Year Zero

I was also a '1976 is year zero' type for about 7 to 8 years after punk broke. Within that, I was listening to many, many types of music from Chic to Cabaret Voltaire, but hardly anything pre-1976 except the obvious(Velvets, Doors, Bowie) . I gradually began to work backwards and realized that the idiocy of this self-imposed censorship had denied me The Byrds, Kinks, Can, The Who, Led Zep and many less well known delights. These days you can't see the join! I started to look at who had influenced some of the bands was listening to at the time - for example the 'Paisley Underground' (terrible name) bands like Rain Parade and Dream Syndicate were namechecking The Strawberry Alarm Clock,The Seeds, and The Standells so I had a listen.

I guess I still have hardly any music pre-1964. 1964 seems to be the year that a lot of the 'beat groups' on both sides of the Atlantic came out of the shadow cast by the Beatles and began to take tentative steps towards a sound of their own.

I'm really, really interested to hear of other "year-zero" or similar experiences from the 80's or even 90's if they exist.

Year Zero is as much an attitude as a date, too - about listening to a style of music or listening for a mood you find in music. I think it's a good thing to do, or even make yourself do, sometimes.

There's also a big buying divide between people who listen to almost all new stuff and people who split their purchasing between new and back catalogue. But thats really a separate thread.

I perhaps should clarify my 'death to the sixties' stance, though. I am heartily sick of the Weight of History argument that produced a travesty like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I am heartily sick of a lot of the music as well. But there's plenty to love from it too, there's just also a lot of it I never ever want/need/desire to hear again, and I have no patience with anybody automatically valuing the decade's overall product in toto over another just because, since that holds no water as an argument.

So no year zero per se for me -- unless you're talking when recorded sound was invented. ;-)

The Year Zero of Year Zeros is 1876, when Edison bellowed 'Mary had a Little Lamb' onto his tinfoil cylinder. Tho there is a suriving disc, with soundwaves traced by hog's bristle onto smoked glass, of Franz Liszt performing, from the 1860s or earlier: playback was achieved five or six years ago (courtesy a computer) obviously.

Not sure whether "New Pop Historians" would be *quite* the right slogan for Tom, but can I use "New Pop Historicism" on Elidor, Sterling?

I think the "year zero" thing is a pretty narrow minded POV, whichever way round you do it. It's silly to dismiss an entire era.

The oldest music in my collection is some Gregorian chants and early church music (yes, I still listen to it, you can take the girl out of goth, etc...) so really, I can't come up with a cut-off point.

As far as things closer to home, I haven't followed developments in rock or hip-hop or electronica much since say 1991/1992. I have convulsively tried to catch up at times by buying, or more often borrowing, discs I've heard some sort of a buzz about, but very little has grabbed me. (Maybe I am listening to the wrong things. Maybe this music just isn't for me.) My favorite pop music is mostly from the late 60's through the early 70's. A lot of my favortie bands from the 80's have not held up for me as well as things I listened to earlier. I'm also discovering that the 70's were a great decade for Latin music.

I do listen to some classical music that was composed hundreds of years ago, but it's not really a big part of what I listen to, and even Bach, who is somewhat of a favorite, doesn't always do it for me. I like some modern classical things from earlier in the 20th century, but I can't honestly say I listen to them regularly.

But I don't have any absolute cut-off point before or after which I refuse to listen at all.

Either Dr. C was doing an uncanny Stewart Osborne impersonation when he wrote that or this was a fairly common phenomenon amongst those of us who retained an interest in music after punk died!

I'm not entirely sure whether it's a reflection of my interest in the music; of the amount of music that was actually produced; or of the amount of music that's still readily available; but my collection does start to get pretty thin on the ground once you go back before 1963 - which, of course, was the year I was born (oh, and the year a band called The Beatles released their first single too I suppose) - and disappears completely some time in (at a guess) the late 40's / early 50's.

But if I had to draw a line, well, 40s loses Robert Johnson, 1900s loses Bach & Mozart, 1700s and a lot of mad Baroque stuff goes out of the window. I mean, I even like the bits of Plainsong I've heard.

Don't know much about music pre c. 1000 - So I'll draw the line there.

You mean my mother's been lying to me about my date of birth all these years?!?