T/F the music you loved most from 16-22 will always seem like the best music to you

taken from a comment by (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved)

"...something everybody kind of already knows intuitively i.e. the music you loved most from 16-22 will always seem like the best music to you."

True.

Next?

for me: false, tho the music from that period has an undeniable nostalgic pull.

lol dr. fever.

music sucks

not especially true, though it still sounds good

false for me. the music from that age did inexorably lead me to find the music i love most now though. i would say that the music from the ages of 21-25 are where i cemented my overall taste in music.

actually i just realised i liked britpop when i was like 19 thru 23 so god help us all

I turned 16 in 1990, so I'd actually probably dial that back a bit, as in "the music you loved most from 13-19 will always seem like the best music to you."

I'm not saying I don't like anything else. I wholeheartedly love the late 60s into the early 70s...well, pretty much all of the 70s and 80s...not so much the 90s anymore. I kind of look back on the 90s (or more specifically what I was listening to in the 90s) with a little bit of shame. It's not indie guilt, just a lack of enthusiasm at the time for embracing everything that was going on in favor of being exclusionary and snobby about it. That makes it harder to go back and re-evalutate that stuff in a positive way. Once I got over myself in the very early '00s, though, I found LOTS of current music to love. (Of course, it probably didn't hurt that a lot of it sounds like what I loved from ages 13-19.)

Related reading: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=1484

What follows may seem narcissistic nostalgia, but I do have a general point. It’s the Law of the Adolescent Window:

Between the ages of 13 and 18, a window opens for each of us. The cultural pastimes that attract us then, the ones we find ourselves drawn to and even obsessive about, will always have a powerful hold. We may broaden our tastes as we grow out of those years—we should, anyhow—but the sports, hobbies, books, TV, movies, and music that we loved then we will always love.

The corollary is the Law of the Midlife/ Latelife Return:

As we age, and especially after we hit 40, we find it worthwhile to return to the adolescent window. Despite all the changes you’ve undergone, those things are usually as enjoyable as they were then. You may even see more in them than you realized was there. Just as important, you start to realize how the ways you passed your idle hours shaped your view of the world—the way you think and feel, important parts of your very identity.

I like that. But I guess it also means that once I turn 40, I'll be listening to Doolittle ALL the time instead of only half the time.

i'll be listening to new order and aussie 45s. which actually sounds like a good time tbqh

There's certain things I first heard during that age range that I know I wouldn't like or like as much if I heard them now, but overall this is very F

if I heard them for the first time now obv

not true

rong

prob more true for the gen public than music nerds

this is false for me. i don't get much enjoyment from listening to most of the shit i did when i was 16-22, tbh. my tastes have gotten more abstract than they were then - kind of like my taste in food.

during my late twenties and for most of my thirties, i would have said this was true. but 16-22 is a LONG fucking way off now, and i don't feel as close to that shit as i thought i always would. i mean, somewhere in my head are stamped these giant, flaming, golden letters 10 feet high saying shit like TALKING HEADS ARE AWESOME!!! and THURSTON IS GOD!!! so i think i'll go to the grave with the idea that that shit is the best ever. but when it comes to actually wanting to listen to it, i find i rarely do. the more i once loved stuff, the more played-out it tends to seem to me now. i work around this by listening more to shit i paid less attention to at the time (like, prince and can were total staples for me in the late 90s and 00s mostly cuz i hadn't already spent years wearing them out).

when i look at my go-2, heavily played shit, it tends to be stuff that's relatively fresh to me, i.e., completely new to my ears w/in the last 10 years.

False.

If you take the music I loved most from 23-40, and subtract from that the music I loved most from 16-22, that still leaves a much larger portion of music that seems like the best music to me. And I don't think I assigned as much importance to 14-15 (my great awakening), never mind my childhood and adolescence, until later.

Still, you can never go to your first rap show again. (I linked that on the taste formation thread too.)

Isn't this false for essentially everyone on this board who is over 22?

False for me too, although obviously it was part of forming my musical personality. Some things have stuck with me, some things I'm ashamed of liking, and I've since found some things that I love better.

False. For me it seems to be the music I loved most from 26-32.

Guess I was a late bloomer.

I don't even listen to Phish, trance, ska-punk, or backpacker rap anymore.

Massively false.

False, although I certainly got more excited about picking up a new release back then and played the hell out of everything. No doubt because I was so poor.

For me, the key years are approximately 8-11. I have no evidence whatsoever for this assertion other than my own personal experience: there are numerous Top 40 hits from 1969-1972 that (to paraphrase Will Smith) spark up more nostalgia in me than any other music ever.

Yeah there are definitely songs I first heard in my pre-teens - not necessarily contemporary songs - that resonate inside in ways I can't get a handle on.

actually i just realised i liked britpop when i was like 19 thru 23 so god help us all

― you're the fucking treasurer (electricsound), Thursday, July 1, 2010 4:05 AM (8 hours ago)

^ this. I cannot stomach it now, so: monolithic false for me.

we've so done this already

I know but I get tired of correcting people

It was horseshit the last time round anyway

Think it might've come to the conclusion that it takes different strokes to make the world

Depending on how old you were when the first Strokes LP came out

Wondering how many of the people on this thread going "nu-uh, no way!" are actually in their 40s yet, or if the "urgh, LOL at shit I liked in my teens" is a function of the late 20-something looking to distance themselves from stuff which appears gauche now, but will nonetheless produce that thrill of nostalgia if heard in another 10, 20 years, when emotional and physical distance has stripped away the intense naffness of the recent past.

Also wondering if this is more true of non-music obsessives (for whom musical taste acquisition is a constant process rather than something formed in adolescence and never changed.)

And yet again, wondering if this is true of any highly emotively charged period of one's life - and perhaps more true for people who *enjoyed* their adolescence (people for whom high school or college was the peak emotional period of their lives.) That the music which produces the best nostalgia in us is the music associated when we were most happy - for some people, this is childhood, for others, it's leaving the family atmosphere and exploring the world - my personal "happy period" of music wasn't until 22-25 when I finally moved to NYC - which makes me think if it's this nostalgia which is triggering mine own rediscovery of the dance music that soundtracked those portions of my life.

The considered answer: your mileage may vary.

Well I'm into my 40s now and nah I just don't do nostalgia much. I still like plenty of the stuff I liked in my late teens but I don't much listen to it and it doesn't have a special magic glow for me.

Late 80s/early 90s techno maybe but I think that's just cos it is magic.

False

I'd be interested to see, from the people who're like "no way," a top five or ten all-time artists list along with some commentary on when those artists entered their lives - for a board whose best-attended polls are New Order ones, this thread comes off a little protest-too-much imo

I don't get people still getting excitable about NO in the 21st Century, tbh.

the beatles entered my life at birth (they were playing it on the p.a. iirc) and never let go, and that seems like some of the best music to me still so: false

impressive recall

Wondering how many of the people on this thread going "nu-uh, no way!" are actually in their 40s yet, or if the "urgh, LOL at shit I liked in my teens" is a function of the late 20-something looking to distance themselves from stuff which appears gauche now, but will nonetheless produce that thrill of nostalgia if heard in another 10, 20 years, when emotional and physical distance has stripped away the intense naffness of the recent past.

This thought is one of the reasons I stopped selling any records, to be honest. There aren't many things that I'm embarrassed about liking from 16-22 (more stuff from 12-16, hello bad grunge), but there are definitely some. But yeah, I still don't want rid of them completely - they make up part of who I am.

true

I'd be interested to see, from the people who're like "no way," a top five or ten all-time artists list along with some commentary on when those artists entered their lives - for a board whose best-attended polls are New Order ones, this thread comes off a little protest-too-much imo

― get your bucket of free wings (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Thursday, July 1, 2010 9:09 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah this is an interesting idea

I'd be interested to see, from the people who're like "no way," a top five or ten all-time artists list along with some commentary on when those artists entered their lives - for a board whose best-attended polls are New Order ones, this thread comes off a little protest-too-much imo

Also, this is probably relatively true - but at least partially because those bands have had time to settle into permanent positions. You'd be wary of putting a band you've only just discovered into an 'all time' slot, as they haven't had to prove the test of time yet.

Er, that sentence was poorly constructed but you get what I mean.

Serious question, does anybody have a top five or ten all-time artists list that they consistently carry round in their head rather than just making one up on the spot if pressed?

No wait I've just remembered where I am

I used to, but had to drop it when I got to my early 30s and realised it was changing too much.

I first dove deep into music obsession from around age 11 to 15, so music I listened to in that period kinda holds more sway over me now than stuff I listened to in my later teens, although there's definitely some records from that period I still totally love, but I kind of think of that era in music as a fallow period for the nebulous genre of Stuff I Like. my early 20s were kind of a low point for buying/hearing new records, until I started freelancing at 23. so this premise doesn't really work for me, although I can't say I reject it outright.

Off the top of my head, here's are the ages I got into band from my rough top ten:

4,12,13,16,21,22,25,27,28,30

Listening to Top 40 incessantly from thirteen to twenty – while loving "alternative" bands at the same time, which confused a lot of people – marked me for life as a generalist. It doesn't seem like "the best music," though; it helped create antibodies to the kinds of assumptions my friends in college carried with them.

Serious question, does anybody have a top five or ten all-time artists list that they consistently carry round in their head rather than just making one up on the spot if pressed?

― It's a rest day, WE WANT TO SHOP (Noodle Vague), Thursday, July 1, 2010 1:21 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

No wait I've just remembered where I am

― It's a rest day, WE WANT TO SHOP (Noodle Vague), Thursday, July 1, 2010 1:21 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol

Steely Dan (got into when I was like 22/23)
Stockholm Monsters (high school)
Souled American (22-ish)
Amy Grant (just a couple years ago)
Prince Far I (just a couple years ago)

There aren't many things that I'm embarrassed about liking from 16-22 (more stuff from 12-16, hello bad grunge), but there are definitely some. But yeah, I still don't want rid of them completely - they make up part of who I am.

Good call. I've written about how much I now regret selling a a couple of dozen high-school era albums (double-live Gentle Giant!) when I was in my mid-20s. My record collection functions as something of an autobiography, and twenty-five years later, I regret that part of the story is missing. (I haven't sold a record since.)

But do you need the albums around the house? What about if you've absorbed all you need?

false for me. the music from that age did inexorably lead me to find the music i love most now though. i would say that the music from the ages of 21-25 are where i cemented my overall taste in music.

This has been my experience. I've held onto a lot of tastes from this era (granted, I'm still only 25) but I think I definitely did cement my tastes at this time, or at the very least, what I'd consider the "roots" of my tastes -- kraut, post-punk, new wave, '80s pop, shoegaze and so forth. That said, I feel like I'm still branching out and have a lot to discover, which makes me happy. I still hear new things all the time that pique my interest and surprise me!

On a side note -- I've never had a problem "letting go" of things I feel like I've moved past. While I have nostalgia over what I've enjoyed in past years, I also feel no shame in purging things from my CD shelves once I haven't pulled them out for a few years, and can't see myself doing so in the future.

But do you need the albums around the house?

It's sad, but yes. Cf. Linus + security blanket.

btw i'd link this phenomenon not to like a personal top 10 but more to the music that has the strongest emotional pull. those are two different things for me--maybe they're not for most ppl?

True, but from 12-22 in my case, i.e. 1974 to 1984. I'd love to say otherwise, but I'd be deluding myself.

Obviously the key word here is "seem", but the word I'd quibble with is "always". Cunga's "Law of the Midlife/ Latelife Return" resonates with me here.

My top 10 would be almost entirely artists I encountered before 22, but it's not the same top 10 I would have listed at 22.

At that age, I wasn't as excited about the Beatles, Stones, Zep, Dylan, Neil Young, etc. as I was about Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, R.E.M., or Gang of Four. Those older acts probably seemed too familiar to warrant much attention. But they were always part of my musical environment, and over time I've come to value them more, while a lot of things that once seemed urgent and key don't get much rotation any more. I think the 16-22 rule still applies here.

A counter-example: I never listened to jazz until my late 20s, and today my top 10 list would include Ellington, Miles, and Monk.

just threw together a rough list of 10 all-time favorite artists, was listening to 8 of them by the time I turned 16, although some I didn't get super into until later

False. by and large, I dont listen to the same music now as I did from 16-22. Holdovers would be stuff like Beatles, Beach Boys, Queen, XTC, but even then, I rarely feel the need to play them.

I prob listen to and get as much enjoyment out of new as well as old, but almost all the artists I've ever been anything of a completist stan about are ones from that adolescent period - this could just be a function of the internet enabling a more dilettante approach though.

I would say I relate best to my taste in music from the first twelve years of my life and from 28 on. Musically, my teen years were largely a matter of drastically expanding my horizons, getting a liberal education in music. This has been followed by a lot of pruning back (well, this music is interesting but doesn't really do much for me, etc.).

absolutely not. pretty much everything I loved most at that age I still love or feel fondly about, and expect I always will, but never thought it was the best music ever at the time - just what I was really into at that moment. same goes for formative ages of 13-15, 27-29, or yesterday morning.

I can't even spurn Britpop really, I still f/w Pulp's Island albums and Ladykillers.

and perhaps more true for people who *enjoyed* their adolescence (people for whom high school or college was the peak emotional period of their lives.) That the music which produces the best nostalgia in us is the music associated when we were most happy - for some people, this is childhood, for others, it's leaving the family atmosphere and exploring the world - my personal "happy period" of music wasn't until 22-25 when I finally moved to NYC - which makes me think if it's this nostalgia which is triggering mine own rediscovery of the dance music that soundtracked those portions of my life.

I don't know if this is true or not, but it rings true for me more than the usual formulation based on age. I do not look back fondly on my adolescence.

5-11 it was pretty much Beatles and compilation albums of novelty singles. Maxwell's Silver Hammer and Gimme Dat Ding, I'll stay tru 2 u, boo

5-11 sounds right for me if I had to narrow it down to a stretch like that.

Few random thoughts about all this:

- the truth is, I probably spend more time these days thinking about all the formative music in my life than I do actually listening to it. Or maybe what I mean to say is I replay a lot of that music in my head more than I do on my iPod/car stereo/etc. There's no doubt in my mind that my tastes have largely been shaped by the records I loved as a kid, and most of that music I continue to love... I just don't spend oodles of time listening to the stuff (though certainly, I can go through a phase of burying myself in something I haven't listened to in a few years).

- key age span for me would be 6-18 (1970-1982). I know that's a long swath of time, but there isn't a single year in that period that doesn't feel absolutely crucial to the development of my personal aesthetic. I feel I'm even erring on the side of caution by using '82 as a cutoff date.

- I don't think I wallow in nostalgia (I have no problem with the idea, though, and I'm not saying this defensively); at a certain point for me -- and I can't pinpoint when -- all music started to become a giant mass at least in terms of actual chronology (I'm thinking the shift occurred for me late '80s/early '90s, and it lined up with my way less obsessive consumer habits re: music, where I was more interested in just letting music find me than the other way around). Music around that time for me became less about "old" or "new" and more about "heard" or "unheard." If I choose to listen to something "old," I think it has more to do with the present than with some idea of what it meant way back when (not that I ignore associating songs with past events, in fact I've lately enjoyed thinking and writing about this very thing, but if an old Roxy Music or Stones song comes on my iPod, I listen through if it's something I need to hear RIGHT NOW for reasons that presumably have something to do with how I'm feeling RIGHT NOW).

"That the music which produces the best nostalgia in us is the music associated when we were most happy"

I had a thoroughly lonely and miserable adolescence, and music was my lifeline, in that it was the one experience that brought joy. Perhaps that's why I retain such a deep attachment to music from that period.

I turned 16 in the fall of 1985, and 22 in 1991. Of the bands I listened to and loved in that period, I still listen to quite a lot of it, but by no means all of it. And I certainly wouldn't call it all my favorite, with the exception of lol The Beatles. If you asked me right now who my favorite band is, I'd probably say New Pornographers, and I didn't catch on to them until Electric Version came out.

The music from your teen years will remain the best music ever for the rest of your life. Right or wrong?

we've so done this already

― j/k lol simmons (history mayne), Thursday, July 1, 2010 1:58 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

TOLDJA

i am going to go with a mitigated false, but largely because although there is stuff in there that i really do love, a whole shitload of the stuff i listened to in that age swing is pure garbage - in fact the bad outweighs the good.

totally false in my case

I think people that say this loved being teenagers, music kinda doesn't have anything to do with it

I'd be interested to see, from the people who're like "no way," a top five or ten all-time artists list along with some commentary on when those artists entered their lives

in no particular order:
the Beach Boys - verrry early, pre-teen for sure. Pet Sounds = high school. Exploring the rest of their catalog has been an ongoing concern for me ever since)
Parliament/Funkadelic - college (18-22)
the Beatles - first album I can remember listening to in its entirety (age 6 or 7) is Rubber Soul.
Zeppelin - aware of them in college, but didn't really dig in until much later when I got my (then future) wife's collection in my late 20s
the Bee Gees - fairly recent, like within the last few years
Ghostface - solo career didn't even really begin until I was out of college so this has been a 20s/30s love affair

I think people that say this loved being teenagers...

also, the phrasing of the T/F point is very black & white. i reject the statement, "the music i loved most from 16-22 will always seem best to me," but strongly agree that, "the music of my youth will always have a peculiar and special resonance for me." and some (not all) of my childhood/youthful favorites likely will always count among the best music i've ever heard.

"the music of my youth will always have a peculiar and special resonance for me."

but see I disagree even with this because when I recall the stuff I REALLY identified with as a teen, including the first shows I got to go to (which were near-religious experiences at the time) - Fugazi, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, the Pogues - I basically have zero compunction to ever listen to this stuff and when I do it's kinda boring. Like I've worn it out.

yeah, there's that. i said it because when i think of my favorite songs from between 0 and 25 (my youth), i find a lot of stuff that still gives me chills -- stuff that helped construct the meaning and function of "music" in my head in a way i'll probably never be able to shake. thinking here of the beatles, simon & garfunkel, stevie wonder, sly & the family stone, kiss, talking heads, "the lion sleeps tonight", "these boots are made for walking", "flashlight", "surrender", "bohemian rhapsody", violent femmes debut, it takes a nation of millions..., license to ill, sonic youth's sister and so on.

some of that stuff is worn out for me, or worn down anyway, but it's still in there somehow, in me, etched deep into the grooves of my brain, looming over everything else i hear.

Man, I seriously don't even own a single album on Moonshine anymore.

"I basically have zero compunction to ever listen to this stuff and when I do it's kinda boring. Like I've worn it out."

I felt like that about prog, for nearly 25 years. Then I went to see Yes and Gong live - no great expectations, just vague curiosity - and it all started flooding back.

x-post shakey mo

yeah funkadelic and led zep too, and in face have gone thru another big pfunk phase recently

false, the music i liked from ages 8-11 has the biggest nostalgic appeal to me. especially age 9.

lol

i think my taste in synth sounds comes from hearing fade to grey at 5 years of age

I'm ashamed of around 80% of the things I listened to back when I was 16 to 20. I didn't use the internet much back then so my musical taste was pretty limited to friends' recommendations and picking random albums at the cd store.

Perhaps a more all-embracing way to think of it would be to note how/where the listening of those years still echoes down to your current interests. Right now I'm listening to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, obviously some years old itself but definitely not something I could have heard back in the late eighties/early nineties by default. However, I was fairly obviously primed to be able to enjoy such a work thanks to those things I heard, enjoyed and internalized at that earlier time -- not saying that the connection is direct, but MBV, Loop/Main, Aphex Twin, Eno and many others help set the stage for me as a listener to respond positively. In the context of the thread question -- MBV being a special case, admittedly -- I'm unsure of calling that earlier grouping of music the 'best,' though I wouldn't argue against the various medical studies cited. But rather than simply being locked into that earlier music -- a large amount of which I have not specifically sought to listen to in years -- I'd rather keep seeing what else might be out there, old and new, and at my one pace rather than via specific record release diktat.

My OWN pace, rather, etc.

if this were framed as 20-25, i suspect that the results wouldn't be anywhere near so one-sided.

This is massively true for me. I still like most of the music I liked from 16-22 but I still like ALL the music I liked from 20-25.

Totally false for me.

What seems like the best music to me: Prince, Michael Jackson, Eve, Missy Elliot, DJ Koze, Frenchbloke... which is basically a neat excision of everything I listened to from 16-25.

(i.e. indie rock)

Let's consider the music you loved most from 16-22 as genres you loved most.

A lot of people's False might move to True or somewhere in the middle leaning towards true (one or two different genres you focus on more or less nowadays (in the case of less you might not listen much to that genre nowadays but you still love the staple band/s from it that you loved back in the day)).

For me it is True.

Bottomline is that I haven't added any new genres to my repetoire of favs from 16 - 22 cept maybe skronk via DNA (dunno when I first heard though). I already had one or more bands that I liked that were glam rock, new wave, post rock, IDM, alt-rock, soft indie rock/folk, pop, prog, kraut, classic rock, etc..

Of course, from 16-22 I had entered the 'music at my fingertips' generation making it that much easier for me to discover all the genres I like by the time I was 22

Plus most of my favorite bands from 16-22 are still favorites of mine today even if I hardly listen to some of them anymore.

music from around this time has held up a lot better than TV. bleagh!

16-22 is a pretty huge range, especially given that nearly everything, musical taste included, is in massive flux, and, we hope, development. The music I liked when I was 16 didn't have much to do with what I liked by 22. Four years of college radio, exposure to tens of thousands of records, and support and mockery from friends will do that to you. Probably started off with an REM, 10,000 Maniacs, Call, Replacements sort of USA guitar jangle and ended up with a harder artpunk ear. Homosexuals, Desperate Bikes, Lines, Sunday Painters, Crash Course in Science. Tons of other things, too, but that was the overall trajectory.

I still listen to and love lots of music from 16-22. Obviously when I was 16-22 I didn't listen to much music I discovered when I was older. So there's a structural advantage there.

The genre hypothesis doesn't play out for me, I didn't get into disco or later dance music until 23/24 and that was a large shift in how I appreciate music. Sure, I had most of my serious head-split-open epiphanies around 15/16 (Faust was the big one) and 16-22 is a period of rapid development in everyone's life, but drawing a boundary at 22 is wholly arbitrary. My appreciation of music is changing and expanding all the time and it doesn't make sense to me to privilege the first half of my musical history over the second.

Not true. At least for me. Half the stuff that I listen to now, I wouldn't have crossed the street to listen to back then (which was not an inconsiderably short time ago). Sure, some of it is stuff that I perhaps *ought* to have listened to then, but didn't really for whatever reason.

Though I still have a fondness for old synthesized music that caught my ear back when I was much, much younger.

there's some truth to this (though there is a lot of embarrassing shit i liked back in the day that i would NEVER admit to liking now). but seeing as a lot of stuff i love came out after the 16-22 y/o period (i'm thinking of Wu-Tang et. al., though 36 chambers came out when i was 23 so it's on the cusp of the 16-22 period) or in some cases i didn't get to hear significant portions of the back catalogs of certain artists i liked when i was 16-22, this isn't strictly true.

then there is the matter of bands/artists i would argue strongly for when 16-22 but wouldn't do so quite as strongly now (here's looking at you, Elvis Costello).

then there is the matter of bands/artists i would argue strongly for when 16-22 but wouldn't do so quite as strongly now (here's looking at you, Elvis Costello).

OTM ^^^^

I would definitely say false. But I would say it's true that in most cases one's relationship to music during those years has a unique power that doesn't return often if at all. I can only extrapolate from my own experiences, but there is something huge about the way adolescent loneliness and insecurity intertwine with music.

...in most cases one's relationship to music during those [teen & early 20s] years has a unique power that doesn't return often if at all. ...there is something huge about the way adolescent loneliness and insecurity intertwine with music.

― Mark, Saturday, July 3, 2010 1:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

otoh, it's not like i've lost the ability to deeply connect with music -- just that it's rarer and less apocalyptic/promethean when it does happen. the experience of age and aging being more subtle by nature, i suppose...

make that: ...it's been a long time since i felt that pop & rock music could really define or speak for my experience, the way they seemed to when i was a teenager.

Probably started off with an REM, 10,000 Maniacs, Call, Replacements sort of USA guitar jangle and ended up with a harder artpunk ear. Homosexuals, Desperate Bikes, Lines, Sunday Painters, Crash Course in Science. Tons of other things, too, but that was the overall trajectory.― Michael Train, Saturday, July 3, 2010 1:08 AM (2 days ago)

I don't know any art-punk stuff (?). I'm gonna have to check it out. Maybe it will compliment all the 90s alternative/art-rock/lo-fi I've been testing lately. There's definitely bands I've found and love after I became 23. I'd be hard pressed to say that they don't have an original sound for me even if they fall into categories or similar genres of stuff I liked before I turned 23. I definitely listened to a lot less, if any, 90s art-rock (and similar) back then. I have a hard time remembering when I started getting into these sub-genres

I have a feeling that 90's and later 'psychadelic' or 'artsy' rock/punk/metal/noise is one category left that I'll always have new favortite bands left to discover (even though there is so much flowery crap like animal collective that fits into these categories)

at 16: a lot of REM, Wilco, Sonic Youth.
at 17: same deal, more hip-hop
at 18: same deal, more synth-pop
at 19: mostly Elephant 6 and that whole 'freak-folk' thing
at 20: mostly NNCK, Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance
at 21: same deal, getting weirrrrrddeeerrrrrrrrr
at 22: same deal, then a weird fading away into the torrent of techno. this is when i first posted on ILM.

right now i mostly listen to synth-punk and noisy techno, so i guess this is pretty false to me? i think my taste as an 11-15 year old is actually more along the lines of my taste now.

at 16: Ministry, Big Black, Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Just-Ice, Ice-T
at 17: Same, plus Minutemen, Tad, Mudhoney, Einstürzende Neubauten, electric Miles Davis
at 18: All that plus Rollins Band, Jane's Addiction, Butthole Surfers, Suicidal Tendencies, Fela, King Sunny Ade
at 19: Same, more or less, plus Napalm Death and Godflesh
at 20: Everything listed earlier plus Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, Motörhead, KMFDM
at 21: Same, plus more and more jazz
at 22: Same

So yeah, other than an ever-increasing interest in Latin music, and a continuing interest in what's new in metal, my tastes pretty much congealed between 16 and 20.

ok I'll tab it that way:

at 16: Radiohead, Cat Power, Modest Mouse
at 17: Post-rock, Massive Attack, Amon Tobin, Bonobo
at 18: Sigur Ros, dntel, lots of idm and downtempo
at 19: Lots of neoclassical and ambient music, idm, Tom Waits, Jimi Hendrix
at 20: Sufjan Stevens, Paavoharju, The Books, Lali Puna, Can, Fennesz
at 21: Loads of different electronica excursions also folk and music driven by acoustic guitars
at 22: Garage rock, Devendra Banhart, Low, Panda Bear, Hip hop, techno

Somewhere along the way I stopped caring almost completely about modern rock music. My current listening habits are heavy on rhythm and texture... all sorts of electronica, jazz, funk, soul and when I'm in the mood for rock music most of the time I'll go for some mod rock or 60's garage rock.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/16/bring-that-beat-back-why-are-people-in-their-30s-giving-up-on-music

Being discussed in the guardian thread

The photo of the Nick Cave crowd does not support the claim made in the article.

Really enjoyed the Quietus article on nostalgia/"indie sleaze" linked to in that Guardian piece.

https://thequietus.com/articles/31167-indie-sleaze-mandela-effect

I can believe this is generally true, but personally, I got more interested in music in my mid-thirties. And there's quite a lot of music that I liked from age 16-22 that I now dislike because it reminds me of being age 16-22.

saw chucxxx Eddy discussing on Facebook how this "giving up new music in your 30s" thing is nothing new and that the Guardian article doesn't quite make that clear with its reliance on streaming data

i'm looking at this thread title and thinking "but it wasn't even 2016 yet when this thread was started" :)

no idea what the guardian article says, i don't like giving those assholes clicks but....

re: "indie sleaze": 2022 is an awful, shitty year and i hate it. everything is fucked, and it's hard to believe in the possibility of a world where things get anything _but_ worse. but i'm happy, you know? happier than i've ever been. it's not just covid, not just the isolation, it's believing that as shitty as things are _this is as good as things get for me_.

and that _wasn't_ my experience in the 2000s, they were fucked for me personally in an extremely _un-fun_ way; not only was the world fucked but my life personally was fucked. but if people were going through the 2000s actually enjoying themselves, you know, i can understand feeling nostalgic for that.

i'm just too _busy_ to keep up with new music. it's too much _work_. i have too much else going on in my life. i never wanted to become that sort of person but you know what, turns out it's pretty cool. a lot of my friends listen to and love new music and i love that for them and i'm just here listening to old indie sleaze records like bjork's _medulla_ and it's ok

It's easy to superficially keep up with new music, but usually from a narrow range. Spotify will recommend things to you that... are already like what you play. So, new but not necessarily expanding your taste. I subscribe to a weekly release list from my favorite label/store and I give a partial listen to everything they highlight but don't really take the time or effort to connect with it other than, "Does this grab me IMMEDIATELY?", if so I'll give the artist a proper listen and have found many young bands to follow. I look at the listings for gigs around town and realize that I don't know what most of them sound like and just sort of shrug. I'm way beyond the typical range for music obsessives and feel like I'm still doing well hunting for music that excites me. I've curated my library over many years and have been enjoying digging into my own crates.

When I feel guilty about not keeping up with contemporary music, I just imagine how absurd my 50-year-old dad would have seemed if he felt he had to listen to the first PIL album or Tormato.

I echo a lot of what Kate said. I can sort of skim dance music records every week just for grooves I might be interested in, but the labor of sorting through cookie cutter acts fed to me by a similarity algorithm is too much for me. I don't know that, say, Junior Boys or Cut Copy were these absolute beesknees acts at the time but they were refreshing to my ears and remain so. But absent getting paid to listen to new music, per ex job, or doing my weekly radio show, which I hung up five years ago, I have no motivation to hunt through it all. Especially with so much of the queer zeitgeist that typically appeals to me being gabber-adjacent, it's an exhausting chore. I'm absolutely happy eschewing novelty and finding deeper meaning, congruence, and critical thought over time for what I already know. Novelty seems more and more like a capitalist thing to me and, try as they might, my personal nostalgia is gonna be a hard nut to crack for marketers. Kind of a fun body armor.

Also re: Gerald's take, yeah, I'm fresh diving on a lot of older records in my DJ sets and recontextualizing them - which has been a cathartic and healing crawl, honestly.

I echo a lot of what Kate said. I can sort of skim dance music records every week just for grooves I might be interested in, but the labor of sorting through cookie cutter acts fed to me by a similarity algorithm is too much for me. I don't know that, say, Junior Boys or Cut Copy were these absolute beesknees acts at the time but they were refreshing to my ears and remain so. But absent getting paid to listen to new music, per ex job, or doing my weekly radio show, which I hung up five years ago, I have no motivation to hunt through it all. Especially with so much of the queer zeitgeist that typically appeals to me being gabber-adjacent, it's an exhausting chore. I'm absolutely happy eschewing novelty and finding deeper meaning, congruence, and critical thought over time for what I already know. Novelty seems more and more like a capitalist thing to me and, try as they might, my personal nostalgia is gonna be a hard nut to crack for marketers. Kind of a fun body armor.

Also re: Gerald's take, yeah, I'm fresh diving on a lot of older records in my DJ sets and recontextualizing them - which has been a cathartic and healing crawl, honestly.

16-22 were deeply formative years in music, but already along a music nerdom curve that meant my taste would constantly evolve and any looking back would be called revisits.
For the people who stopped listening to new music when they were 18, it's begging the question. I now happen to think that's a minority of the population. It's certainly not true for casual listeners, it's not even true for my parents.
Ability to feel nostalgia disappears after 22 if you're having a weird boring life.

For me, it’s music from 4 to 22, which is 1966 to 1984, that gets to me in way that later music, as great and as moving as it might be, doesn’t quite in the same way. However, it’s by no means limited to music which I loved at the time; later discoveries from the same period can cut just as deeply. But then I’m lucky: 1966 and 1984 are such obvious staging posts.

It's easy to superficially keep up with new music, but usually from a narrow range

― Gerald McBoing-Boing

i mean, understand also that i'm sort of the old crank who refuses on principle to use spotify. the only "new music" i run into is what people post to the discords i hang out on, which means that the music i have the opportunity to hear is like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-C-9j-1HbY

or else this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nre0hcDz5TI

as far as i can tell the #1 hottest song of the year is tami t's "worship my titties, worship my cock"

i mean don't get me wrong it's a great song but i sort of have to be in the right mood for it

I'm absolutely happy eschewing novelty and finding deeper meaning, congruence, and critical thought over time for what I already know.

yeah

or else this

not bad

I honestly listen to several hours of ASMR and "relaxing sleep sounds" on Youtube for every 5-10 minutes of actual music at this point

All I really want from music now is 'drip, drop, drip, pitter patter pitter patter'. I could happily listen to nothing but Rain On Roof Window for the rest of my life and maybe World of Echo.

I don't really care about any of the music i liked before i was 25 & can't think of more than a couple of records from that time that i actually still like, even though that stuff is what i mainly post about on here.

I don't really keep up with new anything (music, movies, books, etc.) anymore and haven't in a while. But I deep dive the past constantly. Over the past couple of weeks, I've probably listened to like 25-30 pop albums from '88-'89 that I've never heard before. But even though they were new to me, they're emblematic of a particular sound/vibe that I respond to from the days of my youth, so there's definitely wisdom contained in the thread title.

Which ones?

high school me was mostly blasting through stuff from best of year/decade lists on pitchfork and other various music blogs, so my taste was "highly regarded rock music through the ages" which is kind of unfair to run this question against. i've found plenty more favorites over my 20s/30s but i have not Rejected the Canon

Age 16-18 I was casting around in so many different genres, I had equal love for Gong, Sparks, Scorpions, Fleetwood Mac, and Linda Ronstadt. By 21-22 I was firmly into punk and new wave and didn't listen to much of what I was listening to at 16. Now I listen to all of that stuff, but only occasionally. The best music to me now is Billie Holiday.

"Music you loved best from 16-22" basically = the music you loved best from the first 22 years of your life (since you would have already heard everything you liked pre-16), which is quite a long time, so it makes sense that a lot of people will have somewhat formed tastes by then. Most people aren't going to e.g. discover the Beatles for the first time in their 30s. That said, 16-22 were probably the years when I listened to the least jazz (except for free jazz and Django) so this isn't very true of me at all. A lot of my pre-1945 classical music faves also became faves later than that and any list of current favourites would also include artists I discovered later on, such as Tanya Tagaq, Mary Halvorson and Nels Cline. So, no.

this is not the case across the board but— i have found that i now love some pop music that i hated when it was new and that the inverse can also be true: i'm not embarrassed by some of the stuff i used to swear by, but i'd certainly not pursue it the way i did back then.

Agreed. The problem with my musical tastes aged c.14-28 or so is that I tended to apply too much of a Cool Filter. So while a lot of the stuff I’ve come to like since then didn’t pass through that filter at the time, I’ve also come to realise that nothing can date as fast as the instantly fashionable.

some songs just didn’t resonate with me until I lived a little more

some songs just didn’t resonate with me until I lived a little more

― brimstead

even the songs that do resonate with me resonate differently with me now that i've lived _with them_. the songs i liked when i was 23 have acquired layers of meaning through our shared history.

yes kate; that feeling, but also applied to the pop stuff i used to hate.

xpost to mike: never considered "the cool factor" but makes a lot of sense now that i have more perspective. i did actively avoid some things because i didn't want to be thought of as uncool to others.

the music you loved most from 16-22 will always seem like the best music to you

This is a good way of putting it and I can't argue that most of my favorite albums are ones I listened to during those years, though they are from many different eras and genres.

Another thing that can calcify, as well as an individual's taste, is their "story of music", the meta-narrative they tell themselves about the meaning of music in the world and their lives. That can run even deeper than taste in artists, genre, etc.
I'd love to give examples but the concept is all I can manage right now.

I think my two favorite years of consuming music fall around two very different eras of my life.

Age 19, because it's when I first took my deep dive into hip-hop and metal, so everything was new and fresh. there is absolutely nothing like freshly discovering a genre and discovering its high-water marks.

Age 30, because it's when I really got back back into hip-hop and metal (heavily). I'd kinda gotten casual with both genres in my 20s and then I dove back in headfirst into both. there was one month where all I bought was Wu-Tang affiliate albums (even Cappadonna's The Pillage)

yet if you were to ask for my top ten albums, any genre, all time, only about 3 or 4 of them would come from something I liked between 16-22. most of my favorites I discovered in my 30s.

Absolutely false premise, for me. 21 or so is where I finally completely escaped caring about "newness" as a criterion foe evaluating music, and began divint deep into many oceans of sound. Maybe one album I loved when/released when I was 17-22 (1997-2002) would make my top 50 albums (admittedly, top 5)--Bjork's 'Homogenic'.

Fortunately, that deep dive has been nearly endless, including getting much more heavily into contemporary music, circa 2016 to present. It's not that I can't feel nostalgia for some music, but mainly for music that has also had continuous currency (like say Joni Mitchell, in waves from my mother singing me "The Circle Game" when I was 4, to discovering her first few records for myself as a teen, to getting into her mid-to-late 70s records in my 20s, to enjoying her 80s and 90s work in my 30s.) But most of the music that has remained part of my DNA as a listener is stuff I discovered in the second half of my life.

went from "23 year old stupidly excited to vote in pazz and jop" to zero interest in new music in a span of maybe 3 years. for a while i would just wait until the ilx year end singles list came out and listen to that for a month and that would be my new music listening for the year, but i lost the desire to do that eventually too. part of it is probably that i'd already lost interest in going to shows so there wasn't much of anything keeping me tethered to musicians that were still alive and/or touring.

at a certain point there just doesn't feel like much of a difference between new music and old music, if you aren't making a point to listen to either for a reason, so why not just spend my time digging into all the 60s and 70s and 80s music i haven't heard that's already in my wheelhouse? i haven't felt like i've heard new music that has truly sounded innovative or "new" in a long time, or the music that has been innovative just hasn't kept my interest. i'm not sure there's any sort of innovation a modern artist could achieve that would actually interest me anymore. and i lost the part of me that put value in popularity as a sign of significance - i used to run off of the idea that the singles charts were an indication of something, but i can no longer convince myself that these things are in any way determined by the will of society. so the difference between old music and current music is arbitrary.

streaming and the general mega-availability of everything probably has a lot to do with it too.

I was only interested in classical music from ages 7 to 18, and then went to college, which was kind of a blackout culture-wise. I still pursued classical music, but studying chemistry and physics took precedence over everything else

I didn't see many movies until I became friends with the head of the film society in my last year of college, and didn't really listen to any contemporary music until medical school. My friends in high school were Kinks fanatics but I wasn't on board

I didn't really start listening to music that wasn't classical music until I was 22

Fear of Music awakened me. It will always be my favorite Talking Heads album

This has never been true for me. Some of the most impactful music I've ever heard and will cherish until my dying days was released in the last 5 years. In fact, a lot of music from my 16-22 era, which definitely holds a special place in my heart, I have softened on a bit over the years.

Man, my high school years were dogshit - so much ska and Epitaph/Fat Wreck/Hellcat punk. And Pinkerton. I feel zero nostalgia for Less Than Jake or the first Dropkick Murphys album - I'm more nostalgic for music other people were into at the time and I'd hear in their cars or rooms, like a football player friend who kept his Sarah McLachlan collection on the down low. There's some latent nostalgia for the earlier punk I was finding but honestly I don't need to listen to London Calling or Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables again. Sleater-Kinney is probably the only band I went to see in high school that I'll own without chagrin.

18-22 was better because I suddenly had access to file sharing, more money, started broadening my horizons beyond skater-friendly punk, I was hitting an otherwise dogshit CD Warehouse every week for new rap mixtapes while I worked backward through the years. A lot of that stuck with me but it doesn't feel like an age thing, it was just the start of exploring new styles and genres (and not caring that much if it was new new or just new to me) every few years.

I respect the people for whom this is false.

That said, I do quibble with the framing a bit. "Best" and "favorite" and "sentimentally treasured" are distinct in my mind.

I don't really think that 1984 had the best music. A large number of my favorite songs come from that era, but I don't really even listen to them all that often. But I don't need to, because they're in my head and I can recall them at will.

Hence "sentimentally treasured" seems right to me. I will never _not_ love the music of my youth. Some of it has to do either the way music hit me when I was young and emotionally vulnerable.

Some of it is the social aspect - in my high school, music taste was one of the systems of sortation. The kids with the Cure / Depeche Mode / OMD shirts were on one side of the cafeteria; the kids with Skynyrd (or whatever) shirts were a different caste and they would have been in the courtyard, smoking.

What you listened to was part of who you were, and part of how people perceived you, circa 1984. At least that was how I understood things at the time. Seems superficial in retrospect, but lots of adolescence is that way. People also defined themselves by their preferred sport (or sportsing team) as well, and that's at least equally silly.

even the songs that do resonate with me resonate differently with me now that i've lived _with them_. the songs i liked when i was 23 have acquired layers of meaning through our shared history.

― Kate (rushomancy), Friday, August 19, 2022 6:45 PM

Hi Kate! Would you be willing to pick a song and do a 5-10-15-20 kind of thing where you talk about the acquired layers of meaning or shared history at each age?

(Request is open to anyone who feels like doing this of course)

anyway, a weird marker/milestone of this development happened today while listening to Built to Spill's There's Nothing Wrong With Love, an album i have heard hundreds of times, but not in the last 5 years or so. Fling is not one of my favorites, i always kind of forget it, but never have i noticed that it goes

Since my fling with you, time went from
Popping off three times a day to popping off three times a week
And it takes me a long time
To come to the memory of us

somehow that sailed right past me a thousand times and hit me like a sack of bricks to the face this time around, lol

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Friday, August 19, 2022 6:47 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Are there cases where coming to meet a song that sailed right past you a thousand times actually ruined the song for anyone?

I don't really care about any of the music i liked before i was 25 & can't think of more than a couple of records from that time that i actually still like, even though that stuff is what i mainly post about on here.

ok this is an exaggeration

I really do listen to several hours of ASMR and white noise for every few minutes of music, though.

My family and I have moved and almost all of our stuff is still boxed up including my records and cds. The exception is about 20 reggae cds I’ve acquired in the last few months. Lots of music that is new to me, but all of it is old stuff. It’s nice to do a deep dive into one genre and reggae is just the right thing for my head at the moment. The wife has begun to complain so I may have to mix it up a little sometimes.

I’ve lost most of my appetite for anything noisy or skronky experimental. As i’ve gotten older, with more responsibilities and worries and Trump/COVID/personal bedlam, I am not in the mood for unpredictable wacked out shit. Older wacked out shit that i’m comfortable with is fine, but no alarms and no surprises at the moment, please.

I haven’t kept up with current trends. At a certain point in the last 5 years I stopped relating to any real advances in music. Things definitely seep through, but there’s a lot of newer styles that are not for me and that’s ok. I’m happy that music still occupies a big place in my life even though I don’t understand what the kids are listening to. Looking at Pitchfork album reviews is similar to looking at a People magazine. I sometimes recognize the subject, but more often than not I have no idea who they are and I don’t take the effort to care. I remember reading every review religiously for quite a while.

Back to the thread: the music I listened to at 16-22 is only special to me because it was truly formative. I still like a lot of that music, but there’s too much awesome stuff to stick to the same standards I had for such a narrow range of time. The best music I listened to was from 5-101 or whenever I die.

I stopped engaging with music on a heart-level around age 35. The world was just so sad and the music industry so drowned.

Started engaging again age 39 when I got really into Baroque music and it’s all I listen to and all I want to talk about

I just spent a quarter of my paycheque on some fresh new unsplit gut strings for all my boxes

Those Pine Walk tapes have hit my heart too, beautiful story and lovely music

What do you think of Robert de Visée?

Also Demenga's 2017 recording of the Bach cello suites: C/D?

Robert de Visée makes me wish I knew how to play theorbo, and Demenga is great

My fave modern interpretation is Queyras because he basically pursues all the Baroqueisms but with this extreme modern liquidity in his phrasing that I like. For Baroque interpretations it fluctuates but I'm enjoying Elinor Frey. I'm generally addicted to Netherlands Bach Society videos

Ah, right on, I'll look into that one.

I only really started getting into de Visée relatively recently, and via teaching, but I'm getting a lot out of it, esp when played w notes inégales.

Hi Kate! Would you be willing to pick a song and do a 5-10-15-20 kind of thing where you talk about the acquired layers of meaning or shared history at each age?

(Request is open to anyone who feels like doing this of course)

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse)

honestly i was thinking of when i said that was the essay about the VDGG song "Pioneers Over c" I wrote a few days ago, if you're interested in hearing more about what "layers of meaning" means to me check it out

https://www.alanauch.org/wtob/2022/08/17/my-first-words/

just as a warning it does get into trans shit because that's basically all i write these days

Man, my high school years were dogshit - so much ska and Epitaph/Fat Wreck/Hellcat punk.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Saturday, August 20, 2022 9:51 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is what spoke to me in my senior year of high school.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbgnvVhDtSE

From 16-22 the vast majority of music I listened to was in electronic genres that based themselves around using the latest synth and midi tricks / ‘futuristic’ sounds and so on. Stuff like Techstep, ‘Nu Skool’ Breaks, Atmospheric D&B, other things that ended up on Mary Anne Hobbs’ Breezeblock shows.

With the exception of maybe 70 12”s that I still vouch for, the vast majority of the music I loved has aged like milk.

Synth sounds and stuttering drum edits that sounded way ahead of their time (and were tbf, given the audio kit of the era) now just sound cheap and cliched, and can be replicated by anyone on a phone app.

So I have nostalgia for the era, the parties and friends etc but I don’t care if I never hear a Decoder or Marine Parade record again. So False for me.

The ages I've been heavily engaged in listening to new music so far are 12-19 and 31-40. From 23-24 I was also into new music but only Drum & Bass / Techno / Electroclash. I'm now 43 and as of today have heard 1 (one) album from 2022.

I joined ILM in early 2006, when I was 21.

At 16, my favorite music was REM and Sonic Youth.

At 17, Wilco and Fennesz and Elliott Smith.

At 18, Destroyer and the New Pornographers and Prefuse 73.

At 19, I began university and had access to an immense music library at the conservatory plus the radio station and lots of new friends— it was really *this* age that things changed for me. I went deep on Low and all the E6 stuff, and started getting into more experimental realms— it was in 2004 that I first heard Animal Collective and No-Neck Blues Band, which then sent me toward free jazz and new classical of all sorts. At 21 I was the freeform genre director of the radio station and known for playing "out there" music, and then through a now ex-ilxor, I got very into dance music.

I'd say that a lot of the music pre-university is embedded in me, and some of my favorite stuff— listening to old Destroyer albums, I know all the lyrics without really thinking about it.

University made me more voracious but also more open to all kinds of music, and that's where I like to think I am now, tho something happened in the past 10-15 years wherein I just cannot with a lot of highly-rated pop music like Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, etc. I just have no patience for it.

Nowadays, I mostly listen to jazz of all sorts, ambient music, and contemporary classical, with some beat-oriented electronic music thrown in for good measure because I'm a fag and I love dancing around my house like a maniac.

couldn’t be more wrong … although I did go see RATM in nyc recently

honestly i was thinking of when i said that was the essay about the VDGG song "Pioneers Over c" I wrote a few days ago, if you're interested in hearing more about what "layers of meaning" means to me check it out

ty, i think i see what you mean. it's not that your *interpretation* has changed or deepened, it's more that the song has grown alongside you, in parallel. that's an interesting & relatable idea.

Between about the ages of 18 and 23, pretty much all the music I listened to was prog rock. The more cult, weird prog bands, for the most part. King Crimson. Magma. Henry Cow. Van der Graaf Generator.

wow, you used to be so cool :)

great essay though. I think I was 19 or so when I got into VdGG and even though a lot of the critics I read were lukewarm on them (which seemed significant cuz they were way into Crimson, Yes, Genesis, etc.) I did hear something very special in them. but it wasn't until now that I realized how deep & truly insane some of the lyrics are. on Still Life especially.

and yes the live "Pioneers Over c" rules. its unbelievable really.

I think there's some basic truths inherent in the 16-22 theory even if it's not perfect and exact

Like, I'm a voracious listener to contemporary experimental music and I pretty much have to concede that no modern normal song-based rock music or (except maybe Thee Oh Sees) is going to move me like the bands I liked from roughly age 13-26

Like I would see Bill Orcutt/Chris Corsano over the Chili Peppers pretty much any day of the week, but there's like a 0% chance some modern rock band is going to make me feel like the Peps did when I was 16. When I listen to Orcutt I'm tapping into the present & future, when I listen to the Peps I'm tapping into the past. They're two totally different experiences!

The milder statement that the music that was most important to you at a formative age will always have a special place for you is much harder to deny.

maybe, not sure that's true for me

Maybe too long a thought to summarize on my phone

But I noticed about a decade ago that “music I was long aware of, and didn’t dislike, but didn’t adore” suddenly made so much more sense to me

A key feature of this music was that it tended more toward the abstract: electro acoustic, “unspooling” classical (Baroque, modern, stuff like Schubert), jazz, ambient and drone

I’d vaguely describe this music as “lacking the same concentration of content” as music I was engaging with when I was younger. Not lower-quality, just somewhat diluted

Like my ears had tired of concentrated-content music and just wanted to relax

Stockhausen in particular, which I didn’t get when I was 20, suddenly made so much more sense— “oh this is music for people who want to listen to something but are tired of listening to “music””

A lot of the Erased Tapes stuff seemed featureless to me when I was in my 20s and now it sounds like manna from heaven

Kranky also. Man I remember being SO BORED listening to somebody’s choice to put on Pole in the tour van. Now I love Pole

Haha I sort of went the other way. I wanted to listen to drone and ambient and sparse free improv music all the time in my 20s and now feel much less drawn to it and much more hungry for content.

xp Pole announced a new album a few days ago

Minimal electronic music like Pole definitely part of that too

“The best” no, most meaningful perhaps. For example the recent reissue of Cake’s Fashion Nugget was a must have for me because that album meant so damn much to me as a teenager. When I discovered Soul Coughing a decade or so later I got really into them as well but I actually kinda regretted that I hadn’t bought their CDs in high school, if that made sense. They’re very much a better band but Fashion Nugget will always bring back certain memories and visuals that other music can’t.

To me it kinda boils down to two things, one that the 16-22 period is so much about searching for meaning and an identity and music can express things that you otherwise couldn’t. I wasn’t really good at communicating with others, I just wanted them to feel what I felt when I heard certain things. The other is when you’re young you just don’t know a whole lot, so every band you like is the best band ever. I grew up with ELP (thanks Dad) and was fascinated with them in a way I really couldn’t once I started listening to other, better prog bands.

But as a whole I think I appreciate music more now. I have more context, more concentration, and way better speakers. Also I’ve managed to wean myself off that RYM-brain disease that makes you think of music in terms of like….a certain ideal, where one bad track can spoil the bunch and every album you tag as great only counts if you give mediocre ratings to others. Now I have more of a YouTube commenter mentality. Everything is special to some degree. And even if Cake will never be in regular rotation again I still love hearing it again if only to appreciate all the unusual bits that didn’t stand out to me back then.

ty, i think i see what you mean. it's not that your *interpretation* has changed or deepened, it's more that the song has grown alongside you, in parallel. that's an interesting & relatable idea.

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse)

yep, exactly, thanks :)

wow, you used to be so cool :)

― frogbs

yeah, what the hell happened to me, lol

In my case more like age 10 thru 14.

^that's a little truer for me; also means I love underrated Aerosmith albums

Until now, I've thought of age 13 as my pivotal year; when I turned 13 I was mostly interested in classic rock and dadrock (on the psych/prog side). by the time i turned 14 i was an impossibly hip 14 year old and listening to, on the whole, much more texturally sophisticated stuff: post-rock, trip hop, "electronica" & shoegaze ; The Wire/Other Music-sanctioned reissues; experimental and "downtown" music; left-of-Britpop stuff like Super Furries and short run singles via Peel and NME, etc. Syd Barrett, and talking to people who were older than me who were also into Syd Barrett, was the main catalyst for this change, and my musical interests were p much cemented along those lines until i was 25. 25 was the age i started downloading & was finally able to see past the Cult of the Great Gothic Genius of the US/UK.

Having written that out tho, I trace everything back to a basic impulse of "grunge is/was the dumbest thing ever made" that was in place long before i turned 13. Those years weren't actually pivotal or formative, just part of the continuum. But I had my two imago phases at 13 & 25.

I just checked and Scarcity's "V" does make me feel as intensely as "Theresa's Sound World" did when I was 16. There have been a bunch of contemporary rock releases from my elder life that have: Mew, Horse Lords, Nachtmystium, Krallice.

Scarcity's V is some of the most exciting rock music going atm, really galls me how this board basically hives itself off from exploring such interesting material tbh

(my answer to the thread proposition is F, with an eternal exception for Cardiacs)

here, you 'orrible lot

https://scarcity-nyc.bandcamp.com/track/v

Looks like they're at Saint Vitus Bar a couple of nights in late October, I'm down to check that out for sure.

You know, it's a sunny summer day in New York, not a cloud in the sky. My very first thought was, this is good but i feel a bit too Los Angeles goth, need to try it again in gloomier weather.

There's a problem with this hypothesis. By the time I was 16 it was very hard to like music sincerely, because Q magazine existed and almost all of the great albums of the 1960s had just been re-released on compact disc. A lot of the new music that was hip in the late 1980s owned something to the past as well. Specifically the memory of jangly psychedelic pop. As a consequence I've always had a sense that rock music had a history, and that I was only privy to part of it.

Assuming I'm not a one-off, I believe that sixteen-year-old kids nowadays are more informed, more sophisticated, more calculating, less prone to bouts of naive fancy than their predecessors. They grew up in a post-post-modern age, a post-irony age, where they've been bombarded with the entirety of human culture since birth, and they know which names to drop. Sixteen-year-old kids nowadays know that it's too risky to like something sincerely, you have to adopt a pose. You can't just reveal your innermost likes. That kind of thing will be recorded and used against you.

What music did I love when I was five? I have no idea. When I was about twelve I was mind-blown by (redacted), but I knew that by the age of sixteen I had to project an image - I had to like the right things, and (redacted) wouldn't cut it. For the record I think (redacted)'s run from 1976-1989 has moments of brilliance but is not "the best" of anything, and it doesn't seem like "the best" subjectively, although I struggle to think of anybody who was better at that particular style than (redacted).

It angers me that Psychocandy was released when I was ten. If you're in polite company and somebody asks you what music you loved when you were young, Psychocandy gets results. It wins the argument. But I'm slightly too young to have plausibly liked it. I can't think of an equivalent from 1992. Something universally beloved, that wins the argument.

Do you remember when David Cameron picked "Fake Plastic Trees" as one of his Desert Island Discs? I remember admiring him for that. He played the game right. Usually when politicians play that game they mess it up. If he had picked e.g. "Come to Daddy" it would have been obvious that someone was briefing him. If he had picked Ed Rush and Optical's "Watermelon" ditto. But it's just plausible that he was aware of the Radiohead song and might actually have liked it. And it's not something you'd expect David Cameron to like. But on reflection it is, because he was a young marketing executive at one point and Radiohead were, and remain, a million-selling platinum rock band. If only he had displayed that kind of genius when he was prime minister.

as someone who works with young people, my experience is that you are wrong, ashley

I had older siblings who I thought were cool. Even my parents had, I think, decent taste. I may have been mistaken in this, but that was my perception.

Circa 1982-84, even just going by top 40 radio, a stupid-ass suburban kid like me would hear decently varied music. My memory of those years is hearing "Rock the Casbah" right next to "Pass the Dutchie" and "Shock the Monkey" then "Borderline" and "Everyday I Write the Book" then "Thriller" then "Karma Chameleon" then "Hungry Like the Wolf" then "She Bop" then "Isn't She Lovely" or "I Want Candy" or "Valley Girl" or or "Heart of Glass" or "Glory Days" or "Vacation." I felt like it was a good time, musicwise.

Then I fell into the orbit of the ostensibly cool older siblings who were more about Joe Jackson, Sparks, Missing Persons, Thomas Dolby, Flock of Seagulls, XTC, Talking Heads, REM, Husker Du, and (overwhelmingly) Elvis Costello. Was that better? I don't know. Nowadays it's all blent together.

my musical trajectory was like....

ages 5-8 - I liked Paul McCartney and popular classical works like Night on Bare/Bald Mountain as that's what my dad dubbed me cassettes of
ages 9 -12 - I liked Chicago (the band) and I was hella into Motown and soul but mostly just cribbed tracks from my dad's cd collections (the Motown and Soul thing has been evergreen since then)
ages 12 - 13 - got very into the dance pop the local pop station played, like Real McCoy, Snap - Rhythm is a Dancer, Ace of Base, etc. and gangsta rap like Snoop.
age 13 - Aerosmith, Nirvana
age 14- Nirvana, Alice in Chains
age 15- METALLICA
age 16-17 - Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Alice in Chains, "get that rap away from me, rap sucks!"
age 18 - oh hey I like rap again, also SLAYER, aforementioned bands from previous age
age 19 - METAL AND RAP, METAL AND RAP, METAL AND RAP

c&p until age 41.

you @ age 12-13 otm

I still love all that shit. someone hosted a 90s themed 'dance' party recently and those songs got me dancing like a 12 yar old

Sixteen-year-old kids nowadays know that it's too risky to like something sincerely, you have to adopt a pose. You can't just reveal your innermost likes. That kind of thing will be recorded and used against you.

Idg this - liking something sincerely isn't the same thing as broadcasting that liking, for one thing. What music do you think would be risky for a present-day 16yo to admit to liking? What are the risks - how do you think it would be used against them? Wouldn't that mean that there would also be music it would be socially beneficial to proclaim liking? Aren't there people who sincerely like that music in the first place?

Something else really, but one thing for age 14-16 is that it's an age where your immediate peers and social pressure is most likely to condition what you listen to and like... before you end up breaking away and finding your independence. What were my chances as a country bumpkin not to listen to pop punk and nu metal as a young teenager in the late 90s - early 00s ? I'm not shitting on it or anything, I'm just saying that as a result, 16-22 was a period of progressively figuring it out. There was a lot of magic and enthusiasm, moments where you can't believe how good something is, but in terms of "taste", at first it was still timid baby steps before I found real good sources. To me, OP's question is like saying your first kisses will always seem like the best ever, and yes but no.

I got bullied for my musical tastes (among other things) all the time, but I was never the type who could 'pretend' to like something. authenticity has always been this thing hard-wired into my brain, like I won't even wear a t-shirt of a band who I barely know or only "kind" of like.

perhaps that's why I got into metal, all the bullying made me angry and felt less like dancing.

I do think I got into Offspring more or less to quit being made fun of, though I do legitimatley like Smash

Do kids get cancelled for being too rockist or not having diverse enough Spotify playlists these days? Or vice versa?

"Calling you out, Terrence. What's the similarity between alllllll of these albums. Pop/punk. Pop/punk. Pop/punk. Pop/punk. Pop/punk. Guess other music is 'inferior' to you, huh? Please nobody see this guy play Coach Bolton in High School Musical this weekend."

What never ceases to amaze me these days is that 16-22 year olds seem to know all of the words to all of the songs released since the mid-1950s. I see it whenever I DJ and it’s mind-boggling.

The internet seekers, who can tell you every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978?

i find it mind boggling that people can memorize words so easy.

I can remember what my batting average in Babe Ruth League was in 1989, but even lyrics to a song I've heard 4,000 times, I can't recite from memory, unless it's by Snoop

Someone suggested to me that as full digital natives, who have had instant access to all information at all times since infancy, Gen Z have developed a greater ability to quickly absorb and retain large amounts of information. I dunno, it’s a theory…

Anecdotally, my friend who teaches city kids gets told by said kids to turn off the "weird shit" when she puts on, IDK, The Smiths. I suspect that the "cool kids" are the ones with diverse tastes and that the bulk of young ppl still stick to one or two home genres, or just whatever's popular. Which is how it's been for like the last 30 years AFAICT

I can remember what my batting average in Babe Ruth League was in 1989, but even lyrics to a song I've heard 4,000 times, I can't recite from memory, unless it's by Snoop

I have about a half dozen rap songs from 1987-90 that bubble up in my brain unbidden all the time: Big Daddy Kane's "Raw," a bunch of Public Enemy songs from Nation of Millions, one or two from the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, and Eric B. & Rakim's "Follow the Leader" are the big ones. And it just...happened! I am almost militantly anti- paying attention to lyrics in almost all cases! I just listened to those songs (and the albums they came from) so much in high school that now they'll be there for the rest of my life, I guess.

even lyrics to a song I've heard 4,000 times, I can't recite from memory

This is me, to a T. My family teases me about it. I can't even sing along to my favorite songs for more than a few lines before messing up.

that's part of why all of the songs I know from memory are from my early 20s or before, because back then I would beat individual albums into oblivion rather than listening to as much music as I do now.

but even then, I did that with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black and I still only know fragments. yet i can do almost all of Doggystyle from memory

Anecdotally, my friend who teaches city kids gets told by said kids to turn off the "weird shit" when she puts on, IDK, The Smiths.

This happened when I put on the Smiths at at least two workplaces when I was an undergrad over 20 years ago and someone actively turned it off in both places. Virtually anything went over better, including Erik Satie, Steve Reich, Miles Davis and Indian classical music.

I wouldn't say that most 16-22yos I come across could sing along to all the words of "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers", though.

Tbf I don't always put it to the test. Will do brb.

I think they pass the test if they know 50% or more of "Lemmings".

House With No Door is such a fun song to belt out

I wonder what sounds weird about the Smiths?

I still remember how weird Morrissey's voice sounded when I first heard it.

People just hate his voice.

It's not just the voice, though; the faces he makes when he's singing are a huge strike against him, too.

there are certain things i love because i loved them when i was 16-22, that i wouldn't love now if not for having loved them at 16-22

sometimes i hear things and think, man i would have loved this when i was 16-22. i can still enjoy it on some level, but i know i discovered it too late, past its window of maximum impact

this is true for every period of my life, but truest for 12-15 and 16-22

the thread statement is probably truest for people who were 16-22 during periods when contemporary music was best. for me it was 2007-2011--not exactly a great time for music. i consider the pop/rap/r&b music of my late childhood and early teens (2001-2005) to be more iconic, and that's still the only stuff that will guaranteed make me go buckwild at a dance party

I tried to make a play by play and basically there's a big gap in my musical memory from age 24 to 30

I started "making music professionally" and I definitely stopped listening with enthusiasm, it felt more like "research"

My early 20s were very much "listening to what Pitchfork recommended" (and lots of Vice-endorsed electroclash) and having Rapture "Echoes" be named album of the year was such a weird moment, I think I was like "I don't like this blog any more". The last album I remember loving on its release was Milk-Eyed Mender.

My second puberty happened age 30 with Micachu's "Jewellery", I fell in love with music listening again

It's been pretty much mostly modern classical ambient drone Baroque music and scronky stuff since then, and "a cool appreciation" for everything else

But, up until age 24:

3 Pachelbel's Canon
4 Bach Double Violin Concerto (Midori/Zukerman, had it on cassette)
5 Ligeti Requiem (broke my leg, rinsed 2001 over and over on my godfather's VCR)
6 Bartok Concerto for Strings etc. (cassette)
7 Eurythmics Sweet Dreams
8 Billy Idol Vital Idol
9 Madonna True Blue
10 Enigma MCMXC
11 Rap and Top 40 (Salt-N-Pepa, Public Enemy, Digital Underground, "One More Try" by Timmy T)
12 Shostakovich, Sibelius, Prokofiev, big early 20th century binge
13 Jean-Michel Jarre's entire discography
14 Bjork Debut
15 Lisa Germano Geek The Girl
16 Tori Amos Boys For Pele, David Bowie
17 Canrock, Big Shiny Tunes, Radiohead
18 My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab
19 US Maple Talker, everything Skin Graft and Drag City
20 Smog, krautrock, bought Neu!'s non-reissued debut on bootleg for $30 on CD
21 Anything Pitchfork said to listen to, Darla compilations
22 Xiu Xiu Xiu Xiu Xiu Xiu Xiu Xiu
23 Finally "understood" the UK 80s, heavy into The Smiths, OMD, YMG
24 Musical anhedonia

Kids yelling at you to turn off the Smiths are on the right side of history.

still remember hearing "This Charming Man" for the first time on the radio in 1984, it was memorable

xps amazing post

Wow @ 4-6

I can remember what my batting average in Babe Ruth League was in 1989, but even lyrics to a song I've heard 4,000 times, I can't recite from memory, unless it's by Snoop

― and the worms, they entered his ass (Neanderthal), Friday, August 26, 2022 4:57 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

To this day I only know the words to about a dozen or so songs in full, reliably and unfailingly, and one of them is 'Whoomp! there it is'.

― Adoration of the Mogwai (Deflatormouse), Wednesday, May 5, 2021 10:27 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol I know the whole first verse of that

actually second too

i just looked for it in the recesses of my brain, and whoomp, there it was

:D

Tag team, back again

See, that is a great opening line. It really sets the stage for what's to come.

I know all of the lyrics to Beck’s “Loser,” which I memorized when I was in 4th grade— it explains a lot about me and the poetry I tend to like and maybe the poetry I write, too

I know all of the lyrics to Beck’s “Loser,” which I memorized when I was in 4th grade— it explains a lot about me and the poetry I tend to like and maybe the poetry I write, too

check it to wreck it, let's begin

i don't know what "check it to wreck it" means but it sounds so fucking cool, anyone who says "check it to wreck it" is obviously rad as hell

and i like how he says "let's begin" even though we're already well unerway

So nice i posted twice— I also know a bunch of Beasties tracks, all of the “Live Through This” album, and too many punk songs to name— I was a lonely 10-14 year old who went rapidly from grunge and MTV alternative radio stuff to punk and hardcore , and then my friend gave me a Miles Davis record and another made me a mixtape with Radiohead and Big Black and other stuff on it, and I just expanded from there…

Oh, all the lyrics to Pulp’s Different Class.

*underway. And then he rhymes "noise" with "rejoice" I mean when does anyone rejoice except christmas. It fills me with the holiday spirit

xp

I don't even know a single Slayer lyric front to back and I have two Slayer tattoos on my right arm.

there are a few I can get almost all of the lyrics down to but that's it

Oh yeah, there are at least hundreds of songs i know most of the words to, maybe thousands. but very few i'm totally confident i could recite front to back without tripping up.

upside down and inside out

i just really wanna know why you have two Slayer tattoos on the same arm

like, if you had one on each arm they 'd be visible from all angles pretty much

i can see the logic in that

sooooo....the Divine Intervention album cover was the tattoo I always wanted, but I was afraid of royally fucking it up on the first try if I got a bad artist, so I went for more of a standard Slayer logo first go around. it was going to be my only one tatt.

got another the next year (Baphomet), put it on the other arm. then I put another one below on that on my left arm (Necronomicon sigil). then I said "fuck the guy who did my last two is amazing, let me have him try the Divine Intervention", but by then I'd already filled up most of my left arm.

I was thinking maybe you wanted to reserve the left arm for Voivod tattoos.

nah, i'm getting an ILX tattoo next

we want hen fap

honestly if you were only ever gonna have one tattoo the slayer logo is a solid coice

*choice

as is the divine intervention cover obv

I know all of the lyrics to Beck’s “Loser,” which I memorized when I was in 4th grade— it explains a lot about me and the poetry I tend to like and maybe the poetry I write, too

this rules

5 Ligeti Requiem (broke my leg, rinsed 2001 over and over on my godfather's VCR)

this too

not the part about breaking your leg, ykwim

Responding to the OP. Best? No. But the music I first discovered when I was younger does have a special resonance.

A brief history of musical discoveries:

Pre-12: Pretty much whatever was in my dad's record collection. Talking Heads, Beatles, Frank Zappa, King Crimson. Paul Simon's Graceland was my favourite album, and pretty much still is. It was also my first CD, after I pretty much wore out my dad's LP and the dubbed cassette.
12: This is where things first went wrong, mainly due to my dad's in-car radio station of choice (contemporary rock). I loved Live and Collective Soul, which I just can't fathom now. At least I wasn't into Bush, like my older brother. Started getting into jazz (Coltrane and Davis mainly).
13: My brother ditched Bush in favour of the OGs, so I ended up getting really into grunge. Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana. I remember thinking I was so cool when I tracked down a Green River CD, which none of my friends had even heard of.
14: I started listening to the local student radio station, which broadened my horizons into the great local music tradition. Bailter Space, 3Ds, Chills, The Clean etc.
15-16: Got my own record player, and discovered the joys of record stores. Learned I could trade in my Live and Collective Soul CDs for music I actually liked. I started down the indie rabbit hole pretty hard - Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, Pavement, Pixies, Smog. Traded a lot of mix tapes with friends, which introduced me to UK music like The Smiths, Belle and Sebastian etc.
17: Deep into indie and post-rock. Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Mogwai, Strereolab, MBV, Blonde Redhead etc. Lots of noise and ambient.
18: Discovered kosmiche and Krautrock. A friend switched me on to Wire, which led me to a lifelong love of post-punk. Lots of people were selling off LP collections in the late 90s and early oughts, so I picked up the likes of OMD, Gary Newman and Simple Minds for eye-wateringly low prices by today's standards. Even new LPs were cheaper than CDs then.
19-22: Pitchfork and p2p started to fuck everything up. I used to have take a chance on buying a CD or LP I'd never heard, and even stuff I read about on internet had to be bought in-store. Now I had everything at the click of a mouse, and I hoovered up so much crap. I barely like any of the music I got into over this period. I was really into some pretty inconsequential stuff, like Thee Shallows and For Stars. Still like American Analog Set and Death Cab but god, this was a wasteland musically for me. The fact that everything was available meant I lost my radar of what I liked. I didn't really get back on track until my mid-late 20s.

So 16-22 corresponded with discovering a lot of stuff I love, but also a lot of crap. I still play plenty of my favourites, but other artists have long since been sold off. And the stuff I discovered before I was 16, and then in my late 20s to now, I rate just as highly. So as for the OP question - it's a qualified no.

In response to the OP, I would state that the music I hated age 16-22 remains the worst and most hated

The heinous hits of the 70s now have a brilliant sheen of nostalgia for me.

I'm trying to think of music I hated as a 16-22 year old, roughly 2000-2007. Mostly the sort of "alternative rock radio" shit like Creed and whatever— still don't know or care about that music at all. So much of it just sounds like straight dudes farting out of their soul patches.

It's so bland and horrible it's hard to hate, I just forget it exists

Aside from post-grunge butt rock I was holding on to my hate of '80s hair metal/butt rock and '80s radio synthpop, feel like those are still solidly in the hate category. There will never be a reappraisal of Ratt or Motley Crue for me. Not quite hate but I really disliked Eminem aside from "Forgot About Dre" and that's only grown, "The Real Slim Shady" is nails on a chalkboard, I'd rather listen to Ratt.

In response to the OP, I would state that the music I hated age 16-22 remains the worst and most hated

― the five French fry feeling (flamboyant goon tie included), Friday, August 26, 2022 11:34 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

https://cdn.baeblemusic.com/bandcontent/mooney_suzuki/mooney_suzuki_1.jpg

xxp yeah corporate rock barely registered on my radar then (i think we're the same age, or very close), i rarely encountered and didn't regard it enough to hate it with a passion.

I somewhat performatively hated a lot of things when I was 16-22 that I've done a 180 on: post-rock, jazz fusion, a lot of shambolic or lo-fi or poppy indie rock (Pavement, Julie Doiron, Sloan).

The only band I really hated was RATM – I guess I still do, but never have to hear them.

It’s always bummed me out when people didn’t like something I liked… one of my earliest memories of talking about music was in 4th grade, when one of my friends was putting down “Electric Avenue”… I said (weakly), it’s just about different taste in music; and he replied: “If you like ‘Electric Avenue’, you have BAD taste in music.”

RATM >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>The Strokes (or substitute any of those Arlene's Grocery/Pianos scene bands whose members all had the same haircut)

RATM has been an inverted bell curve of cool lolcorny cool IME

xxp yeah i didn’t know anyone who liked it so it never was an issue— so much of what we’re talking about in this thread has to do with how one’s taste formations and thus young identity have to do with being in opposition to other taste formations and identities.

fuck anyone who doesn't like Electric Avenue tbh

opposing dualities: classic or dud?
xp

I also performatively hated a lot of things when younger - hair metal, 90s R&B, alternative/indie/college rock that didn't FUCKING ROCK, anything with synths and drum machines that wasn't hip-hop - because I was a dumbass 16 year old skateboarder growing up in the extreme heteronormativity of a small rural midwestern town in late 80s. I had a special hatred for the Smiths because the cover of Meat is Murder tricked me into thinking they were a punk band but it was jangly pop with a whiny british guy singing.

Age, college radio, the internet, and nostalgia have erased all this.

I had a "Hanson Sucks" t-shirt when I was 18. now, I would literally rip on someone for wearing that.

(I still don't like Hanson, but I dislike people devoting lots of energy to bragging about what they hate)

MMMBop was the first MP3 I ever downloaded on Napster. I knew it was considered trash at the time but still loved it unironically. I guess 13-year-old me was well on the way to becoming a poptimist.

I wonder if there were Hanson fans back in the day who wore 'Panterra Sucks' t-shirts?

It’s always bummed me out when people didn’t like something I liked… one of my earliest memories of talking about music was in 4th grade, when one of my friends was putting down “Electric Avenue”… I said (weakly), it’s just about different taste in music; and he replied: “If you like ‘Electric Avenue’, you have BAD taste in music.”

― Porcine-lina of the Pig Oceans (morrisp)

that poor fucking kid. who taught him to think like that?

opposing dualities: classic or dud?
xp

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse)

i don't know "opposing dualities" but "dimension-reversing dualities" is fucking classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYg9cNfUt2U

I dislike people devoting lots of energy to bragging about what they hate

And yet you read ilx

Lol touche

On this interesting topic, of "the music you loved most from 16-22 will always seem like the best music to you," you might want to read the following link to a recent article in the Washington Post that addressed the topic and included links to recent "academic" studies:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/09/25/music-taste-personality-traits/

I welcome any thoughts about the article, the studies, or other thoughts you have on the topic.

Because you have a homework assignment on this interesting topic?

Thoughts on the article below:

.

“Arousal is linked to the amount of energy and intensity in the music,” says David M. Greenberg, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Cambridge. Punk and heavy metal songs such as “White Knuckles” by Five Finger Death Punch were high on arousal, a study conducted by Greenberg and other researchers found.

“Valence is a spectrum,” from negative to positive emotions, he says. Lively rock and pop songs such as “Razzle Dazzle” by Bill Haley & His Comets were high on valence.

Depth indicates “both a level of emotional and intellectual complexity,” Greenberg says. “We found that rapper Pitbull’s music would be low on depth, (and) classical and jazz music could be high on depth.”

Take it over to POLL: Rhino Records' D.I.Y. Series

Valence is a spectrumthing

nothing turns me on like FFDP

We prefer music from artists whose personalities we identify with. “When people listen to music, they’re being driven by how similar that artist is to themselves,” Greenberg says.

In his 2021 study, participants rated the personality traits of artists using the Big 5 model: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (OCEAN). To the respondents, David Bowie displayed high Openness and Neuroticism; while Marvin Gaye displayed high Agreeableness.

idk what you call this genre of study but they're never remotely illuminating about music or society or psychology or anything else. it would take all day to unpack all the dubious assumptions behind this one

Greenberg created a 35-question quiz that provides insights into personality and musical preferences. To take the test, visit this site. (Editor’s note: The link is accurate, but there may be connectivity issues with their site because of high interest in the quiz. Greenberg also suggests clearing browser cache.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW3MIixEps4

That clip starts too late, sorry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByeXMGqapnU

meet the ultimate artist:

https://d11mgq5hlnsdgo.cloudfront.net/42267634-1308-47c8-8edf-8528983e4029.jpg

I saw someone in my social orbit post a top 30 for the week ending February 5, 1983, and felt a warm glow of recognition:

1. Down Under, Men at Work
2. Electric Avenue, Eddy Grant
3. You Can't Hurry Love, Phil Collins
4. Sign of the Times, Belle Stars
5. Too Shy, KajaGooGoo
6. Gloria, Laura Branigan
7. Story of the Blues, Wah
8. The Cutter, Echo and the Bunnymen
9. Steppin' Out, Joe Jackson
10. New Year's Day, U2
11. What Rap, Wham!
12. Up Where We Belong, Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes
13. Heartache Avenue, Maisonettes
14. Twisting by the Pool, Dire Straits
15. Last Night a DJ Saved my Life,
16. Oh Diane, Fleetwood Mac
17. Hold me Tighter in the Rain, Billy Griffin
18. Orville's Song, Keith Harris & Orville
19. Change, Tears for Fears
20. Billie Jean, Michael Jackson
21. Going Underground, the Jam
...
etc.

This is, one assumes, a UK chart. The US chart of the same time has a different vibe but I am generally disposed to like it fine as well:

1 2 AFRICA –•– Toto (Columbia)-15 (1 week at #1) (1)
2 1 DOWN UNDER –•– Men At Work (Columbia)-14 (1)
3 3 SEXUAL HEALING –•– Marvin Gaye (Columbia)-15 (3)
4 7 BABY, COME TO ME –•– Patti Austin with James Ingram (Qwest)-21 (4)
5 9 SHAME ON THE MOON –•– Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band (Capitol)-8 (5)
6 6 MANEATER –•– Daryl Hall & John Oates (RCA)-17 (1)
7 4 DIRTY LAUNDRY –•– Don Henley (Asylum)-15 (3)
8 8 ROCK THE CASBAH –•– The Clash (Epic)-19 (8)
9 10 YOU AND I –•– Eddie Rabbitt with Crystal Gayle (Elektra)-18 (9)
10 11 YOU CAN’T HURRY LOVE –•– Phil Collins (Atlantic)-14 (10)

11 12 THE OTHER GUY –•– The Little River Band (Capitol)-12 (11)
12 16 STRAY CAT STRUT –•– The Stray Cats (EMI-America)-7 (12)
13 14 GOODY TWO SHOES –•– Adam Ant (Epic)-13 (13)
14 17 PASS THE DUTCHIE –•– Musical Youth (MCA)-9 (14)
15 15 HEART TO HEART –•– Kenny Loggins (Columbia)-11 (15)
16 5 THE GIRL IS MINE –•– Michael Jackson / Paul McCartney (Epic)-14 (2)
17 18 ALLENTOWN –•– Billy Joel (Columbia)-11 (17)
18 21 YOUR LOVE IS DRIVING ME CRAZY –•– Sammy Hagar (Geffen)-9 (18)
19 23 ALL RIGHT –•– Christopher Cross (Warner Brothers)-3 (19)
20 20 YOU GOT LUCKY –•– Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (Backstreet)-13 (20)

21 24 DO YOU REALLY WANT TO HURT ME –•– Culture Club (Virgin)-10 (21)
22 27 HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF –•– Duran Duran (Harvest)-7 (22)
23 13 MICKEY –•– Toni Basil (Chrysalis)-23 (1)
24 28 YOU ARE –•– Lionel Richie (Motown)-4 (24)
25 25 HEART OF THE NIGHT –•– Juice Newton (Capitol)-11 (25)
26 32 BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG –•– The Pretenders (Sire)-9 (26)
27 37 BILLIE JEAN –•– Michael Jackson (Epic)-3 (27)
28 36 WE’VE GOT TONIGHT –•– Kenny Rogers & Sheena Easton (Liberty)-2 (28)
29 29 SHOCK THE MONKEY –•– Peter Gabriel (Geffen)-16 (29)
30 30 WHAT ABOUT ME –•– Moving Pictures (Network)-21 (30)

Judge me if you wish, but a playlist consisting of the above would keep me pretty happy for quite a while.

including "Orville's Song"?

What Rap, Wham!

: )

'pass the dutchie' too low

1982 to 1984 was the last time the Billboard singles chart was any fun

Find it odd looking at those lists how well established UK acts such as The Clash, Duran Duran, Adam Ant and Peter Gabriel are in the US list but not on the UK list.

Ok - not going to do this for every song, but just crosschecked the info for “rock the casbah” and yeah, it was a top 10 hit in the US (#8 peak), and a #30 in the UK charts.

fwiw, “Hungry Like The Wolf” only became a hit in the US after it was re-released in December of 1982. The original release, in June, did nothing.

1982 to 1984 was the last time the Billboard singles chart was any fun

Which I guess is my point by posting this - per the thread title I am aware of my bias, and I know to resist it. But I can't help looking at those songs and marveling at the variety, the diversity, the eclecticism.

For me, it was a golden period of top 40 radio - the country songs were right next to the New Wave songs and the punk-adjacent songs and the reggae songs and the corny pop balladry and the fading classic rock dinosaurs and R&B and funk, all on the same chart. The number one song had a stolen flute solo, and something like pop rap would emerge within a few months of this with Cameo and Newcleus, but there was also a Beatle and like five glurgey movie-soundtrack duets.

I still think it is significant that the same chart, in those days, could accommodate Michael Jackson and the Jam and Laura Branigan and the Oak Ridge Boys (oom papa mow mow), all played on the same radio station on my childhood nightstand? Forgive me for my pastopianism but I don't think the equivalent level of eclecticism would happen today.

xp the Adam Ant song was #1 in the UK but in May 1982, Duran Duran was also released May 1982 and hit #5, but Peter Gabriel only got to #58.

bovarism, I admire your attention to detail. For me, the larger point is that these few years appear to have been a pretty interesting time for popular music (even acknowledging the bias that it happens to be the time when I was most porous to popular music).

Some time in 1981 my cool older sister told me that the Soft Cell version of "Tainted Love" and the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" would shortly become US pop hits, and that "New Wave" was the next big thing. And lo, it came to pass.

Forty years on and this material is still relevant to me, despite it seeming like a flash-in-the-pan fad. My teenage daughter is currently rehearsing a dance routine to "I Ran" by Flock of Seagulls. This seems like a rather extended flash in the pan.

Round about 1981-82 was when I started getting interested in pop, aged 7-8, when I became aware of radio. Before that, it was music from TV shows (Happy Days, The Monkees), my parents’ few LPs and 8-tracks (The Beatles’ red & blue comps, “The Golden Age of Rock & Roll”, Simon & Garfunkel) and 70s AM radio in the car (Kenny Rogers, The Captain & Tennille).

Early-80s pop felt like an explosion of colour, with like you said rap, post-disco, new wave, countrypolitain, lush ballads, Deutche Neue Welle (altho I didn’t know the term then, these was talk of a “German Invasion” by DJs), and lots of power pop all coexisting quite happily in a kaleidoscopic mosaic.

By ‘86-87 that was more or less all gone and although I didn’t know it I was primed for something else. I was deep into hair metal, of course, although I was too nerdy to be a true banger. Punk hit me like a ton of bricks when we discovered a friend’s older brother’s tape collection, and from there my brain was colonized by college rock and UK sophisti-pop and all the stuff that MuchMusic’s Friday night alternative music show (what was it called again?) played.

To this day I can’t hear Daydream Nation or Repeater or Life’s Too Good or Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart without feeling like somehow they’re utterly perfect, even if I never deliberately listen to them. (I recently heard “Teen Age Riot” being piped in over the speakers at a casino and experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance that physically rocked me.)

1989, when I was 15, is the epicentre. The stuff I listened to obsessively then would show up on an all-time list if I made one, unreservedly. So yeah, for me more than a grain of truth to the original premise, but heavily qualified.

Definitely false for me. I think the music I heard pre-16 probably had a more formative influence on my eventual tastes. And then the music I got into post-22 is probably "the best music" to me now, though almost none of it was contemporary. Of course there's still stuff I love from my 16-22 (which was 1994-2000), but I also liked some real crap (I would love to forget how much a friend and I were obsessed with Oasis in 1995), and, more importantly, I ignored a ton of good music from those years due to some bullshit snobbery

teenage stuff provokes stronger emotional reactions but that's not always a plus. I'd never choose to live in a black flag damaged world these days. zen arcade still works but I can only do it once every few years. the pop songs I listened to in secret in my early teens (britney, avril, pink) can hit me harder than anything else sometimes. I know just like a pill isn't the greatest song technically but it still does what it's supposed to

Generally there's things I chose to listen to all through life that are the "best" music to me, and not always what hit hardest at the time. But something about the popular music that was in the air in early puberty, 12-15, triggers a deep familiarity that music before or after cant match. Those 1983 charts fell in that zone for me, and there's no way I'd know whatever the equivalent of "We've got Tonight" was five years before or after. But I know it, and I'd probably respond to something that stole the phrasing and melody of that hook in a completely different genre and context, like say in Meg Baird.

My preferred language for the music of my adolescence is "sentimentally treasured."

Not "best." I am not going to claim that Roxette (or Dead or Alive, or Men Without Hats, or Kool & the Gang) is better than anything going on today. But those early to mid 80s songs will always have a place in my heart that Sia or Drake (or whatever) will never be able to occupy.

for me it was more like 14-18

Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks Top 38 of 1997

Pos Billboard Modern Rock 1997 Artist
--- -------------------------- ------
1. Sex and Candy Marcy Playground
2. Semi-Charmed Life Third Eye Blind
3. Fly Sugar Ray midi
4. Tubthumping Chumbawamba
5. Walkin' on the Sun Smash Mouth
6. One Headlight Wallflowers
7. #1 Crush Garbage
8. Discotheque U2
9. Freshmen (Responsible) Verve Pipe
10. Staring at the Sun U2
11. Impression That I Get Mighty Mighty Bosstones
12. Push (You Around) Matchbox 20
13. Don't Speak No Doubt
14. Lakini's Juice Live
15. 33 Smashing Pumpkins
16. Everlong Foo Fighters
17. Santeria Sublime
18. If You Could Only See Tonic
19. 3AM Matchbox 20
20. Wrong Way Sublime
21. Greedy Fly Bush
22. Building A Mystery Sarah McLachlan
23. Bitter Sweet Symphony Verve
24. End is the Beginning Smashing Pumpkins
25. Criminal Fiona Apple
26. Gone Away Offspring
27. Bitch Meredith Brooks
28. The Difference Wallflowers
29. Hitchin' A Ride Green Day
30. A Long December Counting Crows
31. Not An Addict K's Choice
32. Your Woman White Town
33. Song 2 Blur
34. 6 Underground Sneaker P*mps
35. Volcano Girls Veruca Salt
36. Eye Smashing Pumpkins
37. New Pollution Beck
38. Monkey Wrench Foo Fighters

I looked at the regular top 100 for the week before my 16th birthday and really have no positive memories of any of it aside from "Mo Money Mo Problems."

Surprised that about half the Modern Rock year list would still qualify as listenable, but there are a few that I would have been sure came out a year or two before - "New Pollution," "Lakini's Juice," "Don't Speak." Those feel like 1995 to me for some reason. I remember talking about "Monkey Wrench" at lunch in junior high and "Santeria" playing on a boom box standing in front of my high school - they're distinct eras of radio in my head.

Forty years on and this material is still relevant to me, despite it seeming like a flash-in-the-pan fad.

When I saw the New Order/Pet Shop Boys tour last year, Paul Oakenfold DJ'd between the sets. At one point he played "Don't You Want Me," and everyone--I mean everyone--in the capacity crowd at the Hollywood Bowl sang along to every word.

I was in high school 80-83, which was a weird inflection point for popular music. We went from listening non-stop to Rush to the stuff that Ye Mad Puffin posted above in 1983.

First Warped Tour attended - not sure who else played the Austin show on the side stages but I definitely had CDs from 2/3 of these. I would much rather hear that Billboard Modern Rock chart than a Warped Tour mix.

https://austin-network.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Warped-Tour-1998.jpg

did not exist in 1983 but it absolutely blows my mind that there was some kind of bizarre alternate reality I missed out on where Heartache Avenue by Maisonettes was a hit song

unrelated but hypothetically if I bought a leisure suit and a loud keyboard and found some backup singers do you think this could fly today, asking for a friend

Forty years on and this material is still relevant to me, despite it seeming like a flash-in-the-pan fad. My teenage daughter is currently rehearsing a dance routine to "I Ran" by Flock of Seagulls. This seems like a rather extended flash in the pan.

I’m not hugely into ‘80s music, but I like this point and it feels true. My 6-year-old daughter loves the Go-Go’s and Joan Jett. We sometimes watch old music videos with the kids, and the ones from the ‘80s hit in a way that the ‘90s ones don’t (even though I have more personal nostalgia for the ‘90s stuff). You hear these songs everywhere, kids know them, etc. There’s something about ‘80s music that seems to keep it at the culture’s center of gravity.

I think the best predictor of what I listen next has always been the last preceding weeks. There's a mix of short and long cycles, but the appetite for newness dominates. There's no specific period that I can pinpoint to which drives and pushes my taste. Rather I'm being pulled and tossed and I don't know where I'm going next.

"Sentimentally treasure" is good coinage. But one day it can be this, the other it will be that, and they're years apart. Our minds/hearts are not linear and chronological.

Word

There’s something about ‘80s music that seems to keep it at the culture’s center of gravity.

I agree -- most of this is down to demographics. That said, there could be something specific to 80s pop that appeals to children (earnestness maybe?) in a way that 90s music doesn't. The innocence of 50s music was one reason I heard a lot of that as a child in the 80s (we even had "sock hops" at my school), rather than "like four dead in Ohio" etc, which I heard a lot too but at an older age.

Yes and no - certain sounds do seem to get lodged in pop culture, and returned to over and over. The Tainted Love/Don't You Want Me/Take on Me/Sweet Dreams sound is what survives the erosion of this era, but the Juice Newton/Oak Ridge Boys/Kenny Rodgers has vanished and the AOR pop rock sound of REO/Styx/Loverboy has been whittled down to Don't Stop Believing. The torchy, smokey r'n'b balladry of the 50s is a set of motifs and signifiers that still gets trotted out more than other pop of that era.

I had mostly horrible taste at age 16, but the waning hours of the old ways of acquiring music had a lot to do with that.

lots of semi-hard rocky stuff that substituted for the metal I wanted to listen to but couldn't sneak past mom.

however, I was already majorly into prog rock by 15

XP

Fun to imagine some alternate universe where Juice Newton/Oak Ridge Boys/Kenny Rodgers is actually the surviving signifier of 80's music.

that's a good point, bendy, and per your examples it's not much of a mystery to me that children would be into Take On Me but not Kenny Rogers.

yeah my generation are the content creators of today and it has created this weird environment where I just constantly feel like I'm being pandered to. I do wonder if my kids will grow up knowing about 80s and 90s stuff the same way I knew a ton about The Beatles, Elvis, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc. but yeah as bendy mentioned there is a lot of revisionist history going on there - just go to any used record store and you can find what people were **really** listening to in those days. it's pretty funny to hear the stories of the dudes from Light in the Attic trying to secure the rights to obscure ambient or City Pop releases from overseas and having the creators go "wait, why do you care about this? nobody really listened to it back then"

Looking at any random 70s top 40 is good for this too. I listen to a lot of 70s music, but those charts are filled with songs I literally have never heard

This too shall pass, as soon as the kids who grew up on Gangnam Style get the masters in english, and start presenting a super-articulate argument for why, actually, that was the best era of music.

The thing is, Gangnam Style has gone away (for now)… the ‘80s never really did! (Can you think of a time when you weren’t hearing “Take On Me” on the reg?)

80s pop music was loathed and despised for a while in the 90s in my world; some of that was fronting for sure, but it did happen

hm not sure why I said loathed AND despised lol

Personally, I will never not love 80s music. But one of my current musical projects is a 90s cover band. This is music that I didn't love the first go-round, but it gets a very good crowd reaction.

I have written of this before, so I apologize for sounding like a broken record. But the 20- and 30-somethings in my orbit REALLY love 90s music. They don't appear to crave Duran Duran or Blondie or Human League (although they will listen politely).

What apparently gets the young adults dropping tips in the jar is the Goo Smash Blossom Blowfish Peppers Mud Jam Sugar Temple stuff.

I worked so hard for so many years to please people in a bar on a Tuesday night. Writing, arranging, recording, performing. Most of it goes unnoticed and is not missed.

But if you play "All Star" or "Loser" or whatever? Prepare to be drenched in boozy affection. There will suddenly be five post-collegiate women in sparkly tank tops dancing in front of the stage. I do not even pretend to understand it.

about ten years ago I was talking to a DJ who worked in similar environment and noted that "Crimson & Clover" seemed to transcend generations.

As much as I'll ride for the '90s, "Take on Me" / "Don't You Want Me" are sure as hell better songs than "Loser" / "All Star"...

in regards to the fetishism of decades, it did seem locally that 80s nostalgia was dwarfing 90s for a looooong time, and I think that's sometimes largely due to the false homogenous association given to each decade.

Like for many people, 80s music is FUN PARTY music, with lots of synths, drugs, and dancing, and then the 90s came around and everybody is depressed or melancholy and on heroin and playing loud guitarists or rapping about killing people, that's no 'fun'!

obv neither of those two stereotypes are remotely accurate but for casual folk who just want to go out for a fun night of dance, these aren't people who are going to be screaming at the DJ to play Human League's "Human" or The Motels "Only the Lonely", they'll be yelling for Bon Jovi and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and not paying attention to the lyrics of the "happy" songs that actually aren't really 'happy' songs.

but I do think 90s nostalgia is taking off here a lot more recently, a friend of mine a few years go did a 90s breakup cabaret where she sang all 90s breakup songs and the building was packed, everybody loved it. and plus any time someone sings "Plush" at a karaoke night everybody sings full-throated (once saw a dancer dance to it at an adult establishment and all of the men were ignoring her and singing to each other)

it did seem for a while that 90s nostalgia/revivalism was really going to be confined to hip-hop (and I don't blame anybody, that was a great era of hip hop) but now all of it seems to be embraced. Cranberries popular on jukeboxes again, and 90s dance parties seem to be a much bigger thiing than like ten years ago.

"Don't You Want Me" was once a pretty vapid guilty pleasure... it's just had a 18 year head start on "All Star" towards canonization.

I wonder why the 90s broke the late-20th century cycle of the 20 year nostalgia revival? It's basically taken 30 years, with only tentative traction a decade ago. Something something Napster?

It's not clear to me which is the fun decade and which is the nostalgia decade between the 80s and 90s.

I think "Breakfast at Tiffany's" soured the 90s for everybody for a while and they just finally got over it

xpost

The '80s revival started basically in 1992-1993, my freshman year of college. The radio station was already playing A Flock of Seagulls, period Roxy Music, Visage, and The B-52's on Mondays. The first Living in Oblivion comp was released in 1992, I think. That decade and its confusing signals about What It Means never disappeared.

Damn good post up there, Neanderthal.

90s nostalgia is taking off here a lot more recently

In the category of "things that are probably quite obvious but which I just realized, because I am an idiot" is that the retro fun party music that was popular 10 years ago is different from the retro fun party music that is popular right now.

And it makes sense (to people who are not idiots like me) that the optimal focal distance for retro fun party music may have shifted, in the last 10 years... approximately 10 years.

It's one of those Duh-moment realizations like "when did I become the same age as OLD PEOPLE?"

Tl;dr: the frisson of recognition that greeted "Hungry Like the Wolf" in 2013 is just about the same as the frisson of recognition that greets "No Myth"in 2023.

to my generation 80s stuff was more of a guilty pleasure - like I remember people making fun of Devo and 80s hairstyles constantly. a few years later people started to like it in earnest and then a decade or so later you had Stranger Things. 90s revival is maybe a bit weirder because that decade had so many things in a blender - like it's hard to imagine what a revival of stuff like Cake, Beck, and Soul Coughing would even sound like. whereas the 80s had a very distinct sound. or rather distinct synthesizers and drum machines that you can't use anymore without sounding like an 80's throwback.

Where are you hangin' out, Puffin, that you're hearing "No Myth"??

because I am an idiot

Would you say you... "ain't the sharpest tool in the shed"(?)

I wonder why the 90s broke the late-20th century cycle of the 20 year nostalgia revival?

The Y2K revival is happening right now... but the music hasn't come back as strong as the '80s never left!

lol @ morrisp

90s revival is maybe a bit weirder because that decade had so many things in a blender

For example, HEART IN A BLENDER

ahem

Um, anyway, to Alfred, "No Myth" has long been a staple of my acoustic trio's set. Along with "Boys of Summer," "No One Is to Blame," "Straight Up," "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want," "Hungry Like the Wolf," "Harden my Heart," etc.

props for "No One is to Blame"

who plays the sax in your Quarterflash cover

I do.

My 6-year-old daughter loves the Go-Go’s and Joan Jett. We sometimes watch old music videos with the kids, and the ones from the ‘80s hit in a way that the ‘90s ones don’t (even though I have more personal nostalgia for the ‘90s stuff). You hear these songs everywhere, kids know them, etc. There’s something about ‘80s music that seems to keep it at the culture’s center of gravity.

Like for many people, 80s music is FUN PARTY music, with lots of synths, drugs, and dancing, and then the 90s came around and everybody is depressed or melancholy and on heroin and playing loud guitarists or rapping about killing people, that's no 'fun'!

It's more like 80's pop songs and artists on the whole are quirky and idiosyncratic and comfortable in their own skin. Lots of Ally Sheedys waving their colorful freak flags, and then apart from a few novelty hits like 'She Don't Use Jelly', the 90's are dominated by the Emilio Estevez musclehead guy from the Breakfast club. He's boasting about how awesome he is. Whether that's a reaction to all the Nirvana self-loathing stuff, or vice-versa, they're two sides of the same coin.

There are always going to be counter-examples, but what I don't see much of in the 90's is that kind of honest self-acceptance and it's not hard to see why that resonates more with kids.

Lots of Ally Sheedys

My next band name, thanks

I think part of the reason the 90s didn't have that as a lot of musicians in the 90s did struggle with accepting themselves. I mean obviously sunshine pop was a thing in the 90s, it wasn't as if it was this purely drab decade, as with all of them, it had a lot of things.

but a lot of the mainstream rock that hit airwaves, esp the stuff that the mainstream called grunge (but wasn't necessarily actually grunge) was about depression, addiction, loss, which, not that 80s rock bands didn't sing about them (though you were less likely to hear HAIR BANDS and their hit singles be about anything but hedonism)...but there just seemed to be more volumes of it with 90s rock. one of Alice in Chains's singles from Jar of Flies, which most karaoke hosts have, "Nutshell", ends "If I can't be my own, I'd feel better dead"...shit is heavy, it's a bummer of a tune and Layne was living in Hell at the time. STP's "Creep" even, that sucker's an earworm, but their hit song had Weiland wailing that he was half the man he used to be. None of the bravado and cocksure attitude of 80's hair metal.

It probably explains why I gravitated towards shit like Alice in Chains in high school, like, I never dealt with ANYTHING at that level obviously, but the mid to late 90s were where I first noticed my mental health declining and was bullied and felt very angry, isolated and closed off from the rest of the world. for me, I didn't want these bouncy alternative pop songs, I wanted slow dirgey shit about death and slowly wasting away, or losing someone and never getting them back.

to my generation 80s stuff was more of a guilty pleasure - like I remember people making fun of Devo and 80s hairstyles constantly. a few years later people started to like it in earnest and then a decade or so later you had Stranger Things. 90s revival is maybe a bit weirder because that decade had so many things in a blender - like it's hard to imagine what a revival of stuff like Cake, Beck, and Soul Coughing would even sound like. whereas the 80s had a very distinct sound. or rather distinct synthesizers and drum machines that you can't use anymore without sounding like an 80's throwback.

― frogbs, Friday, February 10, 2023 8:43 AM

frogs otm that's how i remember it happening as well. "80s backlash" was very strong for a while. to some folks, it never really went away —and that's fine— but it was def not cool to like a lot of 80s pop culture for a while. maybe about 97ish is when i remember the "party weekend" radio format started showing up. you know the one: they would play all 80s from bon jovi to romeo void, doesn't matter as long as somebody remembers it right?

i'd like to mention something along the theme of this thread, but a bit off topic sorry. 16-22 was 1997-2003 and i'm finding a lot over the past few years that the sound of that era (or more specifically, 94-99) is what i remember most fondly. even now, i go back to stuff that i either dismissed at the time or was completely unaware of and i find that it just simply appeals to me. something about the familiar production quirks of the era, i guess: the novelty-ization of the hiphop inspired "dusty drum loop", the general onslaught of more "electronica" (lol) elements, and that one drum sound (idk on this one; i can't get any more specific. it's like the "gated snare" of the 90s but it's a whole kit sound. i've recognized it on albums made during that period across continents, so maybe it has more to do with a specific mic that was popular during the time. again: idk i'm not music scholar or educated journalist, but it's a very specific drum sound from the mid-late 90s. maybe someone else can expound?). all that stuff just sounds warm and comforting to me these days. i still can't get all the way on board with a lot of the pop stuff of that era, but i have a lot more curiosity about it these days.

anyway, cool post. always enjoy reading all ya'll.

I remember being a HS freshman in 1990, and overhearing some cool, preppy seniors talking about music/movies or something... one of them said, "We're starting to look back at the '80s and go... ugh."

they said while playing Phil Collins's "Another Day in Paradise" on their boombox

There isn't a week that passes when I don't fight a rando on Twitter or a message board who calls Scritti Politti "dated" because they use drum machines + keyboards. "You wouldn't accuse a certain Rickenbacker 12-string sound from 1965 dated, would you?" is my conventional response, and it usually makes'em splutter.

*of sounding dated

(idk on this one; i can't get any more specific. it's like the "gated snare" of the 90s but it's a whole kit sound. i've recognized it on albums made during that period across continents, so maybe it has more to do with a specific mic that was popular during the time. again: idk i'm not music scholar or educated journalist, but it's a very specific drum sound from the mid-late 90s. maybe someone else can expound?).

I can't speak to the technical aspects of this -- though it likely involves just a different application of compression and EQ than had previously been popular -- but I heard a song off Jeff Buckley's Grace a few days ago (an album that has not held up well for me at all, for whatever reason) and the snare sound instantly tied it to the '90s. It's just as fat as the typical hair metal snare sound, but warmer, less high-end/snarey, and stripped of ostentatious high-frequency reverb (there is reverb, it's just not ladled on). As for the rest of the kit, there's a consistency in tone that started to become more prominent in drums around this time. The best analogy I can come up with is that, like with cars, drums were now being designed and manufactured using computers rather than slide rules. It's that clear, unchanging, resonant tone that I associate with DW drums (which really started becoming super popular around this time). Essentially, there would never again be a tom sound like there'd been on the Kinks' "Strangers" (listen to the "howl" of the drum in the outro) -- that kind of (for lack of a better term) "gritty" tone had been designed out of new drums (and most drum heads).

Great contributions, all. This is one of my favorite topics and I am grateful for the excuse to think about Scritti Politti instead of the dreary slog of life and work and school and kids and bills and repairing the Honda and cleaning the stupid house.

Anyway. My own personal ages 16-22 were 1986-1992.

My hazy memory is that I aged out of pop during those specific years. "Classic Rock" was a thing in about 1987/8. So it was totes normal to listen to Pink Floyd and the Who and Steve Winwood and Don Henley that year. By the time I was 22 I was more into jazz and classical and other artsy shit. Plus "college rock," which was like REM, Talking Heads, Replacements, Throwing Muses, and other ephemera now called "alternative."

In contravention of the thread title I date my time of musical porousness to ages 11-17, not 16-22. But the larger point remains valid.

ty tarfumes! i figured it must have been a kind of confluence of changing thoughts in sound engineering and new tech coming out. to expound on my tastes a little more, there's also a lot of familiar guitar effects from that period that i just happen to really enjoy. and of course those were mass manufactured so it figures. kind of like the crybaby wah was everywhere in the 70s i guess.

also xpost alfred i have to confess that i'm one of those people: i used to use "this sounds dated!" as a way to negatively critique the music. as if it's cupid and psyche's fault that it got made when it did.

i'm so sorry.

(if it's any consolation: now i don't even care, i only like music that's offensive to my enemies.)

and finally, this is very otm for me as well—

I date my time of musical porousness to ages 11-17, not 16-22. But the larger point remains valid.

― Auf Der Martini (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, February 10, 2023 9:53 AM

piggybacking on the 'dated' comments, it just seems to get used shorthand to suggest "lol this sound/instrument only belongs in music within a tiny confined period". whereas the real way to use "dated" as a pejorative for me, is for those retro acts that seem more interested in creating an artificial replication of the aesthetic without giving the same energy to the material, like they'll get the sound and production right but the songs are an afterthought. like it's 'dated' because they were more interested in creating a wax statue of something rather than embodying it

like typically I hate 'dated' in a review. oh noes they used a Fairlight CMI outside of 1983

otm

so this raises a question— when does "dated" become "revival"?

that's something I really appreciate about the stuff coming out on 100% Electronica, it's kinda dialed into that specific 90's ethereal production style. when I listen to it, it kinda sounds like how I remember the 90s being, moreso than actually listening to tunes from that era. the exception (for some reason) being Savage Garden, those songs still sound a bit magical to me. anyway here are a couple tunes that I think represent what I'm talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieVYydeEOQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAIwC8aFcH4

Tarfumes, I am intrigued by your explication of drum history (speaking as someone who literally owns a DW drum kit) but I am going to need a couple more examples of what you do and don't mean. Can you elaborate?

obviously sunshine pop was a thing in the 90s

hi dere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1fzJ_AYajA

Isn’t it an old Rickenbacker 12-string on the Friends theme song? It’s probably that kind of thing that throws people off when assessing what’s dated and what’s not.

Tarfumes, I am intrigued by your explication of drum history (speaking as someone who literally owns a DW drum kit) but I am going to need a couple more examples of what you do and don't mean. Can you elaborate?

The best way I can explain it is that on modern (post-'80s) drums, the tone stays consistent as it decays. Whereas, in addition to the Kinks example, listen to Bonham's first tom hits on his solo at the end of "Rock & Roll" -- there's a growl that accompanies the decay after the hit. Now, the journey from that sound to the '90s DW tom sound includes years of experiments with muffling, the introduction of clear plastic heads (less room for growl), plus more widespread use of "concert toms" (only a top head, resulting in far less tone and sustain, but far more projection from the hit). There's as many ways to tune (and hit) drums as there are drummers, but the kind of "growl" I'm talking about really vanished once drum manufacturing reached a certain degree of consistency. If that makes any sense.

thinking about "Steal My Sunshine" it occurs to me that there was totally this late 90's trend of coming up with cool and unique beats first, often by looping a cool sample, and then doing some rapping over the top. or something hip-hop adjacent at least. so many big hits were built that way, not just Len but also "One Week", "Summer Girls", "Circles", arguably "Mambo No. 5". lotta people hated these songs but at least they all sounded fun and very different to anything else. I realized later this is why I had a thing for "Old Town Road", cuz in my mind that's just a 90's tune really. or at least it had the spirit of the 90's. and to think it probably all started with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice.

also Tarfumes I appreciate you bringing up "Strangers" here because that outro always bounces around in my head because the drums sound so unique and I never figured out why, exactly

In my case this is true in one sense and false in another. It's false in the sense that very few of my favorite albums from ages 16-22 are still my favorite albums today. Most of my favorite albums I had not heard yet by age 22. However it's partly true in the sense that, roughly speaking, the styles of music that meant the most to me between 16-22 are still the styles that tend to immediately sound best to me today. I don't have to work to appreciate it.

Tarfumes, intriguing!

I guess I can hear what you call "growl" in tom decays - but to my ear it is more about peaking/distortion, i.e., an artifact of the recording technique and signal chain of the day.

Geoff Emerick seems to credit himself with inventing close-mic technique, but he is most famous for recording a certain Mr. Starkey. That dude had an inhuman, and possibly unconscious, control of his dynamics - and as a result never redlined. From there I guess we go to the Glyn Johns triangle technique, which yielded a pleasing "one instrument" vibe. From there I think engineers got intoxicated by the lure of close-micing everything individually and I doubt they were always careful about where the signal went from there. I suspect 1970s engineers just hadn't really grokked what to do with compression and gating yet.

Further (to drive this abstruse discussion even further afield) I am not sure I buy that the drums themselves were producing distinctly different sounds. Heads, yes absolutely; a double-ply oil-filled Pinstripe or Hydraulic head basically accomplishes what Ringo's tea towels did back in the day. I have lovingly played a cheap-ass plywood 1970s Rogers kit, some mid-level Pearl and Gretsch offerings, and my current DW stuff - when I put my preferred heads on them and tune them like I generally do, the sonic result is basically the same. Though I have spent many thousands of American dollars on musical gear, I suspect that a pinch I could use a bunch of yogurt containers and paint buckets and get pretty much the same sound.

I have (had) kits on the extreme ends of the tonal spectrum: a 1995 Starclassic maple set (mfd by Tama) and a 1977 Premier birch (I'm pretty sure) kit. With the same type of heads (Remo coated Ambassador) they sound WAY different from one another. There are many design factors involved in how they differ from one another, things like bearing edges and reinforcement rings and the reflectivity of maple vs. birch -- and no way could I tune one kit to sound like the other. It's not physically possible (unless I put clear heads on everything and dampened them all like crazy so they sounded like cardboard boxes). BUT I do hear what you're saying, and I've heard it with guitarists: Paul Weller's Rickenbacker-Peavey setup couldn't be more different than his SG-Marshall rig, but both sound like Weller. And there's the famous story of Bonham sitting down at Dave Mattacks' set with the 18" bass drum and it sounding just like Bonham.

mad respect to you Tarfumes, I love drum nerdery

(confession: I actually do put clear heads on almost everything and I absolutely do dampen them like crazy, so I am pretty much your sonic nemesis)

lol yeah I like resonant drums (apart from when I was in a hardcore band and took the bottom heads off for maximum volume).

is there a film you could point to that does for 90s music what "The Wedding Singer" did for 80s music?

I don't have to work to appreciate it.