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?

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