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.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My parents had me in their mid-late 30s, and weren't really "pop" people: they had Sgt Peppers but everyone had Sgt Peppers. Dylan's Greatest Hits (never played), a Doors album (ditto). That was it pretty much. I played Peppers as a kid but otherwise their record collection might as well have been from an alium planet. Not just 'different taste' - no point of connection at all, nothing I could recognise as popular music.

I think that kind of experience was more common in 1966 than in 1986 (when I was 13), and probably more common in 1986 than now. But I don't know for sure.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my genres are all kinds of HARDCORE

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

\m/

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

My parents had lots of pop music (although also lots of, at the time mindnumbing classical that they thought would be IMPROVING etc. and which just means I have misplaced affections towards overblown prog probs but anyway) but I don't think that was necessarily par for the course; they had both been massive hippies and were comparatively young (>30) when they had me. They still listened to Radio 1 until I was about eleven, actually but I definitely think I am probably anomalous.

My point was more that there's access to the same music as yr parents, regardless of whether you actually like it. Obviously we are all mad punk rebels here and so probs had to eschew our parents' listening tastes at some point.

[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.

i forgot i forgot

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

EXPERIMENTAL HORSE!

This unites us all -- by dividing us.

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: i forgot i forgot

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

ALL GENRES ARE IN-JOKES. (sez Wittgenstein)

[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.

Genrephobe and proud

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I agree with Julio's answers, mine notwithstanding

Re: Genrephobe and proud

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Mnn, I'm still unsure to what extent I was being fascetious with the whole poll that question and my answer thereto.

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.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I'd rather just listen to Burial. I found Bloc Party's music boring from the off (their first release was on an Angular compilation I bought for some other, better bands featured thereon), and do not feel any progress has been made since. Meanwhile, it has become clear that Kele is a precious berk on a level rare even in indie, and a hypocrite to boot. DO NOT WANT.

Radio Soulwax: something else loved by my generation and the young folk, but the point of which utterly eludes me. Just play one of the songs and then the other one! Or, if one of the songs is less good, omit that entirely!
(Though one mash-up I have liked in the past five years is the MGMT/David Bowie 'Stardust Kids')

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

It took me a long time to realise that my parents had engagement-as-I-understood-it with popular culture. When I was little I appreciated that they had a Boney M record because it was mental and had a picture disc of them in glittery spandex. Later of course there was rediscovering their surviving vinyl, including a copy of 'Arrival', but it was only when you mentioned 'Luv a few years ago that I thought "oh yeah, we had that, well done poptimist folks"

Part of this disconnection may have been format - my parents only really used the tape player to make compilations for car trips, whereas it was of course what all us kid's first albums were on.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

20 and under
0 (0.0%)

Oh dere. Time we packed it in?

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.

[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.

Re: BRAINFIZZ

[cis.livejournal.com]

i am not sure that point had any relevance to anything! oh well.

Re: BRAINFIZZ

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

This is a v. good description! And also probably has more relevance to everything than anything else in this thread.

The 'embarassed by yr previous selves' Nietzschean thinger (is that Nietzsche? at some point he says something about looking back on yr previous self and going 'WHAT?!' in BG&E* I think ...o well, that thing anyway) is 1x v. good point. I mean, is anyone embarassed that their parents still listen to Elvis? (Does ANYONE still listen to Elvis?)

*Gosh I am amazing at quoting.

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.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Interesting point re: reunions. My mum and I were simultaneously horrified to discover that Mike Patton is fanciable awhile ago.