I found the “Let it all out!” thread very interesting, and it clearly engaged others, too.
To generalise, those unhip but liked bits of music are all melodic and well-played, and rarely kick against The Man. So are we saying that received wisdom rock critic/ rock snob values (something is only good if it is obscure, unmelodic, ineptly played, and jolly cross) wrong? Are we post-NME and post-Peel? Do people now NOT say “I preferred their early stuff”?
I think having everything at the click of a button has a big part to play with it. Back in the NME/Peel days, if you wanted something that’s a tad uncool you had to do the walk of shame to the counter with it and hope the shop assistant didn’t sneer (this, of course, was impossible upstairs in the Notting Hill Music and Video Exchange, cos that lass who worked in there sneered at everything!). Now, however, if you want to add Silver Lady by David Soul to your collection you can just download it to your device and listen to it at your leisure. Furthermore, when your cool mate comes round and has a nose through your record collection it’s nowhere to be found, amongst your Misty in Roots, The Fall and Velvet Underground CDs, so your coolness rating remains untarnished. Of course, you’d never let your cool mate have a flick through your ‘favourites’ playlist on your iPhone, so there’s no need to explain what Alvin Stardust, Chas and Dave and Fat Larry’s Band are doing in there.
Either that, or we’ve all grown up and stopped being arses.
I think the last bit. Now I’m older I know what I like and what makes me happy and while I’m always happy to share musical recommendations, I couldn’t give two hoots if someone says “Actually I didn’t like it”. Most of the people in my team at work have (to my ears) dreadful musical taste, but I love working with them. I’ve got over myself.
BBC6 Music couldn’t be more Peel if it adopted a dubious Liverpool accent and lived in Suffolk.
I don’t call that post-Peel; I call it more Peel than ever.
Yebbut, nobody – except civilians – listens to any of that shite, do they?
Well his son is on the station. I would say, however, it is in general way more listenable (and diverse) than any Peel playlist from his last 20 years or so. Can’t stand Steve Lamacq though.
I’m the opposite. I can’t get on with Peel Minor, but I do like Steve Lamacq.
Having said that, I haven’t listened to 6Music as much lately as I used to (a combination of change of breakfast routine/no Shaun K and a change at work meaning that I cannot listen to the radio in the afternoon).
I find 6music falls into two camps, one of which I like, the other I don’t.
One is the earnest chin-stroking SU type of wonk, who takes it all way too seriously, and raises stuff onto unrealistic pedestals. (for me, the likes of Lamacq)
The other is the type who is a nerd about music, but can also laugh at it and themselves a bit, and knows that it’s all just a touch ridiculous really. (Rad & Mac, Shaun K, inter alia)
But now, it’s just another fragment in a diffused culture. There are few, if any, “mass” tribes anymore. And it’s a tribe that many neither know or care about, like many over 40 having no concept of what Tikitok is, for example.
Yeah I think we are mainly in agreement. I don’t listen to 6 Music that much (being in Canada), but when I put it on I find it enjoyable. The loss of the Radcliffe/Maconie M-F afternoon show is unfortunate, as that was my breakfast show over here.
A good point. But BBC 6 is not exactly YouTube in the listening figures (https://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php). I think radio/ newspapers/ CDs are all last century’s thing, and we are now archaic: my students today (post grads in a Russell Group university) said they did not read The Guardian, and didn’t know who Will Self was. The past is a different country, and you can be pretty sure John peel is the name of a stage only to many youngsters now, those youngsters are seeking to hear Kylie on the main stage.
Permission to laugh at them? Actually, I don’t need permission. “Ha, ha.”
Anyway, let’s hope they get to hear there’s a General Election on.
I don’t want to wake up on Friday 13th (how apt) to a crescendo of “So, I was going to vote/So, is that what it means?/So, it won’t make any difference” … like after the Referendum.
I’d be interested (and maybe appalled) to know what subjects they are studying and what they said they did read as regards news sources.
Not too surprised if some at least hadn’t heard of Will Self, but rather disappointed if none of them at all knew of his existence.
I kind of hoped that Russell Group unis were a tad selective about how well read their postgrads were.
We ARE selective; students rarely read books now. My children, raised in a house full of books (including Will Self) read more than their peers, but still spend more time on screens than paper. If one is lucky, students read research papers. Sky news seems to be the thing. When you get a reading, art cinema visiting, musically hip student, it is a thing of wonder you cherish. Maybe it was always like this, relatively speaking, our tutors being appalled at our listening to Hatfield and the North/ crispy Ambulance, and reading the occasional martin Amis.
My daughter is 13 and reads avidly, not always on the printed page, but generally she always has an old fashioned bound, paper version on the go.
As part of my PhD I started taking seminars for undergraduate students relatively recently – also at a Russell Group university, incidentally. At first I was taken aback by how little of the reading I asked them to do was actually done, but then I thought back five or six years to when I did my undergrad degree and I barely read anything then either. I got better for my master’s, though I never read an entire book for it. I didn’t need to.
I’ve also never bought a newspaper, but I read the Guardian online sometimes. But I think that’s more of a technological, rather than generational, thing. My parents used to buy newspapers all the time when I was young, but they just them online too.
I also used to buy NME from 2006-08 and after that I worked part-time at HMV and got it for free. It shaped my taste for much of that time – though I don’t think those years are looked back upon as particularly special. I liked them though.
John Peel died when I was 13. I’m not sure I’d know who he was if I didn’t post here.
I did buy newspapers but haven’t done for at least a decade now. My father-in-law still buys The Guardian and is baffled when I know about stories in there he’s interested in. In fact I’ve almost certainly read them online before his copy’s been delivered.
tbf, I’d like to think I’m fairly well-read, and apart from a bit of The Book of Dave, I’ve barely read any Self, even though I know plenty about him. Lists of things don’t always give the full picture, but we are where we are, I suppose
Never read a Will Self book and have no great desire to. I’ve read a fair few WS newspaper/magazine articles and, while I don’t think he’s a BAD writer, I don’t get why he’s so lauded.
Pound shop Martin Amis, and an absolute toilet of a human being
Is that you, Martin?
Brave man asking 2019 undergraduates if they read a newspaper – any newspaper. To anyone under 30 they are an object of bafflement. “This big papery thing full of adverts for holidays and the day-before-yesterday’s news…. what exactly is it for?” After all, it’s not even used by chip shops any more.
Anything considered shite in 2019 has a chance of being worthwhile.
Anything considered worthwhile in 2019 is definitely shite.
What are they for? Very good question. Sales are plummeting almost as fast as the quality.
Who are “we”?
Good call, Tahir. So are we supposed to be ashamed of our younger selves and our younger self tastes, just as we seem supposed to shame the youngers of today for theirs. Buddha on a tricycle, what is AW norm now? Sing Something Simple, time for re-appraisal? I’m still proud of my NME dogmatic rock snobbism, me, and you should be too.
Peel was fond of 9 to 5 (Morning Train) by Sheena Easton, one of NMEs albums of the year in 1980 was Diana by Diana Ross. Two Earth, Wind and Fire albums also featured in their end of year lists around that time.
NME really embraced black music in the early 80s. They decided (probably correctly) that New Romantics were not for them. To be fair, lots of soul/disco records also featured in their best of the year lists in the late 70s. It was also a highly readable publication in the 80s, I moved to London in 83 just so I could pick it up one day early (not really), was the highlight of my week …
Yep, Peel wasn’t a music snob by any stretch of the imagination. His role was to find stuff that was new and different, and he’d often play stuff he wasn’t entirely sure about on the basis that someone out there would probably like it.
Wasn’t one of the things he basically said, “I’ll listen to most things at least once”
Hardly snobbery. How do you know what you like or dislike otherwise?
Are we being a bit simplistic here..? Personally, I have fallen for the great reviews, or the next big thing hype, and ended up buying shite, but I’ve also just gone with what my ears tell me and bought what I want to listen to at home. The latter has often been (sometimes temporarily!!) unfashionable, but I’m sure most, if not all, of us are quite happy to have people nose through our collections and pull out that ABBA collection, John Denver album, or all those ELO 7″ singles and happily talk about why we like them!?
Having said that, the early stuff is nearly always better…
My mate’s fourteen year old son loves Doctor Who, but only the Troughton years. Rip it up and start again.
She is seriously hardcore!! Respect!
That comment amused me no end @ZantiMisfit.
I just stumbled across this.It is excellent.
As odd as it sounds, I don’t listen to 6music precisely because they play the sort of stuff I like. I don’t want to hear my favourite stuff too much: the thrill goes, and you really can listen to too much music. Keep it precious!
My son’s all like, ‘There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure.’ And while I agree that a good song is a good song regardless, he wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye when most of the guilty pleasure songs were actually minted. He didn’t have to put up with a seemingly endless stream of oleaginous crooners on beige chatshows and insipid variety programmes. Yes, Copacabana is a great song, but it was easy to forget that when you were watching it being trotted out on The Des O’Connor Show for the umpteenth time.
I am 63 & like to think that my years of being a music snob are long behind me.
FWIIW, I love 6 music.
Happy days