Also, there is a LOT more country influence in early rock music than music critics want to admit.
For that matter, there is a lot more country (or "hillbilly", as the term was used then) influence on early blues music (and blues influence on early country) than a lot of blues aficionados want to admit.
I agree with most of this comment, but I really don't think GnR is that far removed, musically, from Bon Jovi, Motley Crue or Poison. The falsetto vocals, the guitar heroics, the lyrical content and indeed the production values seem very much of a piece with the broader genre.
>which featured both very theatrical/ridiculous hair and stage presentation
Slash consistently wore a top hat while performing live, and Axl Rose fully embraced the glam metal look, as you acknowledge.
>a sound that was heavily produced
This is kind of hard to quantify, but Appetite for Destruction cost $370,000 (a million in today's money) and six months to record, during which Axl Rose punched in for each line of each vocal track and the producer worked 18-hour days. It was an expensive and labour-intensive album to create.
>very self-consciously rowdy/sexist; songs for drunk frat guys to sing along to
What part of GnR does this NOT describe?
"Ya get nothin' for nothin'/If that's what ya do/Turn around bitch I got a use for you"
"I been thinkin' 'bout/Thinkin' 'bout sex/Always hungry for somethin'/That I haven't had yet/Maybe baby you got somethin' to lose/Well, I got somethin', I got somethin' for you"
"Panties 'round your knees/With your ass in debris/Doin' dat grind with a push and squeeze/Tied up, tied down, up against the wall/Be my rubbermade baby/An' we can do it all"
"I used to love her, but I had to kill her/I used to love her, ooh yeah, but I had to kill her/She bitched so much, she drove me nuts/And now I'm happier this way"
From a band whose singer chose his stage name because it's an anagram for "oral sex". He wanted the chorus of "paradise city" to be "take me down to paradise city where the girls are fat and have big titties", but was overruled by his bandmates. The original cover art for "Appetite for Destruction" depicted a woman lying on the side of the road with her underwear around her ankles after having been violently raped by an anthropomorphic robot, in a style that looks awfully fetishistic to me
GnR is based in hair metal but transcended the form IMHO. They were just musically beyond what Poison could do. Motley Crüe will always be the platonic form of hair metal - its ultimate expression. Although the odd religious imagery of "Wild Side" showed they could go beyond the genre too.
Zero chance I’ll be reading that piece but can confirm strongly that as I’ve aged I’m more thirsty than ever to know new great music artists and to be on every stupid platform. (Just said “BeReal is over” to a teen the other day and he lol’d so I still got it.) Cringe comment concluded.
Who are these people who don’t understand you can listen to everything and anything you want in the streaming age and don’t need the “permission" of condescending record store clerks (remember them?), college public radio stations or, especially, music critics (esp. those who don't appear to know that aging and not-so-aging white guys make plenty of EDM, IDM and all varieties of electronic music). The Times music criticism has long been bad--I think college valedictorians just don't understand rock, pop, hip-hop or whatever you want to call the popular music you like to listen to.
When I was a young cat, there was one indie record store, basically, and it was in the college town about an hour away. I didn't have transportation, so getting to go there was a special treat. So that was about my only experience with indie record stores.
And Bastet's tail! were the clerks working there a pack of jerks! At least that's what I thought at the time.
Then I moved to a different college town, with a selection of indie record stores. In every one of them, the clerks also treated me like I was something they scraped off of their shoes. Maybe I was really just that uncool?
Then I noticed that they treated *everyone* that way. Except the day I bought "Physical Graffiti" and Chuck Berry's "The Twenty Eight Great" on vinyl. The clerk, who normally treated customers like they were a species of talking cockroach, shook his head and said "man, you are getting some great music!"
Reminds me of Bill's Records and Tapes in Dallas back in the day. Sometimes if you wanted to buy something Bill would quiz you about the record (or tape) and if you failed the quiz he wouldn't sell it to you. It was a bit more good natured than what you describe.
The Old Guy Who Stays Too Long at the Party is very familiar to me. I know a guy who recently turned 50 and yet he slobbers over the Parkland Kids all day every day. He seems to have a fetish for the youth, that they're always right about everything and will save us all. It's very cringe.
Being old or being young keeps none of us from being dumb. To subscribe to a point of view based on the age of the person hocking it has always seemed ridiculous to me. No generation has a monopoly on stupid takes.
As an aging white man (a card-carrying I hafta get up six times a night to piss old white guy), my advice is to embrace the one advantage of getting old, to wit: STOP GIVING A FUCK HOW YOU LOOK OR WHAT ANYONE THINKS. Figure out what you actually think. Like what you actually like. Dislike what you actually dislike. My God, it makes life so much easier. You're going to be ashes in the back of your kid's closet soon enough and it won't matter anyway.
I am 61. The NGAF started coming on strong by my mid-50s. Like the old joke about going broke, it was gradual at first and then all of a sudden. I try not to hurt anyone's feelings, but best case is just keeping my mouth (or keyboard) shut. I am not able to falsely virtue signal or agree with people to help them confirm their own bias. And I do still care what my wife thinks, since I like being married to her ...
It is. And one test of whether in fact you do GAF is how you feel if it turns out you said or did something that hurts their feelings, especially their political feelings. Like your mom just scolded you, or like a dog shaking off smelly water.
I've totes my dad's ashes around since I was 25. He's been on a lot of shelves in a lot of places, but I've been mindful enough to make sure he's got a view and a place where people are around.
I keep trying to find a nice urn, but tbh the tasteful box from the crematorium is as nice as anything I've seen so far.
Man, if I'd been given my da's ashes I'd have whisked them off into the deep blue-green decades ago! But he decided to be inTURD, in the CIA way (Catholic Irish Alcoholic). So... it's a whip, ain't it, being still sexually humming at some godawful age, while the Young world we once knew still spins. Yeah, call it music, call it Rock, call it whatever... it's about that weird, WEIRD confluence of physical reality and mindful vigor. For me. As one who has been hit with mortal fuck-up-edness. But I'm still 19 in my head, jamming to ELP, Zep, Bjork?! Love Freddie and his compulsion to speak.
Amen - I enjoyed this since the Swifty Summer and Barbie leave room for thinking of little else. A central element of each individual human liberation project is learning how to say NO (often), and when to say YES (occasionally). Another one is realizing how very little other people's cursory appraisals of your life mean to you (and them), ultimately. It is unquestionably easier to grasp that perspective when older, cause that usually means wealthier and more established, however that applies for each of us. In the ideal, being able to give and receive critiques is about practicing and sharing to be better humans, and not being judgy to score points. The ideal critical appraisal would be delivered with love and constructive intent, even if direct and pointed. Since people on both sides of criticism fail to meet this motivational ideal routinely, we either shut our critiques up/out, or deliver/receive them with ill intent. I fail to send 9 out of 10 comments I start, because I don't even pass my own low bar for good intentions much of the time. But I subscribe to this stack because I believe human improvement is fun, and critical thinking is part of that evolving project, human culture items among the most interesting subjects. I viscerally connect to hundreds of rock and roll artists, living and dead, through playing their songs on drums, going to live shows, and living the Foo Fighters or Heartless Bastards or Pearl Jam or Hole turned up to 11 riding street motorcycles or gravel bikes. Strands of rock musicians over decades have weaved sonic summons to rebellion, speed, power, sex, dancing, and danger to heighten human emotions and speak to primordial hungers that coil in all of us. That's the masculine part that gets the attention, but also played at 11 are more non-macho offerings from Ani DiFranco or Tom Waits or Laurie Anderson. Music and language co-evolve with cultures, and happy accidents make fools of all would-be cultural arbiters, like the terminally cringe-inducing Wenner. What's old is new again: Taylor Swift meet Madonna, compare and contrast which one more aptly wears the moniker Material Girl. The critique cycle is endless and individual enlightenment is optional. Rock and roll tickles my somatic pathways reminding me ever that living well is the best revenge, be here now, and that human freedom includes the freedom to not give a tinkers damn what other folks think about how you're living your life.
Thank you. As an aging white-woman I cosign that I could literally DGAF about when people half my age think of my tastes. They are mine and that's all there is.
With respect: I am tired of poptimistic journalism for sure, but there are many people who think pop music or music made with synths or whatever is automatically lesser. There always will be. It is an inherent part of rock music fandom for many people. There are probably people still making songs about it.
On the flipside, is every single person aged 40 who likes pop music pretending to like it for social kudos? In the case of Kendrick Lamar, he's one of the most popular artists in America/the world. It seems more likely that people actually like him than that they're exaggerating this for woke points. I get that this behaviour can sometimes happen, but I see it more in more abstract worlds like visual art or poetry or something. With Kendrick Lamar or pop music if someone likes it they are one of many hundreds of millions - that seems less likely to be borne from guilt than a tiny cabal of poetry critics all talking about some shit lower case poem about listening to Drake on the bus or whatever.
I think generally it is pretty hard to second guess people's tastes, though it is tempting. But I have to say I did detect a hint of the argument in this piece that the natural state for a man of 40 is to like rock music, and this was a more authentic and honest way to live, which is very similar to the kind of attitude the opening of the piece claims doesn't exist. People are entitled to like what they like. Rock is not the default music which people have to force themselves to deviate from, or delude themselves into disliking. It's just another genre of music. Some people honestly don't enjoy rock music. I haven't listened to a new rock record with any great enthusiasm in about twenty years, and I'm 40.
Most of my friends, male or female, like electronic music or disco, and maybe jazz or ambient or other stuff like that as we get older. This is because I guess we all went to nightclubs a lot when we were 17 or 18 and we still do when we can, albeit that was 20 years ago. That's just one example of the many many ways or lives lived that can mean people don't like rock music.
I don't personally know people who love chart pop but I guess I just don't see how it would be odd that people would like the most heavily promoted music around which is intended to be catchy and sell and captivate people, and which everyone is talking about all the time. That seems too boring to be disingenuous to me.
And that's a different matter to music critics deciding to act like we live in the best of all possible worlds and only chart pop is worth talking about or writing about, or that it needs to be vociferously defended as if it's a political cause.
That is also bullshit. But I think there's a tendency nowadays to pin various systemic cultural or critical problems on people's individual tastes rather than the systems, which you may be a tiny bit guilty of here.
I'm sorry but poptimism is absolutely hegemonic in the actual spaces in which music is professionally discussed, as it is on social media. Go on Twitter, Tumblr, Tik Tok, or Instagram, say "Pearl Jam sucks," and note the (lack of) reaction. Then say "BTS sucks" and see. You might want to go into hiding after, though.
I don't disagree with you there for a second. But that doesn't mean people don't also have very narrow views on many other types of music too!
I think maybe it's a social media/the discourse versus IRL scenario? And that's not me discounting the hegemony of social media or doing that 'this only happens on Twitter' thing, I just think it's interesting.
Like there are lots of places in the world where a man liking chart pop would have negative consequences too, and I don't just mean at the ISIS cafeteria.
A big function of this is what social circle you're in. There probably are a lot of aging white people who only listen to guitar music, just as there are evidently a lot of people offended by drag, but they're not the people reading NYT trend pieces. And the existence of other circles allows one to plausibly claim to be speaking against a hegemonic consensus without offending anyone you actually care about.
(Surely "middle-aged white dude who constantly talks about 90s hip hop" is prevalent enough to be a stereotype by now though.)
For sure - I live in London and as I read this I was thinking what a stereotype even '40-year-old man who loves house/disco/techno' is, not just here or even just in Europe but presumably in many cities in America too, even if electronic music has always been a little more popular here.
A human female from Bulgaria expressed amazement to me that there were people under 50 in America that still listened to rock music. Back home, it was a tossup between Serbian-style turbofolk (a subject in and of itself, and definitely NOT Joan Baez!) for poor kids and humpin thumpin pumpin techno tronic bass beats for Euroclass and wannabe Euroclass kids.
"I mean, maybe there are some people still in Bulgaria that listen to rock music. Engineers, maybe, I wouldn't know...."
RE: cars, home renovations, and (particularly) sports: it's called _small talk_. You don't just burden people who aren't close friends with your fucking traumas. As a high-functioning autist, I had to learn how to do this shit, like, manually. It's an actual important life skill! If you "can't connect to 98% of people your own age", that's something you need to work on, not something to be proud of.
Sometimes, I see allegedly normal people and wonder if they would have benefited from being explicitly taught the "theory of mind" stuff I learned in the autism room.
I feel sorry for this Christopher Canning guy. A few weeks ago I helped a neighbour cut down a tree that was dying. It was our first real interaction beyond saying hello. So first we talked landscaping, and then MMA, and then hunting.
Jump forward a week and we spent a few hours fishing together and got talking about friends who had killed themselves and other pretty "deep" topics.
Does Christopher think I should have just walked up to him with a chainsaw and asked his thoughts about suicide...?
I used to be that guy. The guy who laments that when you ask people how they are, they give you some flip response of “good!” I used to think it was so trite talking about the weather, and I was above that.
I snapped out of it when I realized small talk was actually good. It’s really just people trying to be friendly with each other and picking a broad enough topic that everyone can contribute to. That’s a good thing! Deep discussions are obviously wonderful, but there’s a time and place.
Some years ago I attended a memorial party at a lovely seaside park on the Oregon coast for a friends mother who had recently passed. Was maybe 11 am in the morning, and we had just arrived to the park to set up the BBQs, food tables, etc., I met one of her brothers (probably in his early 80s) for the first time, and I asked him how he was doing. He explained in his first and only words spoken to me that he recently had a large cyst drained of an enormous quantity of puss in his rectum. I would have preferred a flip response like "good".
I really don’t think these kinds of social skills are differentiated by “normal people vs autistic people”, but that they’re a general condition most people in our society are forced to address due to alienation. People in general want meaningful social connection to some degree, and if someone is deprived of that social satisfaction they may seek it out to greater and more immediate effect (or reject what they dislike entirely and go off the grid out of stubbornness!).
People would benefit from better understanding Theory of Mind stuff in general. The way I understand it, autism just has a scalar affect on the way you interface with the same stuff everyone has to parse.
I can only think of Adorno's ranting about the culture industry which basically states that the function of popular music criticism is to justify and encourage the consumption of what this system produces. Poptimism is hegemonic for the most crass and basic reason possible: it's good for business. It's no deeper than that and never was. Taylor Swift's music, good, bad or ugly is way, way less important than the fact she makes a whole lot of people a whole lot of money and it's in their benefit to get critical tastemakers to bless the music with cultural accolades. No one critic needs to have this as an explicit or even conscious goal for it to work. In fact, it works better in a lot of ways of they don't because it feels more authentic.
My God, no one has made a dime off of Fugazi in decades and they barely profited off them during their prime in the first place. Trash talking them poses absolutely no threat whatsoever to the culture industry. People very commonly make the mistaken of thinking that because what the system wants and what they personally want at that point in time temporarily coincides that they have some control or that this capitalist culture industry cares about and listens to them. They are, under the most charitable definition, pawns. We all are, really, stuck trying to navigate forces way more powerful than outlr own desires and preferences...just trying to figure out how to live within them.
I think it's less MacKaye, than the sort of DIY ethics he championed that bothers them. Nothing is more anathema to poptimism than the idea that you can make your own music, records, zines, merch, and shows if you want to. It's ironically way more true now than in the 80s halcyon days of hardcore. Modern technology means you basically can make and distribute professional quality recordings in your bedroom for a few hundred dollars.
This poses major problems for the idea that popular music is the only legitimate form of entertainment. It's kind of like that famous Steve Albini quote about being able to go to the grocery store and buy roast beef for the same price as fast food. In this analogy the poptimists are telling you to buy the Big Mac instead of making your own food. It's bleak.
I talked to a bona fide French chef de cuisine, who commented that some days, what you want is a Big Mac. That's what you want. Not a wagyu steakburger served with free range avocado or whatever, but a Big Mac.
You don't necessarily want to make a habit out of it, but sometimes, that's what you want.
That's why I always try to emphasize that no one needs to have conspiratorial goals or that there's no smoke filled room where people decide this. It works better if the participants truly believe in poptimism. I also think that's why the full title Adorno had was "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" which I think in part means that people aren't in on it...at all.
The bitter truth is that while he scapegoated jazz, Adorno's arguments were basically correct at their core. It's the old "people hated him because he told them the truth" meme. My entire argument in that comment is just watered down Adorno with more colloquial vocabulary.
It’s fascinating to me that Rock hasn’t been scooped up by academia the way Jazz was at this point. Classical cats like to bitch and moan about how irrelevant they are, acting like they don’t even understand the music industry even if they’re scared of the reality that they’re treated as an anachronism stuck in the tower by industry moguls if they’re not writing film scores (some of them truly don’t understand).
Adorno was right, Babbitt was right, and Jazz went the way Classical did before it and the way Rock and Hip-Hop will go too. Jazz was just lucky enough to get cultivated to the point where artistic interests diverged to survive in the tower/on the ground while business interests have survived through fusion and evolution.
Eh, yes and no. It’s most certainly an extension and evolution of “classical” harmonic thought, but stylistically it’s a completely different game. Classical cats often have a big issue thinking they can just play jazz down like it’s a trivial diversion from their usual programming without learning how to swing, stay in the pocket of a rhythm section, or generally even learn the linguistics of different jazz improvisation styles.
Almost all 'classical cats' I know can swing, improvise, etc And visa versa. The 2 'genres' are symbiotic, always been so, and any solid musician can perform any number of styles, pretty effortlessly.
Still, the Beatles were very much Pop. Also, musical geniuses who successfully grafted their compositional brio onto R & B / Rock & Roll, which itself is a graft.
Pop also happens inside an economic distribution model which is not going to die, just morph via technique.
These complications are part of the story, not the problem.
Honestly? It might as well be an op that worked out in the government’s favor whether or not it was actually intentional. Judging by the way music has been commodified, the industry will continue to produce results regardless. With how deftly postmodernist ideology was woven into the US social structure during the Cold War, poptimism almost seems like it was an inevitability, even if our domestic genres weren’t treated like a bulwark to socialist realism.
I think it's also that, you know, lots of people want things for rather base reasons and once there's a critical mass of people demanding those things, our cultural/political/intellectual discourse bends to provide an appropriately flattering high-minded justification. Obviously there's a financial component at play here but I think you can find a similar dynamic in other areas where there's less financial incentive too.
Edit: like, 90% of this is just, young people reflexively think anyone older than them is dumb/bad/whatever, and so as each new generation is ascendant, we must toss some oldster on the sacrificial altar.
I agree, but what the young don't understand (and I certainly didn't when I was young so I include myself in that category. I'm 40 now.) is that most of youth culture was just dreamed up by a team of marketing execs and sold to them as "the voice of the youth.". It's like the weird, overweight old guy who was the mastermind behind the 90s boybands. What I said about thinking what the system wants and what you want temporarily coinciding, such as listening to Korn and the Deftones because there was good money to be made of the teenage angst of young men, absolutely applied to me too. No one gets out clean, that's the absolute bedrock for understanding the predicament we are in.
This is another way of say I agree with Freddie when he says talk of generational differences is mostly a dead end. None of this is new....at all.
This has been the case with gaming for the past decade or so. The whole thing is set up to hyper-consume silicon commodities and labor. Hardware-wise, 4K is indistinguishable from 1080p past about 3 feet, but we are told it is essential and requires a $500 GPU or next gen console. Software-wise, every game needs to have 100 different types of vases painstakingly modeled for a game with a 9th grade plot.
In my friend group (late 40s, mostly white dudes), there is a great divide between those with kids, who have generally found the joy of not keeping up with pop culture trends, and those without kids, who still try to stay current.
It is a truism in the music industry that the music that a human listens to between the ages of 18 and 21 is the music that human will listen to for the rest of his life.
I think for passive music listeners that might be true. I find my taste in music gets weirder and broader as I age and as I fall farther and farther into the limitless universe of online tunes. At the same time, I have almost no interest in current commercial music, despite my kids turning it on whenever we're in the car.
In my case, they didn't have YouTube when I was a young cat, and it's not as if there were lots of far-ranging radio stations and indie record stores where I was when I was younger.
There was lots of music that I had heard vaguely of and thought that I might like, but even if I could find it, a cd was probably $15, and that was a lot of money to spend on music that I wasn't sure I would like.
Now, of course, it's like drinking from a firehose blasting milk, 24/7.
I addressed this in the main comment I posted here. I think what Finster means is that the music industry deploys that notion about musical taste as a truism because of some study that was done regarding musical taste and age, whether or not it’s actually true.
There’s a difference between music produced for business and music produced as art, just like there’s a difference between casually consuming as a product and engaging with music as a means of communication.
Broadly true. But, as I get older, I find that I am "filling in" and expanding my collection to include jazz (Nina Simone, Billie Holiday), folk, jump blues, select modern pop and also digging deeper into the classical genre - in addition to my core rock and roll focus. Whatever my tastes, I am creating a collection that makes me happy (mostly on physical media, btw. I don't ever wish to subject myself to the capriciousness of a streaming service).
I don't care if what I like makes me uncool. The older I get, the more being happy trumps being uncool. If I am happy in my own skin and living a life that I find meaningful and consuming media that is satisfying and pleasurable, why should I care about the pecking order or other people's perceptions? I don't really care about legacy or being remembered. I have no kids. I just want to suck the marrow on a daily basis… (Kind of like a feline, I would imagine.)
There is some middle ground that I see in which peers do not listen to commercial pop culture/music but are very much aware of it, if that makes sense.
Our days are what we fill them with, so, I guess it is a personal balance (and I think taking note of the weather/traffic is very different from fandom and cultural tastes).
You also have the personal hell option of not liking pop music but loving music, and endlessly pursuing instrumental post-rock, technical death metal, and doom/sludge bands in seedy bars for $25 a pop as you slide towards 40 and beyond
That's basically me, except that I don't understand why you describe it as a personal hell. I love that I can go see Archspire at a small venue for $25. I love that there's a world of great music out there to discover, and I don't really care whether any of my fellow aging white dudes are into the same things or not.
Yes. Once I became a parent, I stopped focusing so much on myself -- including my "identity," appearance, status, and so on. I definitely don't care about being cool or following trends, or the fact that I'm an "aging white woman" which is supposed to be a terrible thing.
This is why, despite the exhaustion, parenting has been great for my mental health. Thinking about yourself all the time isn't healthy.
I could not agree more: the overwhelming love for my children changed my entire world view, very much for the better, as I stopped being the center of the universe. I see my friends without kids lamenting getting old/looking older in a way that I just don't feel. And I wonder if having kids, and feeling that shift, is the way we come to grips with aging and death.
Plus one on this, I turn 40 next year but my daughter will turn 7. Seven! The immense chasm of time she has in front of her feels like an extension of my own, in which anything can happen. I'm not going to worry too much if internet people think I'm bad for listening to Radiohead.
There is no better way to develop perspective than having children. While it isn't impossible to do without them they have a way of forcing the issue. Sometimes I think the fear mass culture instills on the practice is a major driver of the 'staying too long at the party' phenomenon.
My kids are too young for this kind of conversation yet but when the time is right I plan on trying to explain to them that the party is good, and they should totally go, but that they also shouldn't be too afraid to leave when the time is right, and that the time will likely be right earlier than they might think.
There's a point where what is awesome in your 20s has a way of starting to get pathetic and downright miserable, and that point has a way of jumping on people before they realize it. I'm sure they will ignore this advice only for it to (hopefully, maybe) resonate many years later. Either way it's an important bit of wisdom that seems to have been lost and younger people need to hear it.
I have to echo the annoyance of being told how great generation __ is by someone my age or older. I'd argue that the same percentage of each generation, however defined, is great or shitty while seeking a status boost by acting as talent scout puts you firmly in the latter grouping.
There’s also a pretty neat moment at the end of his song Hail Mary where there’s 4 active musical lines happening at once, which is somewhat of a rarity to find in orchestration.
Not arguing any of that - there is some interesting hip hop. There is also a lot of lazy hip hop, just as a lot of rockers joined bands in order to get laid.
My friend group is the complete opposite. Those with kids embrace the most "basic" (IMO) of pop culture, things they never would have cared about before, or actively disdained, because their kids like it. Those without kids tends to be the ones that keep clinging to what they loved so much when they were young (I'm generalizing here).
It's interesting our experiences seem so contradictory. It might be that most of my friends were or are artistic in some way - played in bands, made movies, made crazy art. Having kids hasn't necessarily dulled their sensibilities, but it certainly seems to have expanded their pop culture horizons. Not sure what your friends do, but I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
I have seen some parents who take on their kids' music tastes, but I feel like I usually see it in folks who were never active music listeners. Thankfully, that quirk has not infected my group of friends yet. More generally, I think peers without kids spend a lot more time making small talk, as they go out more, travel more, etc. (x10 if they are single). I can imagine that would encourage being more in touch with current trends.
Yeah, this is part of a normal maturation process. Fads are for the young. Older people have more stable identities and don’t need the external validation that flows from being fashionable.
And you are SUPPOSED to become less self-obsessed as you get older, and derive self-worth from being of use to others rather than ruminating on your identity and what songs make you cry.
That's weird, because I see it as the complete opposite. I'm mid 40s and my husband and I don't have kids, but everyone else does. They're the ones who know all the new music and new movies and new pop culture stuff. Because they have to know about it bc their kids do and they're always buying them tickets or taking them to shows or listening to their music in the car. Whereas we have zero idea about any of it and couldn't care less. I could not tell you the name of or identify a single Taylor Swift song if my life depended in it. All the parents I know can sing along to all her songs. Perhaps you friends had kids later in life and they're still little?? Bc the parents of teens know WAY more about this stuff than most childless people. Or maybe your peers without kids are still somewhat pathetically trying to get laid by people 20 years younger than them and trying to keep up the illusion??
"This unfortunate fellow is just one of a cohort of aging white men who will chew your ear off about (say) how “Call Me Maybe,” once dismissed as a trifle, has proven to be a multi-generational anthem and deeper than the entire Led Zeppelin corpus."
Thankful to say I've never met one of these guys. Hard to believe they're real...
You flatter with the “scientist” label but I take your point. I remember being in Europe when Call Me Maybe came out. I started in Munich and went east to Vienna, Prague, then Budapest, and finally Kiev. As I went further East the frequency of hearing the song kept going down, like I was getting farther and farther from the drums of an approaching army on the march.
I *still* have negative emotions every time "Umbrella" comes up (last Saturday night, also rude neighbors), after being bombarded by it that summer it came out now already several decades ago !
Rock is less commercially successful than ever, but in certain ways that makes it better to be a fan. I'm seeing (imho) legendary bands like Shannon and the Clams and The Black Lips for 20 bucks in intimate venues later this year. I can pay 5 bucks for a cover and see 3-4 pretty good bands on a random Thursday. Bad for the bands though. I know some talented musicians who work in food trucks to make ends meet, but monetizing art in the age of content is a bitch and that's a bigger issue than this genre vs. that one.
That's was the whole point of indie and punk - so you could see a band in a bar or club for a fair price and not in a stadium. You can support bands you love through Bandcamp by buying their digital albums and downloading them. You probably know that already I bet.
There are alotta aging folk out there who bemoan the death of guitar music, and pine for the days when "musicians could actually play their own instruments", but I sense they're culturally disenfranchised, e.g. not writing for NYT Mag or Pitchfork. They do seem to dominate the Youtube comments under vids of their cherished acts, or in the Rick Beato channel. . .
And probably still huge swathes of local papers, or music sections in broadsheet newspapers etc. Plus there's still a sort of aura in the discourse around what's perceived to be great rock music.
I don't like poptimism and want it gone, but we should probably consider it in it's historical context. Rolling Stone was a thing and Jan Wenner is still talking like it's the 1970s. Granted, he doesn't count for much anymore, but he's one of the men that built the edifices in which we still dwell. We can't seem to knock those buildings down and build something else in their place. Instead, we just wander through their decaying halls.
Also, there is a LOT more country influence in early rock music than music critics want to admit.
For that matter, there is a lot more country (or "hillbilly", as the term was used then) influence on early blues music (and blues influence on early country) than a lot of blues aficionados want to admit.
I agree with most of this comment, but I really don't think GnR is that far removed, musically, from Bon Jovi, Motley Crue or Poison. The falsetto vocals, the guitar heroics, the lyrical content and indeed the production values seem very much of a piece with the broader genre.
>they were more pop metal
We may be talking past each other as I've always used the terms "glam metal" and "pop metal" more or less interchangeably.
>which featured both very theatrical/ridiculous hair and stage presentation
Slash consistently wore a top hat while performing live, and Axl Rose fully embraced the glam metal look, as you acknowledge.
>a sound that was heavily produced
This is kind of hard to quantify, but Appetite for Destruction cost $370,000 (a million in today's money) and six months to record, during which Axl Rose punched in for each line of each vocal track and the producer worked 18-hour days. It was an expensive and labour-intensive album to create.
>very self-consciously rowdy/sexist; songs for drunk frat guys to sing along to
What part of GnR does this NOT describe?
"Ya get nothin' for nothin'/If that's what ya do/Turn around bitch I got a use for you"
"I been thinkin' 'bout/Thinkin' 'bout sex/Always hungry for somethin'/That I haven't had yet/Maybe baby you got somethin' to lose/Well, I got somethin', I got somethin' for you"
"Panties 'round your knees/With your ass in debris/Doin' dat grind with a push and squeeze/Tied up, tied down, up against the wall/Be my rubbermade baby/An' we can do it all"
"I used to love her, but I had to kill her/I used to love her, ooh yeah, but I had to kill her/She bitched so much, she drove me nuts/And now I'm happier this way"
From a band whose singer chose his stage name because it's an anagram for "oral sex". He wanted the chorus of "paradise city" to be "take me down to paradise city where the girls are fat and have big titties", but was overruled by his bandmates. The original cover art for "Appetite for Destruction" depicted a woman lying on the side of the road with her underwear around her ankles after having been violently raped by an anthropomorphic robot, in a style that looks awfully fetishistic to me
Never forget (or forgive!) the fact that Slash just went ahead and stole the riff from Black Sabbath's "Zero The Hero" on GnR's "Paradise City".
GnR is based in hair metal but transcended the form IMHO. They were just musically beyond what Poison could do. Motley Crüe will always be the platonic form of hair metal - its ultimate expression. Although the odd religious imagery of "Wild Side" showed they could go beyond the genre too.
Zero chance I’ll be reading that piece but can confirm strongly that as I’ve aged I’m more thirsty than ever to know new great music artists and to be on every stupid platform. (Just said “BeReal is over” to a teen the other day and he lol’d so I still got it.) Cringe comment concluded.
Who are these people who don’t understand you can listen to everything and anything you want in the streaming age and don’t need the “permission" of condescending record store clerks (remember them?), college public radio stations or, especially, music critics (esp. those who don't appear to know that aging and not-so-aging white guys make plenty of EDM, IDM and all varieties of electronic music). The Times music criticism has long been bad--I think college valedictorians just don't understand rock, pop, hip-hop or whatever you want to call the popular music you like to listen to.
I worked in a record store - I was nice to people. They used to thank me while on ecstasy at festivals.
When I was a young cat, there was one indie record store, basically, and it was in the college town about an hour away. I didn't have transportation, so getting to go there was a special treat. So that was about my only experience with indie record stores.
And Bastet's tail! were the clerks working there a pack of jerks! At least that's what I thought at the time.
Then I moved to a different college town, with a selection of indie record stores. In every one of them, the clerks also treated me like I was something they scraped off of their shoes. Maybe I was really just that uncool?
Then I noticed that they treated *everyone* that way. Except the day I bought "Physical Graffiti" and Chuck Berry's "The Twenty Eight Great" on vinyl. The clerk, who normally treated customers like they were a species of talking cockroach, shook his head and said "man, you are getting some great music!"
WTF!?!
These guys are still around - you see them on music Twitter all the time. Same dickish holier than thou behaviour as ever.
They can stay there, far as I am concerned.
Reminds me of Bill's Records and Tapes in Dallas back in the day. Sometimes if you wanted to buy something Bill would quiz you about the record (or tape) and if you failed the quiz he wouldn't sell it to you. It was a bit more good natured than what you describe.
Sounds like the movie "High Fidelity." LOL!
“Music journalists love Elvis Costello and hate me because they look like Elvis Costello.”
David Lee Roth
The Old Guy Who Stays Too Long at the Party is very familiar to me. I know a guy who recently turned 50 and yet he slobbers over the Parkland Kids all day every day. He seems to have a fetish for the youth, that they're always right about everything and will save us all. It's very cringe.
Parkland kids?
David Hogg, Cameron Casky, etc. They're the kids who survived the Parkland school shooting back in 2018 and became gun reform activists.
Being old or being young keeps none of us from being dumb. To subscribe to a point of view based on the age of the person hocking it has always seemed ridiculous to me. No generation has a monopoly on stupid takes.
Your first sentence sounds like a great bumper sticker or a non-standard haiku. Love it!
Thanks! Completely unintentional, I assure you!
As an aging white man (a card-carrying I hafta get up six times a night to piss old white guy), my advice is to embrace the one advantage of getting old, to wit: STOP GIVING A FUCK HOW YOU LOOK OR WHAT ANYONE THINKS. Figure out what you actually think. Like what you actually like. Dislike what you actually dislike. My God, it makes life so much easier. You're going to be ashes in the back of your kid's closet soon enough and it won't matter anyway.
Amen, brother! Not giving a fuck what others think is, by far, one of the best benefits of aging.
I am 61. The NGAF started coming on strong by my mid-50s. Like the old joke about going broke, it was gradual at first and then all of a sudden. I try not to hurt anyone's feelings, but best case is just keeping my mouth (or keyboard) shut. I am not able to falsely virtue signal or agree with people to help them confirm their own bias. And I do still care what my wife thinks, since I like being married to her ...
It’s a fine line, isn’t it? ;)
It is. And one test of whether in fact you do GAF is how you feel if it turns out you said or did something that hurts their feelings, especially their political feelings. Like your mom just scolded you, or like a dog shaking off smelly water.
Or cats of any age and gender.
My father's ashes are literally sitting in the back of my closet right now.
I've totes my dad's ashes around since I was 25. He's been on a lot of shelves in a lot of places, but I've been mindful enough to make sure he's got a view and a place where people are around.
I keep trying to find a nice urn, but tbh the tasteful box from the crematorium is as nice as anything I've seen so far.
Man, if I'd been given my da's ashes I'd have whisked them off into the deep blue-green decades ago! But he decided to be inTURD, in the CIA way (Catholic Irish Alcoholic). So... it's a whip, ain't it, being still sexually humming at some godawful age, while the Young world we once knew still spins. Yeah, call it music, call it Rock, call it whatever... it's about that weird, WEIRD confluence of physical reality and mindful vigor. For me. As one who has been hit with mortal fuck-up-edness. But I'm still 19 in my head, jamming to ELP, Zep, Bjork?! Love Freddie and his compulsion to speak.
Sound advice, sir.
Amen - I enjoyed this since the Swifty Summer and Barbie leave room for thinking of little else. A central element of each individual human liberation project is learning how to say NO (often), and when to say YES (occasionally). Another one is realizing how very little other people's cursory appraisals of your life mean to you (and them), ultimately. It is unquestionably easier to grasp that perspective when older, cause that usually means wealthier and more established, however that applies for each of us. In the ideal, being able to give and receive critiques is about practicing and sharing to be better humans, and not being judgy to score points. The ideal critical appraisal would be delivered with love and constructive intent, even if direct and pointed. Since people on both sides of criticism fail to meet this motivational ideal routinely, we either shut our critiques up/out, or deliver/receive them with ill intent. I fail to send 9 out of 10 comments I start, because I don't even pass my own low bar for good intentions much of the time. But I subscribe to this stack because I believe human improvement is fun, and critical thinking is part of that evolving project, human culture items among the most interesting subjects. I viscerally connect to hundreds of rock and roll artists, living and dead, through playing their songs on drums, going to live shows, and living the Foo Fighters or Heartless Bastards or Pearl Jam or Hole turned up to 11 riding street motorcycles or gravel bikes. Strands of rock musicians over decades have weaved sonic summons to rebellion, speed, power, sex, dancing, and danger to heighten human emotions and speak to primordial hungers that coil in all of us. That's the masculine part that gets the attention, but also played at 11 are more non-macho offerings from Ani DiFranco or Tom Waits or Laurie Anderson. Music and language co-evolve with cultures, and happy accidents make fools of all would-be cultural arbiters, like the terminally cringe-inducing Wenner. What's old is new again: Taylor Swift meet Madonna, compare and contrast which one more aptly wears the moniker Material Girl. The critique cycle is endless and individual enlightenment is optional. Rock and roll tickles my somatic pathways reminding me ever that living well is the best revenge, be here now, and that human freedom includes the freedom to not give a tinkers damn what other folks think about how you're living your life.
> I fail to send 9 out of 10 comments I start, because I don't even pass my own low bar for good intentions much of the time
This is me now, so much...
Thank you. As an aging white-woman I cosign that I could literally DGAF about when people half my age think of my tastes. They are mine and that's all there is.
Yes. Thank you. I’m not alone...
You nailed it, Count.
With respect: I am tired of poptimistic journalism for sure, but there are many people who think pop music or music made with synths or whatever is automatically lesser. There always will be. It is an inherent part of rock music fandom for many people. There are probably people still making songs about it.
On the flipside, is every single person aged 40 who likes pop music pretending to like it for social kudos? In the case of Kendrick Lamar, he's one of the most popular artists in America/the world. It seems more likely that people actually like him than that they're exaggerating this for woke points. I get that this behaviour can sometimes happen, but I see it more in more abstract worlds like visual art or poetry or something. With Kendrick Lamar or pop music if someone likes it they are one of many hundreds of millions - that seems less likely to be borne from guilt than a tiny cabal of poetry critics all talking about some shit lower case poem about listening to Drake on the bus or whatever.
I think generally it is pretty hard to second guess people's tastes, though it is tempting. But I have to say I did detect a hint of the argument in this piece that the natural state for a man of 40 is to like rock music, and this was a more authentic and honest way to live, which is very similar to the kind of attitude the opening of the piece claims doesn't exist. People are entitled to like what they like. Rock is not the default music which people have to force themselves to deviate from, or delude themselves into disliking. It's just another genre of music. Some people honestly don't enjoy rock music. I haven't listened to a new rock record with any great enthusiasm in about twenty years, and I'm 40.
Most of my friends, male or female, like electronic music or disco, and maybe jazz or ambient or other stuff like that as we get older. This is because I guess we all went to nightclubs a lot when we were 17 or 18 and we still do when we can, albeit that was 20 years ago. That's just one example of the many many ways or lives lived that can mean people don't like rock music.
I don't personally know people who love chart pop but I guess I just don't see how it would be odd that people would like the most heavily promoted music around which is intended to be catchy and sell and captivate people, and which everyone is talking about all the time. That seems too boring to be disingenuous to me.
And that's a different matter to music critics deciding to act like we live in the best of all possible worlds and only chart pop is worth talking about or writing about, or that it needs to be vociferously defended as if it's a political cause.
That is also bullshit. But I think there's a tendency nowadays to pin various systemic cultural or critical problems on people's individual tastes rather than the systems, which you may be a tiny bit guilty of here.
I'm sorry but poptimism is absolutely hegemonic in the actual spaces in which music is professionally discussed, as it is on social media. Go on Twitter, Tumblr, Tik Tok, or Instagram, say "Pearl Jam sucks," and note the (lack of) reaction. Then say "BTS sucks" and see. You might want to go into hiding after, though.
I don't disagree with you there for a second. But that doesn't mean people don't also have very narrow views on many other types of music too!
I think maybe it's a social media/the discourse versus IRL scenario? And that's not me discounting the hegemony of social media or doing that 'this only happens on Twitter' thing, I just think it's interesting.
Like there are lots of places in the world where a man liking chart pop would have negative consequences too, and I don't just mean at the ISIS cafeteria.
A big function of this is what social circle you're in. There probably are a lot of aging white people who only listen to guitar music, just as there are evidently a lot of people offended by drag, but they're not the people reading NYT trend pieces. And the existence of other circles allows one to plausibly claim to be speaking against a hegemonic consensus without offending anyone you actually care about.
(Surely "middle-aged white dude who constantly talks about 90s hip hop" is prevalent enough to be a stereotype by now though.)
For sure - I live in London and as I read this I was thinking what a stereotype even '40-year-old man who loves house/disco/techno' is, not just here or even just in Europe but presumably in many cities in America too, even if electronic music has always been a little more popular here.
A human female from Bulgaria expressed amazement to me that there were people under 50 in America that still listened to rock music. Back home, it was a tossup between Serbian-style turbofolk (a subject in and of itself, and definitely NOT Joan Baez!) for poor kids and humpin thumpin pumpin techno tronic bass beats for Euroclass and wannabe Euroclass kids.
"I mean, maybe there are some people still in Bulgaria that listen to rock music. Engineers, maybe, I wouldn't know...."
That was over 20 years ago.
The shitrag NYT and all related publications are utterly dispensable. Your entire piece here supports that idea.
"shitrag NYT"
Redundant
Not everyone seems to be aware that it is only fit for wiping one's ass, so I find it useful to reinforce the point.
It has other uses, such as lining bird cages, potty-training puppies, and stuffing around ceramics when moving. But, yes
RE: cars, home renovations, and (particularly) sports: it's called _small talk_. You don't just burden people who aren't close friends with your fucking traumas. As a high-functioning autist, I had to learn how to do this shit, like, manually. It's an actual important life skill! If you "can't connect to 98% of people your own age", that's something you need to work on, not something to be proud of.
Sometimes, I see allegedly normal people and wonder if they would have benefited from being explicitly taught the "theory of mind" stuff I learned in the autism room.
I feel sorry for this Christopher Canning guy. A few weeks ago I helped a neighbour cut down a tree that was dying. It was our first real interaction beyond saying hello. So first we talked landscaping, and then MMA, and then hunting.
Jump forward a week and we spent a few hours fishing together and got talking about friends who had killed themselves and other pretty "deep" topics.
Does Christopher think I should have just walked up to him with a chainsaw and asked his thoughts about suicide...?
I don't know who Christopher Canning is, but I suspect all 98% of us feel the same way about him.
I used to be that guy. The guy who laments that when you ask people how they are, they give you some flip response of “good!” I used to think it was so trite talking about the weather, and I was above that.
I snapped out of it when I realized small talk was actually good. It’s really just people trying to be friendly with each other and picking a broad enough topic that everyone can contribute to. That’s a good thing! Deep discussions are obviously wonderful, but there’s a time and place.
Some years ago I attended a memorial party at a lovely seaside park on the Oregon coast for a friends mother who had recently passed. Was maybe 11 am in the morning, and we had just arrived to the park to set up the BBQs, food tables, etc., I met one of her brothers (probably in his early 80s) for the first time, and I asked him how he was doing. He explained in his first and only words spoken to me that he recently had a large cyst drained of an enormous quantity of puss in his rectum. I would have preferred a flip response like "good".
Guy must have had a lot of interesting stories. Hope you stuck by him?
Ha. Yep. God knows the entertainment I missed out on by not hanging out with him.
He has inspired me to up my game as I get older and some poor fool asks me how I am doing ...
I really don’t think these kinds of social skills are differentiated by “normal people vs autistic people”, but that they’re a general condition most people in our society are forced to address due to alienation. People in general want meaningful social connection to some degree, and if someone is deprived of that social satisfaction they may seek it out to greater and more immediate effect (or reject what they dislike entirely and go off the grid out of stubbornness!).
People would benefit from better understanding Theory of Mind stuff in general. The way I understand it, autism just has a scalar affect on the way you interface with the same stuff everyone has to parse.
I can only think of Adorno's ranting about the culture industry which basically states that the function of popular music criticism is to justify and encourage the consumption of what this system produces. Poptimism is hegemonic for the most crass and basic reason possible: it's good for business. It's no deeper than that and never was. Taylor Swift's music, good, bad or ugly is way, way less important than the fact she makes a whole lot of people a whole lot of money and it's in their benefit to get critical tastemakers to bless the music with cultural accolades. No one critic needs to have this as an explicit or even conscious goal for it to work. In fact, it works better in a lot of ways of they don't because it feels more authentic.
My God, no one has made a dime off of Fugazi in decades and they barely profited off them during their prime in the first place. Trash talking them poses absolutely no threat whatsoever to the culture industry. People very commonly make the mistaken of thinking that because what the system wants and what they personally want at that point in time temporarily coincides that they have some control or that this capitalist culture industry cares about and listens to them. They are, under the most charitable definition, pawns. We all are, really, stuck trying to navigate forces way more powerful than outlr own desires and preferences...just trying to figure out how to live within them.
I think it's less MacKaye, than the sort of DIY ethics he championed that bothers them. Nothing is more anathema to poptimism than the idea that you can make your own music, records, zines, merch, and shows if you want to. It's ironically way more true now than in the 80s halcyon days of hardcore. Modern technology means you basically can make and distribute professional quality recordings in your bedroom for a few hundred dollars.
This poses major problems for the idea that popular music is the only legitimate form of entertainment. It's kind of like that famous Steve Albini quote about being able to go to the grocery store and buy roast beef for the same price as fast food. In this analogy the poptimists are telling you to buy the Big Mac instead of making your own food. It's bleak.
Haven’t you heard? Albini has apologized to The Kids, who he has always thought were All Right:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/15/the-evolution-of-steve-albini-if-the-dumbest-person-is-on-your-side-youre-on-the-wrong-side
I talked to a bona fide French chef de cuisine, who commented that some days, what you want is a Big Mac. That's what you want. Not a wagyu steakburger served with free range avocado or whatever, but a Big Mac.
You don't necessarily want to make a habit out of it, but sometimes, that's what you want.
/\ THIS. It's not like the author went after Soul Glo.
I often want to say that poptimism is an op but I don't want to be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist
That's why I always try to emphasize that no one needs to have conspiratorial goals or that there's no smoke filled room where people decide this. It works better if the participants truly believe in poptimism. I also think that's why the full title Adorno had was "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" which I think in part means that people aren't in on it...at all.
The bitter truth is that while he scapegoated jazz, Adorno's arguments were basically correct at their core. It's the old "people hated him because he told them the truth" meme. My entire argument in that comment is just watered down Adorno with more colloquial vocabulary.
It’s fascinating to me that Rock hasn’t been scooped up by academia the way Jazz was at this point. Classical cats like to bitch and moan about how irrelevant they are, acting like they don’t even understand the music industry even if they’re scared of the reality that they’re treated as an anachronism stuck in the tower by industry moguls if they’re not writing film scores (some of them truly don’t understand).
Adorno was right, Babbitt was right, and Jazz went the way Classical did before it and the way Rock and Hip-Hop will go too. Jazz was just lucky enough to get cultivated to the point where artistic interests diverged to survive in the tower/on the ground while business interests have survived through fusion and evolution.
And Jazz is really just 'classical' with bluer notes
Eh, yes and no. It’s most certainly an extension and evolution of “classical” harmonic thought, but stylistically it’s a completely different game. Classical cats often have a big issue thinking they can just play jazz down like it’s a trivial diversion from their usual programming without learning how to swing, stay in the pocket of a rhythm section, or generally even learn the linguistics of different jazz improvisation styles.
You can tell someone’s square when you hear it.
Almost all 'classical cats' I know can swing, improvise, etc And visa versa. The 2 'genres' are symbiotic, always been so, and any solid musician can perform any number of styles, pretty effortlessly.
Kalefa Sanneh is too broad-minded for that to be true. The cult that grew around his article, though…
Still, the Beatles were very much Pop. Also, musical geniuses who successfully grafted their compositional brio onto R & B / Rock & Roll, which itself is a graft.
Pop also happens inside an economic distribution model which is not going to die, just morph via technique.
These complications are part of the story, not the problem.
Honestly? It might as well be an op that worked out in the government’s favor whether or not it was actually intentional. Judging by the way music has been commodified, the industry will continue to produce results regardless. With how deftly postmodernist ideology was woven into the US social structure during the Cold War, poptimism almost seems like it was an inevitability, even if our domestic genres weren’t treated like a bulwark to socialist realism.
It's not a theory if it's actually happening!
I think it's also that, you know, lots of people want things for rather base reasons and once there's a critical mass of people demanding those things, our cultural/political/intellectual discourse bends to provide an appropriately flattering high-minded justification. Obviously there's a financial component at play here but I think you can find a similar dynamic in other areas where there's less financial incentive too.
Edit: like, 90% of this is just, young people reflexively think anyone older than them is dumb/bad/whatever, and so as each new generation is ascendant, we must toss some oldster on the sacrificial altar.
I agree, but what the young don't understand (and I certainly didn't when I was young so I include myself in that category. I'm 40 now.) is that most of youth culture was just dreamed up by a team of marketing execs and sold to them as "the voice of the youth.". It's like the weird, overweight old guy who was the mastermind behind the 90s boybands. What I said about thinking what the system wants and what you want temporarily coinciding, such as listening to Korn and the Deftones because there was good money to be made of the teenage angst of young men, absolutely applied to me too. No one gets out clean, that's the absolute bedrock for understanding the predicament we are in.
This is another way of say I agree with Freddie when he says talk of generational differences is mostly a dead end. None of this is new....at all.
Glad someone else get it, lmao.
This has been the case with gaming for the past decade or so. The whole thing is set up to hyper-consume silicon commodities and labor. Hardware-wise, 4K is indistinguishable from 1080p past about 3 feet, but we are told it is essential and requires a $500 GPU or next gen console. Software-wise, every game needs to have 100 different types of vases painstakingly modeled for a game with a 9th grade plot.
That Fugazi are still going through the motions, presumably playing the punk rock equivalent of ribfests or Indian casinos is most instructive...
They're not.
In my friend group (late 40s, mostly white dudes), there is a great divide between those with kids, who have generally found the joy of not keeping up with pop culture trends, and those without kids, who still try to stay current.
It is a truism in the music industry that the music that a human listens to between the ages of 18 and 21 is the music that human will listen to for the rest of his life.
I think for passive music listeners that might be true. I find my taste in music gets weirder and broader as I age and as I fall farther and farther into the limitless universe of online tunes. At the same time, I have almost no interest in current commercial music, despite my kids turning it on whenever we're in the car.
In my case, they didn't have YouTube when I was a young cat, and it's not as if there were lots of far-ranging radio stations and indie record stores where I was when I was younger.
There was lots of music that I had heard vaguely of and thought that I might like, but even if I could find it, a cd was probably $15, and that was a lot of money to spend on music that I wasn't sure I would like.
Now, of course, it's like drinking from a firehose blasting milk, 24/7.
I find it helpful to recognize that there is very popular music that is being made for other people. Take it or leave it.
I addressed this in the main comment I posted here. I think what Finster means is that the music industry deploys that notion about musical taste as a truism because of some study that was done regarding musical taste and age, whether or not it’s actually true.
There’s a difference between music produced for business and music produced as art, just like there’s a difference between casually consuming as a product and engaging with music as a means of communication.
I do not listen to Dave Matthews Band at all thankyouverymuch.
Broadly true. But, as I get older, I find that I am "filling in" and expanding my collection to include jazz (Nina Simone, Billie Holiday), folk, jump blues, select modern pop and also digging deeper into the classical genre - in addition to my core rock and roll focus. Whatever my tastes, I am creating a collection that makes me happy (mostly on physical media, btw. I don't ever wish to subject myself to the capriciousness of a streaming service).
I don't care if what I like makes me uncool. The older I get, the more being happy trumps being uncool. If I am happy in my own skin and living a life that I find meaningful and consuming media that is satisfying and pleasurable, why should I care about the pecking order or other people's perceptions? I don't really care about legacy or being remembered. I have no kids. I just want to suck the marrow on a daily basis… (Kind of like a feline, I would imagine.)
I must be an exception then, because I have no kids and don't listen to any current music really.
There is some middle ground that I see in which peers do not listen to commercial pop culture/music but are very much aware of it, if that makes sense.
Sure, it's like being aware of traffic or weather. It's helpful to know what's going on.
Our days are what we fill them with, so, I guess it is a personal balance (and I think taking note of the weather/traffic is very different from fandom and cultural tastes).
You also have the personal hell option of not liking pop music but loving music, and endlessly pursuing instrumental post-rock, technical death metal, and doom/sludge bands in seedy bars for $25 a pop as you slide towards 40 and beyond
Yes to Bog Monkey, Chat Pile, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Meshuggah, and everything else obscure and weird on Bandcamp!
That's basically me, except that I don't understand why you describe it as a personal hell. I love that I can go see Archspire at a small venue for $25. I love that there's a world of great music out there to discover, and I don't really care whether any of my fellow aging white dudes are into the same things or not.
I guess it's the frustration of having very few (or no) friends who want to go with. I may have been a bit dramatic there 😂
Yes. Once I became a parent, I stopped focusing so much on myself -- including my "identity," appearance, status, and so on. I definitely don't care about being cool or following trends, or the fact that I'm an "aging white woman" which is supposed to be a terrible thing.
This is why, despite the exhaustion, parenting has been great for my mental health. Thinking about yourself all the time isn't healthy.
I could not agree more: the overwhelming love for my children changed my entire world view, very much for the better, as I stopped being the center of the universe. I see my friends without kids lamenting getting old/looking older in a way that I just don't feel. And I wonder if having kids, and feeling that shift, is the way we come to grips with aging and death.
Plus one on this, I turn 40 next year but my daughter will turn 7. Seven! The immense chasm of time she has in front of her feels like an extension of my own, in which anything can happen. I'm not going to worry too much if internet people think I'm bad for listening to Radiohead.
I recall some chick magazine's byline was "the magazine for your me years".
That rang a bell.
CLANG!
There is no better way to develop perspective than having children. While it isn't impossible to do without them they have a way of forcing the issue. Sometimes I think the fear mass culture instills on the practice is a major driver of the 'staying too long at the party' phenomenon.
My kids are too young for this kind of conversation yet but when the time is right I plan on trying to explain to them that the party is good, and they should totally go, but that they also shouldn't be too afraid to leave when the time is right, and that the time will likely be right earlier than they might think.
There's a point where what is awesome in your 20s has a way of starting to get pathetic and downright miserable, and that point has a way of jumping on people before they realize it. I'm sure they will ignore this advice only for it to (hopefully, maybe) resonate many years later. Either way it's an important bit of wisdom that seems to have been lost and younger people need to hear it.
Don't be the old guy at the club.
Why not? I didn't need anyone's permission when I was 16, I don't need anyone's permission now that I'm 63.
23 is good. 63 is good. 43 is not good.
Why?
I have to echo the annoyance of being told how great generation __ is by someone my age or older. I'd argue that the same percentage of each generation, however defined, is great or shitty while seeking a status boost by acting as talent scout puts you firmly in the latter grouping.
(And hip hop is dead.)
I used to wonder whether much of hip hop was a string of nonsequitors, set to a beat, or whether it was unconscious poetry.
The constant bling references lead me towards the former.
Check out 2pac’s Changes
There’s also a pretty neat moment at the end of his song Hail Mary where there’s 4 active musical lines happening at once, which is somewhat of a rarity to find in orchestration.
Not arguing any of that - there is some interesting hip hop. There is also a lot of lazy hip hop, just as a lot of rockers joined bands in order to get laid.
Oh fucking yea absolutely.
My friend group is the complete opposite. Those with kids embrace the most "basic" (IMO) of pop culture, things they never would have cared about before, or actively disdained, because their kids like it. Those without kids tends to be the ones that keep clinging to what they loved so much when they were young (I'm generalizing here).
It's interesting our experiences seem so contradictory. It might be that most of my friends were or are artistic in some way - played in bands, made movies, made crazy art. Having kids hasn't necessarily dulled their sensibilities, but it certainly seems to have expanded their pop culture horizons. Not sure what your friends do, but I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
I have seen some parents who take on their kids' music tastes, but I feel like I usually see it in folks who were never active music listeners. Thankfully, that quirk has not infected my group of friends yet. More generally, I think peers without kids spend a lot more time making small talk, as they go out more, travel more, etc. (x10 if they are single). I can imagine that would encourage being more in touch with current trends.
Yeah, this is part of a normal maturation process. Fads are for the young. Older people have more stable identities and don’t need the external validation that flows from being fashionable.
And you are SUPPOSED to become less self-obsessed as you get older, and derive self-worth from being of use to others rather than ruminating on your identity and what songs make you cry.
That's weird, because I see it as the complete opposite. I'm mid 40s and my husband and I don't have kids, but everyone else does. They're the ones who know all the new music and new movies and new pop culture stuff. Because they have to know about it bc their kids do and they're always buying them tickets or taking them to shows or listening to their music in the car. Whereas we have zero idea about any of it and couldn't care less. I could not tell you the name of or identify a single Taylor Swift song if my life depended in it. All the parents I know can sing along to all her songs. Perhaps you friends had kids later in life and they're still little?? Bc the parents of teens know WAY more about this stuff than most childless people. Or maybe your peers without kids are still somewhat pathetically trying to get laid by people 20 years younger than them and trying to keep up the illusion??
"This unfortunate fellow is just one of a cohort of aging white men who will chew your ear off about (say) how “Call Me Maybe,” once dismissed as a trifle, has proven to be a multi-generational anthem and deeper than the entire Led Zeppelin corpus."
Thankful to say I've never met one of these guys. Hard to believe they're real...
Great post as always thanks for writing.
That's because you are a scientist. Stop in at any college English or communications department and you will know they are real.
Doctors are more 'call me never'
You flatter with the “scientist” label but I take your point. I remember being in Europe when Call Me Maybe came out. I started in Munich and went east to Vienna, Prague, then Budapest, and finally Kiev. As I went further East the frequency of hearing the song kept going down, like I was getting farther and farther from the drums of an approaching army on the march.
I *still* have negative emotions every time "Umbrella" comes up (last Saturday night, also rude neighbors), after being bombarded by it that summer it came out now already several decades ago !
Rock is less commercially successful than ever, but in certain ways that makes it better to be a fan. I'm seeing (imho) legendary bands like Shannon and the Clams and The Black Lips for 20 bucks in intimate venues later this year. I can pay 5 bucks for a cover and see 3-4 pretty good bands on a random Thursday. Bad for the bands though. I know some talented musicians who work in food trucks to make ends meet, but monetizing art in the age of content is a bitch and that's a bigger issue than this genre vs. that one.
That's was the whole point of indie and punk - so you could see a band in a bar or club for a fair price and not in a stadium. You can support bands you love through Bandcamp by buying their digital albums and downloading them. You probably know that already I bet.
All my fave indie bands from 20 years were touring this past summer and charging $150 a pop...I wish I could get these prices you speak of.
Who knows? Maybe I just have trash tastes, so the bands I like are unpopular and have affordable tickets ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are alotta aging folk out there who bemoan the death of guitar music, and pine for the days when "musicians could actually play their own instruments", but I sense they're culturally disenfranchised, e.g. not writing for NYT Mag or Pitchfork. They do seem to dominate the Youtube comments under vids of their cherished acts, or in the Rick Beato channel. . .
And probably still huge swathes of local papers, or music sections in broadsheet newspapers etc. Plus there's still a sort of aura in the discourse around what's perceived to be great rock music.
Contra Ted Gioia:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-is-music-getting-sadder?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=296132&post_id=136763801&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1cc3o&utm_medium=email
Tech tip: Strip out everything after the ? including said ? to remove tracking from links. Don't feed the marketers.
I don't like poptimism and want it gone, but we should probably consider it in it's historical context. Rolling Stone was a thing and Jan Wenner is still talking like it's the 1970s. Granted, he doesn't count for much anymore, but he's one of the men that built the edifices in which we still dwell. We can't seem to knock those buildings down and build something else in their place. Instead, we just wander through their decaying halls.