The only music artists who've sold more than this guy are The Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Elvis...

How did Elton John have over two hundred charting hits on the Hot 100. I only know 1 of his songs

Many of them particularly post-70s didn't chart in the US.

yeah but i mean everyone knows liek 100s of beatles songs, dozens of madonna and michael jackson songs etc. i only know a few elton john songs

You probably know at least Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Philadelphia Freedom, and the Princess Diana tribute song.

cuz he's a cheesy faggot

His voice is toast, man. Thankfully he's retiring now after one final tour.

OP here. isn't me. I specifically didn't talk about John's music's popularity, this is about his celebrity not being as big as the others.

>Philadelphia Freedom was in fact a gay rights anthem that Amerifats took to be some patriotic tune about the bicentennial
Really, guys?

>this myth again
I recall he could still sing falsetto as late as the 1998 tour, in fact he brought back Goodbye Yellow Brick Road after having not performed it live since the mid-80s. However, it's like either his vocal chords then aged very rapidly or he just stopped caring about his performances, which he's now taken to its logical conclusion with a style I can almost describe as "barking Morse code." I've read that some of his early 2000s band would often hear him attempting high notes in rehearsals that were almost as good as anything from his vocal peak, only when they pointed out how good he could still sound, he'd regress into what they suspect is a measured way of putting less strain on whatever capacity he's got left.

My guess is that he just doesn't remember how he used to sing anymore and now just wants to slur in a limited range. In many ways, although for very different reasons, he's become the British Brian Wilson.

That's more down to radio playlists over the years. Elton John always skewed more Adult Contemporary so his stuff was sent to more oldies stations whereas Madonna/Michael Jackson were newer/hipper enough that they remained on stations that cycled them alongside current Top 40 hits.

As for the Beatles, they were so massive in their prime there's basically no way those songs would be forgotten, especially given rock music's dominance in the 70s - 90s.

Don't you recall? He massively damaged his voice in the mid-80s and needed surgery to remove nodules. I don't think he ever entirely recovered from it.

> guilty pleasure
youtube.com/watch?v=InOjdeQqQFA

i guess maybe his personality isnt as attention grabbing. hes a fairly average joe who made catchy pop in style at his time. hes not showy or in the spotlight as the others. also i think his character and music in a way faded. all of those artists obviously faded as styles changed but they come to represent their eras but i feel elton joh never defined his era in the same way and was merely a part of it rather than a driving force.

I think he still sounds pretty good for his age especially given how much he's toured over the years.

youtube.com/watch?v=u_Tvdbz93Uo

Underrated late period track by him

Abusing falsetto _is_ very bad for you. My father used to be a Punch & Judy puppeteer and he had vocal cord nodules before he was even 40.

I mean, Barry Gibb is just a shell of what he used to be as a singer.

You guys are just too young that's all. It was also weird af when that Michael Jackson docu came out recently and people kept asking if he was really that famous. It's difficult to explain how big stars used to get. When everyone had the same few outlets for music and entertainment there were a LOT less celebrities and they were a LOT bigger. Your grandparents and parents knew the singers and their songs, your little siblings and nieces and nephews knew them, your teachers etc. Literally breaking national news when allegations dropped on MJ.

I'm not really denying any of that though. It's that given his record sales John's celebrity just seems like it should be higher. Like, Hendrix doesn't even make the list ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists ) yet he's the more "iconic" of the two from what I can tell.

I've heard way worst from other "veterans". Ian Anderson, Ian Gillan, Greg Lake, Kory Clarke and Paul Stanley have nothing left of their vocal cords but ash.

>Like, Hendrix doesn't even make the list
Iconic =/= record sales

Hendrix barely sold that many albums in his time and had like one Top 40 hit. It was just the fact that he captured the attention of the rock/hippie generation in a major way, especially with his live shows.

I don't know what Elton would sound like if he'd not had that surgery, but he was really his own worst enemy. The Melbourne show was particularly hard on his throat because he decided to perform against the wishes of doctors, who suspected the growths were possibly cancerous. Although the editing just about managed to hide this on the live video from Sydney on the same tour, he was spitting blood into a bucket at the side of his piano, sometimes having to do this literally between lines. On the live album from this period, it's claimed he was crying as he sang the final chorus of Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me because the experts weren't able to guarantee that his career would survive even with treatment. Since then, he's managed a few higher register tracks and been known to very occasionally slip into falsetto, but whenever he's aware of this it quickly disappears again, probably because he's afraid of doing more harm than good (clearly ignoring a certain other contributing factor). With the passing of further time, any natural aging to his voice has been exaggerated to leave what he's now stuck with. Despite this, I can't find any rational explanation for his recent lack of enunciation, which has turned him into someone bordering on caricature, as some have rightly pointed out.

Not always. Falsetto doesn't have to damage your voice, although Punch is fairly gruff-sounding. It's also interesting that Barry Gibb and Mariah Carey lost so much of their range and power considering both have mainly been studio artists who don't perform live that often.

Elton's a lot like Paul Stanley--he just abused the crap out of his voice for years and years, ignoring doctors' orders and on top of that he did a shitton of drugs. Also during the mid-80s, there was a period when he sang high notes in full voice instead of falsetto.

tl;dr Elton basically abused his voice for years and that was the biggest contributing factor to it all. He honestly sounded great up until around 2002 or so, when he began to lose a lot of steam.

I can definitely name more Elton songs off the top of my head than Madonna or MJ, but I've never been a huge fan of the latter two so I am biased in that regard. The average person could probably name more MJ than Elton though, im not sure about Madonna.

I don't think his voice is any worse than a lot of legacy artists, but like most of them, he's obliged to sing material he did in his 20s which he can't really pull off anymore.

Freddie Mercury always sang falsetto and he just kept getting better and better with time.

Yeah I get what you mean you're right. I think it's mostly just music journalism doing it's job desu. Critics get to make the canon from Christgau to Fantano. Fleetwood Mac and Billy Joel were huge too but they're not really iconic now as far as I can tell. Critics have skewed really heavily towards rock until hip hop and poptimism imo.

Elton lived the rock star lifestyle as hard as anyone and he did pay the price for it. The vocal surgery and coke abuse had an effect as did constant touring and just plain aging. Sure, people brag how great Johnny Mathis sounds in his 80s, but he's also always limited the number of live shows he does and even avoids speaking much on concert days.

Also Elton was pretty stubborn and didn't let backup singers take over the high notes until sometime in the 2000s.

>not as showy

Attached: u wot.png (319x394, 254K)

Freddie Mercury also died at 45. I can't imagine he'd still sound so good in his 70s.

Because his audience is old people

Elton's voice is suffering from the same thickness and gruffness as Paul McCartney's. Apart from the nodules issue, I think he's just sang from his throat, rather than his diaphragm too much.

>Elton John always skewed more Adult Contemporary
Not on the classic 70s stuff. 80s and beyond Elton is straight up British mompop.

Elvis's main audience is dying but he's still Elvis.

I think more people in the UK would know his songs? In America I'd say his most famous song is Rocket Man, and That's What Friends Are For...? but I think the latter is credited to Dionne Warwick feat. him + the other people in that song

Billy Joel still sounds fine and he's only two years younger than Elton.

To be fair he took a little better care of himself and didn't abuse the crap out of drugs like Elton did. I mean, he does still sound good although definitely older.

Elton had nowhere near the same impact on overall culture (in the US at least) that The Beatles/Elvis/Madonna/MJ did.

Also want to point out that Elton has spent an absurd amount of time flying over the years. I think he said he slept in his own Atlanta or LA home after _every_ show in North America for 10-20 years or something insane like that.

I wonder if the sheer amount of air mileage Bono has racked up also played a part in his voice changing.

Dylan's been on tour for over half his career at this point and there's a noticeable drop in quality there as well (even if you don't like his 60s/70s voice it's obviously leagues above his singing from the 90s onwards). You might be onto something.

Everyone's genetic make up and how age affects the vocal chords varies. Elton's just gets deeper over time naturally, and add to it the milliage of using and abusing them, plus the effects of the surgery, it's no surprise he sounds the way he does.

>Sure, people brag how great Johnny Mathis sounds in his 80s, but he's also always limited the number of live shows he does and even avoids speaking much on concert days.
Much better than miming to a pre-recorded track which rumor has it that Frankie Valli has been doing lately.

Like I said, his relevance to American audiences mostly centers around the 1971-76 period. His later adult contemp stuff is not nearly as well known here outside the Lion King soundtrack.

how is rihanna that high

I saw an incarnation of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons at the Greek Theater a number of years ago, and there was a keyboard player on the back left of the band who was hitting most of Frankie's high notes for him. They were impeccably rehearsed and as a group sounded fantastic. Frankie did most of the songs quite well and I'm pretty sure they were also played in the original key and not downtuned.

I saw Elton in concert in Adelaide in December '15 and he did sound pretty good overall and played a two hour set. He was better than I would have expected. The only thing I didn't like was that the setlist featured most of his worst songs, but there were still a bunch of classics including half of Yellow Brick Road.

>t's also interesting that Barry Gibb and Mariah Carey lost so much of their range and power considering both have mainly been studio artists who don't perform live that often.
It's not either or. Harry Nillson was 100% a studio artist and massively trashed his voice. Brian Wilson lost his voice in the early 70s when he wasn't performing live at all. Frank Sinatra retired in 1973 and when he came back two years later, his voice was never entirely the same again.

Dylan's voice changed pretty early on though. Same with Liam Gallagher from Oasis: poor technique, drinking + smoking + drug use, general abuse turned it very nasally and weak.

My dad saw them in summer '77. This was shortly after the Four Seasons had had the big comeback with December 1963 and Who Loves You. This incarnation of the group played their own instruments and he said Frankie sang pretty good, but even all the way back at that time, he let the audience do the really high falsetto parts like on Big Girls Don't Cry.

it was the 70s. basically the peak era of music in terms of sales both in albums and concert tickets. jethro tull sold 60 million albums. anything was possible.

His voice sounds different on pretty much every album. Dylanologists often like to debate which "era" of his voice was the best one.

I'm a big fan of his. He has over 30 albums and most of them are ass. That's why

youtube.com/watch?v=nMzm56XSEqw

pure music kino

That's true. But yeah it's been pretty awful for a while.

Three fourths of CSNY still sound really good.

>ITT: zoomer-posting

There are performances when Elton sings like some comedy pub singer, very deep and only singing some of the syllables as he lurches from line to line. But I've heard him do pretty well on other occasions. But in general I wonder at the change - aside from the deepness, there's a weird sort of lisp that has grown worse over recent years.

nice reddit spacing boomer

FWIW the first concert Elton did after coming back from his throat surgery was at Century Plaza Hotel in LA on June 8, 1988. He sounded a little rough there but hit a bunch of really high notes he never attempted again.

Shut up you fucking bitch

He had first started singing in a lower register in the late 70s at the suggestion of Thom Bell, but he almost totally retired falsetto singing after the 86 tour when he was literally spitting blood into a bucket onstage. If you watch the final concert from this tour, he gives Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me such effort that you can almost imagine him being terrified it would be his very final performance.

He came back, but he still did coke and you can hear his voice aging as the 90s progressed. By The Big Picture Tour, tracks like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road were being resurrected in the set, yet they sounded a lot "darker" to me. On top of this, wear from playing live more often again was starting to manifest, plus I have a feeling some of the poor diction so often complained about today crept in as a result of him adopting a drawl to better fit the material he was coming up with around the Peachtree Road era. As for modern Elton, I've never struggled as much to figure out what he's trying to express in song - rather than a prompter, I reckon he needs to be subtitled as standard for the benefit of uneducated audience members.

>He came back, but he still did coke and
He got clean from drugs in 92 at which point his voice was still pretty good. Since the turn of the millenium he's definitely lost a step or two.

You know, the guy has some 20 years worth of material that would be better suited to his current vocal capabilities than Philadelphia Freedom and GBYBR. I feel that this is the same problem Ian Anderson has.

Not all legacy artists are as dedicated to their craft as Johnny Mathis or Colin Blunstone. Most just want a quick, lazy paycheck.

It's different for every individual. Genetics, how well they take care of their voice (a voice can get blown up going full tilt for decades without regard), surgery or illness can be a major factor, and, yeah, drugs. Vocal coaches for opera singers know the importance of how to keep the voice healthy.

Look at Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, Graham Nash and David Crosby still have beautiful voices (if losing some range, and the high register, to be expected)...and if drugs were the only issue, Croz would have lost his pipes a long time ago (tho he has been clean for decades). Oh and the worst drug & irritant of all on the pipes, cigarettes. Yet Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, even with the cigs, found a way to compensate for voice changes; singing in those smoky night clubs couldn't have helped, but they maintained vocal integrity with style.

Plus Elton is expected to belt it out as always, which is not easy on the voice.

Bottom line--we don't know. But we're grateful Elton wants to give us one last tour. It's been a good run--50 years.