Opinions on another generation's music

Cafe Society
41

Hmm. I missed most of the parade - was busy eating. Looking at the lineup…

I know Big Time Rush is a boyband because they had a show on Nickelodeon for a while, but I couldn’t name any of them or their songs.

I know Dionne Warwick, they play her every now and then on SXM Soul Town. She sings Bacharach songs. “Walk on By”, “Alfie”.

I know Ziggy Marley is Bob Marley’s son but I don’t listen to his music.

My opinion on another generation’s music? I do like me some older jazz and blues - the older, the more likely I can only access the music via streaming. Leroy Carr, Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, Albert Amons, Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five/Seven, the Duke, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, etc.

For radio music, I jump between SXM Soul Town, SXM Symphony Hall, SXM Real Jazz, SXM 40’s Junction, SXM Lithium, SXM Chill, and, if in range, WUCF Orlando 89.9 FM (jazz).

On the other hand my desert island song would be the Concerto for Two Violins in Dm (BWV 1043).

It is said that you vote with your dollars, and last year I moved to a city that actually has record stores. So here is some of the music I bought last year… probably about $30 in purchases.

Rock

Led Zeppelin. There isn’t a title but the internet tells me it’s their fourth studio album (“Black Dog”, “Rock and Roll”, etc). 1971.

Dire Straits. 1978.

Stoned Immaculate: The Music of the Doors. Stone Tempe Pilots, Smash Mouth, Aerosmith, Bo Diddley, and more covering The Doors. 2000.

Jazz

Charlie Parker: The Gold Collection, 40 songs from I’m guessing the '40s and '50s.

The Best of Duke Ellington from the CBS Special Products catalog, songs recorded in the '50s and '60s.

Oscar Peterson Plays Count Basie. 1956.

R&B/Soul

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by Ray Charles. 1962.

Donny Hathaway Live. 1972.

Blue Lights in the Basement by Roberta Flack. 1977.

Classical

Sergio Tiempo plays Chopin Pianoconcerto no. 1.

My favorite of those would be… either Stoned Immaculate or Hathaway.

~Max, age 26
either one of the youngest Millennials or one of the oldest from Gen Z

42

I think “brostep” style dubstep to a 1999 audience would be exactly the equivalent of Van Halen in 1955. Hands-over-ears-scream-face and everything.

~Max

43

Sorry for the triplepost.
Here’s an example if you want your ears to bleed.

~Max

44

I’m 36, and for most of my life I thought my OWN generation’s music sucked. In high school in the early 2000s I was listening to the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, Yes, and Steely Dan. I distinctly remember one time I was on the school bus with my Discman listening to “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat and Tears, and a friend asked what I was listening to, I handed him my headphones and he went “what is this shit?!!” My musical tastes had been pretty much directly inhereted from my parents and that was the only music I was into.

The whole pop-punk phase totally went over my head, I never owned a Blink 182 or Good Charlotte album in my life. I liked a few Marilyn Manson and Eminem songs for the shock value, but that was it. It wasn’t until college that I even started listening to bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer, and by then - 2005 - they were almost considered has-beens.

In college, I got into stuff like Pavement and Sonic Youth and The Replacements - again, music that had been recorded decades earlier, but still had cool cred for aspiring rock musicians, of which I was one. But the Beatles, the Dead, Zeppelin, The Band and Dylan, all that was still very much my group’s music. At that time, the general consensus with us was “everything out now SUCKS.”

I will grant that I am an anomaly. And none of this, by the way, was done as edgelord posturing. I just wasn’t into the stuff coming out. Didn’t like The Strokes or the White Stripes or Franz Ferdinand or any of that. Thought OutKast peaked with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (and I didn’t even get into that until a few years after it was realeased). Post-college, from 2010 into the next few years of that decade, there was a big fad of what we called “stomp-clap-hey” music - The Lumineers, Mumford & Sons - I hated that shit. Hated it with a passion.

Then one day in 2015, I was driving in a rented pickup truck in rural Nova Scotia of all places, and it had Sirius XM. I tuned into a station called “Jam On”, and a watershed moment took place as I heard for the first time, something that blew my mind: Vulfpeck. Specifically, the song was “Wait For The Moment”.

From this point on, I tracked down everything else by Vulfpeck and quickly realized, THERE IS GOOD MUSIC COMING OUT, right NOW! A few years later by sheer luck I found myself playing bass in a band - a band that actually took itself seriously, not a “get fucked up and jam mindlessly” band - and the contemporary music that the serious musicians my age were listening to started rubbing off on me.

The Marias, White Denim, Toro y Moi, Idles, Alex G, Polyphia, most recently Wet Leg - there’s KILLER MUSIC made right now by people my age and even younger! I think it took a while to happen, and still stand by the assessment that 2000 to 2010 was not a great time for music and that the real “renaissance” didn’t happen until around 2015.

45

I know we’ve focused on rock and pop thus far, but what about country music? I’m of the opinion that they pretty much stopped creating country music around 25 years ago. The ‘golden age’ of country in my opinion was probably the 50’s through the 60’s. Some really great stuff was recorded afterwards, but the well really started to dry up during the late 80s and only got worse.

It’s worth noting that Ken Burns’ country music documentary stopped with 1996 and went no further than Garth Brooks. That was the right call. What new twists on country have emerged since then…‘bro country?’ I think not.

46

Ehh, most of that style that isn’t the commercial country music market is now classified under “Americana”.

47

In It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the hero of the book, 60-year-old newspaper editor Doremus Jessup turns off the radio in disgust when a nauseatingly saccharine all-male vocal group called “The Smoothies” starts singing their latest hit.

I’ll readily agree that most of the current pop that pervades stores and restaurants is vapid crap, but not that much worse than the '70s greasy listening that’s all too common.

48

This sort of statement makes me wonder if folks have listened to music since 2000… the trap music boom has influenced rap to such a degree to make it very indistinguishable from the pre-2000 ‘gansta’ style. I also think anyone in the 1990s would quickly notice how EDM has infiltrated almost every single genre.

And while it was gaining steam in the 90s, I do think a lot of listeners would have been shocked by how ubiquitous hip-hop is today. Mainstream music is basically pop and hip-hop, and even pop has been greatly influenced by hip-hop.

49

Those are the gradual evolutions I’m talking about. It’s not at all like someone who grew up on Bill Haley and the Comets being exposed to The Beatles. Or the kids who grew up on The Beatles learning about the Bee Gees. And then people who grew up on The Bee Gees hearing Madonna or Michael Jackson. Then those kids having their style of pop change to the era in 1996-1998 dominated by the likes of Alanis Morrisette, Paula Vole, Shawn Colvin, Sheryl Crow, and Jewel. Finally in 1999 we had the rise of Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, NSync, and other similar artists and groups, and since then it seems the changes have been a lot more gradual. The same seems to apply to other genres as well, not just pop, with the 20th century seeing the invention of completely new genres like metal and rap, and in the 21st seeing mostly genres starting to blend together.

50

So aside from Bill Haley to the Beatles (early Beatles though…) a lot of those things seem like gradual evolutions to me. The Bee Gees isn’t that massive of a difference if you grew up listening to the late Beatles, Beach Boys, and Stevie Wonder. And if you listened to James Brown and Diana Ross (the later who fans of the Bee Gees would also probably listen to), Michael Jackson seems like a gradual evolution - though like the Beatles where he grew into was revolutionary though that was his being a singular talent.

If someone lived through them in their younger days I can see them going wow, what differences and changes… but that’s the same point I’m making in regards to current music.

Even 2010s Justin Timberlake sounds like a dramatically different artist than his N’Sync days, though.

51

My favorite is 80s/90s country. But that’s what I grew up on. George Straight, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Garth Brooks, Alabama. Very nostalgic for me. I really don’t care much for the older stuff, and not much of the newer stuff either.

52

That, or Alt Country, Oklahoma Red Dirt, Texas Country, etc… Pretty much anything that isn’t radio-station Nashville country is listed in some other genre like the ones that have been listed.

Hell, even someone like Willie Nelson wouldn’t be considered “country” these days, if he had just come out.

53

People still make older ‘Western’ style country music. Colter Wall is a recent example.

~Max

54

Am I the only one who has noticed a lot of modern country seems to be influenced by… Well, I’m guessing it would be R&B? Not that I’m a music expert or anything. But when I lived in Florida I listened to modern country on the radio for a straight year and I was struck by this tonal shift compared to the earlier stuff.

55

This and Bluegrass are the only sort of ‘real’ country music going on today.

56

Yeah, this kind of music charts better as Americana/Folk these days.

~Max

57

You know its entirely possible for popular music to…actually…suck. It doesn’t have to be a generational thing.

58

No, it isn’t. At least, it’s not possible for all of any genre of music to suck.

59

I think pop music has varied widely in terms of suckage throughout the decades. This is entirely my opinion but 70s were not at all to my taste, 80s is the best decade for pop music ever, 90s was a mixed bag, and in the late 90s, early 2000s nearly everything was abysmal. That was the era of Nickelback for God’s sake. It seems ever since the early 00s it has a been a mixed bag again. But I have not followed music nearly as closely since I did in college, and most of what I listen to is 90s or older.

60

Whatever genre this is…well…Ill let it speak for itself.

mmm…Shakespearean.