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

[koganbot]

Tom, from age 12, 1966, when I made the jump from "folk" to "rock" (I think that's pretty much what I called all the pop on the radio) to when I graduated high school in 1972, at age 18, I knew no one - I mean no one - who listened to any popular music that came out before late 1963. Maybe some of the people did listen, a little, but I didn't know about it. That's the one thing I emphasize most when I try to explain what it was like coming of age musically in the '60s. The musical past did not exist. It's as if the people just older than us had invented music themselves. Music from the '50s and early '60s existed as obviously inferior oldies, even if we'd listened to it when younger. And popular music before rock 'n' roll: nada (unless you want to count Billie Holiday and Robert Johnson or something). Elvis didn't exist except as an oldie. He had a whole comeback in the late '60s and none of us noticed. Culturally he existed in the '50s, he existed in the '70s, he exists now, but in the '60s he didn't count (didn't count to teenagers in the northeast United States, at any rate). I don't think before or since there's been such an Us vs. Them barrier, music older than 1964 belonging to Them and music after 1964 being Ours in such a way that we simply ignored the music Before. Imagine a teen in the '70s knowing virtually nothing about Dylan or the Beatles and not even raising a sweat over his lack of knowledge. Imagine a teenager in the '80s knowing virtually nothing not only of the Beatles and Doors and Hendrix but also of disco, glam, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, punk, Fleetwood Mac, just able to put it out of his mind as of no consequence. Don't know how relevant what I just said is to your question; just thought I'd communicate it. What broke the barrier for me was listening to the New York Dolls and through them picking up on the Shangri-Las (who were after 1963 but in spirit harkened back earlier) and the fact that the harmonies in "Personality Crisis" sounded like the harmonies in Chuck Berry's "Come On." Glitter and glam and what was starting to be called punk in the early '70s are what turned me around, all musics that didn't honor the supremacy of rock or soul or the late Sixties (despite being rock). To get Chuck Berry records or the Ronettes or the Shangri-Las (all out of print) you had to go to oldies stores or glitter-punk stores or used record shops, since Chuck and the Ronettes etc. were all out of print. I got the Ronettes on an import reissue from Britain or Germany.