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

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

My lack of curiosity for the 50s stuff is exactly the same as it is for the 60s, 70s and 80s stuff I haven't heard! I don't think it stops being pop, indeed I suspect I'd like a lot of pre-60s pop music more than post-60s pop music (as that seems to be where the dread influence of the Beatles starts, and where the canon has started in retrospect?).

But I'm not curious because I don't have the tiiiiiime. I still prioritise hearing New Music over hearing Old Music - in an ideal world both would happen but finite time and money innit!

Also this is probably bad but just skimming over the surface, downloading say the No 1s of a particularly year, isn't going to be particularly satisfactory to me, I worry too much that I'm missing the real gems - this is a bad attitude as it basically means I can only enjoy music that I'm "on the spot" for, or which are completely separate from any scene/context.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Canonisation before the 50s => see msg 36 (http://r3ok.myforum365.com/index.php?topic=756.30).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

re. your last point - this held me back in some areas too, "oh there is no way I will ever be an EXPERT on reggae/hip-hop so I will mostly ignore it" - ultimately I just stopped minding. Doing the No.1s thing has helped actually because i) it's an arbitrary sampling of hits, ii) by writing about them I feel I'm combining committment and dilettantism.