Shocked? No, but only because I’ve come to grips with being old.
For a long time, I’ve caught myself saying things like “I went to Hawaii a few years ago,” then reflecting and realizing it wasn’t “a few years ago,” it was 15 years ago! Or I may say, “I saw ***Miss Saigon ***on Broadway a few years ago,” then realizing it was almost 20 years ago.
Time has flown. And this kind of thing happens with music, too. I sometimes think of a CD I bought in the Nineties music as recent, when it would strike any current teenager as ancient.
Another “different part of the 60s” surprise for me is Simon and Garfunkel, which I had assumed had started in the late 60s (1967 at the earliest), since the sound is so similar to 70s light folk-esque rock.
Those extra two years were a lifetime in music in the 60s. It also puts them way ahead of their time in influencing 70s music, since there were some inklings of 70s-style light rock in the late 60s but not so much in 1965.
Time is completely out of whack for me these days. I’m just looking through my iTunes collection now. More time has passed, in terms of calendar years, between Belle & Sebastian’s “Tigermilk” and now, than passed between Dylan’s “Blood On The Tracks” and “Tigermilk”.
That makes zero sense to me.
I think a big part of it is, as I mentioned, that the nineties are really still going, in terms of what sounds contemporary. But I also have the other problem that you mentioned. More time has passed between this or that trip that I took just recently and now, than the time making up the vast eternity of growth and adventures between my teens and that trip.
Apparently, time is out of joint. I wish someone would fix it.
Another weird thing, BTW, is realizing how old some of the performers I’ve had crushes on are now. Hope Sandoval is almost fifty?! How the hell is that even physically possible? What do you mean that this was more than twenty years ago?
Or, sometimes I come across an album that I like, and even the release date doesn’t clue me in, because my brain is so stupid that it parses everything beginning in “20–” as “just recently”. A little while back, I picked up Cat Powers’ The Covers Record. I know that she has been around for ages, but she hadn’t registered with me before. So, anyway, I look at some photos of her from around when it was released, and I think “wow, she’s quite the young hottie.” Then I see a more recent photo, and it turns out that she’s actually some middle aged lady. Because that album was made fifteen freaking years ago.
It’s not just in comparison to 90s-2000s music. If you go back to 1975, when modern rock really started to solidify, and then go back again the same time period, it’s 1935. So modern rock has been around two decades longer than rock and roll was when modern rock started to emerge out of protopunk and garage.
And look at when rock started to emerge from rock and roll – 1963. Then go back again and it’s 1911. People weren’t listening to very early jazz and tin pan alley in 1963 like they are 60s rock today.
Oh man, what a depressing thread this is. So many posters being utterly astonished that a song really came out 5 whole years earlier than they thought! :smack:
I swear I’ve taken naps longer than that. I am so fucking old.
No, I’m old too, and I have that same time-distortion thing of thinking something happened a couple of years ago and finding out it was actually a couple of decades ago. It’s noteworthy that the examples I gave were from my youth, at a time when a couple of years was still a significant fraction of my life, and it was also a time of rapid changes in music (and I was also much more clued into those changes).
I’m no expert on classical music, but I’ve gotten the impression that classical and Romantic composers tended to let their crazy-ass experimental side run loose in their solo piano works, which as a result, often sound more modern or ahead of their time than their symphonic stuff. I’ve noticed that for Beethoven and Liszt. Would anyone more knowledgeable of classical music care to weigh in on this?
A couple of years ago, while having lunch at Culver’s, I saw a teenaged couple sitting at another table. He was wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt; she was wearing a Bob Marley t-shirt. The first thing I thought was, “hey, they’re representing old-school music; that’s cool.” And, it’s not uncommon to see current teenagers listening to music that was popular when I was a teenager.
Then, I thought about it a bit.
They were wearing shirts for acts that had stopped creating new music (due to deaths) 30-35 years earlier. And, I thought about the fact that, 30-35 years earlier, I was their age. If the age 15 “me”, in 1980, had been wearing a t-shirt for a music act that was 30-35 years past their “prime”, I would have been wearing a shirt for, say, Benny Goodman or Les Paul. Which, at that time, just wouldn’t have happened. Those acts, and those styles of music, were something that I think very, very few teens in my generation would have ever even heard, much less listened to regularly or enjoyed.
I can think of a couple reasons why teens are more likely to listen to and wear shirts from old school bands. First, the generation gap in terms of musical tastes has narrowed considerably over the last 20 years. Second, the internet now puts 120 years of recorded music at your fingertips. You can easily access and listen to whatever type of music you want in the privacy of your own home.
From the same album–even the same side–as the track **scabpicker **mentioned. I’ve always interpreted side two of *Ege Bamyasi *- “Vitamin C,” “Soup,” “I’m So Green,” “Spoon”–as a conceptual suite on the subject of vegetable soup.
Absolutely. When I was discovering popular music in northeastern Wisconsin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my options for learning about artists and songs consisted of:
Four radio stations (two Top 40, one Top 40 Country, one AOR / metal)
FTFA, although the better known live recording is from '79, they had been playing it since 1975.
I always forget that a lot of The Cars “quintessential eighties” songs were actually recorded in the late '70’s, like “Good Times Roll”, “By Best Friend’s Girl”, “Just What I Needed”, “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight”, “Bye Bye Love”, “Moving In Stereo”, “Let’s Go”, “Candy-O”, and “Dangerous Type”.
I haven’t read the thread yet, so begging pardon if I got it wrong.
I was fooled completely by Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”. I first heard it playing on a jukebox in a bar. I thought I was listening to a catchy 60s girl group/ Phil Spector thing. Then I noticed that the singer was saying “rehab” and I realized I was mistaken. I had heard of the song, so then put 2 and 2 together.
