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

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Age 12 for me too, though obviously that is before most of you were born - 1972 was when it started meaning a lot to me. Parallel to the above, the glam that I was listening to then (my first single was by T.Rex, my first album was by Slade) still means a great deal to me. I listen to a lot before then, but one difference is that there is less distinction between chart and non-chart tunes, because I am often less aware of their chart status. I mean, clearly I know the Beatles did quite well, but there are records where I have no strong idea whether they were huge hits or not hits at all. This affects how pop they seem, if they aren't mainline pop sonically.

I listen to plenty of jazz-pop stuff from way back. Loads of '50s stuff, and quite a bit before then. I really like old Sinatra, Nat King Cole and so on from before I was born.