Homework

[koganbot]

Dave Moore (2001: A Taste Odyssey): I would lie on my back and "get moved" -- I honestly hadn't listened closely to pop music like this, in what I would call dorm fashion, tired, inert, just listening carefully for sounds and words, letting the music act not as soundtrack but as appreciation object. I don't listen quite like that anymore, either -- too many forced "revelations," too much effort transforming mere boredom into something more thoughtful. It was like a performance for myself: I am going to listen to this to really HEAR something. I think it was helpful -- I was quick to notice structure and attitude and feeling I may not have heard otherwise -- but there was something mildly phony about it, as though I was as busy convincing myself of the music's importance as I was understanding why I genuinely liked it.

I don't think anyone can gain lots of knowledge without going through a period (or repeated periods) where music is a kind of social homework. It sometimes still is (like, when am I ever going to catch up with poptimists and the Jukebox?). In 1966 at age 12, when I realized that I had had three years of solid boat-missing in relation to pop and rock that I had to counteract, I literally called listening to Top 40 "doing my homework."

But for better or worse I had it easier than Dave did in 2001. In 1966 I didn't have to go back and hear the major hit albums of 1932, whereas in 2001 there's Dave on his back listening to the Doors. In the late '60s some of us imagined we'd surpassed the past - with, you know, maybe the blues being an exception. When I graduated high school in 1972 I doubt that, other than some albums from my life before rock - the Kingston Trio and the Brothers Four, West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate - I had anything released prior to 1964 other than an album by Robert Johnson and a Billie Holiday two-fer. I'd been reading Fusion since '69 so I'd already had the progressive narrative flipped on me, but it took glitter - the Dolls and Bowie - to get me to act, to reach into the past.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I spent 2000-2003 catching up with rock music, 2004 catching up with dub/ska and 2005-2006 catching up with all the pop and dance music I missed in 2000-2004 (that was quite intensive, luckily the Internet was to hand).

I am still catching up with everything, obviously - this makes it extremely hard for me to actively seek out NEW music without getting distracted (e.g. looking for new videos to post on Vids Are Alright the other day, I ended up watching old Hall & Oates songs for ages).

[koganbot]

Actually, what was already putting me into the past was movies, many of the great ones coming pre-'60s, of course, but it was when the University Of Connecticut started a film society (our house was in easy walking distance, about a quarter of a mile from the center of campus) when I was 17 or so that I really began to understand that something from the past of great value seemed no longer replicable in the present.

[koganbot]

(I mean, it's not like I believed there'd been nothing but inferior culture prior to 1964, or, e.g., that Beethoven or Charlie Parker might not have been good, it's just that for music - not other things - the past was no longer in effect, no longer was going to feed us, I thought.)

[(Anonymous)]

Re: "In 1966 I didn't have to go back and hear the major hit albums of 1932"...

AKinCLE: The album as most of us know it (i.e., not the big binders with paper sleeves to store a number of 78s) was not introduced until 1948, so there were no hit albums of 1932, although there was a near-equivalent: the songs of Broadway and Hollywood hits, which you probably were somewhat familiar with from vintage films. From Wikipedia: "...in 1952, Columbia Records began to bring out extended-play LPs that played for as long as 52 minutes, or 26 minutes per side. These were used mainly for the original cast albums of some Broadway musicals, such as Kiss Me, Kate and My Fair Lady..." So you were pretty much au courant. But I think I know what you mean; and as for myself, the twenty-five years since my time in New York somwhow seems shorter than, say, the thirteen years before that when I first heard the VU, which was, I'm sure, the "big bang" of why I moved there. I don't know how Taylor Swift factors in here.