Dated

For me, records with a massive weight of historical context - the classics - are more likely to sound 'dated', for this reason. Which isn't to say dated music can't still sound charming or be interesting.

I think people have differing ideas about what the word 'dated' means. I take it to mean 'of it's time and not sounding classic', 'the passage of time has not being kind to it'.

Andy's of course right that things that of a recent generation can sound more painfully dated to us. Forgettable older stuff just sounds quaint.

Arrgh - where did that apostrophe come from?

yeah some stuff just doesn;t sound like it's era, take the guitar solo on CCR's Susie-Q for example

Example: The Linndrum style of clinical but relatively low-resolution drum machine sounds of the '80s seemed hateful to me in the early '90s. The 909 style muffled kick and low-fidelity hip hop style drum samples were a godsend at the time.

But with time, 'dated' becomes 'charming' (or 'quaint' as N. said). It's not 'dated' because it's no longer an issue - the battle has already been won. So now the Linndrum sounds appealing to me because it's so naive (and it seems to link to a *misguided upbeatness* around in the early '80s - connected I think with the economic and political changes going on at the time).

The best example is that weird rigid drum programming you get on certain early house tracks (particularly Todd Terry) where it's like the producer is trying to get a breakbeat kind of switch into the snares, but because their sequencer only allows them to break the bar into 16 segments it just sounds really stiff.

If you drop one of those records into a set of modern records it can sound really innovative and weird because nobody would ever program drums like that anymore.

And similarly if you listen to loads of dated records in a row you get past the datedness and appreciate the difference between 'em. I think it's fascinating the way all these things interact. Plus it'd be great if someone worked out what all the most dated musical quirks were and put 'em all together into one song - producers always pick out the least dated bits of retro sounds, which is much less interesting...

I would like to be dropped back in time to hear a few people talk about electric guitars in the same manner people talk today about synths.

Andy K made a great point here, although ironically, I think people do talk about electric guitars today as "dated." One of the bizarro things about the 00's is that it's much easier to talk about a dated "electric guitar" sound than it is a synth or software synth sound these days.

Guilty as charged, but I really despise the term "Dated", and I try as hard as possible to never use it in the context of describing music, even in a positive way.

never want to see this word again, along with 'bland' because of how often it's (mis)used.

altho Tom's point (how you felt about it then vs how you feel about it now) is good. but i often feel that people are applying the term to stuff they had no real feeling/awareness of when it first came out (this may be another factor why much 60s/70s stuff doesn't get this), received wisdom etc.

Not quite the same thing, but in A Year with Swollen Appendices Brian Eno writes something about how sounds reflecting technical limitations become interesting once they are outdated: i.e., scratchy-record effects, analog synths, etc.

whereas i guess digital synth presets may often have just reflected artistic limitations. interesting.

whereas i guess digital synth presets may often have just reflected artistic limitations. interesting.

Once upon a time, you only HAD presets, though.

i'm always associating analogue synths with a lot more work tho!

blueski - what exactly do you mean by "artistic limitation" before I continue? I read it as "artistic laziness", but I likely misread you.

it was just a suggestion as to why people might disregard a lot of 80s/90s stuff that was competent but lacking authenticity (thus credibility, to an extent) - i don't necessarily buy into it myself and am often the first to defend stuff that lost it's sonic novelty or has been superceded in some way.

i don't if it's the same as laziness - that implies the knowledge/ability is there but has been consciously with-held or reduced...most likely due to impatience. you might argue any artist working with new technology they haven't mastered and are experimenting with is as limited as they are free - glass half-full/half-empty type thing.

I really want to continue to talk about the concept of "dated" as a pejorative or just a signifier, but I don't want to clutter up the New Order thread any more, so...

As to the "dated" thing, I've been thinking about this so much recently, and on multiple different threads and even platforms.

Like, I just spent 20 minutes looking through a 70s Style blog on Tumblr, not just 70s clothes and music, but 70s furniture design, 70s stereos. And obviously that blog has been specifically curated to reflect things that look specific to "the 70s". And it's interesting to see not just the tiny micro-trends (in 1972 every single thing in the world went leopard print!) but that even though there is no unifying stylistic trend, and there were many 70s in different cultures and subcultures, and very specific different periods of the "the 70s" - the person curating that blog has a very specific idea of what constitutes "the 70s" in terms of what they have excluded as much as what they present. For me, it's much easier to see in visual art and design things that are harder to express in terms of sounds, because I don't have a language for describing sounds.

I just feel like "dated" as a pejorative means a couple of different things which are being conflated and used interchangeably: And I wonder if this is a function of "having lived through these events and being able to assign them to specific periods with specific personal memories" versus the ~eternal now~ of the streaming era.

1) Being just slightly behind the curve. Dated as being "there is nothing quite so out of fashion as that which is most recently out of fashion" - wearing a suit from 1978 in 1983 is going to look bad and dated and out of fashion and *terrible* in a way that wearing that same suit in 1993 looks retro and cool and kinda Beastie Boys hip. This is a pejorative, and I do feel that it's an accurate one. Bandwagon jumping after the bandwagon has passed is often (but not always) the sign that an artist is approaching creative bankruptcy.

^^^but the problem with this kind of "dated" is that it's so contextual. One has to be *aware* of what the fashions (sartorial or musical) *were* and what the time frame was. This is easier if you were present during that time period and that culture. (This can be a function of youth, as well as age. Being 13 in 1983 or 23 in 1983 or 40 in 1983 is going to give you a different proximity and perspective to those fashions.) And just because one is alive during that period doesn't mean one had access to that culture.

2) Stuff which just sounds "very much of its time" in terms of being an exaggerated or playful or knowingly over-stated version of the current technology. It is not necessarily a bad thing to sound "of its time" when that time, that style, that technology is something that one enjoys and appreciates. It's often tied in with retro-futurism, in that the Past's idea of what The Future would look like often takes the things that are shiny! and new! technology! and exaggerates them, producing wonderfully anachronistic 1973 visions of "A Future" that looks a lot more like 1973 than it ever looks like 1999. Appreciating or using this kind of datedness is a stylistic hallmark, is value-neutral, rather than pejorative. It can be "good" - the right kind of retro at the right time looks dazzlingly hip. It can be kitsch, or it can even be bad and lazy. But it's the use that makes it so, rather than inherent in being "Dated".

This one isn't necessarily tied to having a personal connection to a time period; it's enough to learn what the signifiers are.

So I don't think that the term "dated" is a bad term. I just think it's important to specify which usage one intends.

― Dröhn Rock (Branwell with an N), Saturday, October 3, 2015 7:23 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Interesting to see people at the beginning of thread say nothing from the 60s gets described as dated. I think it's very untrue. &even when there is a current prevalent retro/nostalgia scene directed at a certain era it is selective about what it picks up on. The 60s that's looked back on is the more cutting edge aspect and not all of that. It was at the time surrounded by a lot of drab end of empire conservatism and other mundanity and mediocrity which is thankfully largely left behind.
Also thinking about the nostalgia elements of the time and wondering if they're picked up on or rejected. Was reminded of music hall and other novelty numbers bands of the time put on records. Have revivalists rejoiced that a band like Electric Prunes had a track like Hooterville Trolley on their 1st lp? Or was it dated at time of release.
Also the prevalence in clothing of making things from recently developed synthetics which would have been really modern at the time. Not sure how 60s nylon wear is viewed, I don't like it myself. Is it just me?
As to somebody earlier saying 'a prog fan in 1974 thinking garage rock dated'. I think that would probably be very subjective. From what I understand Nuggets' release in 1972 triggered a wave of people looking back at that music with some emulating it. I think some people were looking back at garage or whatever it was called at the time already. Things were being written on 60s rock in at least Bomp preceding Nuggets.
release. There was a market for lp series like Remembering covering various mid 60s groups at the time.

Awareness of what will sound "dated" only really comes with time.

(Unless we're talking about things in sense 1, they sound dated because they are already out of fashion because the bandwagon is on its way out.)

Like, the things that sound "dated" arose in that time, but stayed in some way peculiar to that point in time, and did not just carry on. Some ways of doing things don't go out of fashion - or at least, stay in fashion for a very long time. You don't notice the things that stick around and become normal and eventually "classic"; but you notice the things that go away. Cutting edge technology that permeates so thoroughly into culture as to become ubiquitous does not seem to be "dated" until the technology changes again. But stuff that is more faddish, that's going to be more likely to be stuck to a particularly point in time.

I was watching a DVD from the early 00s last night and I was struck by how not-dated "vlogging" as an activity looked; but how dated it looked that the character was doing it with a huge, massive CRT monitor. At some point, flat screen monitors stopped looking like "Hi Tech Future" and just started looking like what people use now. But none of us would have thought of CRT monitors as dated while we were using them.

Production methods, special effects, musical technology - some of them catch on to become ubiquitous ("sampling" which was once hi-tech crazy futuristic stuff, now that is just How Music Gets Made). And others sound so "of that time" that they don't catch on, fade out of fashion and become dated. The bits of the past that stay with us in the present stop seeming like The Future for a long time before they seem like The Past.

Even with guitar effects, I remember having a conversation with Elvis Telecom about how the shoegaze explosion was fuelled by the proliferation of cheap digital delay pedals. That sound, that particular step delay, on a guitar, screams "early 90s" to me. Like, that time when everybody got a Quadraverb all at once. (The first Interpol album is full of that Quadraverb sound - it sounded dated in 2002, but a kind of dated that was starting to signify "cool" and "ahead of the curve" for the 'Gaze revival.)

Listening to Garage Rock and Nuggets type stuff, there are definitely 2 veins running through that stuff. The thing is, the stuff out of that stuff that I really love is the stuff that sounds dated as hell - the stuff with all the kooky Vox effects, wah-wah and tape-flanging and ~psychedelic effects~. While the stuff that is more primal and primitive and lots of fuzz and "4 guys in a room" production doesn't sound as dated, because that approach persisted, right through the 70s and on.

Dated as a pejorative comes with an implicit 'cheapness' to it, for me...whether thats creative cheapness (the jumping on a bandwagon too late), or the cost cheapness of cutting a corner, photos, music, clothes, film, when the quality is high I know its from the past (though sometimes you can subconcsiously get tricked into thinking its a re-enactment), but I dont think of it as dated. Even sometimes when something was done on a budget, if they worked around it creatively, it staves off datedness.

I think implicit there for something to be 'dated', or that term to be the first thing to spring to mind...there has to be an implicit 'this is a bad idea' or cutting a corner, which was sort of a little bit evident even at the time

the CRT monitor thing felt like one of those even at the time, because it was easy to imagine/know it was a temporary step and we'd know pretty much exactly flat screen was next...after a while things are 'good enough'. If i have a crt,i think 'i wish this wasnt so BIG' the day i buy it. I have a flat screen monitor now, and i dont wish it to be any different, there isnt an obvious irritation with it

I remember one of the first places I encountered the term being in the '92 Rolling Stone Album Guide, which said that the early Genesis albums were not "bad" but "dated, almost quaint." The reviewer obviously didn't care for the pastoral aspects of those records (he wanted them to rock harder), so there was a sense that that mythic pastoralism was very specific to that moment in rock history, and something that would have been better left undone. Since those records are arguably the best known exemplars of pastoral prog, this instance doesn't quite fit the idea that "dated" connoting a knockoff... perhaps it would appear cheap in the sense that the pastoral would better be left to classical or folk musics — something was perceived as ersatz about the music's very theatricality, ambition and range of affects.

Ironically, the 2004 update of the RS guide reprinted the same review essentially unaltered. How quaint!

I think music can be dated in the sense of falling foul of the vagaries of fashion and still be vital or just be plain old dated by the span of centuries/decades since it was made/composed and still be vital. I thought this was no biggie tbh, if it was then you could start arguing that some fucking Cast b-side has more validity than Satie's gymnopedies or some similar mismatch.