Yesterday I saw a group of high schoolers, I don’t know the correct terminology for teen styles, but if I had to characterize it, I’d say they were all dressed “Hot Topic Lite.” Not hardcore, just lite.
They were listening to music. The songs I heard play were:
What is love? (You know… the one that goes “Baby, don’t hurt me…”)
A Linkin Park song
An old Red Hot Chili Peppers song (like from my own high school days so at least 10 years ago)
These kids weren’t being funny. This was just some of the music they liked, in a very straightforward sense.
To me, this was a completely weird combination of songs, made weirder by the way they were dressed.
However, as my Last.fm page shows, I don’t think I’m in any position to criticize anyone’s musical choices. You can’t deny that I’m pretty consistent, though.
I’ve certainly always had a pretty ‘odd’ mix of music that I like, even in high school, inclusive of various seemingly unrelated genres and of things that were popular way before I was born - and I certainly wasn’t the only one. At least in my experience, musical taste featuring varying genres from a range of music that went back typically at least as far as “stuff your parents might have listened to at your age”, whilst not a habit that everyone had, wasn’t weird at all. I noticed it in the CD/Mp3 collections of people my age and I recall it in our teenaged party soundtracks. My little sister confirms this was pretty normal among her friends too.
I still notice it now amongst my (completely different set of) friends when I go scrolling through their iPods.
I’m 24 now. Did previous generations do this less? Were my friends and I weird? I never really questioned it.
I think what you describe is typical from a historical perspective. Even though just about every generation seems to take to some particular muical style or subgenre that annoys and perplexes older people, in the end a lot of that is just around the edges of pop, rock, and R&B. The core musical esthetics don’t really seem to evolve that much, they just sort of go around in circles. Hip-hop may be particularly big for a couple of years, then come a spate of moody Nirvana-ish bands. Then it goes back to hip-hop, or something else. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing at all. If rock, or rap, or whatever favorite you have evolves too much, then it becomes something unrecognizable.
The baby-boomer generation was exceptional. The shift embodied by the change to rock and roll from what had come before it was unimaginably huge, and unlike anything before or since. We had absolutely no use for the popular music of our parents, as embodied by the so-called big bands, Broadway songs (which appear then not to have had any particular association with gays), or any of the easy-listening styles they seemed to favor. Some older styles of music, like ragtime, did make inroads, but that was only among piano playing enthusiasts, but apart from special cases like that, you’d have been hard pressed in 1976 to find a 20 year old who had any Glenn Miller or Patti Page albums in his or her record collection.
I’ve read that disco, too, was almost a completely original musical style, and from that there came modern dance music (my personal favorite genre, although ironically I don’t like dancing :p), electronica, and other branches that I can’t remember at the moment.
I dunno… maybe "Disco Duck" was completely original. Sort of.
My son’s fifteen; he wears bright fluorescent-colored things, to rebel against his mother’s punk-rock style with the black everything and all the skulls and whatnot.
Well, I wear collared Polo shirts and khaki pants not to rebel against anybody. And it was original in the sense that it combined the pop and soul music of the time with Caribbean-esque music in a way that hadn’t been done before. Obviously, someone wasn’t just hit on the head with a brick and started composing it, but it was pretty original as these things go.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: I don’t actually like disco music as such, though. My favorite subgenres of dance music are (:o) happy hardcore and bubblegum dance, which is completely unreflective of my personality, but so it goes.
Don’t look at me. My playlist, though a morass of Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Madonna, Mylène Farmer, tunes from “Rent,” etc., is interspersed with the likes of Great Big Sea, Leonard Cohen, Oysterband, and so forth. Who knows?
I still feel bad for this generation. They don’t have a music genre of their own, what’s left to do that will shock and scare we older folk? My generation had punk and metal and rap, the mighty three of scaring the shit out of parents and teachers. Todays kids have…punk, metal and rap. Until someone figures out what it is that will make their parents cringe instead of add it to their own I-Pods the youth of today will continue to be stuck jamming to the same crap that we did.
The OP would suggest that by embracing the greater access they have to myriad musical styles, both past and present, they can freak plenty of people out by ignoring expectations to stick to one particular trend or fashion, seeing no need for a ‘genre of their own’. Good for them
My middle daughter is 17. Her iPod features:
Lily Allen
Panic! At The Disco
Billy Joel
Queen
Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
Leathermouth (I think it’s all one word)
Adam Ant
Songs from Rent
Songs from Wicked
etc. etc. etc.
When she hears stuff she likes, she adds it to her playlist. When she sees clothes she likes, she wants them, whether they “fit in” with what’s cool, have become too common to be cool, are just ‘uncool’, whatever.
In other words, she likes what she likes. All of her friends seem to be of a (heh) ‘like’ mind!
I’ve just remembered a great line from the father-of-the-bride speech at a friend’s wedding: “You know you’re getting old when your kids start borrowing from your record collection.”
And it was original in the sense that it combined the pop and soul music of the time with Caribbean-esque music in a way that hadn’t been done before. Obviously, someone wasn’t just hit on the head with a brick and started composing it, but it was pretty original as these things go.
