When 'should' you have been born, considering the music you love the most?

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Trigger warning: silly hypothetical thread. Alloooow it.

In roughly what year 'should' you have been born to make the most of the period/scene/genre of music you like the most?

Would you opt for 1950, so as to have been 17 in the original Summer of Love? Or skip two decades and be that age in the second SoL, right in time to catch the acid house/rave explosion and The Golden Age Of Rap - and then see Nirvana at the Reading Festival? Or split the difference and be a young 'un in the heady days of (post-)punk, disco, new wave and the peak of reggae influence in Britain, and witness the very birth of hip-hop - as well as seeing David Bowie performing his Berlin albums when they were hot off the press?

Or perhaps you're a 40-something grime and dubstep nut who'd give anything to have been 17 in 2004?

Or Salzburg in 1750? Or what?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was between 5 and 15 during the 90s, so I remember the decade rather idyllically, and the music all seemed so distant from me (I grew up in a village in Oxfordshire), and so romantic and significant. Rave music I was aware of existing via posters my elder sister had on her wall advertising helter skelter, etc. (though this was closer to the tail end of the decade, long past the real golden era).

From this rather narrow point of view, I think of the 90s as being a very positive and optimistic time, and I think if you listen to a lot of music from the 90s there IS a spirit of optimism to it that declined in the first decade of the noughties.

I'm sure for many it wasn't as great as all that, but if I could re-do life from the age of 17, I'd definitely opt for around 1985 (my birth year), ideally with a wiped memory, so that I could experience the excitement of hip hop, acid house, hardcore, jungle, garage etc... Hopefully I wouldn't end up into the Spin Doctors or something.

Oh and I wouldn't mind being rid of the internet for that decade either, on balance.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I know what you mean by the '90s being a very optimistic time. I don't really recall the internet having that much importance except perhaps at the very end of the decade, but I guess some of us were more plugged in, as adolescents, than others.

There's so much great music that's come and been and gone before I was born (or while I was a little kid) that I feel I want to say 1950ish, so as to be able to enjoy all the great stuff that came in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s...but then maybe I'm overestimating how easy it is/was to really engage properly with popular music scenes that have always been primarily youth subcultures if you're not exactly a 'youth' yourself.

I mean, the original rave scene is meant to have been very inclusive and welcoming, the complete opposite of snobby, elitist night-clubbing, but would big events in 1988 have been all that welcoming, really, to our hypothetical 38-year-old music fan? (That's not rhetorical, maybe they were - I really don't know). And probably much the same could be said of punk a decade earlier.

Edit: haha, I had a Spin Doctors CD once, presumably still have it lying around somewhere.
 
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trza

Well-known member
nothing can replace my memories of trashy childrens television of the eighties
 

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
NYC late 70s >>>>> massive blur >>>> mid nineties

I reckon if you came of age old enough to get an early pint in CBGB, leave for a party up Bronx River Houses before dancing away the rest of the weekend at the Loft, you would earn a solid foundation for what's ahead. Sure you would spend the next two decades recalling that you first heard such and such a tune in Mancuso's house or Bambaataa's yard but this was amusing more than irritating .... until.... all your friends suddenly started to drop dead ...this was a terrifying and confusing time but fortunately the guy you sold weed to, a doctor as it happens , recommended some unknown island off the coast of Spain where you could live cheap and escape the dangerous new trend of smoking cocaine.

From a distance it was easy breeze through the eighties, occasional trips home meant you could pass out on Arthur Russell's hallway, some Italian kid called Madonna was causing trouble while we smoked spliffs with Grace Jones in the booth. Her friend Larry played some of those Chicago records that reminded you of the DJs back in Ibiza. Their clubs were miles apart but somehow both reached the same crescent around 7am Sunday morning. The music England was good for a while but started to get too fast after a while. You eventually came to appreciate this new innovation but the seemingly endless rap coming out New York at the time suited my burnt out, lazy pace. I spend the next few years vegetating on the sofa. There I died, peacefully and content of natural causes before the planes hit the towers and the whole world turned turned to shit.
 
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