Does your taste get more conservative as you age?

If I had too much crap going on to be able to enjoy some tunes, I would probably need to re-think some recent life choices!

i've loved john tavener long time, ned. svyati!

Hey, nice! Now let's talk Gavin Bryars.

I am in my 40's and I think my tatse in music is way less conservative than it used to be. I may not be as experimental as I used to be but I am far less genre faithful and more wide-ranging in what I listen to than I was as a callow youth. That said, I have undergone a certain amount of fatigue/busy related lack of opportunity to look for music but then I also have a wider range of interests than I used to have, too.

i'm less qualified than a lot of people here to talk about this, but i suspect that abrasive noise once carried a more political charge than it does now. without a dialectic of subversion is noise rock just the ignorable noodling of dilettante twats?

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 6 July 2010 17:52 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

We talked about this quite a bit on one of the 90s revival threads. I think one of the problems with a lot of rock and leftfield rock music (and other styles for that matter) is that it is art for art's sake and does not reflect the world we live in today, instead either being an experiment for the sake of it or trying to reimagine.pay tribute to ideas from the past. This is why people get wound up about hipsters and hipster culture is that they're so anodyne in their thinking that one wonders what is the point in these statements - what do they represent or tell us about the world?

just my view - not really got much to do with the OG subject.

But this contemporary classical music isn't conservative at all - conservative would be wanting to listen to nothing but coldplay or oasis in my eyes.

You are only saying this because you aren't listening to contemporary classical music.

ok i'll say it YES your taste gets more conservative as you age. YES. except for those people for whom it doesn't. but for that first group of people, YES, YOU ARE DOOMED!

When I was 15-16 I loved experimental noise music like Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristle, Black Dice, Merzbow, etc. but now it's repellant to me.

Surely you'd be more "conservative" if you still liked it?

yeah ding ding ding ding ding, basically!

i think the OP was using the word conservative in the more conservative sense tbh

lol Kate OTM about this thread

lol 15yo Merzbow fan, give me some kind of medal

oh stop it don't be nasty, corey was just explaining himself

it's always boring to be all categorically "i'm done with x, into y now" especially when y is supposed to be understood as qualitatively better than x

yeah you know what, i think if anything my taste has just broadened with age

no. (x-post to "Tom D.")

and what M. White said. if anything it feels like needing to ask myself if my tastes are more conservative/staid these days is itself a reactionary impulse.

food 4 thought

yeah you know what, i think if anything my taste has just broadened with age

More eclectic definitely.

I'm consuming less music, and so by extension stepping out into new genres less and less and, yes, sticking to pretty "safe" bets in terms of music I'm listening to / trying / buying. But you know what? I don't really give one. I'm really enjoying listening to music at the moment, I had a lovely time with Shleep by Robert Wyatt last night, and if I'm not getting into a new genre every month, so be it.

But not necessarily less conservative, in a way (xp)

I definitely check out new/different things a lot more than I did ten (or even five) years ago but that might just be because it's become so much easier and cheaper to do so. Sort of a side issue but this year for once I've managed (to a degree) to focus my listening habits a bit more in terms of older music which has been kind of satisfying.

also, i noticed that my tastes over time are sort of a pendulum, where i'll spend a few months or years retreating into stuff i know i like, followed by a some time spent seriously pushing at boundaries/prejudices and exploring new shit, and then whole thing goes round again. that pattern denies the basic assumption of the "more or less conservative?" question. my tastes don't move in a line from this to that. they cycle through a process, expanding and retracting, shedding the old & played-out about as fast as they incorporate the new, but always open to rediscovery.

Probably--my tastes were never that wild at any point in my life, but I probably do become even more locked into the simple (or conservative, if you'd rather) things that have always engaged my ear: melody, songcraft, etc. I probably strayed from these things more often 20 years ago. If Flipper came along today, I'm not sure that I'd connect. Another problem is that if Flipper came along today, my first reaction might be, "They sound just like Flipper." I try to stay as open-minded as possible. Sometimes I succeed.

I just realized: Flipper's closer to 30 years ago. Ouch.

Do people get more or less boringly self-congratulatory about their musical tastes as they age?

― Cow Bingo (Masonic Boom), Tuesday, July 6, 2010 4:47 PM (4 hours ago)

That's nasty.

also, i noticed that my tastes over time are sort of a pendulum, where i'll spend a few months or years retreating into stuff i know i like, followed by a some time spent seriously pushing at boundaries/prejudices and exploring new shit, and then whole thing goes round again. that pattern denies the basic assumption of the "more or less conservative?" question. my tastes don't move in a line from this to that. they cycle through a process, expanding and retracting, shedding the old & played-out about as fast as they incorporate the new, but always open to rediscovery.

― good news if you wear cargo shorts (contenderizer), Tuesday, July 6, 2010 6:09 PM

I can relate to this.

I'm not trying to say "Oh I'm so fucking cool I listened to all this crazy music before anyone else". I was just wondering if this was a common phenomenon, and wanted to open a dialogue about it.

Its not about listening to Britpop when you 30 or listening to Stockhausen when you're 12 but whether you can enter into a dialogue with the music (and the culture surrounding it) that is of more importance to me.

I do love a lot of contemporary classical but its undeniable that its just a playground for people to avoid the chasm between the intentions behind some of the music and what it actually produces/what its effects are.

So was Beethoven, in a way. Look at the critical response of the time (and even after his death) to the late quartets.

I do love a lot of contemporary classical but its undeniable that its just a playground for people to avoid the chasm between the intentions behind some of the music and what it actually produces/what its effects are.

No idea what this means.

dont listen to music to have a dialogue about the culture around it. kind of a weird idea.

but then i've never belonged to a book group

here's an admittedly gross theory: maybe music is like porn. the kind of tame titillation that got you off when you were younger just doesn't do it for you eventually, and eventually you need something a little more hardcore, perhaps even going into fetish territory to get you off as you get older and it takes more to get you excited.

I guess I have a problem with listening and just enjoying the same things but also I don't want to just find something repellant, leave it and not ask why. I called that dialogue with music.

There is a thing surrounding the reception of contemporary classical and its relationship to what is outside the concert hall. I just called it culture.

HM, you are disagreeing with an argument no one is making (ie, "about" and "with" have very different meanings)

Rudipherous - I kind of want to say something like: a lot of contemporary classical presents itself as something that is hard to enjoy widely except for its small audience who do enjoy it, something smugly so. In the end the music's form can be quite radical but because it sets itself up to reach a small scene, that this can be a source of 'conservatism'. xp

I now only listen to rousing versions of Jersualem.