an amorous party at a farm

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Courtesy of freakytigger and indeed FreakyTrigger, apparently we have all resolved our generational difficulties and become one big happy Radio Two family since 1966. Blimes.

Arbitrary Woodstock reference WTF

Of course you can't have an innaccurate and limited poll carried out without poptimists getting involved, with our great experience in POLL SCIENCE and superior democratic methods. Err. Anyway, I'm clearly not the best mod for this task but away we go.


[Poll #1443342]

It would be more thorough but I appear to be experiencing mild 'stealing wireless fail' so thought I'd just shove it out here quick.

Comments

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

NICE SPELLING MISTAKES IN THE POLL THERE, ME. When lj lets you edit polls in a totalitarian and undemocratic manner life will be much easier.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

This does bring up something I think is an interesting'n'relevant thing since iPods etc. meant you can carry around half your music collection all the blvddy time and the ridiculous ease with which you can pirate the back catalogue of, eg: Metallica means that yr modern sixteen-year-old has no trouble getting hold of and listening to music that might have taken awhile to build up before. But then there's probably a thing like that with every new format and also everyone's always had access to, eg: their parents' record collections etc.

Of course the problem of why on EARTH they only chose seven genres to poll people regarding and had 'Spanish Guitar' as one of them is just ...yeah, I wish I'd had more time to make this poll. Also I forgot to mention that my plan was to have a GENRECANON or something where we worked out what seven genres were the most important tomorrow, since err, I'll be at work?

And err. I am writing like three things at the same time as this so I've totally forgotten what my point was. Fail by me there. Oh yes! I was going to put in a 'what's yr occupation' q in the poll to see if there is a difference between students of all ages and working people or whether the retired enjoy more post-hardcore or well. I don't know. In the spirit of the Pew poll I haven't thought this through very well have I?

(incidentally I am not picking on Lex in the poll; as is well-known, neither him nor me knows any music pre-2000 BECAUSE IT IS ALL RUBBISH.)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

By 'always had access to' and 'their parents' record collections' I mean 'people usually get to hear the same music their parents do' since obviously record collections have only been around ten minutes and I imagine there were always a few old persons at illegal ...waltzing or what-have-you in renaissance Venice or WHATEVER.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my genres are all kinds of HARDCORE

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

\m/

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I love Patrick Wolf's music, but cannot understand what the young folk see in Bloc Party. Then again, nor could I understand my own generation making a fuss about the Strokes, or any generation making a fuss about the Beatles, when both had peers who were vastly more deserving of the attention.

And my parents like the Chemical Brothers, who bore me rigid.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha I once bought my (at the time, seventeen-year-old) brother 'The Magic Position' to go with 'Weekend In The City' (which he'd asked for for his birthday) because I thought 'young(er) persons might like this but it is at least BETTER THAN THIS OTHER THING.*' Next year he asked for Scouting For Grills so I gave him As Heard On Radio Soulwax and discarded him.

*nb: I was RONG about Bloc Party, who are actually grebt. 'Intimacy' is a proper goth thing & the Burial remix of 'Where Is Home' is ridiculously gorgeous.

i forgot i forgot

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

EXPERIMENTAL HORSE!

This unites us all -- by dividing us.

Re: i forgot i forgot

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

ALL GENRES ARE IN-JOKES. (sez Wittgenstein)

BRAINFIZZ

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Whilst I'm explaining myself: the 'fondness' thing is I think important because there are people like, say, Morrissey or Mr E or Pete Wentz or err whatever there was before Morrissey (masculinity perhaps, ho ho ho) or y'know, similar figures, who are hugely important to the listeners/fans (& I have no idea why I'm picking on white male emos here, incidentally, other than the convo me and Tom had in the other thread thing) that are relevant to yr age. I mean, I like a lot of artists like, eg: the Zombies, who obviously primarily existed in the sixties (seventies?) and they mean a great deal to me but are not the same as gateway bands like Eels, which existed at pivotal moments in mine music taste. Then again, maybe the kidz of today do not have to shoplift tapes from Woolies (FOR SHAME, YOUNGER SELF; no wonder Woolies is no more D:) in order to find these bands so perhaps they *could* have a revelatory moment to, for instance, the Beatles, in the same way someone might have in the sixties. Except that they would've had to only listen to fifties music previously in order to get the right context to draw a parallel conclusion? Argh, life has too many variables.

I suppose there are a lot of people younger than me who think Nirvana are the bestestthingevar and perfectly relevant to their lives, when really even I'm much too young to remember much of Kurt Cobain being alive.

Still: I'm always going to have a, basically rational but not necessarily proportionate, fondness for Eels and Marilyn Manson whereas ye kidz of today might like... well I have no idea. Actually tbh Marilyn Manson is v. age-determinate isn't he?

Why am I only talking about rock music? It is like the difference between TAKE THAT and MCFLY is what I mean. Except either way, I'm *NSync but nevermind, nevermind.

edit: I really have lost the ability to make a blind bit of sense, assuming I ever had it. Move along, citizens.

Re: BRAINFIZZ

[cis.livejournal.com]

Kurt Cobain was, briefly, CRAZY IMPORTANT to my friends and I when we were eleven or so and that was all about him being dead. (see also richey manic) (jeff buckley) (sid vicious) (keith moon) (brian jones) (bob dylan); I remember this gang of kids three years younger than me suddenly having a collective Kurt Cobain moment and being wtffed out of my mind over it, all "how can this person be so personally important to you when everything you know about him is older people telling you what he's supposed to mean"

which brings me onto-- i think there is a thing people don't remember, because we are intent on seeing teenagerhood as a cutting edge of fashionable taste, which is the moment when the arc of the fourteen-year-old and the thirty-five-year-old meet, as one is growing into "being down w/ the kids" and the other is growing out of. I remember when everyone I knew was decrying coldplay as boring music for thirtysomethings and i thought: but i just met a kid i used to babysit and he's immensely excited about coldplay, and in a year's time he's going to be pretending he never liked them, and five years later he'll be like "yeah but shiver was a classic". And I think that can mess up any linear sense of how music tastes shift generationally.

Re: BRAINFIZZ

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Certainly when I went to see the Marion or My Life Story reunion gigs, while I enjoyed myself greatly, in each case I recognised that this was not a band to whom I could take young folks and expect them to respond with anything more than bafflement.

Re: BRAINFIZZ

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Actually tbh Marilyn Manson is v. age-determinate isn't he?

I dunno, I think I'm a bit older than you and my fondness for MM has gone up and down over the years, but I remember getting quite excited about why he might be important when I read about Trent Reznor working on their first album in Kerrang!

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

20 and under
0 (0.0%)

Oh dere. Time we packed it in?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I thought we had some young'uns! It always used to be me and poptasticuk in that bracket.

...no wate hang on that would have been, err, three years ago. NEVERMIND.

there was a dog! he had two bones!

[cis.livejournal.com]

OK am I the only person in the world who, when faced with an open Spotify application, never has any idea what to listen to?

Back catalogues being theoretically ultra-available on the universal jukebox of the internet is great and all but it doesn't mean I'm actively going to seek out any music from the vast unfamiliar tundra of the 1970s.

Re: there was a dog! he had two bones!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Does it not have radio yet? And yes, it is well odd staring at it thinking 'I COULD LISTEN TO ANYTHING, LITERALLY ANYTHING; BUT WHAT?!' (future ideas for things: the internet as terrible gaping maw of epistemological panic)

I once used it to listen to the Trina back catalogue. I dunno, I may be coming at this from a sideways angle because a lot of my formative music friends were metallers and for some reason completism is VERY IMPORTANT to Iron Maiden fans, so I sort of assume The Kidz are doing that? Only with Mp3s not, like, tapes or whatever.

Re: there was a dog! he had two bones!

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

'OK am I the only person in the world who, when faced with an open Spotify application, never has any idea what to listen to? '

no i get this a lot too. i wish they'd expand their portal page more, listing more new releases and playlists.

i made a list of 09 albums to listen to thru it tho so have been working thru those. was supposed to be going thru pitchfork's top 100 albums of the 70s too but seem to have stalled there.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

No, hang on, right, I've had a think. And what I think is that everyone (myself very much included) has to stop imagining that this demographic known as THE KIDZ exists, since clearly everyone thinks it is younger than themselves and therefore it is probably just what we imagine we were doing at whatever arbitrary age we've set it at (I think of them as being about eighteen but I thought of them as being about fifteen when I was eighteen and etc. etc.) Likewise maybe people look at old types and go 'AHA, THE OLDZ' in a similar way. And I think maybe this is unhelpful in all directions? I mean the basic thing is that no one agrees about all music and it doesn't matter when you were born with regards to that.

And that is my big hippie thought for the day. It's ok, no one will see it down here so my street cred will be preserved...

[petronia.livejournal.com]

All I know is, every specific musical act-related internet forum I've ever been on has had regular posters who were teens, regardless of how old the act is.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I can't believe I'm posting William Gibson here but there's a bit out of Idoru that entirely describes how I see kidz approaching this:

The wall opposite Chia's bed was decorated with a six-by-six laser blowup of the cover of Lo Rez Skyline, their first album. Not the one you got if you bought it today, but the original, the group shot they'd done for that crucial first release on the indie Dog Soup label. She'd pulled the file off the club's site the week she'd joined, found a place near the Market that could print it out that big. It was still her favorite, and not just, as her mother too frequently suggested, because they all still looked so young. Her mother didn't like that the members of Lo/Rez were nearly as old as she was. Why wasn't Chia into music by people her own age?

-Please, mother, who?

-That Chrome Koran, say.

-Gag, mother.

Chia suspected that her mother's perception of time differed from her own in radical and mysterious ways. Not just in the way that a month, to Chia's mother, was not a very long time, but in the way that her mother's "now" was such a narrow and literal thing. News-governed, Chia believed. Cable-fed. A present honed to whatever very instant of a helicopter traffic report.

Chia's "now" was digital, effortlessly elastic, instant recall supported by global systems she'd never have to bother comprehending.

Lo Rez Skyline had been released, if you could call it that, a week (well, six days) before Chia had been born. She estimated that no hard copies would have reached Seattle in time for her nativity, but she liked to believe there had been listeners here even then, PacRim visionaries netting new sounds from indies as obscure, even, as East Teipei's Dog Soup. Surely the opening chords of "Positron Premonition" had shoved molecules of actual Seattle air, somewhere, in somebody's basement room, at the fateful moment of her birth.

I am still waiting for Taipei/HK/Beijing indie to produce something truly original, mind (as opposed to a few good bands).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"Generation gap is a myth to the extent that this means that there's some chasm between OLDS and YOUNGS. Depends on whom, but I imagine more kidz like their parents music than their parents liked *their* parents' music."

I meant this to mean it's mythical NOW; the part at the end was suggesting that the Gen Gap was probably realer in many ways (in music, at least) in the 60's. But that's also because now there are much much much more significant generational gaps -- internet use, LGBT politics, other basic policy stuff. I'm guessing that there are bigger disparities between childrens' views v. parents' views now than there even were in the 60's, actually -- anecdotally speaking, I think you can find plenty of young people in the U.S. who, e.g., are generally homophobic or gay-unfriendly who still oppose anti-gay-marriage legislation, which aligns them socially with their parents (homophobia and gay-unfriendliness) but politically directly opposed to them (not wanting to write laws to that effect).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Whereas from my second-hand understanding, generational disparities were more outward and complete in the 60's -- your social AND political bearings were a 180, which was a vocal way of doing it but, I would bet, not the norm in the way that some polling suggests it is with political issues now, in a much quieter but perhaps more pervasive way. But then I only think this because the info I have is about NOW, not about THEN. What survives mostly from THEN (from someone who was born during Reagan and lived thru Bush) is a kind of co-opting of superficial cultural moments with a severe downturn in the quality of politics and legislation in areas that made progress in the 60s.

Divided not by age or genre but by function

[meserach.livejournal.com]

Music is FOR things. Different music for different things!

I think about this mostly in relation to dance music. Dance music, when it shows up in the charts and is therefore in the faces of people who do not go to clubs and dance, is often dismissed as so much undifferentiated noise. What's the problem? Well, you're not supposed to sit on your sofa and LISTEN to it, is what. Dance music makes sense at a dance venue!

Functions aren't necessarily as discrete. I usually thing about the purpose of songs in an emotional sense: angry music, sad music, happy music, sexy music. Each has its place in my life.

Much of the extent of generational differences is purely differences in what functions one needs at different times in their lives. I listened to a lot more angry music in my teens!

The rest is largely a matter of simple salience - the music came out at a time while you were receptive, you were exposed, you made it part of your brain. Critical consensus elevates some artists to "timeless" status, which keeps them salient, and in currency, and thus in people's brains.

Grandpa speaks

[koganbot]

OK, er [wheez], everyone gone home? What hour is this? AM or PM? [cough] Well, say, when I was a wee'un, [hacking cough]....

Sorry, oh yes, um, generation gap! Hah! You want to talk about generation gap! I'll tell ya, in my day, we had generation gaps, subgeneration gaps, prenatal generation gaps, postcoital generation gaps, and every other kind of gap as well, I tell you...

Well, let's start with 1963. In 1963, oh, there was... oh, "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh," "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport," "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer," "The End Of The World," "I Love You Because," "I Will Follow Him," "My Boyfriend's Back," "It's My Party"... songs that had almost nothing in common except one thing [gazes into the air]... got bored with pop in '63, I'll say, stopped listening, became a folkie at age 9, got scared and stayed a folkie, I'll tell you, winkling and ripping my van right up to 1966 when... I was saying, about those songs from 1963, those "Surf City"s and those "Mecca"'s. They had zilch and nada in common except for one thing: absolutely nothing remotely like them made it onto the Top 40 in 1966. Other than an anomalous Sinatra and a WTF Lorne Greene, there was nothing. The past was cinders. Talk about gaps, this was a chasm, an abyss, a schism, a gulf. Past was gone, a world of fear ahead.

In 1966 there was no Elvis.
In 1966 there were no Shangri-Las.
In 1966 there were no Shirelles.
In 1966 there was no Nat King Cole.
In 1966 there was hate, like this:

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I am relieved to discover that the Lex is indeed The Lex. Who knows what sort of metaphysical catastrophe might have occurred was this not the case.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I am also heartened that I appear to have back-up versions of myself in case of technical difficulties - I do feel that some of them have some way to go in being me (tho).