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?

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

i was recently at a festival with a friend who was talking to this random guy, and we were talking about Throbbing Gristle, and the guy was talking about the legendary show at the Kezar Stadium which the random guy had not attended, and my friend said that he had gone to the LA show which was also a bit legendary, and the guy asked my friend why he didn't drive up to SF and see the Kezar show, and my friend said, "It was a school night and I was 17 and I think I had a test the next day?"

So I am envious of people older than me who got to see stuff I was to young to be able to experience.

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?

I like this point... it reminds me of how I first learned about Led Zep and Keith Moon from a girl in middle school who was really into that stuff (she was too young to be a "stoner" yet, but I think she ended up aligning w/that crowd in high school).

My instinctive feeling on this subject is no, you had to be there. The best musicians are either responding to what's happening culturally or emotionally in the world at that moment, or pushing the state of the art forward in progressive ways to do something new, or ideally both like Dylan/Hendrix/Beatles/Stones in the 60s, punk and postpunk in the 70s, hip hop and shoegaze in the 90s, etc, and being there at that moment, you are the ideal audience for the new sounds, and the references to other art are in your mind the same as the artists making the new sounds.

But there are a lot of valid arguments against this. Archival albums that were recorded in the 70s but not released til now can be more powerful now than they probably sounded to people back then, because they capture a sort of lost snapshot feeling like a book of weird old sepia photographs.

There definitely seem to be records that were ahead of their time and found a new audience later, either misunderstood in their time like Trans or Flowers of Romance, or just showing up in sharper relief in hindsight after getting reissued like as-good-as-early-REM sides by The Embarrassment, or fans of boundary pushing music finally being able to appreciate 40s and 50s gospel and country records once enough time has passed and they start to sound fresh instead of conservative.

I think Running Up That Hill sounded more like a lot of other 1985 songs when it was on the radio in the 80s; it was still top tier then, but you can imagine it on a radio station or mix tape next to a Voices Carry, How Soon Is Now, San Jacinto, Shake the Disease, and so on, and it isn't as much a breath of fresh air as it is now. Sort of like how Bohemian Rhapsody was as fresh in 1991 when it became a bigger hit in the US than in the 70s, with a movie recontextualization that made its fusion of absurd comedy and bombast more intelligible.

The thread title makes me titter a little bit, seeing as “contemporary music” has usually meant “new chamber music”, and there is no situation where new chamber music has been given the same attention and enthusiasm as the works of dead masters

* usually meant, in my purview, that is

i wrestled with that fgti. i first thought about specifying contemporary POP music, but changed my mind about a second later. because for me of course, the idea extends to all styles of music.

i get what you mean tho.

another day of great discussion, all. thank you.

there is no situation where new chamber music has been given the same attention and enthusiasm as the works of dead masters

The 18th century perhaps?

(I had a similar thought about 'new music'/'contemporary music'.)

how many aristocrats at any given were really enthusiastic about chamber music vs how many

malformed post

basically were people really passionate about haydn string quartets at the time?

I guess some people must have been. I'm sure they heard them differently from how the later great masters ideologues heard them or how I might hear them depending now on the context in which I encounter them

I can get excited about charlie parker but it's not the same as the excitement of that moment, because of my distance from that social movement I can never really know what it meant in that context I can only project my own meanings onto things which sound cool which may be some of the same things which sounded cool back then but probably had very specific social meanings. neither way is intrinsically better or worse but in some sense I feel that music should be social, because it feels nice to be part of something exciting within a community. even though bebop was probably socially as much as sonically alienating for more people than not so it's a complicated example

How many times would even an aristocrat had a chance to hear a particular string quartet or staging of an opera? Four times in a lifetime? Twenty? Music before mass produced parlor pianos and Victrolas was a completely different context of appreciation AFAIK.

No one went to the opera to hear the music

Based solely on personal history, an easy "yes" for me. My cutoff date, 1961, opens the question up to all the early rock and roll and doo-wop, and I have felt some of that as deeply as anything from my lifetime. The question is confused somewhat--maybe this is addressed in previous comments--by the difference between hearing music before you were born and hearing music released during your lifetime but hearing it for the first time years later. Is there a difference?

Mozart was enthusiastic about Haydn's string quartets.

There's nothing else like release date anticipation when you have a plan to physically buy something you haven't heard before.

There's also nothing quite like the feeling of abundant fresh dopeness, the more overwhelming the better. A moment arrives when there's suddenly a LOT of really good new music all at once. For some reason it does hit me harder when it arrives with a multitude of shared experiences, like hearing it on the radio, or on friends' mixes or playlists, or on a video show like 120 Minutes, or just heard out in the world while experiencing life.

I guess for me, the experience isn't that dissimilar from when I would discover 8 or 9 albums from the 70s or from some list or blog and burn them onto a CDR or throw together an 80s mix of songs that were somewhat new to me. This is also exciting, but the lack of shared experience makes a big difference.

"You had to be there" seems about right. I was probably most immersed in first-listen-Beatles around age 10-11, freshly hearing lots of stuff from different eras all at once.

As fun as that was, I honestly don't think it can compare to bringing home a new record and hearing "Taxman" "She Said She Said" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" for the first time on the same day as several million other people.

in some sense I feel that music should be social, because it feels nice to be part of something exciting within a community.

It's interesting to think about at what point in history did music start being made for non-social contexts ... it feels like it was relatively recently

"hearing music before you were born"

In the womb? As is probably evident, I meant to say "hearing music from before you were born"...

like, how recently was it that music could be made by one person only for the primary purpose of being listened to be a person in solitude? Like, the act of creation / conditions of production (sorry Left inspired me) of music was inherently social for a very long time.

*listened to by a person in solitude not listened to be

For most of human history music was not merely social, but seems to have had ritualistic, spiritual or utilitarian functions (like work chants).

This whole discussion makes me think of a response to Rolling Stone's list of top rap albums that was published on Stereogum: that one can't reduce rap to a list of albums to be consumed when what's important is the entire culture that it derives from and reflects.

Put it this way.

We've all been to small one-room clubs that are a bit run down but a good vibe etc, watching a band go over well, followed by another one and a bit of a disco Inbetween.

So, we can imagine being down the 100 club and it's Sex Pistols supported by Subway Sect, let's say.

Now, a lot of people would sell their first born to be able to go back in time and be there. Only to find it's less whelming than they thought...

Case in point: first time we visited NY, I thought should we go down to CBGBs?
No, I decided. Crummy room by all accounts, see a band that's merely ok maybe, come away thinking we'd rather have done xxx that evening.
And then that band become world famous and now it's hey I saw them in NY nobody knew who they were etc...

My point being, um..

On the one full day I spent in New York City, I took a highly abbreviated Rock 'n' Roll walking tour which consisted of strolling past CBGBs on the opposite side of the street, seeing the Dakota from Central Park and checking out Great Jones Street in honour of DeLillo's novel. That very slight experience was enough to give me just enough extra context to feel I've got some connection when I hear or read about those places.

My point being that the human imagination can run with very little stimulus, not that walking past a building once in 2000 is equivalent to going there 200 nights a year in the mid-70s.

the human imagination can run with very little stimulus

ILX being a case in point.

definitely. I’m playing Grace Jones’ “The Apple Stretching” right now thanx to your post

There are musicians that as kids got obsessed with certain types of music and then made the leap to learning to play it that are often in styles long past their lives. My thoughts would be like people that pick up learning traditional say fiddle music or folk or jazz or even classical music.