old age = fixed tastes?

OTM.

I think you can’t underestimate the internet’s role in shaping taste through access. In the 80’s you probably had to have a friend who liked an obscure band to have ever even heard of them. Because so much music is tied to youth culture, it would get increasingly harder to find out about new lesser-known bands. However now people can bring up a msg board and find out what the kids are up to in a few seconds, as long as they are interested.

but i bet you our grandparents felt exactly the same way. i mean, they understood cars. and jet planes. and sinatra. what could any future culture ever possibly do that would leave them behind?

I'll remember this next time I see my parents.

Dad: "That band sounds awful."
Me: "Aw Dad, it's just your brain."

Wont we be embarassed to play the music we listen to now.

IDK.

Certainly new genres will arrive, but I don't really think much will arrive that's so different it becomes indistinguishable from contemporary music. The possibilities explored in noise music serve as the Duchamp's fountain of music. Maybe.

well let's see, John Peel's dead.... so, uh, no. not really. but nobody in previous generations of my family gave a shit about music, apparently. My generation's a totally different story tho...

why is this certain? is there not a conceivable limit?

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but how will the process of ageing be affected? scientists know how to delay cell degeneration, maybe even suspend or indeed reverse it in some way. the way many people of our generation age will be quite different to our predecessors. our experiences with technology are different. more of us are REQUIRED to be more informed than our predecessors (a computer for every child at school in the West, for example) with more information to process. i guess it can be argued either way whether we're better or worse at predicting the future now tho.

good point, but in what industries and cultures do thousandths of decimal points matter?

quick, draw me a short, clear line between the sonics of, oh, Fats Waller and Sunnn O)))).

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In every taste subculture shit like that matters so much. There a number of genres that are a decimal point away from each other, although any specific example I mention will immediately receive a post condemning me for not realizing how different the two genres are, because on ILX we are surrounded by the exceptionally knowledgeable. These people will always be able to draw and see genre differences, no matter how specific.

dingdingingdingding OTM

My taste is considerably broader than that of either of my older-teen children. Between them they probably like 80% of what I do (and I like about 90% of what they like -- close to 100% for my daughter, who is basically an indie-rock/alt-country/power-pop person). But they have never quite gotten soul (classic or neo-), trip-hop, or Dizzee Rascal (and I don't get my son's love of ambient electronica or current U2). They do not believe that listening to non-white, non-American music is a moral imperative, although my son usually enjoys what I bring home of it and is learning the smug self-satisfaction that is a side-benefit of familiarity with pop sung in Punjabi and Japanese.

Of course I am not typical, and of course I am far from unique. I have my little coterie of other dead white men to talk about Rachid Taha with. My wife doesn't generally like anything that doesn't sound like what she liked 30 years ago, but even for her if she hears something around the house enough she forgets that she hasn't liked it for 30 years. She listens to a public radio AAA station that plays about 60% current (though often old-sounding) music.

While I won't take you up on this offer, I will simply suggest that when Cage allowed music to be silence, and others allowed music to be 'noise' static, white noise, atonal, etc. there was a change in what could be defined as music, and I don't think that much will be created that is outside of those, admittedly lenient, rules. Further more, we will be able to recognize it as music, even if it is very very different, simply because of it's cultural role.

Possibly. It seems likely. Although the Apple Lisa was introduced in 1983 and it does bear similarities to today's machines. Still apart from that this is absolutely true. My father programmed computers in assembler in the early 70s and today finds it much more difficult using windows explorer.

That said, my mother has recently stopped liking 60s music and started liking sort of 40s stuff, rat pack, that sort of thing. I think Rod Stewart's partly to blame, but it is a significant change in taste. She used to hate this stuff.

http://www.honkingduck.com/BAZ/baz_one.php?req=theme&lid=39&tuid=201&cuid=20434B

BEST.SONG.EVER!

for some reason i'm just not totally sure there's not a ceiling on this to an extent though. witness ideas about how and what these might be like in movies from I Robot to The Matrix to A.I. - it pretty makes sense to us now right? it's difficult because there were centuries of ink-writing, then the print-press, then the typewriter, THEN the computer...but as there's a limit to the way humans can communicate (including telepathically, assuming that becomes a reality eventually) isn't it all more to do with the range of education and information we receive as opposed to our ancestors? or maybe i am just not thinking it through fully...(this being the point, we can't imagine any better than our ancestors could perhaps)

I think Martin Skidmore is a better example actually, but he doesn't post much on ILM.

I'm a mixed sort of counter-example. I would say my taste was still changing significantly in my early 30s, but I think it may have stopped now (I'm 39). Also, my embracing salsa and other Afro-Latin music in some respects seems to me like a return to more pre-80s musical values (so while it's a change in taste, it could be seen as a turn to something more aesthetically conservative than what I had been listening to in my teens and twenties).

There are a lot of things that bother me about some of the attitudes expressed on this thread, not so much about age, but about technology. I don't feel like I've said, "Oh I can't deal with these sounds," I think I've said, "This music [most solely electronic music] isn't doing what I want." But I guess there's not way to prove it isn't a matter of my inability to hear these wonderful textures I hear about.

Why are people so focused in this thread on sound rather than the organization of sound? I mean, I think western music historically was maybe too interest in syntax and not enough in color, but this backlash is too much for me.

(god, a future of mutant cyborgs reading shitty French philosophy. . . Death will be a mercy.)

-- Shakey Mo Collie

Shakey brings up something I've wondered about, whether something like music or sound can just keep evolving forever or whether eventually some sort of wall is hit. For someone in the 30s to listen to something like Autechre now, it's definitely something they would not have been able to imagine, but sounds have been cropping up exponentially for the last 15 years, and I wonder if we're running out of new combinations. It's rare now that I hear something that falls completely outside of something I could imagine. To me it seems like there is less happening in terms of "new sound" than there was ten years ago. More in terms of new combinations, definitely.

Obviously, this suicide-encouraging idea is stupid. That is mostly because of the fact that SOUND and its textures are nearly infinite. The human voice is probably the best example of this, but computers seem to work as well. Add that to the fact that we do come up with new instruments occasionally, and you have a concept of a music that extends infinitely.

Tangent!

Innovation : What music would you play to most impress upon someone living in 1994 that you really were from the future?

-- peter smith

I can imagine it.

That will be really fun.

I don't understand this point, please elaborate (sound seems of greater primacy to me, since you need to have sound before you have some system to organize it). Is your complaint that humanity seems to be running out of ways in which to organize sound, that we've hit the limit in terms of possible rhythyms, harmonic structures, etc.? That may very well be true - making it all the more likely that some sort of expansion of our sonic horizons is overdue (and is likely around the corner due to the demands of technology and the marketplace).

and yes Mark n Matt those are precisely the sort of technological-driven changes I'm talking about...

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I'm not at all complaining that we're running out of ways to organize sound.

Maybe I can come back later and express this better. Typical excuse: I'm very tired, but I am, really.

depending on who you want to believe, the sum total of human knowledge doubles every two years, or maybe every five years, or maybe every 10 years, but any way you look at it, it's expanding at a logarithmic pace, meaning it's basically expanding faster and faster and faster and there ain't nothing you can do about it. it took centuries to get from ink-writing to typewriter to computer. it will take less time to get to the next iteration. and even less time to get to the iteration after that.

witness ideas about how and what these might be like in movies from I Robot to The Matrix to A.I. - it pretty makes sense to us now right?

well, yeah, of course the future AS WE IMAGINE IT is going to make total sense to us at the time that we imagine it. but somehow, my guess is that when we reach the age of "star wars," the swing band in that dive bar on that distant planet is not going to be playing quite the kind of music that that swing band in the movie is playing.

(and yes, i realize that "star wars" took place in the past, not the future, but it pretends to be futuristic anyway, and i think you get the point.)

Where was I reading about some guy who believes that the only intellectual achievements that are most important are those which we don't expect. Makes sense.

curious example and curious choice in the film tho as that was hardly the most futuristic music imaginable in the 70s either. context key there. point taken tho of course, no point me arguing further as it's unprovable really.

I do read my fair share of theoretical physics, but I was definately reading some cultural theory/criticism when I came across the idea.

Besides, the cantina band was so not swing.

SO NOT SWING.

(and incidentally, I think that affects the point about information being more available in the future. Availability isn't enough - someone has to care about consuming it).

John Peel to thread! Oh wait...

When I look back at my years as an undergraduate English major, it looks like I was too slow in figuring out that I had lost interest in certains things. I was sitting under dim fluorescent library lights reading rare Charles Henri Ford books (or the like), when there were dozens of other things I would have been better of doing. I think aging makes it easier to say: I'm really not very interested in this (after all).

that's true, we hear more music (and receive a bigger range of info in general) then those before. and one assumes those ahead will be able to access even more.

that's true, we hear more music (and receive a bigger range of info in general) then those before. and one assumes those ahead will be able to access even more.

yes, but what you're saying is that if one person had a willy in his mouth and the other balls then most of the other persons there would probably prefer labia. now, i'm not saying that one person should just have labia or just balls, or even just willy or fanny, but if they wanted, say labia and fanny, or willy and balls, i would have to disagree with you there.

I was going to say something like this.

The original question appears to take as a given that exploration of new musics is intrinsically good, but I don't know that that's so.

Leslie Stephen told his daughter that it was better to know one book well than a hundred books superficially. Couldn't it be that someone who just keeps relistening to the same four Beatles LPs loves music just as much as the Pitchforkaholic does?

I know that I keep finding new things in the records I liked when I was 15. We keep changing even if the music doesn't, so our relation to the music changes.

As for future music changing in form to something unrecognizable to us, have you seen these things in stores: Febreeze ScentStories? It's a CD-size disc that you put in a player and it puts out a narrative made up of different smells: walk on a forest path, day at the beach, etc.

I know that Smellovision was already tried in movie theaters, but why couldn't the next multimedia evolution be the linkage of music with smells? I mean, combining sound with video worked out okay, didn't it?

I'm flippin' ancient, and the only fixed taste I've got regards the eternal craptitude of Westlife and their offshots!!!!!!!! Mind you, that's not the result of being of a more mature age!!!!!! It's the result of possessing at least one functioning earhole, and an IQ above 14!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes.

"Fixed" as in "stationary"?

Certainly not.

(Not that I'm old of course, so I wouldn't know really).

I wonder whether Ill still be listening to Masturbating the War God by Nile when Im 98 and my grandchildren are out back, playing with the radioactive waste and loose bones they find in the sand.

Ha ha ha.

I guess I'm starting to get old. I still like most of the music I've always liked, and then some. I do seem to have a pattern of listening to more heavy rock and metal than I used to, and also snotnosed UK pop bands that think they're doing something new and are the greatest thing ever. It's cute, and the attitude results in a fairly energetic debut album, at the very least. Next one I'm keeping an eye out for may be The Heartbreaks.

For me, I know after I ended up with a couple of thousand recordings, I kind of peaked out on trying to aquire more music as I had plenty around to give a listen. I finally got signed up with emusic, but I find myself filling out some gaps on stuff I already have without the exploratory zeal of my 20s to mid 30s.

Mr FNB always had one of the best and widest tastes of the WRC - even love for obscure Brit art-indie like My Computer :D so yeah keep going dude! Also I trust you've heard the new Everything Everything? It's pretty good.

yeah, i was steered toward a bunch of the reggae discs i now own because of f'nb "best of roots reggae" list.

my tastes aren't much more fixed than they were 20 years ago. i do have less enthusiasm for punk-ish rock and metal, and none whatsoever for emo/screamo.

in my old age, I am listening to the new Stone Sour record -- younger me would be OK with this

I've always wondered if some of my youth tastes will translate to adulthood. something just seems weird about listening to a song called "Crepitating Bowel Erosion" when I'm like 73 years old.

then again though, my father's tastes have barely changed in the time I've been alive, yet my mom has adapted with the times/popcharts. it's interesting.

i still have a fixation on the 90's i can't really rid of. plenty of good music today, but all my last.fm favorites are 90's groups exclusively.

pretty sure it'll be that way my whole life.

die children

I at least experienced all but 11 months of the 80s!

When I was a kid and into my 20s, all I knew was pop and rock. Now the song form bores me and I want ambience, noise, drones, and eyeball-busting free improv. (ps, I'm about to turn 47)

kelpolaris, I don't mean to look like I'm stalking you across threads, but I'm feeling exactly the same as what you just said above. Nostalgia for simpler times in the 90s is a huge factor for me. How did you like Milf, out of curiosity?

the thing is with the 90's is that all the music i listen to now i never even heard whilst "living" in the 90's. i mean in all honesty pavement was a word i took literally until about 4 years back. its really the aesthetics of the 90's... it feels like the last generation of music that tried to be its own sound. with all the nostalgic chill-wave/ariel pink/panda bears (whom i all love as well, sure), it just seems like our decade has been one constant homage to every one before us. but then again i can say all the same for every decade before us and the decades before them. but how many my bloody valentines will there ever be? i mean - really, aside from jesus & mary chain, who the hell are they influenced by? of course the decade had its fair share (or really, overwhelming) of bands like oasis, which was the greatest bastard of a beatles tribute band in all history. but at this point i don't even know what my point is anymore. every decade thinks its unique - and they're right, but only so much so.

but no! i just found the milf myspace page but can't find anywhere at all to download anything they've got, nor does it seem like they even have a label to distribute anything...?

Right there with you, WmC. One reason I loved the On Land Festival so much.

At 30 I'd say I do feel like my "aesthetic" is sort of fixed although it seemes to continually get refined. I can think of a few things I've gotten into lately that probably don't fit my prior aesthetic, e.g. Omar Souleyman. More than any of this though I think I'm just less likely to listen to things that are harsh sounding.

ten years ago i fit the 'rockist' trope in that i recited pre-written screeds against 'pop music' that I secretly liked anyway. now I like what I like, no guilt.

yeah for me this is not true

kelpolaris,

I see where you're coming from. Its true, the aesthetics of the 90s as you say seem to be less concerned with mashing up styles and being over the top, due to what I feel is a post-80s rejection of synthetic overproduction and bombast, a sort of punk attitude made popular in the mainstream by Nirvana and in indie by GBV and Pavement among others. Now you are left with a lot of bands being dirty and sounding like a progression from jangle pop, punk, and shoegazing influences from the 80s. I never really listened to this stuff while it was the 90s either, but the stripped down, anti-self absorbed yet introspective sound is especially attractive when all of today's self conscious hipness is blatant, coming across as shallow, and getting on my nerves. Its not a coincidence that "the 80s are back."

And as far as Milf you must have missed the link I posted originally. here it is again:

http://wilfullyobscure.blogspot.com/2009/06/milf-feasting-on-fried-afterthoughts_20.html

^ Its a great place to start, and if you like them, I recommend their two full lengths:

http://www.amazon.com/Ha-Bus-Milf/dp/B000000IBJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1284005540&sr=8-1

and

http://www.amazon.com/Antidope-Milf/dp/B000000IC2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1284005574&sr=1-1

If you'd like any more suggestions, I have plenty!

in comparison with my the habits of my youth, i find that i now listen to a similarly broad swath of contemporary music. broader perhaps. when i was very young, i heard only the radio and the music my parents & friends' parents kept around. from those shallow wells i chose certain favorites, but rarely strayed beyond their bounds. when i became a little older, in my early teens, i began to obsess over certain artists and to pursue the tangents of those obsessions into music i'd never have otherwise encountered. still, the range of artists i drew upon was fairly narrow, consisting mostly of the pop performers (and would-be pop performers) of the day. then, in my late teens and early 20s, i fell tragically in love with the then burgeoning american post-punk/post-hc "independent rock" scene, and for many years spent basically all of my time and money following the dictates of forced exposure magazine. when this subsided, sometime in the mid-90s, i was left with a casually omnivorous but decidely indie-leaning fascination with contemporary music in general, something that's sustained me ever since.

in my 40s, i find that i'm more catholic in my tastes than i've ever been, but also less indulgent. i don't have much time for the waffly gray area between indie and pop, but am happier with mainstream radio hits than at any point since my mid-teens. i shy from deliberately "extreme" challenge-music that doesn't offer immediate points of genuine pop appeal, but nevertheless spend about as much time listening to odd, abstract, heavy and harsh music as i ever have. main difference is that i find it very difficult to relate to music that depends on youthful zest as a selling point. i suspect that if i were 20-something again, i'd love bands like titus andronicus, the arcade fire and animal collective, but now i'm just too old and jaded. i suspect, worse, that among such bands are the husker du, the pixies and the sonic youth of this era, but i'm no longer able to hear it.

the new midlife crisis isn't an old man buying a convertible but an old man buying lady gaga and the arcade fire

i suppose so, but lady gaga really is great. that's the kind of shit i'd rather steal tho.

Every post I read makes me want to slap kp.

i suppose so, but lady gaga really is great. that's the kind of shit i'd rather steal tho.

― having taken an actual journalism class (contenderizer), Thursday, September 9, 2010 1:31 AM Bookmark

edgy

ha ha, never thought I'd agree with Contenderizer, but this is me, here:

in my 40s, i find that i'm more catholic in my tastes than i've ever been, but also less indulgent. i don't have much time for the waffly gray area between indie and pop, but am happier with mainstream radio hits than at any point since my mid-teens. i shy from deliberately "extreme" challenge-music that doesn't offer immediate points of genuine pop appeal, but nevertheless spend about as much time listening to odd, abstract, heavy and harsh music as i ever have. main difference is that i find it very difficult to relate to music that depends on youthful zest as a selling point. i suspect that if i were 20-something again, i'd love bands like titus andronicus, the arcade fire and animal collective, but now i'm just too old and jaded. i suspect, worse, that among such bands are the husker du, the pixies and the sonic youth of this era, but i'm no longer able to hear it.

However, I'd modify that to say that I'm having more trouble continuing to care about the Husker Du and Pixies and Sonic Youth of mine own generation, and suspecting that the "youth" and "newness" and "energy" bits were a big part of why I liked them then, and am not so interested in them now.

it just seems like our decade has been one constant homage to every one before us

tbh I felt like this during the 90's, with the rise of 60's, 70's, 80's theme nights, Britpop, etc. But I guess even that happened before with e.g. rockabilly revivals in the 70's etc.

trying to figure out if it'd be acceptable for a 50 year old me to still be listening to electrik red and jojo. hell yeah.

Also I trust you've heard the new Everything Everything?

You got me, I checked it out last weekend, heh. Just weird enough to hold my interest, though the clipping was really bad. Am double checking if it's a bad rip or if the CD is that way.

I'm having more trouble continuing to care about the Husker Du and Pixies and Sonic Youth...

All their 80s albums (except Daydream Nation) are overdue for a good remastering :) Another thing about getting older is I finally got better speakers and headphones, and now the sound of some of those 80s indie recordings sound pretty terrible. Back when half my stuff was third generation cassette dubs in a boombox, I didn't notice as much.

Yeah, I admit this is certainly relevant. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I perferred this kind of stuff when it was taped off the radio. (I've told the story before of how Sister was my favourite album for many years, based on a home taped copy, but when I got it on CD, the magic dissipated somewhat.)

Thing is some stuff (Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy) can survive this kind of treatment. Candy Apple Grey didn't. (Though that may have been a time and a place.)

I'd say I'm just as keen to find out about new things and explore new territory as I used to be. That said, harsher styles of music like punk, metal, drum'n'bass, gabba etc don't get as much airtime, but this is largely down to the company i keep, my neighbours, and yeah my mood in general. That said I'm exploring new stuff - much more hiphop and r'n'b than ever before. Some artists and styles die hard for reasons other than age though.

Revive!

A lot of interesting points made. It seems there is one thing that hasn't been enphasized enough, and that is the fact that most people aren't crazy about music to begin with (I define "not-interested" as anyone who basically stops paying attention to new trends in music at college-graduation-age).

Just going by friends in my age-group (I'm 31), most stopped paying attention years ago. But if I burn them a CD or email them MP3s to check out, they still sometimes get that same rush felt when they were paying attention. Even that excitement, I've noticed, won't entice them to get back into looking for new music to love.

Long story short, I'm not sure it's necessary an age phenomenon, or at least not an exclusive age phenomenon, but more of a motivational one (which may tie in with age, idk).