Common Ground

just music in general or particular albums? e.g. i havent heard the whole of 'pet sounds' or 'nico' or 'the queen is dead' but obv. i know a BIT about Beach Boys, Velvets and Smiths

i assume everyone with even the slightest enthusiasm for music has heard Frank's 'My Way' and Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' for starters

things like age/generation affect this....older people who like music may not recognise many songs regarded as classic or essential from the last 20 years perhaps? e.g. my boss who is in his 50s had never heard of Nirvana, even last week!

Music in general I think. It just interests me on boards like this the things that people seem to assume other people will know about. If somebody said "I've been listening to the Beatles, they were this great 60s pop group from Liverpool who went really experimental" it would seem a bit odd, whereas somebody explaining in a sentence who, I don't know, John's Children were wouldn't seem as odd. Similarly I could have just put "classic or dud" after my "The 900 Number" thread but I decided to explain what I was talking about. When I didn't do this - on my Ms Dynamite thread - there was at least one complaint.

"Hey Jude"

I guess most people have heard something by the Beatles. For my generation, I assume most people have heard Nirvana and Michael Jackson.

I have met enough people who like different things, like jazz or classical, that I don't assume much.

well it depends on the context doesn't it? i mean, here, i don't explain, i assume people will have heard of what i'm talking about, because even if most don't, someone will (only my Ace The Space thread went unanswered)

in other contexts, it depends on the people, and if people aren't au fait with certain things, those things are less likely to crop up in conversation. if they do, i say about htem anyway, and if someone doens't know they usually go "what the hell is that then?"

I can't imagine anyone who says he/she likes (and therefore is interested in) music not having heard Johann Sebastian Bach and The Beatles.

After that bands/artists which a music lover should at least have heard one track of: Miles Davis covering all sorts of Jazz styles, Chopin for classical piano music, The Smiths for indie pop, The Velvet Underground as they started indie rock and Bob Dylan for songwriters.

I'm not talking about what bands people should or shouldnt have heard, really - we've done threads on that though but I think it's a noxious idea. I'm talking about the shortcuts that get made for communication purposes.

(What Gareth says rings true - on ILM at least there is a lot of assumption and little explanation. The problem is I think that this can be i) alienating to new people and ii) mean that people stick on the threads where they do 'know the territory' so to speak.)

Or "know their NME". Sorry, couldn't resist that bad joke.

People don't like music if they can't name me fifteen Severed Heads B-Sides.

i personally wouldnt feel alienated if there was a post with everyone talking about how great (for example) Husker Du are - a band i have not heard yet, mainly because however good it sounds like they're not my thing at the moment....but i like to see talk about bands i dont know and if anything it usually will prompt me to investigate them - this would be a good attitude for all newcomers to ILM i figure

I'm talking about the shortcuts that get made for communication purposes.
???
Could you please restate your question then, Tom? I don't get it. Is it a meta question? You don't want to hear music styles I assume people should have heard neither I suppose.
What is this common ground supposed to mean? For me common ground can only mean music all music lovers have supposedly listened to. Music is made by artists and to be specific about this I have to name the artists.

Cop-out answer, but true: it depends on their background.

I remember being surprised when a college friend about my age said "what's that?" when I mentioned "Stairway to Heaven." He just hand't listened to rock or pop when he was growing up. Too busy reading Victorian novels and modern poetry and listening to classical music and smoking hashish. At the time I met him he was starting to dabble a little with pop type things and I remember him like a Eurhythmics song and also remember that he liked "The Velvet Underground with Nico" when I loaned it to him. Sorry. I'm off on a tangent.

Anyway, I do tend to assume people have heard the Beatles and, yeah, I guess Michael Jackson.

That damn "should" word. Causes more confusion than any other in the English language.

Yeah, what's up with English people who say "should" where Americans would say "would"? For the UKers in the audience, replace that second to last "would" with "should".

Until very recently I'd not knowingly heard Destiny's Child which people would find very hard to believe because I have more records than them. Obviously I'm too busy listening to them to play the radio or watch TOTP.

Ok, forget the "should" then in my posts. Replace it by "would" or delete it entirely.
I assume that people who like music know the artists I mentioned.
Maybe their relation to music is stronger than just liking though.

The Radio

All genuine music lovers must have heard "Don't Do the Squirrel" by Taco the Wonder Dog.

Yeah sorry Alex it was based in the should confusion. You seemed to be saying "You're not a real music fan unless you've heard X".

I suppose I could reformulate the question as a scenario. Somebody posts to this board and says "Can someone recommend a really fantastic record to me?". What records would you NOT recommend because you'd assume they'd already know about them (rather that the ones you'd not recommend because theyre rubbish!).

U2, Blondie, The Pretenders, Bjork, Otis Redding, a house mix from Miami

I always ask the first few times, only with more well-known bands I say "have you listened to much _____" so as not to offend anyone. A few responses and you can start making assumptions.

But I suspect the question's less about personal behaviour and more about what we consider an actual known canon. I'd say that for people in my age group VH1's list and documentary programs are a pretty good measuring stick: everyone at least knows about the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Hendrix, Dylan, Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, Snoop Dog, Madonna, etc. Canonical 60s and 70s acts and any act since that stayed on the charts for more than five years.

The problem is that you can assume people know of these acts and don't require explanations, but you can't assume that people have every actually listened to the band's catalogs beyond a few radio singles or jukebox staples or whatever. So even with the Beatles I'd ask. I did this with a guy I met during my first year of college, and it turned out that his concept of the Beatles was all early Beatles: I gave him a copy of Magical Mystery Tour and suddenly late-period Beatles was all he listened to.