Paid Members Scratch Posted March 9 Paid Members Share Posted March 9 My dad bought an Austin Maxi in 1987, it was an absolute tank. I always remember driving places as a family and he would always have his 60s tapes on, that very much being his era. As a kid, it all sounded like music from an absolute age before, an almost unfathomable amount of time ago. I was thinking the other day that it would be the equivalent of a 7-year-old now hearing music from 2002 and my brain just can’t compute it being the same. It does make me feel old though. Something that particularly stands out is that by the same time comparison, Definitely Maybe would not have been featured on my dad’s 60s collection as it would have been released in the 50s. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Devon Malcolm Posted March 9 Paid Members Share Posted March 9 Â Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperBacon Posted March 9 Share Posted March 9 Come To Grandaddy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Statto Posted March 9 Paid Members Share Posted March 9 Music equivalencies like those from @Scratch properly blow my mind. I became a Queen obsessive in high school, beginning about 1995. Back then I was roundly mocked for being into such old fashioned music, and even I thought that was the case even though I revelled in it, but the fact is even the oldest albums were only just over 20 years old at the time. Like someone that age now being into Limp Bizkit. I use them specifically as an example cos a couple of weeks back I went to a little Sunday afternoon open mic type thing, and one of the performers (who was an older gentleman) introduced a song as "originally by The Who, but this is closer to the version Limp Bizkit put out a couple of years ago". Um, try a couple of decades ago! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted March 11 Paid Members Share Posted March 11 (edited) On 3/9/2024 at 3:48 PM, Statto said: one of the performers (who was an older gentleman) introduced a song as "originally by The Who, but this is closer to the version Limp Bizkit put out a couple of years ago". I imagine he has been playing it, with that exact intro, for twenty years. Covers bands are a really interesting one for this for me. There used to be a bar in Jersey that had live music almost every night, but only covers acts. With very few exceptions, you'd get basically the same songs every time, regardless of what band was playing, and it was a smattering of "classics" and then almost everything else was early '00s radio-friendly indie rock. Dakota by Stereophonics, Dreaming Of You by The Coral, Mr. Brightside by The Killers, Sex Is On Fire by Kings of Leon, and so on in that vein. You realise after a while that you've been watching this band for ten or fifteen years and what was once a contemporary setlist hasn't changed at all - but then I suppose for the most part the audience hasn't either! It's the same thing with rock/metal DJs. The standard playlist has barely moved on from whatever was on Kerrang! in 2002. I have a couple of theories about it - one, as it pertains to DJs and covers bands in particular - is all economic; Gen Z don't really drink, so probably just aren't going to these gigs, so there's no reason to freshen up setlists because they're just aging at the same rate as the audience, and there's probably fewer young kids ending up in covers bands because they're usually either something you end up doing out of music college, or as a side-hustle to a proper band, and if there's less money and fewer opportunities, that's just not happening any more. The other, better thought out theory, is that the cut-off point of the mid-00s represents the last time that there was really a shared experience of popular music. Digital downloads were included in the charts from 2005, and streaming from 2014. Spotify launched in the UK in 2010. Top Of The Pops ended in 2006. While there has been the odd act, or the odd massive hit, that has managed to break containment since then, for the most part people have just been listening to music curated for them by algorithm, so any effort to present something to a mass audience necessarily has to be backward looking. The flipside of that is popular music isn't tied in our memory to cultural events or specific times as much as it used to be, so it's difficult to associate it with the passage of time any more. Edited March 11 by BomberPat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted March 11 Paid Members Share Posted March 11 7 minutes ago, BomberPat said: The other, better thought out theory, is that the cut-off point of the mid-00s represents the last time that there was really a shared experience of popular music. Digital downloads were included in the charts from 2005, and streaming from 2014. Spotify launched in the UK in 2010. Top Of The Pops ended in 2006. While there has been the odd act, or the odd massive hit, that has managed to break containment since then, for the most part people have just been listening to music curated for them by algorithm, so any effort to present something to a mass audience necessarily has to be backward looking. The flipside of that is popular music isn't tied in our memory to cultural events or specific times as much as it used to be, so it's difficult to associate it with the passage of time any more. I think this ties in with a more general theory of interaction of certain cultural signifiers with other cultural texts, and their consumption/manipulation. Case in point is something I've mentioned before, which, at the time, I framed with film/TV; if you were to make a film set in any period prior to the 2010s, you have a relatively easy job in conveying that to the viewer, as the style of dress, haircuts, cars, architecture, etc., are easily identifiable by what they are, and also because pretty much everybody is a participant in that presentation. If you were to set a film in the 2010s onwards, how would that be presented? It's a significant effect of the internet's cultural "democratisation" (a term I both agree with and use with caution) that there is probably no identifiable trend or pattern to the current day, as culture is no longer defined in the larger part by things like geography, employment, even wealth and social strata (again, the same caution). I don't generally like using the term "postmodernity", but in this case, it sort of is, in its capacity as a rejection of the modern, or perhaps even evolution beyond it via mass production/mass communication. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted March 11 Paid Members Share Posted March 11 10 minutes ago, Carbomb said: If you were to set a film in the 2010s onwards, how would that be presented? It's a significant effect of the internet's cultural "democratisation" (a term I both agree with and use with caution) that there is probably no identifiable trend or pattern to the current day, as culture is no longer defined in the larger part by things like geography, employment, even wealth and social strata (again, the same caution). I don't generally like using the term "postmodernity", but in this case, it sort of is, in its capacity as a rejection of the modern, or perhaps even evolution beyond it via mass production/mass communication. End of History, innit. I think there's a lot to be said for how much TV and film is set in the '80s and '90s - there's always an element of backward-looking, because the people who control cultural capital are pulling from their own youth and their own influences; you get pastiches of late '50s music and fashion coming into vogue in the early '80s, '60s and '70s nostalgia in the '90s, and '80s revivals in the '00s, because people who lived through it are now the ones writing the books, directing the movies, controlling the TV channels, running the record labels, and so on. But there doesn't seem to have been the equivalent changeover in personnel in more recent years, with social mobility having ground to a halt, and previous generations clinging to power, so everything kind of atrophies in one frame of reference. In film and TV, I think there's also a very specific thing that pushes people working within certain genres to stick to setting things in the past, though, and that's mobile phones. Too many tropes in too many genres fall apart once you have to factor them in; it's why so many horror movies have to have a throwaway line about a character's battery being dead, or not having any signal, because otherwise viewers would just be wondering why they don't just call for help or text someone to say where they are. There's equivalent issues in romantic comedy, farce, and really anything that relies on characters having no means of talking to one another or external agencies when they're not face-to-face. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted March 11 Paid Members Share Posted March 11 8 minutes ago, BomberPat said: In film and TV, I think there's also a very specific thing that pushes people working within certain genres to stick to setting things in the past, though, and that's mobile phones. Too many tropes in too many genres fall apart once you have to factor them in; it's why so many horror movies have to have a throwaway line about a character's battery being dead, or not having any signal, because otherwise viewers would just be wondering why they don't just call for help or text someone to say where they are. There's equivalent issues in romantic comedy, farce, and really anything that relies on characters having no means of talking to one another or external agencies when they're not face-to-face. In fairness, I'd say that's a generational thing - what comes to mind is that adage about how "generals don't fight the next war, they re-fight the last one", and that could be expanded to cultural producers/gatekeepers who are still organising and formulating things around their own frames of reference, and don't really have the know-how to work with things that <banevoice> they merely adopted, whereas the newer generation were born with, moulded by</banevoice>. One of the most obvious examples to me is The Umbrella Academy. Spoiler It becomes clear very early on that Gerard Way decided to completely and unapologetically dispense with them because they over-complicated things, and he even has story points that revolve around landline/phone box communication. It's also something that comes up at the writer's group I sometimes attend - there's often discussion of how (if at all) people can work mobile phones realistically into storylines and still retain the classic storyline elements aimed for. Same goes for social media/internet search engines, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Scratch Posted March 11 Paid Members Share Posted March 11 On the music front, I used to DJ in my late teens/early 20s and stopped around 2003/4 as I just didn’t like the music that was coming out. Move forward to last year and I’ve bought another set of 1210s and everything else that goes with it and have started DJing again. My first gig back was in the same venue I played my last gig at in 2003 and I’m pretty sure I played the exact same set. All of the people there were of a similar age and it was a great night. It certainly feels that we’re of that age where we’re old enough to pond for our youth, and still just about young enough to want to go out and embrace it. I’ve never been busier and I absolutely love that I’ve rediscovered an old passion. But it probably means my comeback is naturally limited to the next 5 years or so as we all become bored of going out again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperBacon Posted March 11 Share Posted March 11 18 minutes ago, Scratch said: But it probably means my comeback is naturally limited to the next 5 years *very LL Cool J voice* 🎵Don't call it a comeback, I'm just here for 5 years🎵 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Statto Posted March 24 Paid Members Share Posted March 24 Based upon this discussion the other week, in our huddle on Friday morning I polled the team I have recently begun managing on their favourite musical artist (giving the caveat of it needing to be someone at least half the room had heard of, which might have skewed the results somewhat). I manage 5 people between 20-25, and 1 bloke closer to 50. All the twentysomethings answered with an act who had (in my opinion) peaked before the fan had turned 4, most of the acts had been active long before that fan had been born. I said Queen (giving the context I gave her that it was considered weird that I was listening to such "old" stuff when I was a kid). The older bloke said Pearl Jam (who just scraped through on the 50% rule on the basis I've got a couple of rock fans in the team) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sphinx Posted March 24 Share Posted March 24 There's the Y2K fashion trend and music of that era having a bit of a resurgence in influencing today's music. It's pretty common to see house DJs play remixes of late 90s/early 00s pop songs at the moment. I've not seen it but Saltburn was pretty popular and seemed to be set in the early 00s and Murder On The Dancefloor was everywhere at one point. It's maybe not as prominent as other revivals and it's definitely harder to pinpoint years and decades now, but there's still some later nostalgia happening. The charts has generally shifted away from bands too, maybe because it's easier and more profitable to tour and promote solo artists, so that might be a factor in standard pub bands playing the same songs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Devon Malcolm Posted March 24 Paid Members Share Posted March 24 9 minutes ago, Sphinx said: I've not seen it but Saltburn was pretty popular Keep it that way, it's crap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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