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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Re: All Things Must Pass (or else they'll create intestinal |
| Date | Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:50:28 -0400 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: "John L. Micek" <jlmicek@comcast.net>
> When you're a teenager or in your early young adulthood, you just
> feel *everything* more intensely -- because it's new and because
> it's exciting and because you just don't have anything to compare it
> to. Obviously, that feeling diminishes some as you get older (but
> not when it comes to falling in love -- that rush remains the same
> no matter what) for a lot of stuff, music included. That's because
> you're able to draw lines between records and realize that this band
> was influenced by this band, who were obviously influenced by this
> band. You start to appreciate music along a continuum, rather than
> have those "Holy Shit!!!!" moments you had when you were a kid.
> I feel the same way about hearing U2 and R.E.M. for the first time.
> Those records, because they were the first ones I heard during my
> musical coming of age ("Under A Blood Red Sky," and "Reckoning"
> respectively) remain more vital and intense for me because they were
> the first. They were the ones that inspired me to become addicted to
> Pop music and to start playing and writing my own music. It's pretty
> safe to say I probably would never been in bands or made records
> without having heard them.
> But I wouldn't be so vain to say that everything that came after
> them was inferior or were pale imitations. And that's the essence of
> the argument that's being made in other posts, and it's the one I
> object to heartily.
There's another music list I'm on, where I believe I'm about 5 to 10
years younger than most of the other regulars (38 at the end of June),
and I once wrote a moderately long post about the importance of 1984
in my own personal musical growth. Basically, the gist of it was that
it was kind of a sea change year for me because a lot of the bands I
had really liked in the few years prior to this all released terrible
albums that year: U2, the Human League, Duran Duran, Icehouse, Adam
Ant, Aztec Camera (although to be fair, I've grown to like about half
of KNIFE, but it was a bitter disappointment at the time), several
others. And there was at least one person who at first had genuinely
thought that I was writing some kind of deadpan parody of those sort
of people who had gotten terribly disenchanted with rock after the
'60s, until he realized that I wasn't kidding and I really did like
all those bands when I was 13 and 14, and still like them now. The
idea that there were people who had strong teenage associations with
bands he had disparaged at the time simply had never occurred to him.
And John nails it perfectly: whether folks mean for it to be there or
not, there is a strong stench of generational vanity to the claim that
SGT. PEPPER and PET SOUNDS are the alpha and omega of rock and roll.
It's one thing to say that they are your own personal cornerstones,
but there was an argument made that, indeed, everything that came
after was, implicitly, inferior and imitative. Which...no. That's
not for you to say.
S
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