Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger
I don't see how having a few longer more involved album tracks and having slightly shorter poppier songs for radio stops a band being mainstream.
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I see the difference along these lines:
Standard mainstream rock band: write virtually all songs in a sorta homogenous formulaic format; some have superior hooks to the others; those tracks go on the radio but hypothetically you could imagine hearing almost any of the tracks on the radio in some context.
Band like Muse: write in two different distinct formats; a main format that has no place on the radio at all, and a secondary quite different format that has the hallmarks of being commercially driven.
You are right that lots of bands for the last however many years are of the second category. But then, they're not just pop/rock, they have other facets too. The quintessential pop/rock band, on the other hand, is of the first category.
I agree by the way that Muse are a mainstream band, in the same way that Tool etc are. Their popularity makes that undeniable. What I don't agree with is the idea that "pop/rock" accurately describes their music in general.