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?

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.

Captain Save-a-Cone?

I think they are sold just as pints tbh ...

Marinatin on the corner with ice cream in his cone
You can tell that the hillside was his home
Mo' sprinkles than the rest of the pushers
Cause he got a chop suey in the bushes

seriously though, if there isn't interest in the quality of E-40s ice cream, I will totally stop posting about it

no plz post about it!

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!

― sarahell, Thursday, July 14, 2022 12:40 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

fwiw I've stumbled upon old RYM reviews I wrote like 15 years ago and realized there was so much I was underrating back then, stuff I thought was crap that I'm very much digging now. I think I dig music in general more than I did back then, or maybe I've just become a better listener. but yeah some magic is gone, like whatever it was that made me put song lyrics as my MSN display name or talk about Aphex Twin like he was some sort of cosmic god. maybe that's a good thing.

^I can relate these points. Also, I feel like I'm every bit as enthusiastic about the new music I love today, as I was about the new music I loved in my teens/20s... the thing is, the new stuff I love now tends to mostly be on the poppier side of the spectrum, which feels "out of sync" with my age (and can leads to some awkwardness in a social context, lol).

I think part of that is getting over yourself somewhat (I was 25 before I could admit that the Backstreet Boys made some damn good singles), part is kind of a natural process. I play poker with a bunch of mid-30s guys and sometimes I get the impression that none of them have heard a single thing recorded after like 2012

Something Else About Me (relevant to this thread) is that while I went thru a deep period in my 20s/early 30s of exploring older music, feeling out the edges of my taste profile, etc... now I very rarely do that. From time to time, I'll check out something old that I've never heard ("How are the Lovin' Spoonful albums?," etc.); but besides a song here & there, nothing really makes a strong impression or inspires me to dig deeper / keep listening. I'm happy to just keep up with new music, even though not a lot of it "hits" for me? Not sure why.

"deep period in my 20s/early 30s of exploring older music"

I did this too - I hit my late 20s and both pop and underground music took a swerve where I could sense my heyday was over, and the years 1997-2001 are a sinkhole for what was new then. Grunge was dead, couldn't fathom Spice Girls and Puff Daddy and Creed, nor Tortoise or math rock. I took deep dives into jazz and country, building off all those retro end-of-the-century things going on anyways.

Then napster, returning to college radio DJ'ing and record reviewing hooked me back into new music that I liked a lot. Also the twenty-year-revival cycle brought new post-punk and electroclash and that made new music feel more familiar.

Is this a pattern other ILXors have gone through at that age?

Late 20s/early 30s was one of the times when I was most enthusiastic about new music, far more than most of my adolescence - I was very excited about newer developments in black and doom metal and a lot of then-current IDM, modern jazz guitar, proggy stuff like Battles and Tzadik/modern creative improv stuff.

seriously though, if there isn't interest in the quality of E-40s ice cream, I will totally stop posting about it

― sarahell

is it laced with entheogens? please tell me it's laced with entheogens. lie if you have to.

I’m a little underwhelmed by the generic-ness of the flavor selection

I am also much fonder of the "pop hits" of the mid-70s than I was in the mid-70s. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

"deep period in my 20s/early 30s of exploring older music"

i worked in commercial radio in my late teens/early 20s and so I was very focused on contemporary music at that time. when I left "the industry" I swear I spent two solid years only listening to music made between 1976 - 1982 (i.e. at least 15 years old at the time) with the exception of Tom Waits (lol).

I guess the place I'm coming to in re this question is that I grew up in the 80s and remember all those popular movies featuring soundtracks of 50s and 60s music (e.g. La Bamba, Dirty Dancing), which would then get played on the top 40 radio station along with new music (iirc). I feel like the nature of your exposure to music, the context in which you hear it regularly, also figures into this notion of "contemporary" ... vs. say, when I was in my mid-20s and I searched the discount bins of used record stores for punk / post-punk / weirdo albums with a (c)1978 on the back.

I also think about being a kid (let's say 14 years old) and being part of a friend group that collectively gets into an older band the same way other kids would get into new bands. There were the trendy kids that liked NKOTB, the FFA kids that liked Garth Brooks, the stoner kids that liked Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, the theater kids that liked the Beatles, my handful of weirdo friends that liked The Cure and The Smiths ... but like, in a way, the culture of discovery/enthusiasm was similar? idk ...

I just remember when we found the import version of The Cure's Three Imaginary Boys at the nearest record store (which was about 10 miles away and was partly a head shop), and it was like, the same excitement of a new release.

technically we had all been born when this album came out but we were between the ages of 2 and 4, so ... kinda equivalent?

Not all of us were that young lol

Not all of us were that young lol

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Thursday, July 14, 2022 2:04 PM (one minute ago)

i bow down jim

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