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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

one of the signal revelations of my career was arriving on the editorial team of wire just after richard put michael jackson on the cover and wading through the SACKS of letters of complaint: bcz -- tho written largely by old-skool jazzfans in their 40s and 50s -- they were expressed so IDENTICALLY to the letters of complaint run by MM when they put bobby brown on the cover

jazz fandom had already to negotiate several layers of (pre-rock) passion about when eden was lost to us: in particular there is (was) a famous jazz discographer and scholar called BR!AN RvST who angrily argued that ALL JAZZ WAS WORTHLESS after the arrival of the saxophone (=1921 i think)

i must work harder at converting my HITS OF 1890s to stuff everyone can listen to online

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

googling implies BR is still with us!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I dunno, it doesn't seem too surprising to me that music fans will reach for similar language to express outrage/disappointment/NOT-US-ness when confronted with that kind of editorial 'transgression'.

From my memories as a reader of the NME letters pages when it used to occasionally put pop stars on the cover, the responses broke down into:

- Feelings of betrayal (I rely on the NME to support indie and look how you repay my faith)
- Feelings of fear (This is a commercial sell-out, you are trying to attract the wrong sort of readers, it's a populist move)
- Feelings of exclusion (This is actually an elitist move - you are being too ironic/postmodern/hipper-than-though/clever but I have seen through it!)

And then the basic "But X is shit" irritation.

I guess an interesting test case wd be - what happens when mags in the mainstream (i.e. not relying for reader loyalty on an implicitly oppositional stance like Wire or MM) break their own standard bounds? If Smash Hits had put Elvis on the cover in 1988, would anyone have complained, and what language would they have used if so?

All this is a big but fascinating tangent to what I was asking about!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think it was the first window i really had onto the emotional insecurity and general "indieness" of superior-taste fandom where the fans were no longer actual real teenagers -- in fact a lot older and allegedly wiser and more self-aware than me at the time (i was in my late 20s, and still inclined to give avantists the benefit of the doubt as regards being more intellectually curious)