Will getting older make me hate the music I love?

Absolutely. If I make it to 70 I'm going to end up liking everything.

I completely agree.

I want to hit this person.

It would be a start.

Actually perhaps the writer is correct -- I am now even less tolerant of Billy Joel.

No, not really. I have grown out of various bands that now seem to me silly, or naive, or just don't give me what I want out of music.

But my tastes have broadened, and I find I'm able to appreciate a lot of other music in different ways, that I wouldn't have given a chance at 20, due to snobbery or narrowmindedness or whatever. THat's all emotional, not physical at all.

The only physical difference is that... well, as "Kornrulz" says, post 35 I just find I'm no longer able to physically tolerate many gigs. I can't stand for 3 hours straight, and many frequencies and volumes are now uncomfortable in a way they didn't used to be.

Belle, great question. I'm not sure I'm old enough to answer it well, but the things you describe are sadly familiar to me, too.

xpost: Yeah, I was thinking about what Kornrulz said about live shows. I'm approaching my 30th birthday. I find live shows less enjoyable than I used to. But I wonder how much that has to do with the fact that I've seen more live shows than I had when I was a teenager, and now that I live near a bigger city with better venues, going to concerts is not quite the extraordinary event it used to be. And when I drink beer I get tired even sooner... Certainly a physical change, but more to do with beer and hot venues than aging, I think.

(Marcello, I'll reply to your email asap!)

My dad only listens to "Graceland" once every six months--he doesn't want to "wear it out" which I used to think was stupid but now I'm seeing his point.

ROFL.

Off topic, Ophelia is a great name!

Thanks. I will, however, learn her how to swim asap. ;-)

Also I've had a craving for turkey lately.

At any rate, I'm closing in on 35, and have NEVER listened to music as "heavy" as the shit I've been loving for the last 5 years... The Locust, Racebannon, DAughters, etc...are all at the top of my list. My greying brain just can't get enough of the heavy, heavy shit. Not sure this proves anything, but, I'm not sure getting older means you will start listening to "mellower" music. Not necessarily.

this is not to say that Billy Joel fans lack some mental capacity...

This never happens to me. I don't care how embarrassing a band is now, it's just irrelevant to me.

I do wonder if I'll one day grow out of angry punk rock music, but I don't see it happening any time soon, and I turn 30 in 2 months.

Consensus from above and personal experience says, belle haleine, that you will encounter some things that you will wonder how you ever liked it and others that time will never alter. For me, I can still lieten to most Talking Heads, while believing that David Byrne ceased to be relevant around the time of Little Creatures.

The best that can be hoped for is that you will remain open to new music. I know so many people my age who got stuck in one era and can't hear anything outside of those parameters. In them, I hear my parents' voices about "all that noise." Truth be told, just my Pop. My mom listened to the Doors and Donovan far more than I was ever able to--she just turned 81 and last time I was at her house, LA Woman was on her cd player.

I used to have this attitude about certain favorite albums, but that was at a time when I only owned a couple hundred CDs and wasn't downloading random mp3s all the time. Now I feel like there's little possibility of me wearing something out.

And Eppy, I also thought it was odd that this was the lead piece in Shouts & Murmurs. I felt sympathetic toward teenage New Yorker readers who had to endure the subtle condescension.

It'll make you hate music young people love, morelikeamirite?

there is definitely music I know is amazing but that is just way way too overplayed (by me, by the world) for my brain to find pleasure in it anymore. Nirvana, The Beatles probably the most obvious. I never feel the need to listen to them and haven't since probably my early 20s

I don't think I hate anything I used to like (at least by high school or college), but I def have some kind of hormonal difference in the way I respond to a lot of it. In particular I don't have quite as much appetite for dissonance and noise - don't dislike it just don't feel as much of an urge.

RHCP is probably the only one I can think that fits for me; I excitedly bought blood sugar etc the day it came out and when I listened to it again like ten years ago it was fucking terrible

ween, primus, phish, and zappa are ones i used to listen to a ton but rarely bother with anymore, I can't handle the wacky noodlyness anymore

Like a lot of people here I've always had pretty diverse tastes, so I don't think I've burnt out on anything. I might go a few months or even years without listening much to a certain artist or genre, but when I do it typically clicks the way it always has. Right now, for example, I couldn't imagine putting on a Stones album, but I assume at some point I'll come around to them again. Or, per the aforementioned, even at my peak fandom I always found Sonic Youth kind of insufferable and indulgent, so they spend a lot of time idle in my mental archives between infrequent listening urges. The biggest change I've noticed as I get older is the contentedness of sometimes listening to nothing, just silence.

yeah I find myself often putting headphones on while working and then never actually playing anything; this might have to do with having an extremely extroverted and talkative 6 year old

"the contentedness of sometimes listening to nothing, just silence."

I have this too. Music can also just be information I dont need. Sometimes you just need silence to centre yourself.

I think my brain will automatically attach itself to noise, and so as i'm in a city with noise and neighbours close around, i'll choose music over silence because its rare I get real silence. real silence is a very enjoyable privilege.

The biggest change I've noticed as I get older is the contentedness of sometimes listening to nothing, just silence.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, April 22, 2021 7:45 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm. I used to wear headphones everywhere. Probably listened to anywhere from 5-10 albums in a typical day. Now it's rare I listen to more than a few, and a lot of it is just being perfectly happy walking about without an ipod.

Real silence is always rare, but as close as you can get to it, that's sometimes a nice thing. And you need it to listen to music again with clear ears. The days of needing or wanting music in my ears all the time, I dont have that anymore. And it can make you appreciate it more.

most music just reveals more depths to me as i get older and experience more life. when i was a kid i just heard chord progressions, i'm hearing air and weight and movement much more now.

Been thinking a lot about how "auditory imagery" is completely untrustworthy.

Records somehow sound different every time you play 'em. It's amazing, and also pretty scary. You can never really hear anything the same way twice anyhow. What i "used to love" is meaningless.

A lot of Pitchfork indie bullshit from the early to mid-00s that used to move me (The Wrens, etc.) now just leaves me cold and/or makes me roll my eyes.

Thanks to ilx for the deprogramming.

Like others in this thread, I've only found my appreciation of music expanding. Never thought it would happen otherwise

I have never identified as either rockist or popist, so looking back I used to listen to way too much triphop/downtempo/chillout fodder when I was 14-16 that doesn’t make me roll my eyes but I’d probably only rescue about 5% of those songs/artists.

I also had a small post rock phase in the early 00s because everyone on the internet kept raving about lt... such a weird trend when you think about it, most bands that hopped into that bandwagon lacked the textures or ideas to justify what amounts to 6+ instrumental crescendos.

I think the only genre I have no real interest in is the grindcore and extreme hardcore that I listened to as a young teen. Some stuff from the period I still love, tho-- Born Against, Behead the Prophet, Man is the Bastard, Los Crudos.

But do I really need to hear Spazz or Capitalist Casualties or Sloppy Seconds ever again? Not really.

Yeah, my taste has absolutely expanded from 20 years ago - jazz, metal, Brazilian, various African, etc. It just came at the expense of a lot of indie.

I too have come to think the sound of the world around me is interesting and perfectly adequate a lot of the time -- life is musical! At some point for me all sounds became interesting and almost melodic. Right now I'm digging on the three part harmony comprised of the birds outside the window, the hum from the ventilation system, and the lady on the phone down the hall from my office whose tone I can hear but not specific words. Not sure if this was learned from listening to music so intensively all my life or what.

I'm the opposite of a lot of you though in that the more I absorb, the more most music seems inadequate. Expanding and diving deep into classical and especially Opera rendered so much pop/rock music and even most jazz kind of beside the point -- they lack nutritional value for current me. That stuff which I used to thrive on has become more like candy, good in small doses. That stuff just plain isn't the rich three course meals provided by Modeste Mussorgsky or Bartok Bela or whomever. Hatred hasn't set in just more or less complete indifference. Which isn't to say all that other music is lacking in significant high-level value overall, just it's not yielding dividends for me anymore! The only things that I remain interested in are things with exceptionally brilliant/colorful and idiosyncratic performers at the center -- Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Patton, Dieter Moebius, Circle's rhythm section, Elvis, some strikingly pissed-off sounding hardcore groups like Deadguy and La Gritona, Autechre -- and even that stuff I find myself less enthused about than it deserves. But I'm the same with books; once I got around to reading all of Henry James and Flaubert it became much much harder to really appreciate so many other very, very good books. Really curious where I'll be ten years hence. Maybe the polarities will flip completely once more, who knows.

I have never identified as either rockist or popist, so looking back I used to listen to way too much triphop/downtempo/chillout fodder when I was 14-16 that doesn’t make me roll my eyes but I’d probably only rescue about 5% of those songs/artists.

I also had a small post rock phase in the early 00s because everyone on the internet kept raving about lt... such a weird trend when you think about it, most bands that hopped into that bandwagon lacked the textures or ideas to justify what amounts to 6+ instrumental crescendos.

I still get a kick out of late 90s/early 00s downtempo and its precipitates but I agree that the crescendo school of post-rock has aged poorly, barring a few notable exceptions.

A lot of Pitchfork indie bullshit from the early to mid-00s that used to move me (The Wrens, etc.) now just leaves me cold and/or makes me roll my eyes.

Thanks to ilx for the deprogramming.

― keto keto bonito v industry plant-based diet (PBKR), Friday, April 23, 2021 4:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

if we deprogrammed you from enjoying the only good indie rock band then we did it wrong

Yeah I don't have much patience for indie rock anymore. It was my go-to genre for a good while.

That said, I don't really hate any of the stuff I'm no longer into.

My tastes have definitely broadened over time, but I still love the core/heart music (aka corny rock music from the 90s and 2000s)

i listened to Josh Groban when I was younger.
I do not listen to Josh Groban now that I'm older

I had a crush on someone who was a huge Josh Groban fan back in the day. Should've been my first clue.

So, a month from turning 50, I still love the things I loved when I was 15. Mostly 80s new wave, post-punk, "college" indie. With various side interests like soul and folk and vintage jazz and "classic rock" and Baroque and Motown and and and. Possibly even more! My nostalgia lens is so rosy that when I hear a throwaway one-hit-wonder pop confection from 1985, I get happy even if it's something that I would have disparaged back in the day.

That said, I have done very little growth outside the core of things that first grabbed me. But one peculiar thing about me is that I don't feel it's a moral imperative to continually stay up to date on current music (nor on current art/books/movies).

Unlike (I suspect) most of ilx, I could happily live the rest of my life just with the contents of a suburban Tower or Sam Goody or HMV circa 1987. Lots of great stuff have happened subsequently, of course, but I could content myself with rediscovering stuff I'd forgotten about, or finding new layers in familiar material.

xxxp gimme that sweet, sweet guitar-oriented corn!

Speaking for myself, I still like most of the music I was into as a teenager (90s indie & punk, Radiohead, etc.), I just like a wider variety of stuff now. I've only now, in my 30s, started to *really* appreciate what this board calls "bobbins," probably a side-effect of my burgeoning fascination with synths and other electronic music hardware. I will say that my tastes still tend to stay within the sphere of pop broadly speaking; I don't listen to a lot of classical or purely experimental music. Maybe 10 years down the line that will be different! IDK.

What I've noticed on my journey to being old and irrelevant is that I care way less about "important" music past and present. It's a relief to me to not have to pretend to care about the Velvet Underground *or* Taylor Swift.

as I've gotten older I've definitely developed a better understanding of how people change over time and have been more sympathetic to how artists evolve and why they can't just keep on cranking out the same sort of stuff they did when they were younger. sometimes I'll go through an entire band's catalogue, usually one where like the 2nd-5th albums (from 30 years ago) are considered the "classic period", and often come away thinking the early work is overrated and the later work is underrated.

^likes Load and Re-Load

yeah I find myself often putting headphones on while working and then never actually playing anything; this might have to do with having an extremely extroverted and talkative 6 year old

― joygoat, Thursday, April 22, 2021 8:23 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

literally doing this rn and hadn't thought about it

I also have an extremely talkative 6-year-old (and a taciturn 10-year-old), we should start a club

my father always told me my tastes would mellow as I got older, and yet I probably listen to more depraved extreme metal now than I did as a kid.

but I *do* have a huge love of 70s AM radio hits and 80s power ballads, but that was true then too.

in conclusion, my dad is wrong and dumb

(ok not dumb, that was harsh! but wrong, wrong he is!)

xxxp It's a relief to me to not have to pretend to care about anything other than the Velvet Underground *or* Taylor Swift! (lol)

I don't hate anything I used to like. I might not listen to it much, if at all, but I still like it.

There's stuff I kind of hate from my teenage years, like I find Jane's Addiction kind of painful now (although even there I'd say "hate" is too strong).

So much in this thread is resonating with me. I find that I still love (or have newly re-appreciated) most of the stuff I loved in high school. But the college years are a different story... I went through an industrial phase, then a jam band phase, both of which are baffling (and embarrassing) in hindsight. And now my middle-age tastes are a huge super-set of all the stuff I used to love + new genres I didn't get into until my 40's (jazz, metal, bobbins, FM classic rock).

That said, I do wonder how much my horizons have broadened based on getting older, vs just a change in the zeitgeist.
In 2001, when Pitchfork only covered indie, I was on a straight diet of indie. Then poptimism happened, and a lot of the musical tribalism broke down, to the point where it all seems silly now (was all that Billy Joel had upthread really necessary?). It was like the time I realized that just because I hated all vegetables as a kid, I might not hate them anymore... that I had to re-try all vegetables as an adult whose palate had matured, and decide again. (Steely Dan were the brussel sprouts that enabled this epiphany). And this a continual process where it seems I keep unlocking more stuff that was previously inaccessible (ILM has been a big help here).

I'm the opposite of a lot of you though in that the more I absorb, the more most music seems inadequate. Expanding and diving deep into classical and especially Opera rendered so much pop/rock music and even most jazz kind of beside the point -- they lack nutritional value for current me. That stuff which I used to thrive on has become more like candy, good in small doses. That stuff just plain isn't the rich three course meals provided by Modeste Mussorgsky or Bartok Bela or whomever. Hatred hasn't set in just more or less complete indifference. Which isn't to say all that other music is lacking in significant high-level value overall, just it's not yielding dividends for me anymore! The only things that I remain interested in are things with exceptionally brilliant/colorful and idiosyncratic performers at the center -- Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Patton, Dieter Moebius, Circle's rhythm section, Elvis, some strikingly pissed-off sounding hardcore groups like Deadguy and La Gritona, Autechre -- and even that stuff I find myself less enthused about than it deserves. But I'm the same with books; once I got around to reading all of Henry James and Flaubert it became much much harder to really appreciate so many other very, very good books. Really curious where I'll be ten years hence. Maybe the polarities will flip completely once more, who knows.

This makes a pretty good case for avoiding opera and Mussorgsky, but also makes me curious to explore Moebius and to try listen to those other idiosyncratic artists with new ears.

Ha, yeah, opera is a dangerously addictive drug once you acquire the taste!

I think the thing which attracts me about those kinds of idiosyncratic artists is they're like larger than the material, like cartoon characters almost, or old movie stars -- a Jimmy Cagney movie is first and foremost a Jimmy Cagney movie. Art like this is so stamped with the personality of the artist, all the quirks and even the limitations (looking at you Elvis) get amplified and become virtues!

I too find myself re-trying stuff. Sometimes you get a serious jolt and then you wonder if you should go nuts and re-examine everything! Probably should make a habit of it.

I literally cannot fathom thinking Henry fucking James is that brilliant.

And I *like* Henry James!

it’s inverse u-shaped to me. i grew to hate a lot of music that i loved in my teens during my early and mid-twenties, but then came back around to loving most of it again. i rarely actively dislike music anymore so the worst is indifference or “i can no longer hear what once stirred me in this”

I got a weird taste of this recently. A band I was randomly VERY into in high school (The Deathray Davies, if you're curious) just released a new album after a 16 year wait, and even though I haven't really listened to them at all SINCE then, nonetheless just hearing the guy's voice & idiosyncrasies again brought up visions of places I used to go in high school. Figured I'd maybe listen a few times as I've "outgrown" them but I've actually been spinning it a lot!

I literally cannot fathom thinking Henry fucking James is that brilliant.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, April 23, 2021 3:10 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

And I *like* Henry James!

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table),

Ezra Pound:

If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.

And I love Henry James!

Been thinking about this since the thread was launched and I can't come up with a single band/act that I liked a lot when I was young, and hate now that I'm old. The closest equivalent would be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose first four albums I liked a lot but then I leapt off the bus when Blood Sugar Sex Magik came out. I haaaaated that record, and they've somehow gotten worse with every album since. But that came out when I was...19 maybe?

As I've gotten older, my tolerance for screaming noise has diminished quite a bit; I no longer feel any need to listen to Borbetomagus or Merzbow, though I keep the CDs on my shelf. And even in that case it's not "I can't believe I used to like this shit!" as much as a general mellowing-out. Who knows? Maybe by the time I'm 70 I'll finally learn to like Bill Evans.

I only listen to bill evans live boots on youtube rn

Not read the whole thread (I say that - I might have posted on it) so apologies if repeating things that have been said.

I do think "hating the music I love" is fine. Change is important. My music tastes have changed a lot, partly from bereavement, partly from changes in work and, yeah, partly from age.

On a tangent, I was pondering on a walk home from the shops who is the artist/band I have most loved that I have most lost the track of. Possibly Bjork? I don't really know what she has done for an age.

I was thinking similarly recently. A friend in a Discord server was talking about recent Animal Collective, and I realized that I hadn't listened to any new AC records or related projects in something like 13 or so years...

And I used to post on the Animal Collective forums...I think that is how I eventually found ILM, actually.

One day you and your friends listened to Modest Mouse for the last time and none of you knew it