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

[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.)