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.

[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]

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

[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.

[(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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

re 2. I think I STILL think of baggy and indie-dance as being more important than they were. I definitely think they LASTED longer than they actually did, because I was very consumed with their progress at the time.

[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

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

Everybody Loves Roxette

(would make a better TV show AND it's true)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ooh i like the idea that history is what distorts the (uniformity of the) continuum

you can extend the metaphor to include "stars" and "gravity"!

[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.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Wasn't this the message of that Alan Moore futur shock that we linked to on the Life on M/A/R/R/S* thread.

*someone use this somewhere pls

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to ask you Mark - have you read Latour?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

(OMGZ)

am i mad (BROTHERS AND SISTERS)
in a coma (WE'RE GONNA GET YOU)
or back in time (DANCE! DANCE!)

[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.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

"influence at a distance" :-)

[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.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

bruno? none (tho if you do mean him i HAVE read some michel serres, who wz i believe his mentor) (haha on wikipedia BL is doing the dr evil face!)

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!

I am avoiding my essay

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Actually I just had a further think about this and don't think was actually into music in any proper sense before The Great Busted Revelation, which was largely brought on by Freeview and consequent exposure to Music Telly which meant I watched pop videos simply because I found the concept of music telly exciting and consequently did start giving pop a proper consideration when I would have discarded it as not being proper music before, due to the heady influence of realising I was actually the only person in my class who knew anything about rock/indie when nu-metal rolled around and suddenly becoming cool after years of avoiding talking to anyone about music by liking Skunk Anansie following traumatic incident when moved to new school in year three and was told had to like Take That or East 17, neither of which had heard of. :( Hrmm I don't know. I feel there was some kind of watershed then, though, because before I'd been fairly content to let Zane Lowe dictate what I was listening to to a certain extent.

Actually I think it may have been a sudden advent that if I did not eat lunch I could buy two CDs at £5 each EVERY WEEK, mostly facilitated by HMV Oxford's sale section. Before then I'd taped nearly all my music off the radio with one or two CDs for Christmas and birthday.

Now I have over 300 CDs. And no student overdraft.