like way, way better. I have no clue as to why shariff didn't like it.
I’d have to disagree with that: most prof bands reached a peak in their middle career after they developed enough report to afford to cut out any remaining pop from their sound. By the time the 80’s rolled around and they tried reintroducing pop, most prog bands had split up.
Exactly this. Ask anyone to name any other song of theirs other than Bohemian and Stairway. For Queen, it's We Will Rock You, for Led Zeppelin, Black Dog? Maybe? Other than that, what else do people know?
Another One Bites the Dust, Fat Bottomed Girls, Radio Gaga, You're My Best Friend, Don't Stop Me Now, We Are the Champions, Bicycle Race, also Under Pressure with Bowie. Some of their unknowns are pretty good too. I'm not even particularly a Queen fan.
While it's probably not a normie pleaser, I've always thought Achilles Last Stand was the best, most ambitious Led Zeppelin song and basically the logical conclusion of traditional pre-Van Halen rock music.
Achilles has my favorite guitar solo of all time. It's wildly intense and passionate. I love how that solo has a couple of little mistakes in it that were kept in because Jimmy Page pretty much would just improvise a bunch of takes and then pick the best one. Gives it a real human quality. Page used to say that Achilles was his favorite thing he ever wrote.
It also makes it an absolute motherfucker to play. There are so many little idiosyncratic things and patternless flurries of notes that you just have to kinda bullshit your way through it.
Yeah to try to play it note for note is a mfer indeed. I've never been able to play that one, working out a good solo guitar arrangement of all the overdubbed riffs is a bitch, too. It's wild that Page would attempt to play that shit in front of thousands while being smashed out of his mind on various cocktails of drugs(even though he usually didnt do a great job of it). I can do a half decent rendition of the black dog solo, but that one is just blues scales fuckery, albeit top tier blues scale fuckery.
Queen were a great singles band, like Madness or New Order. There is a few songs I like by them, but am I a fan? Nah. I skip most of the tracks on A Night at The Opera.
