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Post by Vegas on Feb 9, 2018 20:15:06 GMT
I was in the car listening to Rod Stewart's Maggie May (1971).. and it hit me.. That song is over 46 years old... *gasp*Now, back in 1986, if I had heard a song from 1940, I probably would have turned the channel for either not knowing the song or not liking it. I realize that back then there were a few stations dedicated to the "Golden Oldies" or the "Oldie But Goodies"... but, even those usually stuck to the songs of the 50's... and, they were pretty much delegated to the AM stations in obscurity... Do teens today look at the music from the 70's the same way that we looked at music from the 40's back in the 80's?  - "Who the hell is Rod Stewart?" |
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Post by MCDemuth on Feb 9, 2018 20:26:50 GMT
Well, it seems they think movies and other tech that was new or in use by us at the time, as being old... "I won't watch that if it came before 1995!" UGH!... So, it would not surprise me if they consider music from the same time period as being "old" too.
I really don't have a problem with it being considered old... The problem I have, is the fact that they won't even make an attempt to watch or listen to media that predates their birth. There is a lot of good media that they are missing out on...
Even as a child of the 1980s, I have found that I have enjoyed media that predates my birth.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Feb 10, 2018 9:31:22 GMT
Most kids will always look at old media as dated, uncool, boring, and not worth their time; it doesn't matter the decade. I'm only different in that I developed a passion for the arts and will watch/read/listen to anything from any time. Hell, I watch silent films, read Middle English literature, and listen to lots of classical, jazz, and old pop music (though my main interests in pop start with the 60s).
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Post by The Herald Erjen on Feb 10, 2018 10:07:21 GMT
I know what you mean, Vegas. It's a heartache. Nothing but a heartache. I'd like to teach the world to sing, but everybody was Fung Fu fighting. I just want to get some sunshine on my shoulders. It makes me happy. Sometimes I think I am suffering from cat scratch fever, especially on rainy days and Mondays, which always get me down. And sometimes we feel as if we're on the top of the world, looking down on creation, while we wander around like Gypsies, tramps, and thieves. Yet.....we had joy. We had fun. We had seasons in the sun.  |
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Post by drystyx on Feb 10, 2018 16:31:45 GMT
You and others are picking the weakest songs of the seventies. That's one problem.
I used to wonder if people today would look on seventies songs as we used to look on forties songs, and there's a very striking difference.
The Beatles might be the key. Even more than the sixties hippie movement. Take the forties songs, and about 80% of them are about a girl and boy, maybe loving, maybe fighting, or maybe a triangle, but it's pretty much all oriented to sexual awareness.
Now, the Beatles had their share of such songs, but mostly they had "think pieces", and even some of the romance songs of the Beatles and most bands of the time were more along the lines of Universal love, instead of just one boy and one girl. "All You Need is Love" is Universal.
John later had classics like NUMBER NINE DREAM, arguably the greatest song ever written, and INSTANT KARMA, undeniably the most definitive rock song ever written. INSTANT KARMA will never be out-rocked. It has the perfect rock beat, along with all that made rock-Universal love, world peace, rebellion against unjust authority, and it's even done by one of the four true sultans of rock. He also gave us MIND GAMES, STEEL AND GLASS, HAPPY XMAS WAR IS OVER, GIVE PEACE A CHANCE, and others that deviated from the usual romance angle.
ELO, Rush, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, just about all the giants from the late sixties to the eighties follow the same design of "message" music for the most part.
There was a huge trend to "message" music that still takes place today, although "message" music has taken a back door the past decade or so to forties style romance. Maybe this generation does look at the seventies as passé, but in effect, they regress to the forties themselves. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Feb 10, 2018 16:40:13 GMT
ELO, Rush, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, just about all the giants from the late sixties to the eighties follow the same design of "message" music for the most part. Rush was only message music during the period when Neal Peart was obsessed with Ayn Rand, but that died out as they got into the 80s. There's no "message" behind Red Barchetta, eg. I don't associate Pink Floyd with "message music" either, except maybe a "seize the day" song like Time. |
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Post by Vegas on Feb 10, 2018 17:12:09 GMT
I'm not sure what the qualifiers are for "message music".. but.. Pink Floyd (mainly Roger Waters) wrote music as entire "concept albums"... There's nothing but a message to be seen as each song either describes the next part of the story or part of the overall concept. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2018 19:56:43 GMT
I was in the car listening to Rod Stewart's Maggie May (1971).. and it hit me.. That song is over 46 years old... *gasp*Now, back in 1986, if I had heard a song from 1940, I probably would have turned the channel for either not knowing the song or not liking it. I realize that back then there were a few stations dedicated to the "Golden Oldies" or the "Oldie But Goodies"... but, even those usually stuck to the songs of the 50's... and, they were pretty much delegated to the AM stations in obscurity... Do teens today look at the music from the 70's the same way that we looked at music from the 40's back in the 80's? - "Who the hell is Rod Stewart?" In the 90's I liked music from the 60's. You don't hear much from the 60's anymore. |
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Post by Terrapin Station on Feb 10, 2018 20:16:07 GMT
I comment on this frequently with a bit of frustration. It's not at all that I dislike new music. But I find it frustrating that music has more or less stopped evolving in the way that it had been so rapidly evolving for about 100 years.
Most new stuff has at least one foot in the past, in a way that's fairly retro, and most media focused on music fandom considers stuff from 30 to 60 years ago to comprise a significant percentage of the pinnacle of music. You could blame that on aging Boomers like myself, but where is the music fan media that is focused just on new music and its departure from old stuff? Even sources like Pitchfork champion tons of old stuff as a pinnacle. Rag on Nick Drake, Big Star, Leonard Cohen etc. to a Pitchfork reader and they'll have a cow. When I was a kid, the only people who would have been getting upset if you'd rag on Doris Day, Al Bowlly, or even Frank Sinatra were basically considered major dorks.
That would have been ridiculous to propose when I was a kid. People weren't about to start considering music from the 1910s through the 1940s as a significant percentage of the pinnacle of recorded music. Music from that era might as well have been from another planet to most youth during the 1970s (all of my teen years were during the 70s). Heck, to a lot of my contemporaries in the 1970s, music from the 1950s may as well have been from another planet--just think of how distant, stylistically, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were from Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, etc.--and 50s music was only 10-20 years old at that point. Imagine kids today feeling that way about music from the early to mid 2000s compared to the 20-teens. In 1978, we had no one who put out albums in the late 50s that had the respect that, say, Radiohead has today.
There hasn't been a major new genre since hip-hop really, and hip-hop was well in development by the 80s. The oldest stuff unquestionably considered hip-hop is almost 40 years old already.
No one has really tried to experiment with music-theoretical elements for a long time. That angle has tended to regress rather, with people settling for the same old cliched 4/4 rhythms, trite diatonic chord progressions that have been around forever, pentatonic melodies, etc.
For about 100 years, from the 1880s/early 1890s through the later 1980s/early 1990s, people routinely tried to push boundaries, tried to push things in new directions, with genre after genre, some radically different than anything before, rapidly developing--there were major new developments at least every 10 years, often more frequent than that. But since the 1990s, things have settled mostly into nostalgia.
Some might argue that it got to a point where there was nothing that hadn't been tried already, but I don't think that's really true--at least not where everything turned into a significant movement that spawned a ton of music. For just one example, there was never a big trend of alternate intonation/alternate tuning systems, including microtonal music. That's still a huge, largely untapped area to explore, and it would be easier than ever to explore it with current technology.
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Post by lowtacks86 on Feb 10, 2018 20:54:37 GMT
There's one big difference between kids of teens of today and teens from the 80s and that's access to music. A kid from the 80s might hear a few 1940s oldies on the limited radio playlist and lose interest whereas a Millenial/Gen Yer can sort through a bunch of 70s music and find something they might like. In the last 10 years or so we've seen both synthpop and disco revival. Also certain types of music from the 70s (pariticularly hard rock, metal, and punk) still seem to resonate with a lot of today's youth It's not unusual to see a teen wearing a Black Sabbath/Misfits/Ramones shirt.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Feb 11, 2018 3:06:40 GMT
I'm not sure what the qualifiers are for "message music".. but.. Pink Floyd (mainly Roger Waters) wrote music as entire "concept albums"... There's nothing but a message to be seen as each song either describes the next part of the story or part of the overall concept. "Message" music is music that's saying something like "war is bad" or "love each other" or something like that rather than just being a typical song about love or heartbreak or whatever. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Feb 11, 2018 3:22:03 GMT
I comment on this frequently with a bit of frustration. It's not at all that I dislike new music. But I find it frustrating that music has more or less stopped evolving in the way that it had been so rapidly evolving for about 100 years. Most new stuff has at least one foot in the past, in a way that's fairly retro, and most media focused on music fandom considers stuff from 30 to 60 years ago to comprise a significant percentage of the pinnacle of music. You could blame that on aging Boomers like myself, but where is the music fan media that is focused just on new music and its departure from old stuff? Even sources like Pitchfork champion tons of old stuff as a pinnacle. Rag on Nick Drake, Big Star, Leonard Cohen etc. to a Pitchfork reader and they'll have a cow. When I was a kid, the only people who would have been getting upset if you'd rag on Doris Day, Al Bowlly, or even Frank Sinatra were basically considered major dorks. That would have been ridiculous to propose when I was a kid. People weren't about to start considering music from the 1910s through the 1940s as a significant percentage of the pinnacle of recorded music. Music from that era might as well have been from another planet to most youth during the 1970s (all of my teen years were during the 70s). Heck, to a lot of my contemporaries in the 1970s, music from the 1950s may as well have been from another planet--just think of how distant, stylistically, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were from Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, etc.--and 50s music was only 10-20 years old at that point. Imagine kids today feeling that way about music from the early to mid 2000s compared to the 20-teens. In 1978, we had no one who put out albums in the late 50s that had the respect that, say, Radiohead has today. There hasn't been a major new genre since hip-hop really, and hip-hop was well in development by the 80s. The oldest stuff unquestionably considered hip-hop is almost 40 years old already. No one has really tried to experiment with music-theoretical elements for a long time. That angle has tended to regress rather, with people settling for the same old cliched 4/4 rhythms, trite diatonic chord progressions that have been around forever, pentatonic melodies, etc. For about 100 years, from the 1880s/early 1890s through the later 1980s/early 1990s, people routinely tried to push boundaries, tried to push things in new directions, with genre after genre, some radically different than anything before, rapidly developing--there were major new developments at least every 10 years, often more frequent than that. But since the 1990s, things have settled mostly into nostalgia. Some might argue that it got to a point where there was nothing that hadn't been tried already, but I don't think that's really true--at least not where everything turned into a significant movement that spawned a ton of music. For just one example, there was never a big trend of alternate intonation/alternate tuning systems, including microtonal music. That's still a huge, largely untapped area to explore, and it would be easier than ever to explore it with current technology. Interesting post. Not sure if I've heard enough contemporary music to say whether I agree or disagree, especially when I know how people tend to look back at the past and pick out the originals and innovators and forget all of those other bands/artists that were just copying/imitating the past as well. I think MOST art has always had "one foot in the past" to an extent, and the innovators tend to just be those who are doing just enough differently from what's been done to sound truly original. I do, however, think there's a few key events in the 20th century that could make sense of some of this. The first was recording technology, which was pretty primitive up until at least the 50s when the first stereo technology came in. With the exception of the some of jazz pioneers an a handful of great, early conductors, I don't know of a lot of music from that era that people still care about listening to. The second was The Beatles and Dylan. It's easy to forget that, beyond the lore, both of these artists really opened up a massive door into what was possible in popular music for both bands and solo artists. For decades it was possible for bands to just take aspects of what they did and create entirely new genres, and then develop those genres incrementally. I do think it's likely that, by now, those possibilities have just about been tapped out. Even when I look at a genre like metal, it had a pretty steady and remarkable progression from about the early 70s with Sabbath, Zeppelin, and Purple; well into the 90s with bands like Opeth. Now every time I listen to new metal, all I hear are bands essentially copying one of many retro styles out there. There are a few exceptions, though, but they're mostly very underground. Kayo Dot springs to mind as a band that's really pushing the boundaries, combining a lot of disparate genres--jazz, modern classical, metal, electronica--into a decidedly avant-garde mixture; but even their newer stuff has more of a retro-flavor to it (last two albums sound like The Cure meets Depeche Mode). Still, Choirs of the Eye and Hubardo were a pretty good shock to my system when they came out. But other than that, I'm drawing a blank on contemporary artists I can point to and say that they're true originals/innovators. All I can guess is that perhaps such bands/artists have simply disappeared from the mainstream, which is so much dominated by formulaic pop and rap. Of course, the vast majority of the mainstream has always been dominated by formula, but it does seem like in the past many of the biggest artists--Beatles, Zeppelin, Prince, eg.--were also among the most original. Now for every huge mainstream star I can think of, they all sound extremely retro. |
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Post by tickingmask on Feb 11, 2018 11:40:51 GMT
Do teens today look at the music from the 70's the same way that we looked at music from the 40's back in the 80's? In my experience, yes. Let's face it, some of the music from the 70s was a bit shit. Does anybody remember when this got to number 1, for example? (Edit: and as for this one, also an erstwhile number 1, ewwww...) |
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Post by Cody™ on Feb 11, 2018 13:10:33 GMT
Have any of you guys been listening to K- BILLY's super sounds of the seventies weekend?
Can you believe the songs they been playin?
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