For a person who was not yet born when music was initially released, is it possible to enjoy it with the same level of enthusiasm as contemporary music?

I read it as another thread where ILM can remind itself that pop music is the only music that exists.

The age of a piece of music is completely irrelevant to me; all that matters is its visceral impact. If it hits me the first time I hear it, I will keep listening, and discover more and more about it — or not! Perhaps it will always be just as pleasurable, on the same superficial, instant-gratification level as the first time. Every time I listen to Aerosmith's Rocks, it just...rocks, period. I don't need to analyze it, I just put it on and...fuck yes, this music rules. If, on the other hand, something doesn't work for me, I don't think about whether it's a brand new artist, still dripping from the vat where the music industry grows them, and tell myself that it's too early to tell whether they'll develop into something marvelous...I just go listen to something that I actually like. I think part of this is connected to my near-total disconnection from any "social context" for music. I don't go to live shows anymore; I never did go out to dance; I don't listen to music with other people in the room at all, really. So being part of some broader "fan community" or whatever is an utterly foreign and frankly unwelcome concept to me.

Isn't that visceral impact still determined at least in part by the frame of reference you bring to the music, though, which is invariably shaped by the time periods we have lived through and in which we currently experience the music? Part of the reason Mary Halvorson is exciting to us surely has to do with recognizing what is new in the way she works with guitar sound, juxtaposing acoustic sounds with electronic delay/looping/pitch-shifting effects that she controls improvisationally in real time - and this is new because it has yet to be copied and we have listened to plenty of other guitarists who don't do that; and part of the reason has to do with recognizing what is already familiar in her sound, what we can connect to jazz and progressive rock and noise-rock artists we have already heard. It doesn't necessarily mean that you can't be enthusiastic about In a Silent Way or In the Court of the Crimson King, or that people won't love Mary Halvorson in 20 years, but there is something distinct about the experience that seems to depend on the age of the piece of music, I think.

i like Bach but am i really feeling him i ask myself

― bury my heart in wounded kieth (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, July 13, 2022 12:53 AM (twelve hours ago)

idk like, that Schubert piece that was in The Hunger, the scene with the flowing draperies, I still remember that from when I saw that movie as a teenager ... like, very formative in romantic Goth fantasies of my youth, but ... when that Schubert trio hit the charts back in the day, they totally had a different excitement over that piece plus Bowie + Deneuve ... idk

Part of the reason Mary Halvorson is exciting to us surely has to do with recognizing what is new in the way she works with guitar sound, juxtaposing acoustic sounds with electronic delay/looping/pitch-shifting effects that she controls improvisationally in real time - and this is new because it has yet to be copied and we have listened to plenty of other guitarists who don't do that; and part of the reason has to do with recognizing what is already familiar in her sound, what we can connect to jazz and progressive rock and noise-rock artists we have already heard.

Maybe, but what does a wet-brained 13-year-old who doesn't know anything about anything think feel when they hear Mary Halvorson? That's what's really important!

Yeah, sort of. The thing that's exciting about a current artist is the zealous anticipation that results from not knowing the trajectory they're going to take yet. Potentially, there's more and better and different kinds of music to come and if it's a very new artist, then probably they haven't set a steady course yet. Everything is still undecided. So maybe you take a more active role in completing the work for yourself.

With stuff that came out before you were born all that is immutable and unchangeable, you already know what happens next, even if you have to dig around a little to see how it happens. You can get totally wrapped up in it, if it's just a question of degree. But it's more like being an archaeologist than a dreamer.

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse), Wednesday, July 13, 2022 12:44 AM (fifteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is well put and archaeologist v. dreamer is great.

I mean, my favorite genre is metal, but I am only 41, so obviously, I was only in pre-school/kindergarten when a lot of the genre's defining albums came out. they excited the fuck out of me when I first listened to them, like Reign in Blood, Black Metal, Don't Break the Oath, etc, but I imagine having heard them in context, like being a pre-existing fan and hearing these on drop date would have been a transformative experience that I unfortunately didn't get to be a part of.

but it's what it is, y'know. It's not like I sit at the foot of my bed sobbing each night going "I WAS LATE TO KING'S LOVE, MAN"

I remember thinking how I was insanely late to albums and artists as a teenager, when these were things that came out... only a few years prior

me, getting into NIN's The Downward Spiral in 1996: omg, I am a poser

unlike Radiohead, where I was a fan already when OK Computer came out, and I got to experience it as a new thing. which actually hurt the experience as the hype made it harder for me to enjoy at first.

Maybe, but what does a wet-brained 13-year-old who doesn't know anything about anything think feel when they hear Mary Halvorson? That's what's really important!

Haha yeah that whole teenager angle seems a bit tangential. The OP doesn't say anything about the age of the listener at the moment when they are exposed to the new or old music. There is a certain intensity of enthusiasm that comes with being young and naive (whether of the extroverted screaming-fan or the introverted 4chan-posting variety) but that doesn't necessarily have to be for contemporary music. I was more enthusiastic about Led Zeppelin and Lenny Breau at 13 than Mr Big or Paula Abdul. No doubt the experience was different for someone hearing Zep IV in 1971, though.

as a tail-end boomer (i turn 64 next month....gaaaahh) i'm gonna say...i lean toward "no"? in a zelig-like way i guess i experienced these things first hand: beatlemania (i was 5/6 in 1964 and can definitely understand all those "it changed my life" people), arena rock (my first concert was led zeppelin in '72) and punk (i went to college in nyc from 1976-1980). like, that was amazing, and i can't imagine any of those things being so visceral when experienced after the fact. but conversely having had these experiences it makes me bend over backwards to *not* let them color my experience of older and/or newer music to the point where it blinds me to great things that are happening currently. i mean, if there were great things happening currently. but there's always that echo chamber in my head. like when people are all over that big thief album -- and yeah i like some of that big thief album -- i'm thinking geez does their drummer sound amateurish to me *just* because i saw john bonham and keith moon? i also think music has to cut through much more cultural crap to be as great now as it was then, but that's a whole other thread.

beatlemania (i was 5/6 in 1964 and can definitely understand all those "it changed my life" people), arena rock (my first concert was led zeppelin in '72) and punk (i went to college in nyc from 1976-1980)

damn, lol! zelig-like for sure.

Maybe, but what does a wet-brained 13-year-old who doesn't know anything about anything think feel when they hear Mary Halvorson?

Avant-garde music was exciting to me when I was 13 years old precisely because it respected my intelligence enough to not dumb things down. Finally there was a voice in my life that wasn't talking down to me.

I was a 13 year old chorister at Notre Dame when Perotin invented polyphony.

Who has more "enthusiasm" for the Beatles: A teenage girl in 1964 screaming until she's blue in the face and passes out or a smug, self-satisfied 2022 Holden Caulfield nerd who posts "born in the wrong era" image macros on 4chan. Who can say?

― Whiney G. Weingarten

so much selection bias! look whiney i do happen to run into 4chan-poisoned folks sometimes, and your comparison is right on in that a lot of them are teenaged girls, but they're all fucking trans girls and are less "enthusiastic" or "smug" than, like, about as consumed with self-loathing as you are. i apologize, i know it's rude of me to call you the way you constantly call out other board posters, but i'm so fucking sick of it, yeah we all fucking learned to hate ourselves, quit taking it out on other posters you have two-decade-old beefs with, do some trauma work or some shit.

austin's a good guy and his thread is worth engaging with genuinely. anyway, your canonical 4chan nerd is probably gonna be listening to, like, backxwash or one of those other suicidal transfem record albums and no matter how much they try to cover it up with irony their emotions regarding those records strike me as being pretty fucking real and genuine.

I was a 13 year old chorister at Notre Dame when Perotin invented polyphony.

― Antifa Sandwich Artist (Boring, Maryland)

perotin? that hack! totally stole all the credit from Anonymous 3.

my kids love “Macarena” more than I ever did. So sure.

seems like a low bar

seems like a low bar

― “Lawman,” Slick (Grunt) (morrisp)

that's limbo

There is a certain intensity of enthusiasm that comes with being young and naive (whether of the extroverted screaming-fan or the introverted 4chan-posting variety)

although tbh music critics can overrate this at times imo - teenagers can also often be anxious masses of self-consciousness who are easily pressured and influenced. Some percentage of those screaming Beatlemaniacs were probably screaming because their friends were or they thought they were supposed to. I don't know that my middle-aged enthusiasm for Mary Halvorson is lesser than my preteen enthusiasm for Aerosmith. 6xps

Now I'm second-guessing my answer, as I remember all those young folks going ape at the Pavement reunion show a few months back.

(btw - I haven't been taking the "not yet born" part of the question literally - I just figured it meant, like, "at least a decade old" - but if that's really part of it, it might change things even a little more)

Yeah, it's not my experience that teens who are into Ed Sheeran are more enthusiastic than teens who are into Bach or Skynyrd.

Ask a 12yo music fan about Queen if you want to see enthusiasm.

I'm gonna take a risk here and project that about 98% of Ed Sheeran's biggest fans don't actually like music.

When I was 12, Queen were just another Classic Rock Group trying to get video airplay.

Kate, I respect your attempts to keep it positive, but you are def not going to get me on board with “actually making fun of the Nazi website is transphobic”

Also, I have no beef with Austin!

my kids love “Macarena” more than I ever did. So sure.

up to age 12 or whatever: yes
teens and after: would be tough

in response to OP. Not specifically the Macarena.

come to think, I was 13 for the popularity of the Macarena so I enthusiastically ripped on it... while secretly loving it. I could not have had this experience at any other point in history.

Also, I have no beef with Austin!

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, July 13, 2022 5:54 PM

i have no beef with anyone — even if they have beef with me!

just reading in here and enjoying the hell out of the direction this went. you lot are alright.

also this,

I read it as another thread where ILM can remind itself that pop music is the only music that exists.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Wednesday, July 13, 2022 1:12 PM

no no no, not what i wanted! like . . . at all. sheesh. now i feel like i failed in posting this.

part of my main impetus behind this was my memories of how i was devouring 60s blue note and 70s soul by the time i was 19. i used allmusic.com as a reference for albums to find. of course back then, if the used racks didn't have certain stuff, you just had to wait. so by the time i finally heard something like accent on africa, it blew my fucking mind. of course, now stuff like that has been (rightfully) reissued and put on streaming but when i finally heard it (and many others), i had the same level of anticipation as if it had been getting hyped on mtv/bet/radio for months.

also some other musings: there isn't much hype anymore for new releases. seems like most stuff gets announced, three or four "preview" songs come out over the following few months and then, yay album time. okay. the latest kendrick was highly anticipated for me, but before that the last "new" thing i can remember being *that* excited for was probably years prior . . . like maybe 2017? maybe it's just me, but i like the idea of catalogue music just sitting there, waiting to be discovered and appreciated on the same wavelength as contemporary music. there's a bit of romance in that for me.

this is all otm. There's so much to chew on with this question. But I think almost always the contemporaniousness will help the excitement. Exploring the work of someone who has passed (as a starker example) can be very exciting, but there is always the knowledge in the back of your mind that you are working your way through a finite and completed body of work.

I can't imagine any kid of today feeling the same way about MC Hammer and Primus

maybe not Primus specifically but a lot of those weirdo-prog 90s/00s bands still have a lot of legs. my wife's 18 year old cousin used to pass the time by transcribing Porcupine Tree songs. when I saw Ween a couple years ago a good third of the crowd looked like they were in kindergarten when their last album came out.

as for MC Hammer yeah it might not be the thing anymore like it was when you were a kid but I remember discovering a lot of cool and goofy 80s shit like "Take On Me", "867-5309", "Tainted Love", and "Push It" as a teen and being weirdly enthusiastic about it even though it was solidly out of my era. in 10 years my daughter is probably gonna discover "Gangnam Style" from someone in high school and will rush home to ask me what it was like to live through it

think the attachment you can get as a teenager to older music is stronger but it's such a different experience. If it's something that was huge in its time, like the couple kids I knew in high school or middle school who "discovered" Led Zeppelin or whatever (lol) then there's this sense of validation. If it's something that was fringe, or popular but not in rotation on whatever regurgitates some zeitgeist, be it radio or some spotify playlist or algorithm, it's like some secret knowledge and you get the teen tendency to assign all this importance and see things through rose-colored glasses.

I mainly listened to 'old' music when I was a teenager, and I think that has it's own particular kind of excitement and appeal, tantalising glimpses for this lost world that you can never quite reach. It used to frustrate me that I'd never get to experience that music first hand, but I think the frustration and longing was definitely part of the appeal for me, if I'd been born 20 years earlier I'd probably have been obsessing over music from 20 years before that. It's strange getting into my mid-30s and seeing teenagers for whom the era when I was a teenager is their lost idyll that they romanticise, stuff that seems completely banal to me has this stardust sprinkle for them.

Who has more "enthusiasm" for the Beatles: A teenage girl in 1964 screaming until she's blue in the face and passes out or a smug, self-satisfied 2022 Holden Caulfield nerd who posts "born in the wrong era" image macros on 4chan. Who can say?

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, 13 July 2022 20:51 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I was definitely more of the Holden Caulfield nerd type and I think there is something potentially reactionary, anti-life about it - it's about communing with the past alone in your bedroom, not going out with your friends and connecting with other people and actually living your life, this vampiric nostalgia for someone else's past, - but if you're not cut out for the real world and don't mix well you can summon a lot of enthusiasm for this stuff

Who has more "enthusiasm" for the Beatles: A teenage girl in 1964 screaming until she's blue in the face and passes out or a smug, self-satisfied 2022 Holden Caulfield nerd who posts "born in the wrong era" image macros on 4chan. Who can say?

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, July 13, 2022 9:51 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The blue-in-the-face girl, but that's not what the thread asks ?

Obviously you cannot replace the experience and zeitgeist. Is that affecting the appreciation of the music, is there Beatles-contemporary music appreciation, and anything else can't compare ? That seems to rely on idealizing the period, which sounds like nostalgia and "you had to be there" that gives young people knee-jerk reactions.

Maybe it's about clearing up what we are talking about. A live event will exert fascination, being part of something, all those things are real and distinct, no question. It's certainly not the same as the "40-year aura of most influential pop rock band" that we all love to feel cynical about. But that's more than just the music. Can we isolate the music ? The ephemeral part and the enduring part ? I feel like we can, otherwise how do you have generations of fans. Maybe there's a limit, a point at which the Beatles are just too remote for people to make a full connection. But I have a hard time accepting the suggestion than blue-face-girl was hearing a different record when she was putting the vinyl on.

My initial thought on this was to turn the question around, sort of: there is no music being made today, however good, creative or exciting, that can reach me the way the music of my youth does. Anything that was released after I reached my mid 20s just does not have the same emotional impact, generally speaking. So much of what I hear now seems derivative of what I loved when I was young. I realize that this is largely a function of my own perception, but there it is.

That seems to rely on idealizing the period, which sounds like nostalgia and "you had to be there" that gives young people knee-jerk reactions.

I think "You had to be there" works for bad music too!

I was there...when Nastradamus dropped

i feel a bit goofy to say so, but there's a lot of stuff that got me hard around 20 that i don't give a shit about anymore, and I'm.. relieved?.. i can still get bowled over by, i dunno, Kero Kero Bonito. Not a band I might ever get to meet many fans of, but at least I can follow the work in real time

Maybe there's a limit, a point at which the Beatles are just too remote for people to make a full connection. But I have a hard time accepting the suggestion than blue-face-girl was hearing a different record when she was putting the vinyl on.

As a counterpoint, Royal Trux had a thing about this (sort of):

...(T)he pleasure principle is ever shifting. A 50's orgasm is undoubtedly different from the 90's version. If we're in the music business we are looking at the insurmountable task of predicting the favored stimulus for the "orgasm now." Our prospects are better if we focus on the possibility of a relationship between our recordings and the infinite variety of future orgasms.

yeah there’s this Scott Seward post that I think of sometimes where he talks about how some 70s hard rock bands don’t make as much sense now because you can’t get barbiturates anymore

Ludes, rather

I think I’m usually more enthusiastic about music from the past because the contemporary music I usually love doesn’t seem to get many people as excited.

As a counterpoint, Royal Trux had a thing about this (sort of):

...(T)he pleasure principle is ever shifting. A 50's orgasm is undoubtedly different from the 90's version. If we're in the music business we are looking at the insurmountable task of predicting the favored stimulus for the "orgasm now." Our prospects are better if we focus on the possibility of a relationship between our recordings and the infinite variety of future orgasms.

― “Lawman,” Slick (Grunt) (morrisp)

weird way for them to announce that they've started taking hrt but ok

Throughout this thread there seems to be a conflation of "was alive when the music was released" and "demonstrated more enthusiasm for the music in question because they were young and impressionable"

I feel the same way as Whiney re: rap at 10 (except I was into Digital Underground) and Primus at 13; however I had the same enthusiasm at age 5 for Bach and the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the same enthusiasm at age 12 for Shostakovich and Sibelius. I was simultaneously into Led Zeppelin and (Canadian Led Zeppelin sound-alikes) The Tea Party at age 16.

The contemporaneous nature of an album's existence is meaningful, but not nearly as meaningful as "I was a child/teenager".

If anything, my ability to participate as a "music fan" in the real-time release schedule of landmark albums by Björk and Tori Amos during my teens has inexorably clouded my ability to appreciate those albums-- I associate them so strongly with my anxious teenage self and cannot "enjoy" them the way I enjoy, say, Liz Phair's "Exile In Guyville", which came out at the same time but I didn't hear until my early 20s

Come down to L.A. and we'll do a Primus tribute for Halloween

Do you want to know something. The two wordy lyrics that I can recite at any given point in time are, ridiculously, "The Humpty Dance" and "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver"

Bay Area represent

Come down to L.A. and we'll do a Primus tribute for Halloween

― Whiney G. Weingarten

well that sure sounds like a crusade only of the brave

My initial thought on this was to turn the question around, sort of: there is no music being made today, however good, creative or exciting, that can reach me the way the music of my youth does. Anything that was released after I reached my mid 20s just does not have the same emotional impact, generally speaking. So much of what I hear now seems derivative of what I loved when I was young. I realize that this is largely a function of my own perception, but there it is.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Thursday, July 14, 2022 7:15 AM (three hours ago)

yeah ... I think there was actually a book (or a chapter in a book) that was one of those pop-science of music books that addressed this ... like, it cited scientific evidence for this phenomenon. We definitely had a thread about it, where, we determined that many ilxors are atypical in terms of music listening and appreciation!

Bay Area represent

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Thursday, July 14, 2022 9:59 AM (forty minutes ago)

hey, I am still low-key trying to find a store that sells E-40s ice cream so I can try it and report back 2 u.

Buddy Bolden to thread!

a pedant writes: there was commercially released music a decade before Bolden's heyday, and always rumours that he even recorded some himself.

or me it's always been just as much worrying about the possibility of them falling off

Indeed. Check out let's discuss New Order's 'Republic'

I am on record as a person who enjoys Mozart, even though I was too young to appreciate his dope-ass trax when they were first released.

all the cultural and sub-cultural wars have been fought so I don't need to worry about any of that crap.

Good point that I don't think anyone else has brought up. Like the way the squareness of the Monkees (as compared to, say, the Rolling Stones) flattens out after so many years. I think about that often. Ultimately I feel like old music just keeps attracting new cultural baggage all the time, and it evolves and changes but you can never really escape this.

I don't honestly know how anyone could seriously answer "no" to the literal question, as phrased in the OP. If one person exists who enjoys music made before their borth as much as contemporary music, the answer is "yes". Fun springboard for conversation, though.

Right but there's some fuzziness about the wording of the question vs. the intent of the question:

i've seen some sentiments (not here) that a 13 year old in 2022 isn't able to appreciate kate bush on the same level that someone who bought hounds of love in 1985 did.

Like, it honestly didn't occur to me that the thread premise might have anything to do with this initially (i know, duh). And it seems like what's at issue here might be ownership rather than enthusiasm, in which case the correct answer is def still "yes". It's like telling someone who just moved to Corona that Flushing Meadows Park doesn't truly belong to you because you missed the '64 Worlds' Fair, or something. Like, you still get to say "This is where I live" or even "This is part of what defines who I am", you inhabit that space. Those structures weren't designed to become monuments, you know, they were meant to be used briefly and then demolished or forgotten, but they're still there & part of your immediate landscape, of course they belong to you.

that's a good point ... also, it brings up the issue of the contextual changes that history could produce. Like, ok, fuck it, it's Leo season, I will refer y'all back to my very clever post about Schubert's use in The Hunger, where someone hearing that Schubert piece when it was "initially released" was not going to associate it with sexy goth vampire movie, The Hunger. Like, the nature of the "thing" that one has ownership of (in terms of identity formation) is different, just as Flushing Meadow Park has become a different "thing" over time.

To me the answer is a resounding yes: one can enjoy *music* as deeply--and probably more broadly--post-facto, as anyone did at the time of its release. What one probably can't enjoy to the same degree as those who "were there," is the cultural, temporal, and geographical context of said music. Whether those things are crucial to an enjoymebt (or "understanding") of music, or auxiliary, is up for debate.

But I feel, as someone born in 1980 who owns several thousand albums released before I was born, that part of what is so wonderful about music is that it can speak to you even if it's creation is wholly removed from your time and place. The emotions, the feeling, the sounds themselves can hit you, transcending time and place. This fact can get misunderstood and misshapen into appropriation, denial of origination and innovation, etc. But it can also lead to continuity and evolution within w living culture; and meaningful communication between cultures and across time.

Plenty of music from the past (and/or from places I haven't lived) has inspired me to learn more about its creators, and their context. But I view that as a meaningful but secondary facet of enjoyment of music to body/heart/mind engagement with the sounds of the music itself.

That said, "enjoyment of" and true "knowledge of" may be separate things. The fact that I can engage (even in great quantity and depth) music from times/cultures other than my own in personally meaningful ways, and even recommend/advocate others to do the same, doesn't mean I then necessarily have anything real to *say about* said music, particularly in terms of its cultural significance, the motivations or intentions of its creators, etc. It's a big reason my listening lead me to making many mixes, and increasingly to wanting to just let the music therein speak for itself; and away from any semblance of being a critic or a music author. Even in saying nothing, there is a risk of making sonic connections between music from my removed vantage point that might not appeal to its creators. The act of making a mix, I sometimes fear, implies "authority," rather than just the "deep enjoyment" that I feel motivates me.

The perspective of time (especially in the internet era and reissue/post-blog era) probably affords us a breadth of knowledge few to none would have at the time and place of a musical movement. For example, it's hugely unlikely I would've known the hundreds of artists and records I was able to hunt down for the '1981' poat-punk box set (not before I was born, bit I was in diapers in that year) if I'd been the right age to be culturally engaged in some local variant of the post-punk scene in 1981. My enthusiasm in the early 2000s for this music of the late 70s/early 80s was off-the-charts obsessive, and must've been evident and disarming to those I encountered who had "been there," as I got very few "what does this baby think he's doing plumbing the depths of *my* music".

(Conversely, I was so enthusiastic about that music "before my time" because I was so acutely disappointed by and disconnected from the music of my "time and place" in the early 2000s, to which I refused to be obligated to listen or pretend had any importance to me. I was very anti-time-and-place for a decade or so, feeling the opposite of the excitement older friends described about the musical (sub)culture of their youth.)

So in short--I don't see how there can be any doubt we can match the enthusiasm for music out-of-time of those who were there; and if anything, we can probably get more breadth-and-deoth obsessive. But that comes with a lot of caveats about how separable or not music-qua-music is from "the lived-and-breathed cultural, historical, and personal context of its creation". And I think there's probably something real--and potentially essential--that a time/place outsider can never experience or know about "non-first-hand" music, and therefore probably a certain humility we have to have in whwt we say about said music, a deference to rhose who were there and especially those who made the music. But music ultimately is transcendent, and there's nothing walling it off in time and space, when approached it with open ears in good faith.

(Please pardon any typos or lack of pith in this post, written in a time and place of insomnia on a phone.)

Great post Soundslike.

It's not often I get to experience music oblivious to when it came from but first time I heard Silver Apples "Oscillations", I assumed they were an 00s retro band and was pretty stunned to learn they were from the 60s.

I've been thinking about how people said so many old bands legacies are solidified despite many of them still being active. They can still destroy their image like Rolf Harris, their level of popularity is never settled, new associations can happen but it seems like their music is unlikely to evolve, innovate or have the same impact again, with few exceptions?

I was surprised recently to see someone get upset about the popularity of a current C-list rock band because I can't imagine why it seems that consequential to anyone now.

Please pardon any typos

“poat-punk” is unforgivable

Lol

I've been thinking about how people said so many old bands legacies are solidified despite many of them still being active. They can still destroy their image like Rolf Harris, their level of popularity is never settled, new associations can happen but it seems like their music is unlikely to evolve, innovate or have the same impact again, with few exceptions?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, July 30, 2022 5:35 AM

tangentially related? Instances where you can't separate the art from the artist. vs. instances where you can.

also yes re:silver apples. that stuff rules.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I voted.

Didn't have to think very long for some reason.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow, surprisingly one-sided result. I thought "Yes" would win, but not by that much.

Not that surprising.

It surprised me.

Pretty obvious when you think about classical music in this context.

It’s basically some kind of very narrow essentialist view of art that I imagine very few people here would hold. And it seems easy to come up with counterexamples like the one you just mentioned.

How would we know? Some kind of time travel experiment? I guess we can examine our own experience. Music that was made at certain earlier part of my life might have certain particular emotional associations but I wouldn’t say I enjoy it more than music made before I was born or that people who were born after that music was made can’t understand what it really means because they weren’t there, man.

The thought of classical music crossed my mind in the context of this thread. I listen to a ton of "classical" (however you want to define that). It's a rare experience indeed where I have the kind of emotional response to a classical work that I do to, say, "Blue Monday." This is largely down to association, but also raises the question what we mean by "enjoyment." Most classical (or, let's broaden it, "serious") music engages my brain much more fully than does the pop music of my youth, which I still love beyond reason. It's a qualitatively different form of enjoyment.

The original question seems to me a variant of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw-TVrR8wZc