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

[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.