Grew up hearing their songs over radios/movies/friends place at West coast it was a normality here.
I wonder friend circle, the region you live in, and accessibility to music played a role.
If people put half of the energy that artists/musicians debating/fixing art/music on world problems I think we would live in a much better world altogether 😂
It's sad that their early work gets overlooked and dismissed by people who hated their dance/disco hits. Songs like "In My Own Time" and "Every Christian Lionhearted Man Will Show You" are pure 60s pop-psych masterpieces. There is no denying that they could manage some incredible harmonies and key changes in one single song.
Yeah I can imagine the feeling of dissociation this could cause. I’ve also spent the entire lunch listening to deep-cut Bee Gees songs and being all goosebump-y despite this stupid leakage in our pipes :D
"As is becoming apparent from all I said above, it was the general consensus in our family that The Bee Gees are great - an opinion I still stand by today."
Love this take!
It was the same in our household, we had every album and obscure record. "Run to me whenever you're lonely" and that's exactly what I do with the Bee Gees.
Thank you for speaking the obvious and the necessary!
Super sweet and cool piece. Thank you for sharing.
The Bee Gees are one of the great Australian bands you never hear here so I appreciated the opportunity to refamiliarize myself with some of their work.
I’m always struck by their songs’ strong production, as well as harmonic and melodic sophistication.
Generally speaking they are objectively good songs by whatever metrics you want to use.
Here’s my theory on why people hate them.
Disco has always been a highly subversive genre dominated by the black and queer community. To the point where the music itself becomes a target for social aggression that culminated in a homophobic album burning at a stadium etc. This is when “disco is dead” became a thing.
Since then the Bee Gees have been called upon anytime an advertiser or film maker wants a track to create a disco aesthetic.
Because they are safe and white.
Naturally this is going to lead to a perception of them as “cheap” sellouts to the original disco fan base that they never really represented anyway. It also leads to a general public perception of disco being a tacky fad from days gone by.
Disco is almost always treated as humorous in pop culture in order to take away from the free expression of sexuality and identity that it provided to marginalised communities.
Yeeep I actually am in the middle of a demo that’s kind of meant to be existential disco, I’m just praying it sounds anything like it, never written a disco song before haha!
Yeah, I googled their Wikipedia page to disambiguate this in my mind 🙃
Thanks for sharing your love for The Bee Gees! You talk about a period of their career when I had moved on, so now I have to go back and check out their albums from the 90’s forward.
My love for The Bee Gees started with the Greatest Hits double vinyl from 1979. Then I also listened to their Best of Bee Gees from 1969, with a lot of songwriting gems, as well, before the falsetto era.
I’ll write about my experience working with their music producers sometime! What is clear, is that Barry was the engine (and the voice after their initial era when Robin was the main singer) and the songwriting genius that pushed them forward. An incredible talent.
I like the beegees, can’t say I’ve ever listened to much of their stuff, but in a similar way to beach boys, their clear melodic mastery is what separates them from most other pop music.
The fact they liked to transpose their motifs midsong or take them into non diatonic territory regularly shows their intuitive melodic genius.
I feel like more recent music only fails by not experimenting beyond major/minor scales, and this melodic meandering was what was so great about music of this era.
I really enjoyed the trip down memory lane by the way! I spent my early teens in record shops on Saturdays with my friends buying the latest CD’s, and I also remember the later dramatic shift when everyone started downloading music and the birth of the MP3 CD. This was truly liberation.
Back to Melody, and It’s funny that all the music I listened to as a kid cos of my parents, like Dylan, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, the eagles, Neil young etc, were all masters of melody in their own, more simplistic, but still non diatonic way, and informed the melodic punk and ‘alternative’ rock music I’d grow up to gravitate towards.
Yet listening to what you’re saying here, I see a somewhat clear trajectory from this kinda melodic freedom in the beegees into your love of prog, the two styles are sort of intertwined in this sense, do you see this too at all?
I definitely would name The Bee Gees as one of my inspirations cause I try to combine proggy concepts with melodic hooks akin to those of The Bee Gees :)
The shift from CDs was real, man! It seemed awesome then but in retrospect there is some sort of a romance missing from what we came to experience. Having everything at the tips of your fingers cheapens the experience if you remember all those cherished CDs
It seems they are definitely linked concepts, the more interesting the melody, the more proggy you can get with the harmony.
The beegees weren’t just singing chord tones, they would often harmonise with the underlying harmony, for example singing a 9th over a 7th chord. When you add the harmony to that it creates a wall of sound. I see a lot of parallels between the very early prog acts like genesis. My dad would put on trespass or foxtrot and I would be away in another world- that’s how powerful a strong melody and interesting modal harmony can be.
I still have a lot of my cds in cases with the booklets. There’s nothing like that feeling of reading a booklet about the music you were listening to, reading the lyrics and seeing all the mad stuff people used to write in those things and the crazy artwork.
It was an extra layer of mythos/lore we have lost.
What I think people don’t understand is that listening to people interviewed about their music, as opposed to reading a load of stuff with lots more artwork involved creates an entirely different experience.
Keep the actual people as distant and mythological figures who rarely speak in public, and let me read and look at artwork any day!
No defense needed. Good music is good music, even disco. Thelma Houston’s DONT LEAVE ME THIS WAY. Gloria Gaynor’s I WILL SURVIVE. And yes, the Grateful Dead’s SHAKEDOWN STREET.
Goodness, Cecilia, thank you for mentioning “Nights on Broadway”! I can’t describe the chills I feel every time that song goes into the pensive interlude with “I will wait, even if it takes forever”. Aaaah!
Ok, you know I’m far from being a music connoisseur. But I know two facts about The Bee Gees. First, I learnt about them from you. Second, How Deep Is Your Love is on my top 10 all time favourite songs list. Great post, I think you should write a music column in a magazine!
Somehow I think that music journalism in mainstream editions seems a lot like public literary masturbation using objects that aren’t meant for it 🫠
But I’d be happy to write a column that would be specifically UNLIKE that!
I’m so happy I opened up The Bee Gees for you? Wow! I didn’t know! “How Deep Is Your Love” is a work of extreme beauty, it’s one of the gentlest songs I know 💙
send this to every anti poptimist immediately (not that it will convince them to like modern pop, but still!)
I think you should apply for a patent of the term “anti-poptimist” :D
And yay!
sadly I didn't make it up!
Grew up hearing their songs over radios/movies/friends place at West coast it was a normality here.
I wonder friend circle, the region you live in, and accessibility to music played a role.
If people put half of the energy that artists/musicians debating/fixing art/music on world problems I think we would live in a much better world altogether 😂
We’re all just humans! We want to be aimlessly snobbish about music! 😄
I got their first album on vinyl recently, still need to spin it.
Yes, spin that record!
Also Sesame Street Fever with the original Sesame Muppet artists and Robin Gibb is pretty fire.
This is the first time I’m hearing about this! Is that in YouTube?
I think someone’s probably got it uploaded. I got that on vinyl too! :)
I found it! It’s hilarious! :) thank you so much!
“Run to Me” is a Bee Gees song hill I will die on.
That’s a good hill to die on! 🙂
It's sad that their early work gets overlooked and dismissed by people who hated their dance/disco hits. Songs like "In My Own Time" and "Every Christian Lionhearted Man Will Show You" are pure 60s pop-psych masterpieces. There is no denying that they could manage some incredible harmonies and key changes in one single song.
Yes! Both earlier and later work!
And of course just the pure genius of mixing these harmonies and making the vocal melody navigate all of those beautiful key changes 💜
I think one other example that comes to mind immediately of a very special song is “Dogs”. I think it’s suuuch a masterpiece!
Thank you for these pleasant memories. The Bee Gees are undoubtedly a legend.
Thanks for introducing them to me all these years ago! One more thing to share!
Get this: “Stayin’ Alive” is among the songs whose beats match the rhythm for performing hands-on CPR.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2023/11/27/barry-gibb-kennedy-center-honors-bee-gees/
Yeahhh, I’ve heard that before! Does that mean all our hearts beat to the rhythm of disco?
Take that, disco haters!
By the way, I just got back from doing a groceries round by foot. With this in my brain on repeat:
“I will wait. Even if it lasts forever - I will wa-a-a-ait…”
Outside people were arguing. Mother -daughter; a bunch of kids coming from school; an elderly couple over a bottle of shampoo; people on their bikes…
Needless to say, I preferred listening to the falsetto in my head… 😆
HSP and the outside world doesn’t always match. Triggering!
Yeah I can imagine the feeling of dissociation this could cause. I’ve also spent the entire lunch listening to deep-cut Bee Gees songs and being all goosebump-y despite this stupid leakage in our pipes :D
Leakage in our pipes. I love that!
I mean it quite literally, unfortunately :D
Are you having the flu?
No, I have a heating pipe leakage at home :)
Who the Funking Disco knows?! 😆
"As is becoming apparent from all I said above, it was the general consensus in our family that The Bee Gees are great - an opinion I still stand by today."
Love this take!
It was the same in our household, we had every album and obscure record. "Run to me whenever you're lonely" and that's exactly what I do with the Bee Gees.
Thank you for speaking the obvious and the necessary!
I straight out sang the “Run to Me” line in my head :D we’re positively crazy and I love that 🙃
Yeah I notice that people who understand how great The Bee Gees are, are like: duh, why even say this, anyone with a brain can see it!
But no :D sometimes you gotta say it!
Obnoxious Comment #2
Super sweet and cool piece. Thank you for sharing.
The Bee Gees are one of the great Australian bands you never hear here so I appreciated the opportunity to refamiliarize myself with some of their work.
I’m always struck by their songs’ strong production, as well as harmonic and melodic sophistication.
Generally speaking they are objectively good songs by whatever metrics you want to use.
Here’s my theory on why people hate them.
Disco has always been a highly subversive genre dominated by the black and queer community. To the point where the music itself becomes a target for social aggression that culminated in a homophobic album burning at a stadium etc. This is when “disco is dead” became a thing.
Since then the Bee Gees have been called upon anytime an advertiser or film maker wants a track to create a disco aesthetic.
Because they are safe and white.
Naturally this is going to lead to a perception of them as “cheap” sellouts to the original disco fan base that they never really represented anyway. It also leads to a general public perception of disco being a tacky fad from days gone by.
Disco is almost always treated as humorous in pop culture in order to take away from the free expression of sexuality and identity that it provided to marginalised communities.
I again don’t see anything obnoxious about your comment! So well analyzed and makes a lot of sense.
And duh, people can disappoint even when it comes to perception of music, yaay 🫠
Also though, I’ve never really understood if The Bee Gees are from Australia? Cause I thought they were from the Isle of Man this whole time!
Haha it feels obnoxious when I normally write half a dozen lines of poetry on this thing..
Thank you, I love disco music a lot and am happy to see hints of it are returning to music generally.
People are coming up with new ways to disappoint everyday.. it’s called progress! 😂
They are haha, but they formed and had their first success here. It’s a bit of an AC/DC situation.
Australians love to claim stuff that isn’t theirs. There’s a rich history of it..
So you’re in Australia? Wow!
Yeeep I actually am in the middle of a demo that’s kind of meant to be existential disco, I’m just praying it sounds anything like it, never written a disco song before haha!
Yeah, I googled their Wikipedia page to disambiguate this in my mind 🙃
Haha yeah I’m surprised I wasn’t appearing upside down 😅
Awesome, I am really intrigued by the genre. Excited to hear how it turns out! Might even have a go at my own disco song for fun..
Nice work, never trust what I have to say 😂
You’re being too humble :)
Now that I’m squinting, you do appear to be upside down, but just a bit and in a good way!
Thanks for sharing your love for The Bee Gees! You talk about a period of their career when I had moved on, so now I have to go back and check out their albums from the 90’s forward.
My love for The Bee Gees started with the Greatest Hits double vinyl from 1979. Then I also listened to their Best of Bee Gees from 1969, with a lot of songwriting gems, as well, before the falsetto era.
I’ll write about my experience working with their music producers sometime! What is clear, is that Barry was the engine (and the voice after their initial era when Robin was the main singer) and the songwriting genius that pushed them forward. An incredible talent.
Oh yeah, definitely check out the albums from the 90s, there’s so much good stuff on there as well!
And I’m looking forward to your story on working with their producers :)
I like the beegees, can’t say I’ve ever listened to much of their stuff, but in a similar way to beach boys, their clear melodic mastery is what separates them from most other pop music.
The fact they liked to transpose their motifs midsong or take them into non diatonic territory regularly shows their intuitive melodic genius.
I feel like more recent music only fails by not experimenting beyond major/minor scales, and this melodic meandering was what was so great about music of this era.
I really enjoyed the trip down memory lane by the way! I spent my early teens in record shops on Saturdays with my friends buying the latest CD’s, and I also remember the later dramatic shift when everyone started downloading music and the birth of the MP3 CD. This was truly liberation.
Back to Melody, and It’s funny that all the music I listened to as a kid cos of my parents, like Dylan, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, the eagles, Neil young etc, were all masters of melody in their own, more simplistic, but still non diatonic way, and informed the melodic punk and ‘alternative’ rock music I’d grow up to gravitate towards.
Yet listening to what you’re saying here, I see a somewhat clear trajectory from this kinda melodic freedom in the beegees into your love of prog, the two styles are sort of intertwined in this sense, do you see this too at all?
I definitely would name The Bee Gees as one of my inspirations cause I try to combine proggy concepts with melodic hooks akin to those of The Bee Gees :)
The shift from CDs was real, man! It seemed awesome then but in retrospect there is some sort of a romance missing from what we came to experience. Having everything at the tips of your fingers cheapens the experience if you remember all those cherished CDs
It seems they are definitely linked concepts, the more interesting the melody, the more proggy you can get with the harmony.
The beegees weren’t just singing chord tones, they would often harmonise with the underlying harmony, for example singing a 9th over a 7th chord. When you add the harmony to that it creates a wall of sound. I see a lot of parallels between the very early prog acts like genesis. My dad would put on trespass or foxtrot and I would be away in another world- that’s how powerful a strong melody and interesting modal harmony can be.
I still have a lot of my cds in cases with the booklets. There’s nothing like that feeling of reading a booklet about the music you were listening to, reading the lyrics and seeing all the mad stuff people used to write in those things and the crazy artwork.
It was an extra layer of mythos/lore we have lost.
What I think people don’t understand is that listening to people interviewed about their music, as opposed to reading a load of stuff with lots more artwork involved creates an entirely different experience.
Keep the actual people as distant and mythological figures who rarely speak in public, and let me read and look at artwork any day!
Yeah I think I’ll probably agree about leaving a little bit of myth around the artist :)
Also, a 9th over a 7th chord? Sign me up :)
No defense needed. Good music is good music, even disco. Thelma Houston’s DONT LEAVE ME THIS WAY. Gloria Gaynor’s I WILL SURVIVE. And yes, the Grateful Dead’s SHAKEDOWN STREET.
Yeah, that’s because you’re smart and, as a consequence, don’t harbor mainstream prejudice about great music just letting it be great 👽
exactly!! so much good music. nights on broadway still feels like magic every time I listen
Goodness, Cecilia, thank you for mentioning “Nights on Broadway”! I can’t describe the chills I feel every time that song goes into the pensive interlude with “I will wait, even if it takes forever”. Aaaah!
You make a hit song and then nobody cares what you make afterwards...
Yeah that’s the worst fate! And The Bee Gees have like around a 1000 songs!
Such a great piece of creative non-fiction my friend. This was so much fun to read. Please keep em coming!!
Thank you so much! Haha I never knew what I was writing was creative non-fiction 🌝 I will! I’m so happy you liked it!
Ok, you know I’m far from being a music connoisseur. But I know two facts about The Bee Gees. First, I learnt about them from you. Second, How Deep Is Your Love is on my top 10 all time favourite songs list. Great post, I think you should write a music column in a magazine!
Somehow I think that music journalism in mainstream editions seems a lot like public literary masturbation using objects that aren’t meant for it 🫠
But I’d be happy to write a column that would be specifically UNLIKE that!
I’m so happy I opened up The Bee Gees for you? Wow! I didn’t know! “How Deep Is Your Love” is a work of extreme beauty, it’s one of the gentlest songs I know 💙