I don’t mean to say that there isn’t great music around today, or that there aren’t bands that would have scared my parents even worse than hardcore did (hello Deicide) it’s just that there hasn’t been much of a paradigm shift in popular music that’s noticable enough to “change the future of rock and roll”. I’ve yet to hear the “new music” for the times we live in. Someone will come and just lay waste to convention, they just haven’t arrived yet.
Yeah, gotta love it how the biggest musical innovation of the last generation gets completely ignored. But I don’t want to turn this into another hip-hop thread.
Anyhow, each generation should have their own music. And each earlier generation should think the current generation’s musical tastes are lacking. That’s just the way it should be.
It’s weird, though, because the older I get, the more I appreciate current music.
Biggest musical innovation? :dubious:
Perhaps you meant “best selling”?
I generally classify music as something played by people on instruments. 808 drum machines, record players and samples of *other people’s * music are hardly instruments, although I suppose the mouth of a rapper is the only instrument necessary, even if it mostly spews garbage that happens to rhyme.
You’re entitled to your own opinion.
Amen.
My kids were raised on Beatles,Hendrix, Clapton, Grateful Dead, Stones,Springsteen,Dylan, Neil Young, Warren Zevon, Police, Red Hot Chili Peppers–with Coltrane, Pogues, Chieftains,Glen Miller, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Los Lobos, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and others thrown in.
They sat in their car seats or high chairs and soaked it up.
Now they’re grown. They come home and turn me on to all kinds of new stuff, and I absolutely love it.
However, it’s interesting to see what influences some of the new stuff, such as the band Beirut.
Nah. I wonder if you’re defining the way things “should be” buy the odd sociological and technological experiment that has been the last ~125 years. While there were certainly shifts in music before 1880, they weren’t so divisive, were they? I find it hard to imagine that a parent who grew up listening to William Byrd would be outraged when their kid got all into this new shocking Vivaldi fellow. But IANAMusic Historian.
My Dad and I have some similar musical tastes- we both like The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd- and, to a lesser extent, Led Zeppelin- but he’s very fond of the Beatles for nostalgic reasons (I’m pretty “Meh” on most of the Beatles stuff, to be honest).
My brother started listening to ultra-hardcore Metal/Industrial/That sort of thing music to annoy my parents, and failed spectacularly- they just smile pleasantly when he’s blasting Du Hast out of the stereo, and drive him from the room with The Moody Blues or something like that. It’s quite funny to watch, actually. 
I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t listen to older music. I mean, I was always about 20 years behind modern music until late high school (and, frankly, until Nirvana and grunge exploded, most of the white kids in my all-boys high school listened to either 70s classic rock or 80s classic metal.)
However, I just feel each generation should have a pop culture to call their own. It’s just kind of nice to have your own slice of musical history.
Guitar Hero is the main reason a lot of classics are becoming popular again.
Interesting thread. I certainly see all the kids around me picking up on the older bands. But I have a hypothesis about what is going on: Music is no longer the thing that kids use to rebel from their parents - the Internet is.
Rock music up through the grunge era, and rap/hip-hop from it’s inception - they were all about rebelling and come up with noise that pissed your parents off - the fact that some of it was really great noise made it that much cooler. But now, folks like me - who love that music and still actively engage it - ARE the parents. My kids can’t rebel against me over music. And if someone thinks Animal Collective or Deerhoof would ever have the rebellious impact of Dylan or the Beatles in a generational way…well, it ain’t gonna happen.
But the Internet - ah, there you. They do stuff in Myspace I don’t understand, don’t want to understand and don’t have time for - and it scares me! I exaggerate a bit, but you see where I am going - I think the web is the new rock / hip hop / source of generational separation…
So, since the internet is where the rebellion is, we can unite over cool music!
It’s all good.
Ah, “just kind of nice” I’ll buy. It’s the word “should” that brings out my username in me! Me, I like intergenerational communication and living. I really don’t like the “teenager” category we’ve created and the mythos of the terrible time you’ll have with your teenager because you can’t relate anymore (and now we’ve added “tweens” just to make things more divided. Ugh.) I *like *that my kids and I like the same music - makes long car rides much more tolerable!
ETA: Ooh, I think WordMan’s onto something. I can’t fathom safely meeting and dating people on the internet. (Individuals, Dopefests don’t count.) While there are people my age and older that do it, I still hold a “danger” flag to it that my kids just don’t. Plus, the LANGUAGE they use to one another in their comments and bulletins! Dire insults used as terms of affection! I don’t get how, “Fuck off, you cocksucking bitch! Go swallow another gallon of cum, you cunt!” is something you say in good jest.
It’s been that way in “popular” music going much further back than the '70s.
If you go by just the greatest hits compilations and/or what most radio stations were playing in virtually any era, it’s easy to conclude that past (or present) generations were inexplicably drawn to ear-wrenching garbage. There’s always been underground, non-mass sanitized music worth listening to. I’m still discovering stuff from “my era”. For instance, how could I not have known about NRBQ? A terrific group which apparently never got much beyond a cult following.
No! I went to high school in the mid '90s and I believe that great music was born in the '50s, came to fruition in the '60s, declined in the '70s, and died in the '80s (with a brief gasp for life in the early '90s). I listened to the Beatles and Hendrix when I was a teen, and I still listen to them now. The music that was made when I was in high school and college was 90% crap.
Wordman is absolutely right about the internet thing. That’s the real front of teenage rebellion right now. In fifteen years, kids who are teenagers now are going to be wondering why their kids don’t have any trailblazing websites like they had in their time. You know, Facebook, Myspace, Google, etc…
Kids now aren’t really using music to define their rebellion from their parents like kids in the 60’s did, because they don’t need to. It’s not really a failing on the part of modern pop music that it isn’t fitting into a 1960’s paradigm of what we think the relationship between pop music and teenagers should be.
At any rate, I think it’s pretty silly to say that kids today are being drawn, en masse, to older music because the 00’s are a black hole of musical creativity. You may not like stuff like “My Humps” and “Low”, but it’s definitely different from stuff that was popular in the 90’s. Kids who are teenagers now are going to look at the music their kids are listening to in fifteen years and wonder why none of the aritsts they like are as creative or talented as Lil’ Wayne, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, Fallout Boy, Panic! At the Disco, Green Day, etc…
But none of those artists (perhaps Green Day aside, perhaps) are that talented, so onward marches the decline in taste and quality.
I definetely think you guys are onto something. There’s no doubt places like MySpace are addicting to teens (hell, some even die for it) and are a little awkward for adults.
I also wanted to add that in terms of music and the internet, there’s just so much more content out there now than ever before, too. So much accessability. Maybe that waters down interest in utilizing music as a rebellion tool because most adults alive right now with teenaged kids have pretty much been there, done that with musical rebellion and it’s a played-out avenue. Other than some really bad death metal or really bad gangsta rap, how much more explicit can music get? It’s been done ad nauseum, the shark’s been jumped.
Modern teens, we are not outraged by your music!
shakes fist
And as someone else posited, now that that’s been played out, searching for “real music” becomes more of a priority, and classic rock has withstood the test of time.
I think that’s definitely true. Kids aren’t stupid. They know what kind of stuff their parents listened to in the 80’s. By and large, they aren’t going to try and shock them because they know that nothing is going to be that shocking (although you do still tend to hear a lot about young girls and hip-hop fashion).
See, I think this is a somewhat misleading way of putting things. It’s not that classic rock has stood the test of time, so much. After all, we’re defining “classic rock” here as everything from the early 60’s to the late 80’s.
I think it’s just that as time goes on we tend to separate the bad stuff from the good stuff in any given generation, and leave the bad stuff behind. Kids who listen to music from the 70’s now are listening to the good music from the 70’s, not just 70’s music in general. We’re already starting to see teenagers discover the music of the early 90’s, and when they do, it’s the good music from the 90’s - the Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Biggie. Creed and 2 Live Crew? Not so much.
Likewise, in fifteen years I doubt kids will be going back to listen to Flo Rida and Fergie. But I have no doubt that they’ll be going back to listen to the good stuff from the 00’s - the Kanye, Lil’ Wayne, and Eminem along with indie stuff like The Shins, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, etc…
This kind of thing also tends to be pretty genre-dependent. You don’t really see kids seeking out dance or straight-up pop music from previous generations, for example; I don’t really see anyone ditching Rihanna for 70’s disco.
Excellent point. I don’t see a lot of kids today tripping out on the acid rock stylings of Helen Reddy very often.
My kiddos grew up listening to Alice Cooper (youngest is still a fan), Weird Al (oldest is still a fan), Meatloaf, Quiet Riot, Whitesnake, Armored Saint, Dio, Black Sabbath to name a few - and throw in some Stevie Nicks, Prince, Fleetwood, and Journey to tone it down some…
Then to kick it back up there was The Dead Kennedys, Clash, Ramones, etc. I had a large appreciation for the various music genre.
Now, you turn on the radio to such crap as ‘Alcohol and Ass’. At least Prince used creative metaphors (do kids even know what a metaphor is nowadays?).
Time to break out my vinyl records again…
To be fair the song in question is Alcohaulin Ass by Hellyeah, the sad bastard child of Vinnie Paul of Pantera and a cadre of questionable guys from other bands such as Mudvayne, so there is at least a shadow of a metaphor.