Recorded Music
Rock is not dead. You just love the music you listened to from 16-25.
Everyone shut up.
Ok, just you, Tony Alva.
If you love music, you look for bands. For every band that you hate, there are 900 bands doing the exact same thing that you also hate. And for those 900 bands there are 90,000 bands doing shit you don't care about.
But for every 90,000 bands there's a band that is worth it. It doesn't have to be a new band. That is the glory of recording. You can enjoy a recording from 1974 as much as you can enjoy a recording from 2006. (And, as a betting man, I would give you odds if you gave me '74.)
Nothing will ever match up to the music you heard when you were of the right age. We had a snow last night in New York, and a friend emailed me about the best songs to listen to while shoveling snow. All the songs mentioned came out when we were 25, earnest, and impressionable.
Let the kids have their fun. Otherwise, I'll have no one to make fun of.
Everyone shut up.
Ok, just you, Tony Alva.
If you love music, you look for bands. For every band that you hate, there are 900 bands doing the exact same thing that you also hate. And for those 900 bands there are 90,000 bands doing shit you don't care about.
But for every 90,000 bands there's a band that is worth it. It doesn't have to be a new band. That is the glory of recording. You can enjoy a recording from 1974 as much as you can enjoy a recording from 2006. (And, as a betting man, I would give you odds if you gave me '74.)
Nothing will ever match up to the music you heard when you were of the right age. We had a snow last night in New York, and a friend emailed me about the best songs to listen to while shoveling snow. All the songs mentioned came out when we were 25, earnest, and impressionable.
Let the kids have their fun. Otherwise, I'll have no one to make fun of.
posted by stinkrock at 10:36 PM
10 Comments:
Your absolutely right of course. I've always sort of scratched my head when it comes to hard persuers of "new music", Jackson's brother over at A VC being one example. There's been so much good shit recorded prior to 2000, that I've got plenty of catching up to do record collection wise that I'll be good to go through my lifetime, but as Chef says, "What about the chirdren?"
It takes a while for me to immerse myself into a record. I get invested in the good ones. My hope is that each one I buy will make it worth the investment, not the actual monetary value, but from the emotional stand point. I'm a horrible casual listener. I'm in there listening to bass parts and drum fills for a long time before I either horse it, or put it in heavy rotation. It’ll surly take the rest of my life to get through the classics. Hell, I just bought my first New York Dolls record.
Re: "Nothing will ever match up to the music you heard when you were of the right age" I long ago considered this posit prior to drawing my conclusion or rock’s demise, and can easily dismiss it since by ratio I'd say 1/3 of the shit I listened to during my impressionable period was contemporary (Heavy Metal), the other 2/3 was recorded in the early/late sixties, and early seventies when I was still filling diapers. My listening likes were, as was most of my circle of degenerate friends, balanced by those that came before and new stuff.
I know great rock is still around (hell, all I have to do is listen to what the guys at S&M have recorded since my last visit), it just doesn’t enjoy as much prominence as it once did. I don’t think it means as much to today’s kids as it did to us. I know this sounds like what boomers said about us, but fuck them, they knew they were wrong when they finally figured out my generation’s punk rock thing. They knew it was legit. I’ve got family and friends with teenagers and I constantly search for the kids who remind me of guys like me, Jackson, and our friends at that age (dedicated fans of rock who would leave their prom dates in the car for an hour while we argued the merits of the last Judas Priest album) and I just can’t find them. They’re not there.
What happened? IMHO, two things: the elimination of scarcity and the overall devaluation of recorded music brought on by P2P theft (i.e. you had to be selective about purchasing the music you bought in our day), and the overall absence of any real tangible teenage rebellion. Maybe it’s because boomer parents became friends with their kids (as a kid I’d shudder at the mere thought of it), maybe it’s because the middle class has grown so big kids are too spoiled to get angry or emotional about anything beyond fucking computers, spinner rims, flat screen TV’s, and their Xbox. I’m cool being on the old side of gen gap, but where’s the gap and the resulting music? Snow Patrol? Arcade Fire? Not only does this shit suck, it sucks without even trying to move you. Completely forgettable as time will prove.
My hope, the bands making good rock music re-emerge and we discover that it’s just a cyclical thing like El Nino. That’s my hope. Sorry for the dissertation, but I had a little time.
Fred W. is Jackson's brother??? I worked in one of his portfolio companies a while back (Fred's, not Jackson's)
Couldn't agree more.
Amazingly, though, my current favorite to listen to is...Eddie Cochran. I started listening on Super Bowl Sunday because it was the 49th anniversary of "The Day the Music Died" and I was digging through some early rock 'n' roll.
Cochran is just pure rock 'n' roll. What's more, just about every move in the rock vocabulary of the later British artists is there. One tune is practically the blueprint for The Who. Amazing.
DC - I have an old cassette of Eddie Cochran - both sides - about 25 songs each side - aweseome stuff - ever hear "Ain't Gonna Make a Cotton Picker Outta Me'? Now that's a track!
Holy shit - it's on YouTube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RulMDekiaeU
I picked up some Del Shannon recently and have been rockin' out on it pretty hard. THAT is a great R&R voice. I was sorta wondering wht Tom Petty was such a fan. Now I know.
I was lucky to have happened onto Eddie C. ealy in my musical journey. Great stuff.
See that's the thing: you didn't like your generation's punk rock thing (as you were pissing off your prom dates by playing Judas Priest instead of the Buzzcocks).
And frankly, I think the music that you list during your impressionable years 'is' what you're yearning to hear. Very recently you posted that Tom Petty poo-poohed songs written for a new Roger McGuinn album. If Roger McGuinn is such a great musician, let him write his own songs.
The musical landscape has changed, without question. But it's not because of the bands, it's because of the labels. Labels used to give bands three albums to get profitable, whereas now they're toy manufacturers looking to keep a budget in check so their parent company's share price rises so they don't lose their jobs.*
*Haha, they never lose their jobs. They just lay off hundreds of employees.
By the way, you old guys...get a room.
You might've misinterp'ed my punk reference, we (my generation) dug the punk thing hard core, the boomers struggled with it for awhile before coming to terms with it as a contribution from the younger set.
Roger McG has written some pretty killer tunes of his own. I'm not sure the circumstances of the record he was making when Petty laid the label dicks to waste, but I'd be willing to bet they were going use a DX7 on it and Tom couldn't contain himself.
I agree the labels have dug their own grave.
I was about 30 when I stopped digging new bands. It's me, not them.
Tony is a bit of a revisionist. His brother was more open to the punk thing than he was. I used to hide my Ramones/Devo/B-52's records when he came by for fear of ridicule.
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