Just to add a personal note to this point of view, I want to clarify that my tastes and my mother’s were not and are not (she died in 1999) all that divergent. She and her siblings were all capable musicians and my earliest awareness of music was listening to her piano playing. I attribute a large part of my musical tastes to hers.
My father and his siblings were less musically inclined. I can’t recall any of them playing an instrument or having any great singing abilities. If I had to guess at their musical interests I’d be just guessing with little to go on. They never made much of an issue about music.
My children have shared my tastes for a large part and where theirs depart from mine it’s more a matter of degrees than huge steps.
In my own case I don’t feel as if I rebelled against the earlier generation. I just became aware of and appreciative of newer forms of expression. My own tastes have stagnated to the point that the more experimental and “avant garde” efforts have left me cold. Still, there are new artists and genres that I do like.
In short, I think that labeling musical tastes by generation is short-sighted. Wendell Wagner has said it well.
I have to say that I am all over the map with music because my parents never played it in our home. So my parents had a hard time dealing with their artsy musical daughter. I was more attracted to the music that my parents were ashamed of and that was my Grandparents music. The reels and the Irish songs from the old country were some how associated with being “poor irish”. I just loved watching the O’Connor clan have a good time but my folks were ashamed of it.
No, my folks never enjoyed the music they grew up with and I developed my own likes in music. My kids like everything from classical to folk music to rock, you name it because we always had music playing in our home. My kids are all over the map just like me. They both like a little Hootenanny like Iris Dement and can probably sing ‘Our Town’ word for word from memory of the folk show on NPR.
Does the ability of the younger generation to appreciate the music of the older generation really contribute to this “one shing moment”? Surely, there have been youth of every generation who have been able to appreciate the music of their parents, but the real key would be finding situations where the music of the younger generation is appreciated by the older generation.
Although kids today may like the Stones and the Who, do they embrace them as their own, or do they acknowledge and accept the talent present in an older generation? The biggest difference today may be that the older generation is still willing to embrace (and more importantly, spend money on) the music of their youth, thus allowing these artists and bands to exist continuously, rather than only uniting for “reunion tours.”
That’s not to say that E-Sabbath doesn’t have a point. In my experience, the does seem to be a tendency for the older generation (at 31, I consider myself at the upper end of the “younger” generation when it comes to music, but YMMV) to be accepting of newer music. Perhaps this is related to the longevity of the aritists of their generation. Whereas in the past, there have been an age at which people felt they were “old” and “out-of-touch”, there is increasingly the the opportunity for older generations to stay in touch with the current music scene. they may not like everything (who does?), but they may also not reject outright the music of new artists.
Thus, people who grew up with NWA may still be fans of Dr. Dre. While Dr. Dre may be an icon of an (slightly) older generation, he is also relevant to the current generation, and may be heavily involved in the careers of the upcoming generation. This creates opportunities for the older generation to connect to “current” music.
You have to remember, the TV show Hootenanny had been pretty well scrubbed of anyone controversial. Before it ever aired, it announced that neither Pete Seeger nor the Weavers would appear on the show. As a result, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott all announced they’d boycot the show.
There were lots of other the people you DIDN’T see: Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, & Mary, Phil Ochs, or the Kingston Trio for example.
Look at the following from wiki:
So the whole thing was pretty white bread. Hell, the show was hosted by Art Linkletter’s son, Jack, fercryin out loud. It’s not suprising that parents and kids could sit and enjoy the show together. It was Sing Along With Mitch with acoustic guitars!
Weren’t the two big shows back then Shindig and Hullabaloo? Plus, I think you could throw in Smothers Brothers Show in the mix as well, although they pushed the political envelope quite a bit.
These shows had some decent performers - I want to say Joan Baez and Judy Collins, Pete Seeger and their ilk?
To a certain extent, my parents would watch them as the music was a least somewhat recognizable from folk music perspective.
Lawrence Welk, however, made my skin crawl. It was the best way for my parents to get all three of us boys to flee to our rooms simply by turning on that show. Come to think of it, maybe that is why they liked it so much - to get us out of their hair for at least an hour!
Even though Hootenanny! ended in the same year Shindig debuted (April and September of 1964 respectively), the gap between them was huge, in that The Beatles hit in January of 1964 and changed everything. I can only imagine how irrelevant Hootenanny! must have seemed to any younger viewers it had managed to attract in its last three months or so.
Hullabaloo premiered in January 1965. Both it and Shindig are fascinating to watch today, because while there are some outstanding musical performances (when they aren’t lip-synched), the shows are still dressed up in cornball showbiz trappings that I have to believe most kids endured rather than enjoyed.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour didn’t come around until February of 1967, another cultural eternity away. For young, hip audiences, the entire package was now very definitely worth watching.
Although they had on folk and folk-rock acts, both “Shindig” and “Hullabaloo” featured nearly every type of music that was popular at the time. Also, “Shindig” and “Hullabaloo” were ABC’s and NBC’s respective responses to the tremendous ratings success CBS had with the Beatles’ appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show.
(And I see DChord568 pretty much got to the subject before I did.)
My teenage son recently said “Man, none of my favorite bands have all their members alive.” Who, Beatles, Led Zepplin.
And it goes both ways: he’s introduced me to some of my now-favorite bands: Vampire Weekend, Beirut, and the “Animal Bands”: Grizzly Bear, Octopus Project–an offshoot of Animal Collective.
BUT back in The Day, I hated my parents’ music, except for The Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte.
And in our suburban late-50’s/early 60’s culture (or lack thereof), ALL my parents’ friends had the same tastes. I’m not kidding. The same exact tastes.
And. The. Exact. Same. Records. I’d be playing at a friend’s house, and I knew I could open the faux-CapeCod-shuttered record cabinets (or the pseudo-Mediterranean “Entertainment Console”) and find:
3-4) Lawrence Welk albums
5-10) Easy Listening records, with almost-Muzak versions of previously popular songs
"Ebb Tide" by some generic strings “orchestra”* (I mean, really, what was with the ubiquity of this? I now see hundreds of them in used vinyl stores and Goodwills)*
2-3) Herb Alpert albums (and us kids would giggle over the “Whipped Cream” cover)
–and if more than 2 Tijuana Brass albums:
1-2) The Baja Marimba Band
2-6) “Light Folk” like PP&M, The Kingston Trio– no protest music, though
1-2) Stand-up comedy routines, including Bill Cosby’s “I started out as a child”
And, if they had a larger sense of humor:
The First Family (JFK parody by Vaughn Meader) or Bob Newhart. Not Lenny Bruce.
The Allen Sherman album with “Hello, Muddah, Hello, Faddah” on it.
This list was SO standard, with SO few deviations, that I could’ve bet money on it. And I do see these so often at garage sales and other used vinyl places, that my parents’ friends must be dying off right about now.
