Which of these bands is the least deserving of the abuse heaped on it?

Most of these bands really lost it after the early 80s. Back in their prime, it was definitely the case that hipster critics in love with punk and New Wave hated them and they were adored by the legions of Camaro-driving suburban white teens.

I don't get how Boston got labeled as corporate rock. Corporate music would be Britney Spears or N*Sync or Billie Eyelash where the artist doesn't write their own songs and is 100% a puppet of the record label when Tom Scholz spent much of his time fighting the label at every step of the way. He wanted total creative control. The label "corporate rock" sounds like a smear job by Rolling Stone Magazine. I mean, fuck, the B-52s were far more corporate than Boston.

No but Boston did have a huge impact on arena rock and it's what made bands like Journey possible.

Ok so then Nirvana was Geffen's corporate MTV version of the Pixies.

Toto kinda slap. They’re only a meme cause of Africa.

I understand your point but I don't think you are working from an accurate definition of "corporate rock" or at least how it was commonly defined by rock writers.

Forget about the business connotation of the term corporate. Corporate rock isn't about bands whose strings were pulled by the record company. Corporate rock refers to big late 70s bands that had somewhat anonymous or faceless members, very clean note perfect recordings, and tended to use their breakthrough hit or LP as a formula for subsequent releases. Their albums were sort of safe or middle of the road.

Love them or hate them Nirvana doesn't fit the corporate rock bill at all.

Asia is my brother's favorite band.

Hair metal pretty much replaced corporate rock from 1983 onward and did a lot of the same things. I mean, there is a certain point about the abuse of the term by critics and it's one more case of the lazy, politically-driven Rolling Stone Mag kind of music journalism.

Though not all of these bands were as sterile as you'd think for example, Journey was comprised of ex-Santana session musicians and Steve Smith could do jazz-inspired drumming that most rock drummers weren't capable of.

A lot of the critical disdain for these bands was really more a disdain for the audience, because the Camaro/mullet crowd were not seen as being very hip to these people. It was just like oh they're just a bunch of dumb rednecks from the Midwest who don't matter. I've mentioned it before, but the 33 1/3 book about Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love has an excellent discussion of how aesthetic judgments often serve as proxies for class or social judgments.

>Arena rock is hard to define because any bigger band on a major label plays arenas, but somehow Toto and Foreigner have a stigma attached to them that Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith do not.
It's because they aimed themselves at people who were either already middle-aged, or thought like they were. A generation later, they don't have fans who "grew up with" them the way Led Zep and Aerosmith did.

Who wrote that book? I'll read it if it isn't by a total arsehole I've dismissed before.

Although most of these bands reached a point in their career where they kind of 'sold out', none of them played it safe from the start. If you dig a little deeper into their catalog (which most of the 'haters' simply refuse to do) you'll find that there's no truth in the common notion that these guys just found a formula and simply stuck to it. Apart from the admittedly generic lyrics there's a lot of great musicianship on some of these records, whether you like the music or not. It's not their fault that their hits were/are overplayed ad nauseum.

Probably history is unkind to them because they went on past the point where they should have quit and ended up playing Greatest Hits setlists at county fairs for aging rednecks.

I should also add that none of the corporate rock bands were much of a going concern in Europe, they were basically limited to one side of the Atlantic.

Tell me some good Foreigner songs worth checking out (not most popular ones)

If anything, critical darlings REM moved in the direction of corporate rock on Pageant and Document - hiring John Mellencamp's producer and then Scott Litt to give them that big 80s drum sound, moving from mumbled lyrics to clearly intelligible ones, and even, god forbid, incorporating some slap "funk" bass on "Finest Worksong."

What Buck, Mills, and Berry played didn't change that radically, although the production quality certainly went up. What really changed was Stipe's lyrics and his singing style.

>even, god forbid, incorporating some slap "funk" bass on "Finest Worksong."
I've never heard a good explanation for why indie fans think all black music styles are a sign of moral decline.

The music also got more political. R.E.M. became vocally anti-Republican, anti-Reagan, anti-Bush. A lot of it is still relevant today such as Welcome to the Occupation. So to even say that they moved into the direction of corporate rock is profoundly wrong. R.E.M. however always desired commerical success, but certainly they carefull avoided to cater to corporate interests and kept their independence.

Corporate rock actually means "bands who formed after most or all of the members already had recording careers". Eg: The Nicks/Buckingham Fleetwood Mac, the Doobie Brothers.

I vote for Boston because of the first album. It may very well be that this record is responsible for all the rest of the "Arena Rock" that followed, but that was a new ground breaking sound when it arrived in 1976. It was as big as any album from any era, and at the time offered a bold new sound flying in the face of disco and the other trends of the day. I would be the first to say that it turned out to be the only idea Tom Shholz ever came up with, and for some unexplainable reason it took him several years to create pretty much the exact same album again, but that doesn't take anything away from the first one.

Don't be ridiculous, if you're a college rock band, being vocally anti-Republican is good business sense.

I remember going to college on the East Coast in the 90s and encountering that kind of political and class-driven elitism, like you had to like certain artists to be with the hip crowd and that did not include Metallica, Guns, or Pantera. It never entirely made sense to me because there's no reason to think the typical Pavement or REM song was any smarter or more profound than a Megadeth song.

The first Asia album is great. Foreigner and REO definitely lost their rock chops in the 80s and turned into power ballad mush. The only thing I've ever heard by Toto that I could stand is the soundtrack they did to David Lynch's Dune. I think they're so bland that I'm surprised to find out that they ever filled up an arena.

No, there seriously is.

These bands were ok when I was 11. After that...

It does if you're still doing rock in 2019, but it didn't then, because rock was still pop. Now it's the equivalent of the late Bing Crosby albums released in the 70s.

Kansas are pretty good

Oh look, it's this meme again.

Well, R.E.M. carefully avoided catering to corporate interests and kept their independence until 1988, when they left I.R.S. for Warner Bros. :)

>he thinks I.R.S. was ever a real indie label
>he thinks they didn't rely on the big labels to press and distribute their albums

I consider I.R.S. to have been a real indie when they where distributed by A&M. At least they certainly had more of indie vibe during that period. When MCA took over the distribution in 1986 (?), everything changed. I recall reading an interview with Mitch Easter of Let's Active describing how the new MCA administration really pushed him to move in a more blatantly commercial direction, resulting in the AOR Every Dog Has Its Day.

I don't care for Tom Scholz's guitar tone.

Kansas's vocals/lyrics and, yes, Dust in the Wind killed them for me. I think that's why they get lumped in with these bands as opposed to the British prog bands - those super-clean, over-dramatic faux-operatic generic vocals and lyrics.

Journey had a few acceptable songs mainly Separate Ways and Who's Crying Now, but they do deserve to be laughed at for their unintentionally hilarious music videos and Steve Perry's outfits. Also Don't Stop Believin' has been beaten into the ground and nobody ever needs to hear it again.

A lot of these guys were talented musicians who sold out to lowest common denominator radio pap. That's one reason they're disliked. Boston, Toto, Journey. All those bands had some really talented musicians in them but they wrote songs apparently based on a book titled "How To Write Arena Rock".

Of course given what critics thought of prog, Journey continuing to stick to the format of their first two albums wasn't going to win friends and influence people either.

In the end, you should try to remember that the biggest crime these guys committed was that they sold more albums and had more hit singles than Wire or The Clash.

It's the truth. The only people under 40 who spontaneously listen to rock as pop music all live in sundown towns.

>In the end, you should try to remember that the biggest crime these guys committed was
Putting me the fuck to sleep when I try to listen to a whole album side of any of them. Seriously man, they fucking sucked.

Probably Toto or Journey, but I am NOT qualified enough in boomer music to say.

>I don't care for Tom Scholz's guitar tone.
peak contrarian

toto is alright but literally all of the others are absolute trash. they're so fucking generic i honestly cant tell them apart

I wasn't going to get into this thread, because I have some strong negative opinions about these bands, but what the hey... if someone is suggesting Toto is "better" than U2 or Springsteen, I may as well jump in. In the late 70s, these bands were The Enemy (TM). They were the only rock you heard on the AM dial while punk and indie never got a second of radio play. They were the 70s equivalent of Imagine Dragons and Twenty One Pilots. Anyone who thinks Foreigner had any "soul" to their music or any actual content against Springsteen, the Replacements, or Elvis Costello deserves to be laughed at.

Funny that because you could read about Wire, Elvis Costello, the Ramones, and the Clash all day every day in magazines and the music section of newspapers, but they were never ever heard on the radio. You had to buy their albums and for a lot of them, they weren't on major labels so you couldn't find them at Sears next to the Olivia Newton-John albums, only hole in the wall record stores had this kind of stuff.

Boston's my personal favorite, but probably only because of their debut album. Outside of that it all became nothing but ballads and filler.
Journey also gets a lot of unwarrented hatred, but that's more because of overplay than anything. They were probably the only group of the 8 who managed to actually make their ballads worth something.

Uh huh. When you listened to 50s rock and roll, you could hear the energy and passion those guys had. You didn't get that from a Foreigner or Journey album. It sounded like strictly calculated, formula music you could sing along to in a stadium.

Least deserving of abuse?

Boston, although they (he) really was a one-album wonder, and Styx.

Styx paid their dues. And they had a virtuoso guitarist in Tommy Shaw and a showman in Dennis DeYoung.

They even tried to expand their music and do concept albums, like Kilroy Was Here, a rather prescient piece tying totalitarianism and high tech together -- rather far-seeing, considering it was 1983 and the internet and cellphones were still a good decade away.

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You do not seem to know R.E.M.'s history very well. They always kept their independence, they even took great pains to ensure their independence, when they signed to Warner.

So goes their oh-so-carefully maintained party line. Musically, they were good, but they were never radical. They didn't push the limits of music anywhere. They took a little of The Byrds, a little of Patti Smith, and a little of Big Star and put it all together into an appealing package. Michael Stipe was pretty good at coming up with melodies at his peak.

I actually like the band and have a bunch of their records. But by virtue of their place in the 80s alternative scene, they are often made out to be some kind of do-no-wrong sacred cow (along with The Replacements, The Pixies, and others). Now I like a lot of really "out there" music including John Zorn, LaMonte Young, John Coltrane, Henry Kaiser and the like. So really I hear the punk and alternative bands as more part of the pop music continuum than anything else. Perhaps that's why I find it so curious that Journey of all bands is held up as the example of all that sucks while some of these are parroted about as examples of what's really original.

I never said that R.E.M. were radical or pushed the limits of music. I have no idea what you are trying to imply by mentioning John Zorn (for instance). This was certainly not their ambition and I find it more than a little bit strange to hold them to this rather far-fetched standard. After all, they were indeed operating in the big field of popular music, as you correctly state. They were an often excellent, sometimes brillant band that was hugely influential during the 80s. Nothing more and nothing less.

Not true btw. My local station WQDR in Raleigh did used to play some punk and New Wave back in the day. They played Elvis Costello, some Patti Smith, Talking Heads, even the Clash's "Train in Vain". The Ramones and Sex Pistols weren't played at all though and British stuff in general was rarely heard.

Foreigner if only because they seemed more grounded and didn't have the lofty conceptual pretensions of the other groups.

except that kilroy was here is shit.

Corporate rock tends to have faceless and largely interchangeable members. How could you have the Rolling Stones without Keith Richards or RHCP without Flea? On the other hand, you could swap out all the members of Toto or REO Speedwagon and nobody would notice.

Better to try something new and fail miserably than be stale

IDK, Steve Perry was a pretty distinctive vocalist. They did replace him after he left in the 90s and it was never the same again.

They had no choice. The dude's voice was _done_. This was obvious as early as 1993. Also since then they've reached into the deep album cuts more and not just played the hits. Sometimes the guys have even played jazz-fusion sets like they did on the first two albums. Not all the fans who are there strictly to hear the hits like it of course, but it's a noble effort anyway.

Once again, R.E.M. are not so different from their corporate rock peers - it sucks to see R.E.M. without Bill Berry, struggling to fill arenas they once would have sold out in minutes.

Why even mention R.E.M. in the same sentence as Journey et al? They weren't contemporaries and belonged to a completely different era of music.

My point was REM get props for trudging around in a van playing shitty clubs before they got famous yet people don't give these aging corporate rock groups credit for still continuing to play into their senior years ala . How is that not a committment to the music?

They tour because they need money or maybe don't know what else to do with themselves. Maybe they also enjoy basking in the adulation of an audience of guys with graying mullets, IDK. I don't see how playing Keep On Loving You for the 120,000th time means you're "committed" to music.