I am one of those old farts mentioned above. This thread has been very interesting to me. There are many reasons given and in most part I think most are valid. Over the years, I really don’t see how anyone could stay current, unless you are in the music business. The older you get the more it seems you either don’t get into any music after a certain point in your life or you have a delayed appreciation of it. For instance, I hated Heavy Metal when my kids lived it, but later I began really liking some of it. I would almost go as far as to say that most of the reasons given on this thread have had some sort of effect on my appreciation of music.
Well, I just turned 41 and my taste in music has yet to stagnate. I still find new and exciting bands, and while I do listen to some older stuff, the majority of stuff in my regular listening rotation is less than a decade old. There’s plenty of current bands that I don’t care for, but that’s always been the case.
I should point out that I rarely have music on as a background filler. When I listen, I usually focus on listening.
I seem to need periodic infusions of good new music to keep my soul from stagnating. I don’t know why that is, but it seems to be so. So it seems I can’t stop listening to stations that play new stuff, in order to sort through it and find out what works for me.
That’s taken me, across the decades, from the Beatles to The Doors and Jethro Tull to Jackson Browne to The Cars to Mellencamp and U2 to Voice of the Beehive to Third Eye Blind. Right now, I like Staind and Good Charlotte, among others.
I don’t think I’m very typical, though; most of my friends that I went to HS/college with had stopped listening to new stuff by sometime in the early 1980s. My wife, who’s 10 years younger than me, probably wouldn’t be able to identify anything that came along after Billy Joel’s River of Dreams album in 1993, and even that’s only because she grew up on Billy Joel.
Mind you, it was a really great album, but the point is that eventually the musicians you grew up with are going to stop producing anything new that’s actually good. Either you start listening to bands that weren’t on the air when you were in HS and college, or maybe your 20s, or you wind up listening to the same old stuff over and over again. Eventually we all face that choice. My wife’s chosen the latter option (nothing wrong with that; it seems that most people go that way sooner or later), but I’m just not wired in a way where that’s acceptable. So I listen to the radio a lot when she’s not around.
I don’t know. Mine haven’t stagnated yet. But an old friend of mine (we’re the same age) complains that he misses the '80s and he only listens to early '80s New Wave. He once said to me, “Why don’t you listen to '80s? It’s our generation!” I told him, “The '80s are over.”
Hey, I still like music from the '80s. And the '70s and '90s. And the '60s. And the '40s and '30s. And classical that’s 100, 200, or 300 years old.
Just give me music!
I’m an old fart. And my taste in rock stagnated about 1975. I’ve occasionally picked up on newer groups, like Talking Heads or more recently Dave Matthews. But most of the newer stuff has failed to grab me. The older stuff I love because I associate it with partying in high school and college.
But my taste in music hasn’t stagnated at all. I’m always looking for fresh stuff. I’m particularly into World Music. There’s an incredible range of musical styles out there completely different from rock. Recently I’ve been listening to Saba Habas Mustapha and Jalan Kopo (Indonesian Fusion), Zap Mama, Varttina (Finnish folk-punk), Desorden Publico (Venezuelan ska), Okinawan pop, and Akira Sakate (Japanese bluegrass).
your taste stagnates when you let it.
i used to listen to “classic rock” stations exclusivly. with the invasion of shit in the morning and the repetation, i have gone AWOL and will now surf stations.
one day, like being hit with a bolt of lightning, i simply couldn’t stand to hear the doors “light my fire” or Creedence “born on the bayou” ever again! i defected to alternate stations and will change in a heatbeat when they start to repeat themselves endlessly.
i now listen to the music on dmx only, shining on the radio all together. i have heard a bunch of new stuff, and started buying cd’s from people and genre’s i ordinarily would not be into.
see ya, got to go!
i’m eighteen and i’m afraid it’s happened already! i constantly complain ‘what is it with limp bizkit and linkin park and all this whiney crap they’re playing these days? now smashing pumpkins, they were a rock band. give me nirvana and pearl jam over korn any day.’
then again, i’ve just discovered different things, like indie rock (strokes, death cab for cutie, weezer, belle and sebastian), hip hop, trip hop and all that bjork-radiohead-gybe type stuff. so i haven’t stagnated yet. fortunately.
what i want to know is how what people will be thinking when my musical generation stagnates. i mean ‘black music’ used to be like soul and all that, but when my dad is listening to that i’m thinking - ‘oh… boring!’
so are my kids going to be saying ‘this snoop dogg is such a boring old fart! turn it off!’
speaking for my dad, his taste in music stagnated sometime around the late 70’s, but he seems to have rediscovered it. he just stopped buying new stuff around then and he’s recently started liking new bands. and he’s playing catch-up! didn’t like the clash or the cure or r.e.m. or billy bragg when they started making music, but now he’s buying all their old albums.
any of you other oldies suddenly finding that your tastes un-stagnate?
right, back to the playstation.