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