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I'll always adore the music that excited me as a teenager. When I listen to those records now (which is fairly often - and at least once a week or so for Can's Ege Bamyasi) I can be more critical about them but eventually I just let the music take over again. It certainly doesn't make me feel young again but it's probably my closest approximation. It's been weird and funny in the past 5 years seeing the music scenes that I was heavily into become mainly of historical interest only. But I can understand why that happens (or at least that it DOES happen for everything) and it doesn't negate my passion for it. For my part, I'm constantly on the alert for music that makes me tingle in anything like the ways I used to. It doesn't happen often but it happens often enough to make me want to continue looking.

The way you phrase the question, Tom, you make this process sound gloomy. But I enjoy this part of music appreciation (bad term, but I'm pressed for time). In some respects, once the time has passed for a certain music/band/scene, it becomes easier to analyze it and get a handle on what it all means (this is why I like the David Berman line so much, "An anchor lets you see the river move.")

This isn't anything "greater" than the beautiful and confusing feeling of being into something while it's happening, it's just a different phase that any sort of cultural aritifact eventually shifts to, and I enjoy it.

It's also fun because it offers a small snapshot of where you were at a certain point in your life. I don't feel embarassed or long for the time, I just enjoy the picture & take my time trying to figure out what the hell happened.

Tom E: so the question is, what happens when What You Like becomes Historical?

You, understandably, imply that bad things happen. Let me suggest two more positive possible answers:

1) What you like never becomes Historical. The 'Rock Heritage' thing you're getting at just doesn't matter if you still love the music.

2) You feel vindicated: Hooray, my music's become Historical! (This is presumably the one obvious possibility to which no-one is going to lay claim. No-one is going to admit to feeling vindicated, or to turn out to have felt vindicated. Why? I guess because History is seen as the Other of What You Like: you don't want to hand it over to History.)

I once wrote an article largely about the way that the Smiths had not yet become fully Historical, which also suggested that there were things about them that would resist their becoming fully Historical. In other words, I said that their perversity might prevent them ever really being inducted to the Hall of Fame. I am quite prepared to be told that I was wrong about this (I wasn't clinging desperately to my argument, it was just a general guess about the meaning of the band); but I'm still not sure I was totally wrong.

Supplementary question: if the Smiths *have* (contra my guess) become Historical, what has had to be SUPPRESSED for this to happen? Are The Historical Smiths really a Marr phenomenon, with a lot of Morrissey oddities edited out? (This looks like an obsessive tangent, but I think it is a test case that does relate to Ewing's original question.)

The gloom in the question wasn't intentional - as a matter of fact I do think that 'vindication' is one of the pleasures to be got from this process and I will lay claim to it. It is always difficult and tiring to say that music is important while it's there and it's nice to be able to say "I told you so", or more realistically, "I told myself so". It's no nicer than someone saying "Yes I agree" at the time, maybe.

But gloom does come in, and in a way Mark hints at (though he presents it as a positive). History and the individual are not natural allies - individual testimony is the raw material of history, but the historian often sees it as a duty to make the individual general, or to assume that the individual can stand for the general. So a story of The Smiths evolves, or a story of What The Smiths Meant evolved - what it was/is to be A Smiths Fan. But for you-the-listener this might not be your story, at all.

And so what I'm getting at is not so much gloom but a sort of dawning melancholy as you realise that history moves on without you and that your experiences in the end have nothing to do with it (unless you're one of the lucky witnesses). This melancholy is probably 'maturity' and 'growing up' and we all probably encounter it sooner or later, and no doubt more sharply. But my intuition is that pop is one of the arenas we meet it in first.

(We can see this in action on the B and S thread - an idea about what B & S were and who liked them has evolved, and all the real individual B & S fans cry "That's not how it was".)

I think this is one of the things I was trying to sidestep in the thread where I said that I hated all music after 1967. Maybe I thought I wouldn't feel glum about watching my own memories become historic if I was already browsing in the history section when the new books arrived. (But then that book on K Records came in and got me all riled up!)

Tom E: your post is Quality. You're probably OTM.

Maybe I'm in a qunique position to answer this, being still a teenager. I remember the Beatles were the first band I ever really liked simply because I had my mums records to play and play again. Of course, they were already history at this point but how was I to know? I went through a phase of quoting the critics ad nauseum about them but not too much of it. They were always just something I enjoyed. When George died the other week, this was what upset me, that, quietly, part of my life had just passed away, something buried inside my conscious and subconscious. From the Beatles I moved onto Lush (who I will probably nearly always describe as 'dodgy indie' to feel safe but who I probably love more truth be told) and then the Dandy Warhols (and I have slagged off a certain member but doesn't stop me loving them per se). These were bands I could love and obsess over, go to all the gigs (well, the Dandys, anyway) and I was thinking that I am unsure if that could happen anymore. How as I read more, and hear more, I am unable to simply love records for the sake of loving them (see the indie thread), but that some ulterior (sp?) motive may creep in. Having said that, of course, live it can still happen, when you don't really know who the band are and have none of those critical influences milling about in your mind. (The Gossip were one of these, explosive live, but then I didn't think their actual album lived up to it). So, live, it's easier.

1) Unique.
2) To sum it up: It happens because you accumulate experience as you get older and lose a certain innocence along the way.
3) I still do love those bands un-historically.

I don't think it's all that bad cos I can go back to old records and hear new things in them. For those who started getting into pop music pretty late and so were already fairly sophisticated listeners, the opportunities to do this may be limited. Also, I don't think I hear things very well, so it takes me a long time to follow what different instruments are doing, etc. Others may find that pop music doesn't have enough depth to support this kind of listening.

Even during the first interval of your exposure to a piece of music, what you appreciate in it changes. What you notice first may not be what you end up loving about it most. If you stretch this out over a period of years, the possibility for the music to change for you increases cos you yourself will have changed that much more over that time.

...that the younger you are, the easier this happens.

The younger you are, the less you've heard. When you hear something that, at that moment, hits you where it counts, you latch on to it. Then you get into other bands (that sound alike, or that belong in that category: say, indie or hiphop or metal for that matter). You get the knowledge, i.e. you specialize yourself in that area (and in others, which often is the case). Basicly you work yourself towards a point where few things can take you by surprise anymore. You're not into one or two bands anymore, but "into music". You know every trick in the book. You know exactly what to look for and where to get it. The downside is that you indeed become somewhat cynical and jaded but that's mostly because the relationship you've got with music has become a deeper one. It has become a part of you even more than back in the day when you were just into The Smiths or MBM or whoever. It's like being married and waking up 10 years later with the realisation that you actually love the old bat/bastard even more than when you were humping 3 times a day.

Thing is, be it consciously or not, you've made sort of a commitment to your passion. Even though the pressures that come with becoming an adult make it increasingly difficult (and as time will pass, it WILL get more difficult. Many will indeed slip away and look at their vast collection of records from a certain era as a mere phase a few years from now), you MAKE time for it. Of course I'm speaking for myself here, but I know that there's a few others out there who think the same and who have also made that commitment.

Probably the biggest reward is that it will keep you young at heart. I've seen men in their midforties and late fifties get childlike gleams in their eyes discussing new music much in the same way kids do on this here board. One of them went to see Can Ox when they played in Amsterdam last week and I'm sure he's got tickets to go see the Strokes. Music kept these guys from becoming old gits. My wish is to grow old like that too some day.

A twist on Alacran's post:

The only worthwhile thing I got out of the Ian McEwan book I read a few months ago was a brief musing on a person who is deeply attached to Rilke. The thing is, Rilke is all this person reads, and the more you hear him rave about Rilke, the more you start to realize that what he's getting out of Rilke is actually stuff he could be getting out of any number of other poets -- only he doesn't realize this, and most probably he's also missing out on whatever it is that makes Rilke uniquely Rilke.

Same goes for young people and music. When you love your first rock band, you're not just loving them -- your appreciation for them contains your entire newfound appreciation for rock in general. You lack the context to see what parts of "rock" they're offering and which parts are just background. Best example of this: Nirvana. They were not as special as they were made out to be -- they just happened to be the ones to show people the door into an already-populated room. But so many kids' deep love of them was actually a deep love for the entire ethos which they introduced to general public.

This bears on Tom's question, I think, even the end parts. We develop these massive attachments out of sequence -- the band that wakes us up to a particular sound sometimes gets more credit than the bands that refined it. If we could actually be musically omniscient, completely up-to-speed, we'd probably realize that no single development is ever really that revolutionary -- we wouldn't fall completely in love with anything, because we'd recognize it as just a baby step in what's actually a much bigger picture.

Thus I'm thinking that the History question emerges when we all realize that our attachments are personal, that X band was important more because we were all watching them at the right time than because they singlehandedly created something new. Many have just admitted this about Belle and Sebastian, as Tom mentions: no, they weren't objectively all that special, they just happened to be doing the right thing at the right time for people who had heard certain things and hadn't heard others. The History question is quite possibly just a struggle over how much we want to impose Where We Were and What We Were Doing on what we'd like to be a semi-objective history. It's essentially a question about how important we are. Should the record be talking about folks like me, for whom Belle and Sebastian really were sort of important for a while? Or should the record be about someone else, for whom Belle and Sebastian never meant a thing?

What listeners, with what listening lineages, should have their perspectives prized? Music criticism is basically a way of arguing this out, tugging back and forth between heartfelt devotion to a particular Place to Listen From (which is hard to back up for those who aren't also there) and more critical Attempts at Omniscience (which make it hard to claim anything but 21st-century electro- acoustic is outright Important). And this is why, while I sometimes argue in favor of indie on these boards, I completely understand most of the indie-bashing that goes on: it's simply an attempt to wrestle the Critical Perspective back from the Indie Viewpoint, which has completely hijacked it over the past twenty years.

i feel like a keeper of the flame rather than a relic. each day i meet students half my age whose parents grew up in the same era as myself yet their knowledge of that era doesn't tie with my experience. this is partly to do with always having lived in the north east- any analysis of rave culture usually stops at manchester, our local hiphop scene is disdained, our indie culture sidelined. over the years the music of my teenage years has influenced both the music i make and the music i gravitate toward. when the music of my teenage years was reassessed by the media there were great gaps - i have a panthenon but it's my own- my little timeline - fuck you time warner /mtv/totp2 - thee racer won't defer to the official version - because for me it didnt happen like that[soz im rambling]. when imeet friends from waybakwhen - its like a cabal - secret knowledge lost and never archived - we are not History but we have a history - ok so maybe this sounds smug/elitist/schmindie but care as little about that as journos seem to do about life above sheff. it is late and i am drunk - until tomorrow when i shall be deep......

So can I take it you are Geordie Racer, Sean?

Strange: I'd never recognised you until now and wondered where you were!

Absolutely on the money with that post.

OK, well, I think that a lot of people here (particularly the Pro-Pop massive, although that's not a dig at all) have an attachment to the music they listened to as teenagers because they see that as Younger = More Vital. For me, I'm not ashamed to say that I am ashamed of a lot of music I used to listen to, and it has nothing to do with being embarrassed by their perception now, it has do with the fact that they actually were bad.

I was going to make a similar point to Alacran, really, that it also has quite a lot to do with the limitations of your knowledge. At the time I probably did listen to the best of what was out there, but then what was out there for me was out of a range of about four records in the entire world.

And one other thing (there was going to be more, and more eloquence in this post, but I got sidetracked by a phone call, so I can't remember)- in many ways I have been irredeemably tainted by cynicism since I've got older, but I only had my first ever live epiphany earlier this year, and there are some records now that I can foam at the mouth about more than I ever could. I am aware at the sheer level of dross, but this somehow makes that which is spectacular yet more so.

1. I do not think you can say in general that getting excited about music is more likely to happen when you are young. But I would say that it probably gets more difficult to find music that grips you when you are older. You have to spend more time on researching and listening to music you don't know to find a gem. And being a music addict you take this time and you find the music which excites you. (I should have said me instead of you, too late now).

2. Tom, you said the music of your youth either vanishes to maybe become influence later on or turns into history. I do not really understand the difference. If it becomes exhumed influence later on it does not vanish. It is metamorphosed. And why can't music turning into history become an influence? I would distinguish between the music of my youth which embarrasses me now (a lot of it) and the stuff which passed my personal test of time. Music which enbarrasses me now turns me into a snob. It's like I know that music, I loved it but now I think it is crap as my taste has improved. Has become subtler. I know more about music now then then. How do I feel about this? It's a little bit of a shame but what can I do about it?

3. The music which excited me when I was younger which stood the test of time does nevertheless not excite me in the same way as it did back then. Music like wine has an apogee. And the apogee of almost all music I loved when young is over. It has become part of me but the thrill is gone. I feel that to get excited about music of my past now I have to get excited for different reasons than in the past. I have to hear sounds in that music I did not hear before.

The problem for many here, emil.y, is that we've *always* listened to good music.

Arf. Or maybe the problem is that you still don't and just haven't realised yet? Boink.

Hum, I had not considered the issue under that peculiar angle..

For me, and for a whole lot of other people I know, the process of devoting myself to a band or a sort of music was partly about self definition and self-identification: about finding a hook on which to hang my nascent personality.

Although I've moved on (at least in part) from that kind of music, and although I've been as excited by other sorts of music since, there was an intensity when I was (say) 16 which there hasn't been since. First time, it felt like that love was making me me. Subsequently it felt like I was finding exciting new stuff. Very different.

I find a broader more nuanced historical understanding to be a more powerful pleasure than my old days of searching for the depth simply in the music alone. First, because there is a depth to history, and there is only so much to any album. Thus I am less disappointed. Second, because I am excited by things which are pivotal and important beyond my reactions, and in a broader social sense, which means that I can relate my experiences and thoughts to people.

I consider myself part of the pro-pop contingent, but I don't think I particularly associate youth per. se with vitality per. se, but rather find the vitality in the constant renewal of so-called youth culture which begins anew every year, and in how youth culture has turned into the most honest place for cultural dispute and recasting of self, among all generations.

Also: Nitsuh's comments were great.

[In the question] the younger you are, the easier this happens. Is that true?

Not in my experience. I'm still getting as excited about new things in my 30s as I ever did. Possibly more so. It's got something to do with the 'the-more-I-search-the-more-I-realise-I- don't-really-know-anything' factor (sort of what Alacran and Nitsuh were saying - we're only gradually seeing the big picture etc.)

Come back to me on the rest of the question when (if! ;-)) Rush or Rip Rig & Panic make the cover of Mojo.

Loads of quality answers in this thread BTW. And pinefox, if you're still reading, how about answering that Go West thread, huh?

RE: Pro-pop. Complete tangent I guess, sorry.

I am pro-pop in general, and I can also understand the contextualisation of music, and specifically that which is marketed for a younger audience. I just sometimes get the feeling that there is an automatic assumption that POP=GRATE because of its youth target, rather than because it genuinely is. Whilst I can rave about, for example, Britney and Destiny's Child (for the moment), I find a lot of pop more dull than Weller. Also, part of the reason I like some pop is because of its transient nature- I don't think that the kids listening to it now should all still like it later. A lot of these are groups born to make you sick of them- their very nature is akin to that of a firework, it looks pretty for a very very short time.

Anyway, in terms of the original argument, the only pop I liked as a kid was Thomas Dolby, so what do I know?

Would anyone agree with me that much of the feelings of inadequacy towards one's "commitment" to music is caused (or at least amplified) by the fact that much (if not all) of it is marketed towards younger, therefor more prone to be less experienced, audiences, making you feel sometimes as if you're not really meant to be in the loop? And I'm not only reffering to pop here. After all it's easier to sell something as 'fresh and revolutionary' to kids that at that point in their lives don't know better, right?!

Nitsuh, in your post does Indie Viewpoint = Place to Listen From?

If more critical Attempts at Omniscience = the false historicization that the Pinefox and Tom talk about, then Place to Listen From seems preferable.

Tom had a link to this article called