The difference is that the bands that started up because they heard the Sex Pistols (or the Velvet Underground, or The crime wasn't committed by Nirvana, though; that's the fault of the record companies. "Hey, these guys sound like Nirvana! Sign 'em up!" Feh.
posted by aaron at 2:14 PM on June 29, 2001
Well, hey, I'm as pro-titty/booty as the next guy, but god, it's ALL THERE IS these days. If it isn't hiphop or a half-naked lip-synching bimbo, it's not going to be on the air. Yes Internet P2P yadda yadda yadda, but for me one of the best things about music was that it brought disparate groups together. We all knew the songs. Now music is pushing people apart.
posted by aaron at 2:27 PM on June 29, 2001
Whatever happened to the Blow Monkeys? Truly seminal, that lot.
posted by aaron at 2:28 PM on June 29, 2001
Yeah, but I think this depends largely on just when you went to high scool. Judging from the bands you name, I'd guess you went somewhere in the early 80s, possibly very early. But for me it was 1985-88, when New Wave had evolved to a point (meshing with other genres along the way) where it had pretty much taken over the top 40 charts, largely due to MTV. Back then, they did give at least some time over to all the subgenres you mention (insert obligatory "back then they really did play videos 24 hours a day, and thus had time to program blocks of certain genres" note here), so most of us were pretty well versed in currently popular music across-the-board. Most of us may have preferred Duran Duran, but we were very much aqainted with Van Halen,
Genesis, Black Flag, etc, and we did tend to appreciate a lot of it. We just didn't make any of them our sole genre. Which means in the end music still was still mainly all-inclusive.
And earlier it was even worse than that. For people of my dad's age, it was all top 40 and nothing else, unless some of them were still sneaking listens to their parents' Perry Como records behind their backs and not telling anybody. Songs about girls and cars. Until the Beatles came along and screwed all that up, and even they took a few years to really throw a monkey wrench into the whole system.
Music has always been a way to define your self and your worldview in opposition to that of others.
I see your point, but I'm saying that you can choose to define said "self" either as "just me and three of my buddes who know of some truly excellent bands in town and we'll never need anyone else," or "me and every other girl in the country that wants to look like Jersey chicks with big hair and spiked heels, who don't need anything but metal hair bands." Or it could go so far as some 1930s-era guy thinking, "Well, I know our sort of music may not impress the savages in Africa, but by God the white man knows how to appreciate it!" In other words, said "self" can be anything from you and you alone to half the planet. Likewise with the "others." And what I'm claiming is that the "self" in popular music used to be a pretty wide swath of the youth population, at least containing all of the US (and often the UK as well), but now it's been totally split apart into hundreds of micro-selves. And I'm not sure that's a good thing. Worse, I'm not sure we'll ever get to experience a larger self again. It certainly won't happen as long as it's all hiphop and BritneyTits on the radio and TV. Those two genres could not possibly have been able to forever repel larger numbers of people if they'd been specifically designed to do so from the start.
Anecdote: My parents are only in their early 50s now; they had me when they were in their early 20s. As a little kid, I totally absorbed all the rock music they played (as well as the bad 70s top 40 stuff which I will forever have a embarrassing soft spot for, since it was programmed into me). As MTV came on in 1981 and I started edging into adolescence, my parents came right along for the ride, and bought as many albums and CDs and watched as many videos as I did. They were totally into it. But once things started fragmenting in the late 80s, and got progressively worse in the 90s, I was still able to find stuff to like that still had some of the 70s/80sish aspects while adding on newer influences, but my parents found themselves completely disgusted by it, totally ostracized. They made a rather dramatic switchover to country music. (And in the last few years they've started to dislike that as well, as physical looks and loud explosions started taking over that genre just like it is in pop. Now they're sort of toying around with various prog rock stuff, and sampling the latest musical attempts of the old dinosaurs. "New Stevie Nicks album? I'm there!") We've finally reached the point where all inclusion is gone. There is almost literally no new popular music coming out today that can be tolerated by anyone outside a certain age range. It's all focus-grouped and preprogrammed to appeal to a certain demographic, and when those people get tired of it, the next "more mature" album will be already pressed and waiting for them to ingest.
posted by aaron at 4:18 PM on June 29, 2001
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This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
(this is sarcastic, if you haven't guessed.)
It's a damn shame that Kurt Cobain is an icon. If only every pretentious, self-absorbed asshole would commit suicide the world would be a much better place.
posted by ttrendel at 5:06 AM on June 29, 2001