The Past? Now let me tell you about the past...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in how people think about old pop. We spend quite a lot of our time here doing polls about it, but nonetheless I'm going to start another thread on it and see what happens.

Two thoughts specifically:

- "Older sibling syndrome": I remember a conversation I had with Al (my younger brother WINOLJ) a few years ago where he was expressing envy at my having "lived through" acid house and jungle. Obviously he was alive between 88 and 95 too, but he meant "paying attention to music". I explained that I might have been around then but I'd hardly been taking advantage of my raving opportunities. Anyway it struck me that, even though I don't have an older brother myself, I also had always had a fascination with the years just before I got into music, the stuff I'd just missed or had absorbed haphazardly via the Sunday Top 40 show. Does anyone else recognise this?

- When does pop stop?: Not many people tick anything in the 1952-1953 Number Ones polls. Fair enough - this stuff is quite obscure. But there's no sense of curiosity either, or not of curiosity in the sense of "wow maybe there's some great old stuff here". It's too far beyond pop as we understand it to excite much enthusiasm. Are there other, more recent, pockets of 'old pop' which are like this for you - sounds and styles whose appeal is lost or baffling?

Comments

[umlauts.livejournal.com]

Interesting, this. I don't think about time before I was listening probably because of the way I consumed as a child. I was lucky enough to have a pop-obsessed sister four years older than me, who would play me Madonna and Duran Duran and Kate Bush and other such things from when I was 3-4 years old. I honestly can't remember a time when I wasn't a consumer of pop music.

At the same time, on long car drives, my parents would always have the radio on and I was exposed to 70s music this way. And a lot of 60s music from my mother's collection of tapes. And 50s music from some of my grandmother's old records (she lived with us). So I had the older sibling syndrome in lots of different ways.

I tend to think pop doesn't stop, but the band of it which you find appealing does certainly thin the further back you go. At least if you're me. Or rather, if great pop is about being 15, the further you are from 15 when it came out, maybe. I like pop today a little more than I think I would at 5 (1987), anyway.