Sometime in 1999, there was one of those emails floating around the office I worked in. One of those emails that contained jokes or funny pictures of cats or Darwin Award winners, the ones that we don’t get anymore since Facebook appeared. This particular email contained a bunch of amazing facts about the millennium, one of which was that first year university students would only have been 8 years old when the Stone Roses debut album came out. In the office this did give us pause for thought. A generation had grown up and gone to college who probably had no idea how important that album had been to my generation and who had a relationship with it that was, at best, the same as my relationship to Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, a record I loved but could never really ‘get’ as I’d never heard it in context. It was a snapshot of a time I only dimly remembered and of a scene I had no experience of.
(I’ve linked a load of videos into this bit. Don’t worry about watching them, they’re there as a sort of series of footnotes, you don’t need to listen if you don’t want to. But you should, because they’re brilliant! Except for Al Martineau.)
Of course 11 years further on and this year’s graduating students, never mind undergraduates, weren’t even born when the ‘The Roses’ album first made it’s impression on a generation of indie kids. That’s an even more sobering thought. Putting that into my own timeframe, the genres of glam, punk, disco, krautrock, prog, hip-hop, new wave and dance were all ‘invented’ or at least popularised after I was born.
Going back 10 years before I appeared and the Beatles and Stones hadn’t released a record. Bob Dylan was playing the folk clubs in Greenwich Village having just released his first album. Go back another 10 years and it’s the first year that the Top 10 (Top 12 as it turns out) was even recorded. The people having the most hits were Bing Crosbie and Vera Lynn. The first recorded Number One is ‘Here in my Heart’ by Al Martineau (have a listen – yikes!). It was a very different world. Rock and Roll was still two years away in the form of Bill Haley and the Comets ‘Rock Around the Clock’ which sold 15 million copies around the world and kicked the whole shebang into commercial life.*
I re-watched a film called ‘Almost Famous’ a few months ago. If you don’t know it, it’s a Cameron Crowe movie, heavily autobiographical, set in 1973 about a teenager who blags himself a job as a music journalist following a band, which are on the point of breaking through, as they tour around the States. It won an Oscar for best screenplay and Kate Hudson showed she’s a damn good actress before going on to appear in a seemingly endless stream of terrible rom-coms. I digress. In the film there’s an old, wise, journalist who acts as a mentor to the young hero. What struck me was that from Bill Haley to the setting of the film, only 19 years have passed and that this is all them music that this old sage will know about. That’s like the film being set now and no music existing before 1992. It really brought home to me just how much of what we should probably term ‘pop music’ was made in my lifetime and how much of it I can remember first hand, certainly compared to the bright young things I stand alongside at gigs.
I wonder about the relationship that people have with music that comes from a time that they don’t remember. I get a sense of ‘now’ from music that’s been freshly made and even listening to stuff I first heard twenty years ago I can still remember how it made me feel back then. It still has some of that newness. That connection back seems important in the way I relate to the songs. It always feels very personal, even if the person I was has gone, leaving only me.
A lot of music I hear now will be made by people of a different generation who have grown up in a world that’s moved on from my growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. It might be music by and of people living in a culture and from a background of which I have no firsthand experience and no real understanding, like West Coast Hip-hop or Americana. That doesn’t seem to matter. It’s enough that they’re living in a world that I understand and that we’re all experiencing something of the zeitgeist together. Does this matter to other people? Is there something important about listening to new music as it appears or is living in a world of old songs fine too? I’ve not come to any conclusions. Feel free to let me know what you think.
<<End of Part 1 – I’ll pop part 2 up later this week>>
David Millington
February 28th 2011
Nottingham
* - And I’m not citing any of these records as era defining or ‘classic’, they’re just examples of what was going on at given points in time and records I like.
Relationships with music have changed so much it's true, I still hold dear to the now archaic concept of buying a physical CD and listening to it reading the liner notes. With MP3 and streaming media being the main source for musical discovery and consumption now music seems to have become cursory.
ReplyDeleteYou can get hold of an elusive track, any time and any place in 30 seconds, if its that easy to find and own, it becomes very easy to disregard and throw away.