Still Too Soon To Know

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Three questions, which I will try and phrase right - all related though.

They're about importance. For once I'm not talking about importance to one's personal listening history, emotional development etc. I'm interested in how we as individuals perceive "music history" and "historical significance" while it's happening.

The question:

1. What moment, or trend or era in music have you felt was most important while it was happening?

2. Have there been any moments you felt at the time were important, which don't seem as important with hindsight.

3. When you first became aware of pop music as something which had a history, what seemed to you the most important things in the previous ten years?

Comments

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

1. Post-grunge mainstreaming of the alternative (insert quote marks as desired). I didn't think it was a good thing, but I did think it Changed Everything Forever.

2. Not really. My favourite era ever was britpop, but it was less a glorious thousand year reich than this is fvcking brilliant music to be young (~20) to. Seeds of it's downfall enthusiastically hailed etc - why should our younger siblings have it when it was ours?

3. All of it! Dance Music/hip hop/noo romanticism/SAW - I might not have officially approved of all of it, but the sense of everything heading outwards at once was very powerful.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

re:#3 it counts as a sense of history if you think that history is being made now, right? I knew all these things were new and exciting even if I couldn't quite figure out what they had replaced. If the question is "what's the first thing you missed out on", then punkpunkpunkpunk.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

1) Well, I moved to NYC in 2001 and started playing in bands, so certainly all the stuff that was going on there at the time (electro(clash), garage rock, dance-punk) seemed fairly important, both because of what other people were saying and because of what people around me were doing.

2) I needed something to read in the bathroom the other day and so I took the NME with me, and I was somewhat surprised to see them say of the Klaxons that they were the most exciting, world-changing thing to come along since the Strokes. I like the Strokes, but in retrospect, the important part of the turn-of-the-century NY music scene was definitely not their kind of music.

Other than that, I'm sure there are lots of things that ignorance led me to overstate. As an American teenager I though "electronica" was important, but in retrospect, again, I think the wrong aspects of it were seen as important.

3) Not quite sure how to date this question--my first album was The Beatles and I did a project on Billy Joel in elementary school, so that would indicate a certain awareness of pop's history. Then again, I didn't really start digging through older music until 1998 or so, and I didn't really become more fully aware of pop's scope until a few years after that. If you take 1998 as the date, I would say Britpop, since I had been more or less ignorant of non-American music until then (Beatles excepted, but come on). If you take the later date, I guess the 90s R&B explosion and Scandanavian teenpop.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My answers:

1. I'm tempted to say dance music and club culture, even though my notions of its importance only fully cohered when they were already being written up by eg Matthew Collins. For one thing I had quite a strong "DO NOT WANT" reaction to the first house music I heard, so I accepted it as 'significantly different'. And for another when I started reading the NME the people who cared about dance obviously seemed to be having a better and more committed time than the 'main' writers.

"Dance music" in that sense now seems a lot less important than it did then, though.

2. I predicted an eighties revival that never came for years and years and I thought it might 'matter' when it did arrive. It hasn't really though I like a load of the music.

Also in 2002/3 ish I thought the post-Garage diaspora, with loads of DIY experience and hungry from their fleeting taste of commercial massiveness, would make urban British music a massive force domestically and internationally. This didn't really happen either.

3. I first got interested in 'pop history' in about 1987 or so - so punk obviously. Hip-hop felt like something happening NOW even though it had its roots in "then". I would probably have partisan-ly said The Smiths, in fact I think I probably did, repeatedly, to anyone who would listen.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

something always stops me seeing the Smiths as 'important' even though i (eventually) loved them to bits and could see plainly how much they were distorting the space-pop continuum.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

1- acid house, even though i did not get into it when it was happening, it was obv 'important'
2- late 80s indie dance x-over/baggy/stone roses, immersed in it. nobody cared outside of the Late Show
3- in the early 80s, Punk and Gary Numan

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

qualifying 1: i LIKED what i heard in the charts, and really loved quite a few tracks once i had accepted it (I was dismissive of Voodoo Ray when I first heard it!!). but i didn't jump in. my first actual rave was ~95.

[(Anonymous)]

1. Acid house, even though I was a passing intrigued observer, mostly.

2. Probably trip hop – so dense with possibility for a few months, and then such a cul de sac.

3. I don't remember not being aware of pop's history - we had oldies singles like Yummy Yummy Yummy and Lily The Pink in the mid-70s, and I was Beatles mad at nine (in '79)...

[MCarratala]

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

1. No idea. It's not bloody nu-rave, that's for sure. Though it seems to be a much bigger thing than the I-love-retro-but-only-when-Erol-Alkan-or-Soulwax-play-it schtick that was floating around in 2003. I am loathe to say Britpop though it is probably the true answer (ie it was important but not really to me, only the Elastica side of things was!).

2. Electroclash, hahahaha. I fell for it hook line and sinkah.

3. Grunge. As a checked-shirt wearing 14-yr-old I was distraught at having paid little attention to Nirvana/Pixies at the time, instead preferring the happy bosh love of Rave and Eurodancepop. And Roxette.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The "last ten years" bit has skewed my answers somewhat. When I *really* started to get obsessive about music then punk seemed like the most interesting bit. Then it was post punk. Then it was Motown. Then 60s/70s UK rock bands I felt I should know more about (eg The Who, T-Rex). Then dub reggae. Then cheesy 80s ting. Then back to techno! Each one has had made its own little impression on me, and now none of them really seem important at all apart from the stuff I always liked in the first place (Rave and Eurodancepop. And Roxette.)

---:D

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

plz to stop this thread at exactly 49 comments by wed morn and i will print it out and read it AS MY PAPER AT EMP

Re: ---:D

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Argh! So annoyed I'm going to have to miss yours, as I will be doing my own at that time. I'd love to read it when it's done!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

1. I am not actually sure I've been conscious of any particular trends due to my general total lack of awareness re: what the hell is going on (bad quality for International Relations student really) however, I think nu-metal was probably rather more important than it was good, by suddenly forcing a need for "credibility" into a lot of things?

2. Err, I don't know.

3. I got into pop a week before Busted's demise. I am not quite sure when this was exactly but it was then.
-grunge/nu-metal
-rave etc.
-the FVCKING Spice Girls :( x a billion
-pop idol etc.
-Eminem

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

OH NOES, I have answered the last question totally wrong. I really mean by that when I first stopped thinking it was MORALLY WRONG to like Girls Aloud.

To be honest I just spent ages trying to think of the answers to that when answered properly and could think of nothing. I think I did actually only become aware of music as a whole having a history then, having previously preoccupied myself with genre histories, if at all.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have generally been very interested in history and I think the time I got really really interested in pop (late 80s) also seemed quite world-historically "charged" - well 89-90 did. The perhaps sad truth is that at 16 I was CONSIDERABLY more concerned about what "pop culture" in the 90s might be like - I DEVOURED all the end-of-the-decade supplements on the 80s, which I had lived through but been muchly oblivious to much of - than about the Berlin Wall coming down or the Ozone layer.

I'm not sure what conclusions I came to about the 90s but it exercised me hugely.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

> I DEVOURED all the end-of-the-decade supplements on the 80s

I just watched the Clive James end of year countdown.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Not read the thread yet, but my instinctive answers are:

1. Early 80s indie! I even wrote my final year dissertation at Uni about it. The term "post punk" hadn't been invented at the time (1985-6) but I'm referring to the the way that punk and indie labels (like Factory, Rough Trade and 4AD) opened up pop (or rather, rock) in myriad ways - sonically, lyrically. At the time I really thought it was the most progressive pop movement since ... well, ever.

2. Late 80s indie (as in: white noise blissout bands like MBV, AR Kane)! I'm not sure I really regarded this stuff as "important" in the sense that post punk clearly was/is - mostly just liberating after a brief stagnant period for pop (1984-86). But I'm much more ambivalent about this stuff now than I was at the time. By contrast, I think I undervalued (ignored too much of) the rap and house music that was being made at the same time, although obviously I loved the stuff that crossed over / got covered in MM.

3. Don't understand question.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Clearer way of phrasing 3:

"When you first got into music, what recent stuff that you might not have directly experienced struck you as important?"

Question I probably wanted to ask:

"What stuff were other people claiming as recently important when you joined in the* conversation?"

*macro **

** I said Macr-O.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

1. Concurrent movements of grunge and rave, I think. I was too young to really get involved but it seemed new and exotic and a bit scary but both looked and sounded a lot of fun.

2. Grunge again probably, bar Nirvana, and the 1992-era indie that was knocking about at the same time. It just disappeared totally (plays of Carter at Poptimism notwithstanding).

3. Michael Jackson!

unfortunately another interesting topic i don't have time to chat on

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

MOMENT IMPORTANT AT THE TIME - Sorry to keep bringing up the same moment, but I have to mention grunge, ie., "when punk broke." Because I was living outside Anglo-American culture at the time, it all happened without me really knowing about it. But when I came to the US in 1994, everything was different. (I wonder a lot about MTV, whether there was a moment, but again, I missed it personally so I can't say.)

NOT AS IMPORTANT IN HINDSIGHT - Not really, to tell the truth, but I actually think there is a pretty clear "continuum" out there if you investigate enough. And a continuum to some degree runs counter to the idea of particular moments where things change.

MOST IMPORTANT IN TEN YEARS - I think it must have been the original punk wave (Sex Pistols, Clash, etc.)

Re: unfortunately another interesting topic i don't have time to chat on

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

It also occurs to me that the arrival of rap/hip-hop NEEDS to be accounted for - your comment above about "what other stuff were people claiming etc." Also clearly hugely important from "Walk This Way," maybe.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

1. During my lifetime and at the time it was happening? I had no real idea of rap's struggle for mainstream acceptance and then domination because it was already hitting the charts well by the time i started listening. I'm going to have to say Acid House because it felt CLOSE (literally) so i could see the impact it was having for myself to an extent, and because of how it sounded (new, different rules etc.), media controversy etc.

2. I never though of Britpop as 'important' as such so can't say that. It's still too early to tell for a lot of 00s stuff. I can't really think of anything.

3. V tough because I was listening to mainstream radio very fixed on the present. I suppose Punk in the UK tho - felt like something that had already happened and ended but there was still an aftermath to experience in what was seen and heard.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

actually Matt's answer is good re 3 (Jacko rool)

salad of all my salad days

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i had a very clear idea of rock-as-history when i second came to it, which was late -- 14 or 15. I grew up quite isolated in the v.rural country (hi robin!) and somehow apart from my mum and dad's love of the beatles and simon and garfunkel and haha andrew lloyd webber neither pop nor rock really impinged, apart from a liminal fascination with glam (bolan/slade) as sexy allure/threat

when i decided i wanted to be interested i had loads of catching up to do so
i. i bought the "nme book of rock" and studied it v.closely
ii. in it i discovered that one TONY PALMER (http://www.tonypalmer.org/) had educated himself in rock by asking his friends what where the best alBUMS and listening to the top ten and then (cheekily if i am korrekt abt this!) becoming a ROCK CRITIC in a sunday paper and WRITING A TV SERIES about it
iii. so then i too conducted 1xmassive LJ POLL of all my school chums and tabulated the results (which i may still have somewhere) and borrowed tapes to listen to the winners and the outliers and MARKED EVERYTHING OUT OF FIVE

Re: salad of all my salad days

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"listening to the top ten" -- i mean the top ten of the alBUMS his friends suggested, not the charts (and his website suggests it was the SPECTATOR he was rock critic for)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

that was 3. i guess

to answer 1. PUNK ROCK -- i recall while still in the "catching up" phase (which took some time) reading about the BILL GRUNDY EXPLOSION in the shropshire star (which printed it verbatim) and being most perturbed by the apparent disfavour shown towards BEETHOVEN!!! and imagining in my head discussing this w. j.rotten and PUTTING HIM RIGHT!

anyway a few months later i heard the larf at the start of anarchy and fell totally head over heels in love w.lydon, and the unfolding of that story (pistols; punk; aftermath) was more important to me than my own life till i wd say abt 1983, when i started writing myself and began the glide into a. disenchantment and b. working out my own voice (these both took AGES) (in fact CONCRETE SO AS TO SELF DESTRUCT is probably when i negotiated full freedom from that story

2. no! (i am very full of myself)

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

1. Grime -- Although I ws v distant listener, I still feel this in some way and that the seeds have been sown for something special.

2. not sure, nothing comes to mind right now (I'm sure many would say Grime).

3. Became strongly aware (hand on shoulder) of music history (pop or otherwise, I suppose I can never answer q on poptimists on just pop music) sometime in the late 90s. In prev 10 years it probably would have to be the stuff written in "Blissed out", but I never really thought of it as important, just some v good bands, wriiten about in a very convincing manner. The actual answer (today, stuff I ws beginnign to discover then) would have to be the avant-garde classical stuff by the likes of Finnissy, Ferneyhough, Dench, Barlow and the like, but the history of that stuff has yet to be written.

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

haha of course grime isn't quite 'over'..

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

1) Romo
2) See 1)
3) The KLF

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I saw this briefly at work and was too busy to even think about composing a response :( And now I'm doing it because the alternative is to deal with the boxes piled up behind me.

I'm not sure I can really answer any of the questions properly in any case because my musical "development" was so weird. I first fell in love with music a couple of years before I moved to v rural isolated countryside - at age 8 it was just so much chart pop. And then in the country - where even if I had been aware of a pop history I wouldn't have had access to it, PLUS it wasn't that kind of household, my parents morally disapproved of rock/pop and were given to CONFISCATING RECORDS as punishment. And that is where I stayed for a decade - not reading any music magazines (first encounter with NME = diss of Tori Amos = immediate and never-rescinded prejudice) but somehow still voraciously consuming music and going through the usual pop => alternative angsty stages.

Which meant that by the time I emerged into the outside world ie university I was armed with v in-depth knowledge of What I Liked, Why I Liked It, What I Hated, Why I Hated It, and What The Past Decade Of Music Had Been (but only if that music was a) Chart b) Female Singer Songwriter c) Trip-Hop) - but absolutely no sense that it had a history worth noting (apart from a couple of key artists who I recognised as being in the same vein as what I loved and who I'd had easy access to) and absolutely no sense that there was this...body of STUDY called Rock Criticism. (I discovered most of my music through broadsheet reviews!)

At university I had about a year of half-hearted effort to catch up, esp when I briefly decided I wanted to be a music journalist, but it never really took (if I had discovered ilx in 2001 it would have not taken AT ALL and I would have saved a great deal of money and time), mostly because I didn't really like much of the canon. And because I was getting my ideas of the canon/old music from the most deathly dull of sources (didn't discover internet til 03 really)...by the time I discovered ilx and so on, I just wasn't interested in the history of pop at all, I believed and still believe that what really, really distinguishes pop music from most other art forms is that what is important is ALWAYS what is happening now. Which means:

1) Everything I have ever loved
2) Have never felt this, I mean...grime is the obvious answer but it was important at the time! Ultimately I don't care if it goes crap and gets forgotten about. All that matters is that it was there.
3) First became aware pop had a history (as opposed to just a past) about a decade after I started loving pop, and when I discovered that the people writing and cataloguing this history were calling the music I knew I hated most the most important (ie Britpop)...I knew that this history was not for me.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

My lack of interest in the history of pop right now is...

- a quarter defence mechanism against all these people who are about a gazillion years ahead of me, such that if I thought the history was important I would basically be unable to talk about pop music to them, bar a student/teacher kind of deal which neither of us would be interested in
- a quarter prioritisation of what's happening now - I will always always always choose to hear a new record which might be great over a 40-year-old record which might be great, and I think this is the ESSENCE OF POP, though it's also a consequence of...
- a quarter lack of time and funds - you know, if it was humanly possible, I would buy or download every record I thought I might potentially love! But...I was talking to Stevie C on the Amerie thread today, some dude was v patronising to me when I asked who some old Motown people were, but lovely Stevie actually gave me recommendations and enthusiasm about them which made me want to hear them. But still...he was like, all of it's so good you can leap in blind! But I can't leap in blind, because I have stoof in the Motown section of HMV approximately 100 times in my life and every time ran away in panicky indecision. There are HUNDREDS of compilations. HOW DO I PICK ONE?! And then where do I find the time to listen to a 3CD box set? It makes me feel nervous and tired just contemplating it.
- a quarter genuine lack of interest :D

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

1. Actually it was teenpop c. 2005, because I felt like I'd found this awesome mostly deserted island that a few people had once populated (c. 2000-2001) and subsequently went off. Which turned out not to be true (good thing), but it was the first time in my life I felt like I was kind of feeling my way through the music on my own (and learning its own) terms and not just getting gradually closer to the center of a hip/hype machine that echoed through the internets. I thought a lot of indie rock c. 2003 was important to me at the time, but mostly I was playing catch up.

2. Eminem seemed like just about the biggest deal ever from when he came out through the end of the general media storm after his second CD (some time before the CD with "Cleaning Out My Closet" on it). But now I'm not I'd call him "important" outside the scope of the appeal of his own music.

3. I always loved Kylie, who was kind of the center of the pop universe right in the pre-pop phase. From spring to fall of '05 Fever and Discovery were pretty much all I listened to, plus the Alan Braxe comp. that I'd dl'ed somewhere, so I guess that counts as my "history" at the time -- this was the summer after I spent six months in London, actually, and I've heard this sort of thing happens sometimes to indieish-Americans who run out of money what with the exchange rate and sit in their erm, flat listening to all the CDs they bought until their money ran out (since they had their DESTROY ALL MUSIC phase directly before boarding the plane and music playing devices = paper weights until they found FOPP).

But I grew up enjoying most big singles on the radio, and don't think I ever went back on that. When I tracked my personal pop music history thru History of Jop, turned out I'd always had a pretty close relationship with US chart history without even fully realizing it...that exercise also kind of paved a 10-20 year pop narrative in a way I was always sort of intuitively aware of but never really set down. So yay Poptimists!

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(Before the 3 on the list here, I was kind of working my way through what I thought was a canon, tho it turns out that AMG's semi-randomized recommendations actually significantly skewed my perception of the canon. So that I bought, say, Camper Van Beethoven albums thinking there was something particularly "significant" about them.)

[koganbot]

1. 1964-1968 rock soul the works (a lot of which I hated and avoided and fled from at the time), the world turned upside down, boys looking like girls, crustaceans having sex with mammals, the Martian invasion, etc. etc. etc.

2. I think No Wave of '78 exists as still-to-be-tapped potential rather than as the refashioning of the infrastructure it seemed at the time. It got absorbed and neutralized too fast as indie-avant pseudo-wildness.

3. Elvis, Chuck, the Girl Groups.

[koganbot]

Interesting that when I think of Importance I tend to overlook things like soft rock, Crosby, Stills & Nash, etc., which were important for taking what had been a convulsion and making it normal and livable. Seems to me that this stuff is important too, but it'll always be outshouted by the hubbub that precedes it.

[(Anonymous)]

1. '70-'76 music on Sesame Street and Electric Company; '77 Saturday Night Fever; '82-'84 MTV; '84-'85 American underground punk; '88-'89 hip hop/go-go/house; '90-'93 American underground rock/alternative crossover; '92-'98 New Orleans brass bands; '95 jungle; '98 rave; '00-'05 Duluth/Low; '98-'07 Minneapolis hip hop; '05 New Orleans and Houston (tie).

2. I think hindsight invests these moments with more importance, not less.

3. The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Sex Pistols.

--Pete Scholtes