Biding Time

You can get into other kinds of music. Or dig deeper into the past, or the underground. Surely people do all these things.

But I'm interested in what people do who aren't that much interested in new music, and who don't invest much effort into digging. Maybe it has something important to do with resurgence of all kinds of neotraditionalist things?

Genres never die, you just have to know where to look. Right now, at this very moment, theres a guy a tin-roofed shack playing sounds that haven't been in style since 1923. There's still King Oliver-styled Jazz if you keep an eye out. At a local bar near me a band plays grunge so perfectly typical that it sends you right back to 1991. You just have to know where to look. "Purists" are everywhere.

Yeah but even doing that much work might be out of the question.

And I don't want to ask about purism, but about people whose tastes just sort of stay constant.

nowadays its not work at all. i can find silver spoons fan fiction if i want. there will be mods and hippies till 3001 at least.

Yeah, but genres lose their vitality and sometimes never recover. Some genres never come back into fashion. If you mostly listen to one thing, I think it would be good insurance to spontaneously pick up a couple new genres to explore per decade. I do think guitar bands will be around a while longer, like at least until my generation dies out, in some form or another though.

I don't really need to discover anything new. I'll never be able to buy all the CDs I want now. It would be nice to have more live music I would be interested in hearing, however. Too bad I never got to see the likes of Oum Kalthoum or Farid el Atrache. If I were in New York I'd at least get to regularly see good salsa bands and have the option of seeing a lot of avant-shite, some of which might be pretty good. Philadelphia can't compare. But I digress.

They listen to the same old records, and find other things besides music to occupy their time.

Well, I don't focus on one genre but tend to jump around (not to the sounds of House of Pain - which would have been a good thing since they came back in fashio in the form of Limp Biscuit but....). What I did was listen to lots and LOTS of old Punk in the meantime. Now I don't listen to it much anymore. Not that I listen to Electro all that much but I do prefer newer sounds. I am not making sense.

i dont think whats in fashion should dictate what yr listening to. at any given point in time, there are people actively making all types of music.

start an internet mailing list and try and concentrate as many genre geeks as you can in a single online community.

This site should answer your question.

Yeah, for people who are into music in such a specific way, the chances are that when the music was initially in fashion they would have dug deeper so as to distinguish themselves from the people who they thought only liked it for its perceived fashionability. In doing so they'd likely have made contact with communities of like-minded people and so could follow the music via bootlegs, small-time tours, unsuccessful underground acts etc. through the 'lean years'.

I think whatever genre is fashionable is always pretty interesting.

Because, if it's fashionable, by definitiion, a large number of people are listening to it, thinking about it, probably trying to play it out, make their own version and generally pushing it forwards in some way.

Whereas a genre which is out of fashion has maybe gone underground, and is changing in an interesting way there; oor maybe, has just been abandoned to the purists, who don't allow it to evolve at all.

Some people's music is so beautiful (Gheorghe Zamfir) I'll listen to it regardless of fashion. But most of the time I'd rather give my attention to the fashionable genres, or if I discover something interesting happening in the underground, to them too. I'll listen to the out-of-fashion genres occasionally when the mood takes me. But I won't grieve for them or worry about when they're coming back.

Presumably people who strongly liked a genre are UNLIKELY to like what others view as its resurgence. They will ALWAYS keep listening to the old version, not the new.

Idea that genre really 'resurges' is possibly misguided: to 'the true fans' the apparent resurgence will really be a latter-day corruption, possibly to be despised.

Hey, Brian Setzer has made a career out of ressurecting dead genres. If your favorite genre is coughing blood, give Setzer a call.

pinefox is otm. most of the garage rock fans I know have retreated deeper into the caves of obscurity over the past years. It's sad.

Perhaps the caves of obscurity lead to the springs of enlightenment.

perhaps but one must spelunk the grottoes of nostalgia and golden ageism along the way

Nostalgia = secret lake of sweetness

no it's full of nostalgia-algae that'll suck you under

This algae is the very elixir of youth.