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| From | "John L. Micek" <jlmicek@comcast.net> |
| Subject | Re: All Things Must Pass (or else they'll create intestinal |
| Date | Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:36:53 -0400 |
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On Apr 26, 2007, at 4:50 PM, Stewart Mason wrote:
>
> ----- 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.
>
I'll be 37 on 3 June, and I'm right there with Stewart. 1984 was kind
of a musical Year Zero for me, and I came of age listening to the
same bands, and marveling at them. To this day, the music of the
early to mid-80s holds strong sway in my musical universe. As an
aside, I've never been a big fan of AC's "Knife," but "High Land,
Hard Rain," remains a longstanding favorite.
john
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