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The way I see it…

by 160 Comments

…there seem to be more bands and artists than ever before.

But none of them really ‘matter’ any more.

1

Comments

    • I actually love being old. But, if we are being serious for a sec, where are the new Stones, Dylans, Beatles et alia? I appreciate that there are great artists and bands out there, but none of it seems to transcend the barriers of ‘music’ like the Fabs or the Pistols did. None of it offends the likes of old gits like me any more. And I really wish it did.

      • Highly unlikely they are to be found in rock music as its about 60 years old now.
        Maybe they’re not in music at all.
        Do you opine the fact there is no new Shakespeare in theatre?

      • The generation gap isn’t as wide as everyone tries to hang on to their youth. Mainstream pop isn’t that offensive as it’s had all the edges knocked off but I’m sure there is some extreme metal or hardcore rap that you could find offensive if you tried

  2. I am sure that the bands of today mean as much to their fans as bands did to you when you were their age Eddie.

    Actually, I am not quite sure that I truly believe that, but I am sure that when todays teenagers became parents/ grandparents, they will echo what you have just said.

    I am (sort of) with Dave here…

    • I’m always open to being amazed and/or appalled but I’m usually left knowing exactly where it came from originally.

      I suppose I was a bit offended by Kanye West’s almost complete lack of any obvious ‘talent’ at Glastonbury. So there is that somewhat grim glimmer of ‘hope’…

  3. I’m not so sure Jack. When the kids of today become adults they are far more likely to be nostalgic about Super Mario, Lego Batman, GTA and the other games they played.

    Music just isn’t so desperately important to a lot of them.

  4. Not sure.

    My kids don’t have the same devotion to their favourite artists that I did when I was 14/15. Music just isn’t all enveloping to that generation (generalising) as it was to mine.

    Too much other stuff to do.

  5. I think the demise of the ‘shared viewing experience’ represented by TV has something to do with it. Back then our parents could be ‘outraged’ by Bowie or Bolan on TOTP or by the Pistols on London’s Tonight Show. Nowadays pop and rock has been left in a kind of ghetto. Great things are doubtlessly being made, as they are also probably being made in the theatre or ballet, but it doesn’t cross over any more. And pop/rock is one medium which has historically relied on at least an element of outrage. It has lost that power. And I blame the internet and the ipod.

    Although both were/are inevitable….

  6. Towards the end of the last academic year I did a project with four year nine classes which involved them downloading a picture of someone famous – who they admired – as a starting point. There were plenty of sportspeople (football rugby and American Football) and actors a LOT of You-Tubers but only one person from the world of music – pop rock rap rnb – and that was James Bay.

    (apols for lack of commas in this post – keyboard is broken!)

    • I suppose the thing that’s missing these days is the idea that you can be a ‘famous’ musician. But fame was so often the spur for invention, surprise and progress. Not always I grant you. But when nobody outside your demographic pays much attention it all becomes a bit culturally ‘enclosed’.

      I’m obviously not suggesting that ‘all modern music is rubbish’ because it’s not. I actually produce a music radio programme for the BBC and I get exposed to a hell of a lot of new stuff- most of it is so-so but some is great and I have no doubt that the quality ratio is the same as it was in 1963. But the difference is that, these days, it just doesn’t seem to resonate beyond a dedicated tribe of ‘fans’.

    • I watched a Beeb highlights of Glastonbury show the other night and the only artist that I had never heard of was James Bay. Has he been mentioned here? What have I missed?

  7. Everything underground and anti-establishment ultimately gets absorbed into the mainstream where it is tamed. Rock, dance, hip hop, you name it. It ends up not mattering so much to people, though most were fairly untouched by these things anyway. There are still special works being produced but yes they do not resonate as they once did.

    • Indeed, George Melly made this point years ago in his book ‘Revolt Into Style’, but the difference is that these days it doesn’t get the opportunity to be ‘wild’ before it is tamed because there is no mainstream exposure.

      • I think that’s true. The exciting thing was something raw and untamed getting major exposure – like The Smiths first few performances on TOTP, or Suede at the Brits. The thrill of a shock factor among the squares perhaps. Now you have the likes of Cameron as a fan, heir to Blair’s cool Brittania, children of Live Aid. The potency of it all’s been nullified. Johnny Rotten and Iggy became cute.

      • It’s not about how ‘great’ the bands are…it’s more about the cultural/social contest they exist in. It doesn’t allow any cross-pollination. We’re all listening on our ipods. Nothing is ‘public’. There are no ‘charts’ that matter. No pop TV. Parents don’t care where before they were scared. And I really believe that Pop is at it’s best when it appears to have arrived from Venus and threatens world destruction.

        Romantic, old-fashioned fool that I am….

        • I would agree Eddie, at my place of work most offices, if they have a radio at all, are tuned in to Heart FM, or something similar and at a volume barely discernible . Discussions about music are rare and uninspiring – most of my colleagues are younger than me and just interested

    • The extremes of what can be done with pop have already been explored by the seventies so if you’ve already experienced those things nothing new can again have that impact. Hence the unfortunate jadedness. Still I suppose those who are young are lucky to have it all to find out about.

  9. So what you’re saying eddie, is you want some new band to come along and offend your sensibilities or for them to ‘matter’? Good luck with that.

    I let’ youthful narcissism on social media’ be the equivalent of my parents generations horrified reaction to punk rock.

  10. You’ve mentioned Kanye already but Rap ‘stars’ resonate most of all these days and they continue to provoke controversy. Kendrick Lamar and Donnie Trumpet have produced the most discussed albums of the year so far. Run The Jewels weren’t far behind last year. Plus, they are addressing ‘current’ issues in a way I haven’t heard since Billy Bragg but with more swearing!

    I posted Twigs because she combines aural and visual so stunningly well. That EP is free on YouTube. Other female music artists are resonating in the same way, with Rhiannon probably being the most popular alongside Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Nikki Minaj. Their music may be derivative but their videos are definitely pushing some kind of envelope.

    Most ‘parents’ are horrified by both phenomena.

  11. Ain’t going to happen, Eddie. Anything new and revolting that comes along (like that fucking dreadful FKA Twigs nonsense) you will cos of your age and background automatically hate it. Stop thrashing around looking for anything remotely groundbreaking, not going to happen, not going to happen.
    And accept that’s actually a good thing. There’s a ton, an absolute ton, of stuff out there that somehow you missed first time round. Thanks to the modern world we live in it’s all there just waiting for you. Just don’t expect that Sex Pistols rush, that’s gone and gone forever. And just to repeat, that’s actually a good thing.

    • You are right of course, and I suppose I really do understand that it isn’t going to happen due to the way pop music reaches us now (or doesn’t, more to the point). But I think it is the beginning of a slow death. Pop music has to be more than ‘good’. It has to be ‘breathtaking’. And I just wish that my step-daughter’s generation could feel the same excitement from the generational shift which the best pop music produced- be it Elvis, Stones, Pistols or Smiths.

  15. You’re just old.

    Everything feels more vital and urgent when you’re young – the first cut is the deepest (as someone sang back when they used to make REAL music with proper signing and that).

    When I was in my early 20s I knew someone who was obsessed with the band Embrace. Followed them on tour, knew all the lyrics, counted their successes as her own. They really mattered to her, but it wasn’t because Embrace were a great band – in fact, they were shite – it was because she was 17 and she’d picked them and that’s how it works.

    Young people have just as much stuff that matters to them as they ever did. Some, but not all, of it is still music. In very few cases, bar the odd Afterworder forcing the case with an offspring, is it the Beatles or the Stones, or anything that sounds like the Beatles or the Stones. And that’s just as it should be. There is tons of great new music being produced, despite the examples tigger posts ; )

    We seem to be having these threads on a weekly basis now. Pencil is spot on – just enjoy what you enjoy instead of trying to empirically demonstrate that your own youth was somehow special and singular. As a great man once said; every man thinks he has the prettiest wife at home.

    • There is an element of this but it’s more complicated. We’re talking about the end of the shared experience, the disappearance of the generation gap, the inability of extremes of noise/weirdness to shock since we’ve all heard weirder before, that is those of us who have listened to a lot of records. Everything’s changed. But yes there’ll be teens who feel their band/act is the most important thing never. Meanwhile great records are made of course. It is not as simple as being old and thinking your own era was best.

      • The end of the shared experience, I get. But the “nothing shocks me” thing is about the recipient, not the material. If you say “nothing can shock me, I’m unshockable” and then steel yourself, then of course no material will so much as put a dent in you. Your attitude has you armour plated.

        I think it’s still possible for new music and sounds to have a huge impact on you, if you allow yourself to be open to it. Last year I played Dream House by Deafheaven every day for a month, because it was the most beautiful, powerful piece of music I’d heard in ages. I posted it on here and got a collective “WTF is that shit?” from the Massive, bar a handful of individuals. Isn’t that the reaction we’re talking about here, or does it have to be mainstream pop?

        This week I’ve had to stop myself listening to Carrie & Lowell because I realised it was actually really upsetting me. I’m 36 years old. Maybe I’m not jaded enough yet, but I suspect there are others on here, older than me, who are still able to be excited and moved by new music. To the extent that some people aren’t, it’s possibly because of pre-existing prejudices which filter and reduce the whole experience, such as the limits of pop having been fully explored by the 70s, no?

  16. Interesting thread. I agree there is a lot more other stuff for young people to ‘get into’ – they’ll never know boredom (b’dum b’dum) like the generation that gave us The Pistols, Buzzcocks, Joy Division
    As DFB points out, the generation gap for music is narrower because people like me still go to gigs by new bands and buy new records – if the next Sex Pistols came along the ‘yoof’ would be jockeying for space with middle aged 6 music listeners in the crowd- and immediately deflate the excitement by tutting that they’d seen it all before.

    There’s also no scope for mystery and intrigue – such an important part of what made bands special – you had to find whatever scraps of information you could – and also you had the narrow lens of the music press to experience and find out about bands – I think that’s an important distinction. Mozzer wanted to be aloof and frosty. Nowadays bands and artists want to be your friend on Facebook or Twitter.

    – there’s also sooo much more music around I can’t believe any young person invests much time in music when they can so easily listen to anything, from any time, immediately.

    So no, the conditions aren’t there for bands to ‘matter’ like they did in the 60s, 70s and 80s and I don’t think a new Bowie or Sex Pistols will be along any time soon but there’s still loads of great music and there are still kids who get obsessed with bands and write their names on their pencil cases – there are just less of them – the rest of them are watching YouTube videos of people playing Minecraft (I still don’t have a fucking clue what that is)

  18. My 18 year old nephew is just as passionate about the Courteeners as I was at his age about Costello, his 26 year old brother was just as barmy about the Arctic Monkeys.

    Mind you, I still listen to Costello, hold that thought for 35 years and let’s see what they are listening to then…

  19. Thanks to Tigger’s tireless praise of To Pimp as Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar was on my radio when I went to Roskilde this summer. When I went shopping in town, I asked the (cute, young, blonde) young shop assistants who they wanted to see at the festival and he was definitely top of the list.

    I’ll confess I only saw a couple of songs from his set. (On my way to see German boy band Einsturzande Neubaten). But the atmosphere in the very large crowd was amazing.

    When I got back I told my 12 year old son about KL and he’s now an enormous fan. Despite the fact that generally he’s not very interested in music.

    Tigs is right. There are artists out there who are mega. And there is still a sense of community. And most mums and dads will not be dashing out to buy To Pimp…

  20. David Hepworth once noted that, when it comes to music nowadays ‘it’s never been easier to play the game, but it’s never been more difficult to win’. And I’m with him on this. For pop music to be truly ground-breaking there has to be some sort of widespread bafflement and fear surrounding it. Now, thanks largely to the internet, the cultural conditions for this kind of environment has gone. Bbands or artists like Embrace, Pimp or Donnie Trombone can have millions of likes on Facebook, can pack them in at festivals and can even get to number one in what counts as the charts these days but they will only operate within the comparatively narrow confines of ‘music’. My mum won’t be dashing out to buy Pimp, no. But that’s because she has never heard of him/her/them and, more significantly, doesn’t care. She cared about the Sex Pistols because she was a bit worried about them and their influence. And Morrissey can still piss my mum-in-law off when he talks about suicide or the Queen. But he is just about the only ‘pop star’ left who can annoy across what was once known as the ‘generation gap’. Newspapers still quote him and he is good copy. He is the last truly controversial and confrontational pop star because the older generation care enough about him to hate him.

    There is still good music being made by young and old alike. That is not really the point. Pop is dead as a vibrant, meaningful force because it is omnipresent. It isn’t Pop’s fault. But it isn’t rare anymore. You don’t have to make an effort to find it. And there is no shared platform where bands or artists can be seen by your mum, dad or grandparents and therefore shock or annoy them. Pop needs this. It’s the spur by which it progresses and defines a generation. In the 60s and 70s it was the TV. Presenters (usually elderly) were genuinely puzzled by this ‘Pop’ thing be it Ed Sullivan with the Beatles or Bill Grundy later with the Pistols. Now The Late Show parades bands like sandwiches. These days the medium for music is the internet and it’s a largely solitary pursuit. We can ‘share’ or ‘like’ but it can’t annoy your mum because she’s watching Coronation Street. It has finally happened I’m afraid. Pop has been neutered. It has eaten itself. Great music is still being made. But Pop was never really about just the music.

    • Excellent post, Edmond, but I can’t agree that Morrissey “is the last truly controversial and confrontational pop star”. He’s no more confrontational than many others of his generation, like silly old Johnny Rotten or the oft entertaining George Michael or bonkers treasure Sinead. Or indeed many young pop stars like Miley Whatshername or Beebs.

    • Lovely post, Eddie, but I think it just means that you don’t really have any idea what’s going on in pop music in 2015, because you – sorry – ARE the older generation. My dad doesn’t have a clue who Morrissey is, or Johnny Rotten, because they were never on his radar, and that seems to be you now. Nothing wrong with that – to each his own. But believe me, Kanye West is more than ably filling the “oh, who IS that little twat and how DARE he?” niche so beloved of parents down the generations. So did Gaga in her pomp, although she’s gone a bit quiet of late. Miley’s doing it nicely, too. Even Taylor Swift is doing her bit as well – deeply upsetting the parents who thought she was a safe little mini-Shania by producing an electronic pop record and getting one of those RAPPERS they have now to do his RAP-SINGING on one of her singles.

      I think it’s true that rock music has lost all its power to galvanise the disapproval of the old folk, because the old folk all think (if they even have an opinion) that guitars are proper music. Guitars are safe. We understand guitars. That’s why the kids aren’t using them.

      The idea that Morrissey was the last controversial, alienating force in pop is an interesting one but doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. Since Morrissey last truly fitted that description (late 80s), they’ve done the moral panic thing about rave – HUGELY about rave. They’ve done it about grunge (“his hair’s pink and I think he’s on drugs, I think we’d better have a talk” – © my dad circa 1992). They’ve done it about metal – remember Judas Priest being sued in 1990 for supposedly making some kid kill himself? They’ve done it about hip hop almost endlessly since “Straight Outta Compton” – there hasn’t been a pause in the 30 years of outrage caused by black people daring to make music that isn’t soul, some of it on this very site (“it’s just someone shouting over somebody else’s records” being a memorable Afterword comment in the not-distant past).

      Remember the furore from the wholemeal brigade when Jay-Z was announced for Glastonbury? Remember the same furore repeating itself both before and after Kanye at Glastonbury, and the glee, so poorly hidden, that a “not-proper-Glasto” merchant had been a bit pony? VINDICATED!

      And look at North America right now – EDM (or dance music, as the rest of us have been calling it for 40 years) has taken huge hold over there, and you’re seeing the same panic about that among parents as you did about rave in the 90s over here. DRUGS! ILLICIT SEX! SAVE MY BABIES FROM SKRILLEX AND HIS FUNNY HAIRCUT!

      If your thesis was that, for the time being at least, guitar bands have lost their power to upset the olds, then I’d agree with you. But you’re not, so I don’t. 😉

  21. You make some great points there Eddie. Particularly agree about there not being a shared platform. All media consumption has become very fragmentised. Other than something like a big sports event, there are now very things onTV that a large number of people will have seen.

    You are right too about pop being a lot more than music. Fashion, social attitudes, the graphic arts are all part of the package.

    What I’m not certain about is whether music is unable to at least be a part of defining a generation because the older generation don’t know about it and the media are not all over it. I suspect it’s still there in the mix somewhere.

    When the Swedish House Mafia called it a day, they did three enormous farewell concerts and it felt that everyone in their early twenties was there. Not the Pistols or the Beatles perhaps, but a defining moment for that generation nevertheless.

  22. Thanks both. Yes, I am aware that I may well BE the older generation now and have become like the archetypal High Court judge in that I need to be told who certain bands are etc. I may also be wrong to overlook George Michael, Sinead and Kanye as musicians who can still court outrage. Perhaps I cling on to Morrissey because I believe he shares my ridiculously Nik Con-like Romanticism and Purism when it comes to the Pop Culture ethic and I may be applying it too rigidly.

    But I suppose the main point is not about growing older and being more ignorant or disinterested about certain bands or genres, it’s about the structure of pop music these days and the way it is consumed. I still cling to the belief that for Pop music to be a truly vibrant and revolutionary cultural force there simply has to be a generational shift on a major scale (not the ripple in a pond stuff that accompanied Jay Z or Kanye at Glasto)- I’m thinking more of Elvis or the Stones on Ed Sullivan virtually shocking the whole of America, not just music fans. I’m thinking about the disbelief and confusion surrounding Beatlemania, the Hippes and the Punks. Today’s revolutionary stars are probably just as confrontational and just as ‘relevant’ but the shared platform whereby they can be truly ‘defining’ to a generation other than their own has been neutered by the very format and medium by which pop music is now ‘consumed’. Also, what’s left of the record industry and the media now understand how to package ‘outrage’. That’s why it has become almost impossible to ‘win’.

    • That idea of a whole nation experiencing something together has gone though, hasn’t it? Elvis on Ed Sullivan had such a massive cultural impact because, shallow though it may sound, there wasn’t anything else on and a far larger percentage of the viewing public were watching than they would now. Even Bill Grundy and the Pistols were back in the days of three channels and no telly in the morning. Compare that to the multiplicity of entertainment options out there now. It’s not just music, it’s pretty much all forms of media – can you think of a television moment in the last decade or so that had the impact of “who shot JR?”, to pick one example off the top of my head. If you only read this site you would probably think Breaking Bad and The Wire are the Bible and Shakespeare rolled into one, but I bet my dad’s never heard of either of them.

        • It’s just the way the world is these days. You might as well moan about how there’s loads of new bikes around now and no one has a penny farthing anymore. The only things I can think of that everybody pays attention to are the major, major, news events like 9/11 or Diana dying.

          (this being Bristol, there is undoubtedly some hipster with a shovel beard and an anchor tattoo riding a penny farthing to the nearest craft beer establishment as I type)

      • Re Grundy and The Sex Pistols. Who actually saw it as it was being broadcast? I certainly didn’t and I haven’t met anyone else who did. I was definitely pissed off queuing for their gig in Wigan, only to be told it was cancelled. The Sex Pistols were media hype writ large. Opinions were formed on the basis of impressions and prejudice, rather than hard facts.

        A bit like the furore over Rhiannon, Swift, Minaj, Cyrus videos. My mum has an opinion on them and she has never seen one.

        • Agree, Tigger. The people who think Grundy and the Sex Pistols was somehow more of a “thing” than the Jay-Z Glasto furore are all old punks. My dad – b. 1939 – might possibly have heard the name Sex Pistols but certainly never saw that supposedly revolutionary happening, nor was aware of it. It changed nothing, punk changed nothing, unless you were a punk. There was no wider social impact.

          Kids will be talking about their versions of that moment for just as long as the handful of punks still talk about Grundy. I think people overestimate the cultural importance of their own youth.

          • I think that’s only true to an extent, DB. Acceptable moral values were undeniably influenced by the punk movement in the UK. Attitudes to swearing, racism, class, the establishment, gay people etc. etc. were changed by the new role models. Of course many other factors were involved and it is wrong to overstate the importance of punk, but as someone who witnessed The Pistols on Grundy’s show live I find that moment/period a very handy dividing line between two different Englands. I can’t imagine how Jay-Z could possibly have that same level of cultural resonance.

        • Me Sir! I was corrupted by the filth and the fury and have never looked back. And I’ve got the first pressing of Never Mind The Bollocks and a hundred classic punk singles and every thing has been shite since oh about 1980.

  23. I don’t know why people expect pop music to go on being an exciting creative force, of all the arts. We accept that classical music, jazz music, and reggae music, and other genres have their golden periods that are generally not expected to be surpassed.

    It’s all very well for the trendy old farts amongst you to affect an understanding of, and liking for, contemporary pop, and to make lofty claims for it being just as exciting, radical, creative, whatever, as it was back in its heyday, the sixties (which lasted from roughly ’65 to ’75, culturally speaking), but that ignores the overall tendency of any art form to reach an apogee within its own terms. We don’t make claims that Impressionist Painting is as interesting or lively these days as it was back then. But ageing music fans do adopt the laughable pose of a Paul Morley or Annie Nightingale, taking their bemused kids to festivals and sharing spotify lists and marvelling at pop music’s continuing ability to re-invent itself and remain a vital creative force.

    It’s not getting old that has to be “got over”, it’s the fact that pop music, for all its qualities, peaked (in whatever sense you understand the term) some time ago.

    • I don’t think anyone is making a case for ‘pop’ being at a peak now. Although, those young ladies in their YouTube vids look and sound appealing for a lot of people close to their own age and younger.

      We are living in an era of Rap/Hip-Hop.

      I was thinking about Bob Marley. He transcended his genre and sold all over the world. He did it without a moment of shock & awe, building his fan base slowly over years and incorporating ‘rock’ elements into his reggae to broaden its appeal. Anyone see him at the Lyceum in 1975? My mum liked him.

      • Bollocks, Burt, it is out there, but there is so much, unconstrained by time or genre, that it just needs hunting, which in itself becomes an unfortunate obsession. I spend most of my cardriving to an from work, an hour or 2 a day, listening to new, some of which is, some of which is just new to me. So new to me can be jazz fom the 50s, country from the 40s, or folk/blues/rock/world anytime from then till now. And I can be enthused still. And I can reject other stuff. I suspect my taste is more retro, SWIDT, than cutting edge, but I look forward to new new too. Current faves are the Alabama Shakes, enlivened by their Glasto-show (on the telly) and Dream Syndicate, whom I had never knowingly heard until yesterday. The former are new old-style and the latter old old-style but both full of life to my ears.

  24. To Bingo – regarding shocking and extreme I mean when you’ve heard atonal noise and screaming, i.e. as far out as music can get, even if you didn-t like it, something new isn’t going to startle you much, however odd it may be. Newer music reverts to going further and further with swearing, language and sexual provocation to cause upset and get attention. That’s the frontier. Hip hop gets some of us oldies riled but it’s been around a long time now, as has electronic dance music.

  26. “We accept that classical music, jazz music, and reggae music, and other genres have their golden periods that are generally not expected to be surpassed.”

    Aha, the old “we all know that…” move. Except we don’t. Classical music is nearly 1000 years old, and shows no sign of having peaked.

    “…pop music, for all its qualities, peaked (in whatever sense you understand the term) some time ago.”

    I’m not sure I understand the term at all. The main people who are determined for that peak to be true always seem to be the people whose music it was. The interminable Beatles/Beach Boys/whatever as long as it was more than 40-years-ago mythologising that goes on here conveniently ignores the fact that nobody outside of here and Mojo magazine gives a toss. The “revolution” that Eddie talks about, and the peak that you talk about, are accepted as axiomatic only by people of approximately your generation. The sixties don’t matter any more.

    What possibly did peak in the sixties is a mass hysteria that more or less outgrows its original object. You can’t have that today, because, as Eddie says, everything’s a bit more fragmented. But why should that be a bad thing? Why was the sixties thing so exemplary, apart from the fact that those who experienced it are in charge of everything now and keep telling us it was?

    I sometimes think that the boomer/Xer tendency to insist on their popular music’s objective importance might be born of embarrassment that they all got so swept up in it. It wasn’t just a teen craze! It was an artistic peak! It was a revolution!

    • Classical music shows no sign of having peaked? A “thousand years” you say, Bob, but the 150-year period between the late seventeenth century and early twentieth – from Mozart to Mahler, very roughly – still accounts for 97% of today’s concert repertoire and classical record sales, scientists have found. * Why should musical genres behave any differently from any other movements, schools or vogues in any other art forms? “The 1950s were the heyday of abstract expressionism” is not a controversial statement to make; it’s widely accepted as a given. And if by “rock and pop and roll and soul” we mean mostly 4/4, mostly mid-tempo tunes, mostly performed on guitars, electric bass, drums and keyboards, then I think HP’s window of wonderfulness is about right (although I might advocate extending his 1975 cut-off by a couple of years, if only to be able to include Billy Ocean’s “Red Light Spells Danger”, which is obviously the greatest British single of all time).

      Nobody’s saying there are no good records any more. Of course we can find bright stars dotting a generally dark sky. But if we compare like with like, “Uptown Funk” is not the equal of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”, Bob. It just isn’t. (It’s not even funky, for starters.)
      ____
      *Yes, of course I made up the stat, but you know it’s probably true.

      • Well, I suppose if we equate peaking with money generated, then maybe. But Ogheckam was 300 years before JS Bach who was 300 years before Judith Weir and Arvo Part. All still widely performed, all sell recordings of their music and fill concert halls. Maybe not the concert hall equivalent of stadiums, but they do fill them.

        I think you’d really struggle to argue that Western art music has had a golden period, or that it’s now past its peak unless you’re just talking in nakedly populist terms, and that’s a really sticky wicket.

        I would never claim that Uptown Funk is better than Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, but the implication is that it *couldn’t* be: that PGABNB is unbeatable by virtue of when it was released. I think that’s nonsense.

        • I don’t think that’s what HP was saying. Or me. In pure pop terms, I’d argue – and think I once did on the previous version of these very pages – that “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance” are the equal of the early-’60’s Phil Spector productions. But go back to the bright-stars-dotting-the-dark-sky bit of what I wrote. All we’re saying is that the dazzling galactic cluster is to be found between the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s.

          • And that’s not all! Look at the history of pop since 1975-ish. It’s all been about revivals. The mod revival, the ska revival, NWBHM, the soul revival, the current funk and prog and Americana revivals … all hark back to music that was originally made during the period HP has defined – a period during which, as far as I recall, there was no “bebop revival” or “big-band revival” among the young people who were making music then. There was no need to go retro because what they were doing had never been done before. Now it has. Unless you recycle, the well is dry.

            • And those other post 75 revivals…the grime revival, the gangsta rap revival, the Detroit techno revival, the New Romantic revival, the roots reggae revival, the rave revival, the ragga revival (contd p.94).

              Music is as fertile and productive as she ever was.

          • But, Arch, don’t you think it’s a leetle bit telling that almost everyone who pushes that “galactic cluster” view is, ahem, of a pretty specific vintage?

            • They’re not. They – we – are more familiar with the music because we caught it the first time around. This means we can compare the then-new records with the now-new records, and the latter usually come up wanting. We’ve pretty much heard it all before. That wasn’t the experience then.

              Why do the Mumfords and their ilk sound so much like like CSN? Because CSN sure as hell didn’t sound like the Inkspots, which is what the equivalent retro-ref (ilkspots?) would have been.

        • “Ogheckam was 300 years before JS Bach who was 300 years before Judith Weir and Arvo Part”

          Hey! Nice to see there’s another Johannes Ockeghem fan on this board. Top stuff.

          And of course Hildegard von Bingen was another 300 years before Ockeghem himself, and her music is still being performed to this day.

          • You can take the boy out of the cathedral choir, @duco01, but you can’t take the… Hang on. That sounds a bit Yewtree. Let me rephrase.

            I used to be a cathedral chorister and I really love early and renaissance music.

      • And classical I am only just getting, hoovering up stuff way past the alleged peak of the genre, if we are to accept that traditionalism, Arvo Part, Gorecki, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, in no small part due to this site, btw.

    • Bob, your examples above of how pop is still outrageous to me show instead how conservative it has become. Taylor Swift uses rap – how innovative is that when it was already part of the mainstream when she was born in 1989? America is now listening to dance music, which as you point out is forty years old. I don’t really object to the idea of styles peaking, partly because I started listening to jazz in the late 70s at college, and I’ve always thought that the real period of innovation was over before I discovered it. Everything comes and goes

      And I notice that on the recent poetry thread, there’s only one poem, I think, which was written in the past thirty years – I don’t notice the “olds” being berated over this.

        • “But none of them really ‘matter’ any more.” Kinda depends how we’re interpreting “matter”. In terms of cultural relevance, or musical influence, or artistic quality? I think only in the latter sense can what Mr.g is saying be seen as untrue. (There’s too wide a spectrum now for individual artists to have the same degree of cultural relevance as in the past and their influence on the direction of music will obviously become rarer as time goes on.)

          • Comment pushed gently in the direction of Mr Bob. I didn’t say modern music was rubbish. I happily concede that there are good records and artists out there.

            This is really about fragmentation being a neutralizing factor when it comes to the power of pop to shock and my theory that this power is essential to the health of the medium.

            • Yeah, I suppose what I’m saying is that I don’t agree with the last part. The medium may not be perceived as driving cultural change etc., but I’d argue that a) it never did, or not as much as people with a generational vested interest would like to think, and b) the “health of the medium” can only be measured in the question “Is there still lots of good pop music, both original and derivative, being made in 2015?”

              To which the answer’s yes. I don’t know how else you can measure its health, unless you want to assign “revolutionary” cultural powers to pop music that I’d argue it probably never had anyway.

  27. Golden ages – they’re just times when new unexplored territory is discovered and exploited. An embarrassment of riches follows for a limited time until most of the possibilities are explored. Then it all dies down a bit. Inevitable and natural. More peaks follow but they don’t compare to that original big bang. Those with the ability and vision to exploit the possibilities who are lucky enough to be around at the right time make hay.

    The supposed golden age of pop was coming to an end when I got into music in my late teens in the late seventies. It was not my era so it is not nostagia or a sense that the bands of my formative years were superior. My era was full of great records too but it did not compare to the earlier explosion of brilliance that was simply the creative people in the right place at the right time making the most of the possibilities that a new art form gave rise to.

    • Look at this list, folks:

      Fire – Arthur Brown
      Mony Mony – Tommy James & The Shondells
      This Guy’s in Love With You – Herb Alpert
      I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten – Dusty Springfield
      Mrs. Robinson – Simon & Garfunkel
      Dance to the Music – Sly & The Family Stone
      Do It Again – The Beach Boys
      I’ve Got to Get a Message to You – The Bee Gees
      Macarthur Park – Richard Harris
      Baby Come Back – The Equals
      I Say a Little Prayer – Aretha Franklin
      On the Road Again – Canned Heat

      “Yeah, a dozen hit records from the late ’60s hits. So?” I hear people say. The “so” is that they were all in the top 30 at the same time, exactly 47 years ago today. (I chose 1968 just to make a change from nineteen seventy-bloody-one.)

      I mean, come on, Bob. This isn’t about old timers getting all all-fields on yo’ ass. Isn’t it plain as day that more much-loved, lasting, hummable pop music was made back then we’ve seen in any period since?

      • Well, at a pinch I reckon there are two and a half decent records in that list, and more than a few absolute stinkers, which just goes to show once again that there is little point in trying to talk objectively about something as emotionally subjective as music.

        The really interesting thing, though, is your, and the other galactic-clusterers here, idea that this supposed Golden Age is some kind of indisputable fact that can’t be argued with. I mean, I don’t suppose you could name the Belleville Three off the top of your head but I’m really not that bothered about it. I genuinely don’t get this obstinate insistence that my songs are better than yours, nyah nyah nyah.

      • There are some good records in there, of course there are. Nobody’s denying it was easier for talent to be heard in 1968 than it is now. But I don’t think it’s possible to say that there isn’t the equivalent quality now – there may well be but just not concentrated as densely in the charts.

        If you’re arguing that the odds of a great record reaching a huge audience were much better in the sixties, sure, I agree. But the thread is about music “mattering” – does that just mean “selling in large numbers”, then?

        • Of course I know who the Belleville Three are. Their conviction was a travesty of justice. (Actually I do. I’ve seen both Derrick May and Juan Atkins DJ-ing live. Atkins was train-wreck rotten – a legend, literally, only in his own bedroom).

          But I thought we’d established that EDM (spit) and hiphop are out of this discussion. We’re talking about guitar-based pops and rawk.

          • Fair enough on the Belleville Three. Bet you couldn’t name all of Goldie Lookin’ Chain though 🙂

            I missed the part about electronica and hip hop being out of bounds (which does strike me as gaming the discussion a bit, but never mind), but even in the field of men playing real instruments that have strings, I’d point you at metal. Important work done pre-1975, sure, but as a field completely revolutionised in the early 80s with the advent of thrash and the emergence of Metallica.

            • It’s only gaming the discussion because they are two examples of popular music that is mostly made by and for young people that didn’t rely on what had gone before. I know next to nothing about hiphop. Quite a bit about techno and house, because when I discovered it (late, in the late ’90s), I was thrilled by it because it was unfamiliar. I hadn’t been able to say the same about any guitar-based rock music for decades, which is why Britpop, most indie, nu-folk, alt.country and neo-Americana has largely left me cold.

              Point taken about thrash and Metallica. But wasn’t that a fairly logical extension of applying a speed-fuelled punk ethos to what had been laid down by the Sabs and the Purps and the Priests? It seems to me that in comparison hiphop and electronica came out of nowhere.

              • well yes, but you might as well say the first Beatles records were a fairly logical extension of applying a speed-fuelled Hamburg ethos to what had been laid down by Chuck Berry et al. Everything comes from somewhere. Sometimes it gets better on the way, sometimes it gets worse.

      • Play half of those records to someone under 40 and see what response you get.

        The Wu Tang Clan released 36 Chambers, Liquid Swords, Tical and Cuban Linx in the space of under two years. To me, that craps all over the list above.

        Will I spend the next 30 years bending the ear of the next generation about how they missed the absolute golden age of hip hop? Course not, because (a) if the music is actually any good it will abide, and speak for itself, and (b) they would (quite rightly) laugh at me.

        The knee jerk need to constantly defend and promote the 60s/70s as a high point of music and cinema (what a coincidence!) speaks to a deep-rooted cultural insecurity. As does the belief that pop music today should mean anything to people over 40, and perhaps even 30, or be measurable using a scale that denotes appearing on the Ed Sullivan show as a high.

        • Half baked theory alert! Is this insecurity because this is the generation that was born and grew up immediately post-War? With something that huge looming in the past and at every childhood dinner table conversation or bombsite walked past on the way to school, it’s no wonder they are looking in their own experiences for something that can be deemed to be of absolute importance.

          • It’s an analogy, Archie.

            I like hip hop. I believe the Wu went on an unparalleled two to three year tear up that has never been bettered in that genre.

            Would I attempt to convince some young Thundercats that they too should share this view, or that it’s somehow objectively correct and beyond question? No, because that would be – again, in the words of a wise man – patronising bullshit.

            • Yes, sorry, that did sound substantially snippier than I intended. (Note to self: the word “bullshit” usually does.)

              Again, see my latest reply to Kid D, where I explain where I’m coming from. (To save you time, it certainly isn’t “hiphop is shit”. I don’t much care for it, for purely subjective reasons, but I don’t disparage it at all. It’s today’s poppers and rawkers I’ve got my sights on.

        • Now look here, you young ticks…I absolutely don’t care whether you think I think the 60s/70s (and let’s not forget the 50s) were a high-water mark in the history of pop music, because I absolutely don’t care if they were or not. Were they a high-water mark in the history of mikethep? Of course they bloody were, and I count myself lucky to have been alive to enjoy them. But I’m not going to try and argue the case for that, because you’d quite rightly laugh me back on to my bombsite to play with my Dinky Talbot-Lago.

          As for ‘looking in their own experiences for something that can be deemed to be of absolute importance’, doesn’t everybody do that?

          • I’m not sure they do, to be honest. I look for things in my own experience that mean a lot to me, of course I do, but I have no interest in forcing that onto others. There is an attitude that pervades the media and cultural commentary in this country that the sixties were some kind of Arcadia, and the rest of us should consider ourselves lucky to be breathing the same air as those who were around then. Maybe it’s a cyclical thing, and as that generation retires and shuffles offstage, the following decades will go through the same. But I doubt it.

            • You all can feel free to ignore this. I am just working through deep seated issues that arose from long journeys with my parents as a small child, being forced to listen to Sounds Of The Sixties on the car radio. What torture it was to be alive in those days, and to be young was very hell.

  28. People in 1964 couldn’t avoid the Beatles or The Stones, even if they’d wanted to.

    Fast forward to 1980 and, with only three TV channels, TOTP and the charts still viable concerns, a healthy weekly music press, and a far greater percentage of households reading daily newspapers, it was impossible to avoid John Lennon’s death unless you spent the six months between December 1980 to June 1981 down a pot-hole.

    2009, and mainly because I loathed him, I effortlessly missed everything surrounding Michael Jackson’s death. That’s EVERYTHING. Don’t buy a daily paper, no TOTP, a chart that needs 20,000 sales for a No. 1, and the NME et al a joke.

    The explosion of the Internet and social media works two ways.
    Yes, there’s more out there but (mercifully, I’d suggest) it can be almost completely avoided, even Jackson.

    The various media commentators rarely get that apparent contradiction.
    In fact, I’ve never heard one of them get it.

    • Nonsense. I had no idea Lennon had died until around 1988, when it came up in a primary school assembly I was attending. I didn’t even have to try to avoid the news, either.

    • My dad was 21 in 1960. He effortlessly avoided The Beatles for the entire decade and beyond. Stones too. Hendrix, the lot. He’s a classically-trained baritone: wasn’t into pop music, still isn’t. He couldn’t tell you now which Beatles are alive and dead, because he probably couldn’t name all four Beatles.

      The idea that, regardless of your cultural affiliations, this objectively superior pop tsunami changed everyone’s life is nonsense.

    • My Michael Jackson story. The night the news broke I was watching The Fleetfoxes in Wolverhampton with El Toro occasionally of this parish. It was the first time we had met. During their encore one of the Fleetfoxes muttered something about Michael Jackson but couldn’t really hear what he was saying. Driving home the news was coming over the radio that there were unconfirmed reports of his death. It was approaching midnight when it was finally confirmed. I woke my wife to tell her the news – she was not at all happy that I had disturbed her sleep.

  29. Yeah, very good, BL!

    My point is that now the kind of person who knows they would loathe Lady Gaga or Kayne West (e.g. ‘me’) can completely avoid them. And I have, completely.
    In the 1980s, Madonna was easy to loathe but not easy to avoid; in 2015 I do both, easily. She doesn’t exist.

    I wouldn’t have fancied anyone’s chances of avoiding Beatlemania in Britain in ’63.

    Also factor in that now a Grateful Head fan could, if he or she (OK, he!) wanted to, purchase an 80 CD box set!!!!!!!

    Where on earth would you get the time to listen to anything else, let alone anything new, if you’ve just bought 80 CDs in one hit?!

  30. Disappointment Bob,

    He might not have actively followed their career but if he read a daily paper or watched a TV , he absolutely would have encountered The Beatles.
    Intricate knowledge, maybe not, but he would have encountered them.
    I know nothing about Kayne West and I am interested in popular culture.

    Also, if he walked down any high street in 1969 he surely would have noticed the difference in dress and style compared to what it had been in 1960…..it was The Beatles wot did that, not a symphony orchestra.

  31. I agree that the oft referenced (by the cognoscenti, media, writers, those who take an interest in such things) once a generation big pop moments like the summer of love, punk, acid house/rave, britpop passed most people by relatively unaffected bar maybe a comment about strange hairstyles, or clothes. The so-called revolutions involved a small, often London-based minority of in-people. Perhaps the 90s was when the largest number got a taste of it, drugs and lifestyle-wise, but in a largely hedonistic sense.

    To have had a golden age doesn’t require a mass audience awareness and understanding. It’s just about the peak of an art form, like a movement in painting, as has been mentioned, which is far less known about in the case of abstract expressionism, for example, but nonetheless real, being documented and written about, by those who take an interest, have studied the ‘art form’, have taken the trouble to listen to a lot of records. Unless, it’s all subjective, end of. Of course the thing about it is it’s popular and it thrives on a certain provocation of society, albeit limited. Take away that awareness and it does lose something, but that’s about it’s vitality in the present time not about a judgement of records made over the years.

  32. Bob, kid and bingo – to make a facile point – could it not be indicative of your own ‘deep-seated cultural insecurity’ that you are so resistant to the idea that pop and rock’s ‘golden age’ was over before you’d even been born?
    I wholly agree that there are ‘golden ages’ for certain ‘arts’ movements. For example, there would be no argument that there were time-specific ‘golden ages’ for bebop, Beat poetry, big band jazz.
    IMHO (which brooks no contradiction), the ‘golden age’ for rock and roll was from ’55 to ’59, encompassing Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy etc. The ‘golden age’ for pop and soul was in the ’60s; for rock, the ’70s; for Krautrock, punk, prog and ‘heavy’ rock, also the ’70s.
    Personally, I’ve been very disappointed by the music of the past quarter century, probably intensified by my dislike of rap and hip hop. I’d like to think I’m open to hearing new things, but I’ve found very little that’s enthused me.
    It’s slightly difficult to explain, but the roots of my overall disillusionment stem from my early experiences following the Beatles. Their constant striving for improvement and their restless experimentation made me believe that this was the norm and that the advances that were obvious in the pop field between ’60 and ’65 would continue into the future. I was wrong.

    • Quite possibly so.

      The difference being that I don’t need to reflexively go on and on about the 60s and 70s, or suggest that my world-view is somehow “objectively” correct. I’m quite happy for people to believe that their youth was a cultural high point, just as I believe the same.

      What makes me scratch my head is when someone on here posts an OP in which they casually use the word “little” in the proximity of “the Beatles” and are immediately corrected by half a dozen scandalized people, or the reaction whenever it’s suggested that the Beatles’ music might one day fade entirely from relevance. There is, quite simply, no band I care enough about to get wound up by that sort of stuff. Maybe that’s because the 90s were a howling cultural wasteland, or maybe there’s something else going on here.

      • Bingo, old chap, aren’t you ‘reflexively’ banging on about the ’90s or , to use a shorthand, that ‘howling cultural wasteland’ as being of equal cultural import?
        Personally, though the Fabs are tattooed on my heart, it’s of zero concern to me whether they resonate with anyone else. What I would point out though is that the major acts from the ’60s draw a fairly wide demographic to their gigs. It’s not just old farts, nor are the young people there being dragooned into attending.
        When one considers the major acts in ‘popular’ music from the ’50s onwards in terms of significance/popularity/sales/iconicity whatever, the vast majority of these are from the ’50s to the early ’80s. That would suggest to me a movement that ran out of steam. A major caveat being that the music industry also expanded hugely over that period, so there have been some mega-selling artists over the past decades.
        Complicating this discussion though is, at the bottom of it all, a desire to have one’s youth back.

        • My references to the 90s are either in jest, or by way of saying that – to me – they represented a cultural zenith. Because I was 11-21 during that period.

          I make no objective claim that anyone else should feel likewise, I don’t get hurt if someone says the 90s were crap, etc. The period isn’t a core part of my identity to the point where I need to defend it. I’m not saying that you, personally, take this approach re: the 60s (it’s my strong impression that you’re probably less bothered than most on here what anyone else thinks, and more power to your elbow), but there is a trend of it across the blog.

          I’m not massively keen on cultural relativism as a rule, but I have no idea how one goes about forming an objective view of the place in the pantheon of the pop music of one’s own youth. It’s simply too clouded by personal experience.

          We can’t just boil it down to sales, can we? There are plenty of acts we all think are shit who shifted units/tickets. Besides which, I’m not doubting that the Beatles were and are popular with large numbers of people, particularly 30 years ago.

          I’m just doubting this Beatles exceptionalism. This notion that (a) their legacy is bulletproof, far beyond that of any other contemporary musicians and will maintain through all space and time; and (b) that legacy also needs to be defended at every turn. Those two propositions don’t quite mesh together, for me.

          I hate to say it, but if we’re looking for a pop artist who will probably be remembered beyond the Beatles, and who has far more of an influence on modern pop music, occupying a far higher peak in the perceptions of the youth, then you could just as easily make an argument for Michael Jackson. But you’d be laughed at on here if you behaved over Wacko the same way some do over the Fabs, wouldn’t you?

          • I see what you’re driving at and that’s the reason I mentioned the sadness implicit in the realisation that one’s youth can never be recaptured. The immediate ‘potency of cheap music’ is inevitably heightened by the emotions and events of the pre-teen and teenage years.
            I do believe in the cultural significance of The Fabs, though I accept there is an argument to be had as to whether they were driving these changes or not. I do recall, as a nine year old, showing my mother the cover of ‘With The Beatles’ and informing her that I wanted to grow my hair to that length. I was told, with unnecessary firmness I believe, that I would never, ever be allowed to have my hair as long as that.
            The ‘sales’ thing is shit, indeed. IIRC, the top-selling album of the Swinging Sixties was ‘The Sound of Music’.

  33. I simply can’t imagine what pop music would sound like today without the Beatles. I think it’s only because we’ve grown so used to the ‘sound’ of guitars and drums that we forget how revolutionary they truly were.

    But it’s only half about the music. I would argue that the invention of the ‘group’ as a self-enclosed ‘gang’- culturally and artistically- was just as crucial. No one had ‘looked’ or ‘sounded’ like them before and, even today, you can trace all band photos (whoever they are) to that basic tenet that the group is a ‘gang’.

    They weren’t really my generation. I was too late for them and only caught them ‘second-hand’ at the beginning of the 70s. But, despite nt being ‘mine’ generationally I am happy to recognize that if they do eventually ‘fade from relevance’ they will be the last pop group or artist to do so.

  35. Some good points on both sides of the argument, so far.

    Without wishing to be all ‘Hepworth’ about it, I’d like to make this obvious point: Beatles tribute acts can play sold-out annual tours in big theatres, some 50-odd years after the band’s heyday. There’s a reason for that.

    My time machine’s on the blink at the moment, otherwise I’d jump forward and let you know if there are Kanye West, One Direction or Radiohead tribute bands active in 2065.

    Or, indeed, further Beatles tribute acts.

    • Yep. The reason is old people with disposable income and no need to arrange a babysitter.

      Or maybe the gigs are packed full of all these “kids” wearing Beatles t-shirts who eddie mentions above, and who will boldly carry the legacy of the Fabs on into the 22nd century and beyond. I dunno.

      • What EMI have discovered, to their obvious delight, is that the grandkids of the original Beatles fans are buying the records now. Seriously, they do anticipate further cash flow into the future now they’ve got them on board. Not in mega quantities obviously, but still pretty healthy.
        FWIW, I think the baleful legacy of Heppo banging on about 1971 hangs over this thread.

        • I agree the Beatles to seem to attract new young listeners, but also other performers seem to have dropped off the radar for them. On the David Bowie thread, Ernie said that there doesn’t seem much interest in Bowie among the young, and I think that’s true as well. Maybe it’s a subject for another thread – why some once big stars cross over to new generations and others don’t. I don’t know how you’d find the evidence, but it does seem that let’s say punk and post-punk aren’t of any interest to anyone I know under 25 – which is admittedly a very small sample.

          • If I could hazard a guess: it’s because several Beatles songs work for kids.

            At my primary school, back in the 80s, our morning assembly included lusty singalongs to the likes of Hey Jude, Let it Be, All You Need is Love and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, while our very progressive headmistress strummed a guitar.

            Sadly, there were no singalongs to Suffragette City or Be My Wife.

            • Said this before, but I recall that, at the time of the remasters, the ST magazine had a (to me) fascinating article where a group of young children listened to Beatles tracks. Their responses were very intriguing and my memory of the piece was that the music had quite a profound impact on them.
              The fact that Macca is still touring constantly will, no doubt, help to keep their memory alive.
              As an aside, I read a snippet today that David Gilmour would love to have been one of the Fabs.
              And, yes, some tracks do lend themselves to singalongs.

  37. I think too much is claimed for The Beatles much as I love a lot of their stuff. If anything it’s their formation and early years that were most radical. The fact that they were lucky enough to get noticed by the right people – Brian Epstein and George Martin such that they had unheard of freedom to work the way that suited them. Later on though Dylan lead the way in terms of ambition and invention. They had to catch up and other bands were more daring in getting heavier and experimental. I recently watched a clip of Let’s Make Love Tonite In London, a documentary from 1967 showing Pink Floyd playing Interstellar Overdrive at a happening in 66. Now that was really out there and brilliant. The Beatles were one of many bands trying new ideas, influencing and being influenced. They were not unique in this. In fact they always had to be a bit cautious and conservative being hampered by not wanting to alienate their public too much with the more strange material.

    • I never felt that Dylan led any musical changes of directions, just did his take on existing forms. Did the folk thing and ditched it and went electric after hearing The Beatles ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, ducked out of the Psychedelic counter culture, went back to his roots and has basically hovered around them ever since. I think his greatest contribution was in the evolution of lyric writing.

      • Lyrically he obviously raised the game. Everyone made more of an effort in his wake. Like A Rolling Stone as a single is surely a signpost to getting serious and ambitious. It’s the beginnings of rock. Highway 61 Revisited was a big shift. A wake up call for many acts.

  38. I suspect I will get into rap by about 2020. Heck I only got jazz a decade or so ago. And soul a decade ahead.
    It’s about letting your ears keep processing the noises. Suddenly the insufferable tripe of disco will seem acceptable when played by Chic cos it’s the music not the style.
    Excuse my random cross purposes, I just get annoyed by music/art/literature/this blog is dead threads.

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