ChineseArithmetic
It is what it is
...or, why I don't listen to non-electronic music these days
As a teen back in the eighties, almost all the music I bought and listened to was current new releases. Some indie rock type things I heard on Peel or saw in NME, but mainly stuff like Virgin era Cabaret Voltaire, other industrial, ON-U Sound, Colourbox, New Order, hip-hop I heard on Mike Allen when I could find it, Public Enemy etc. When house, acid and Detroit techno appeared, they felt very much like my kind of thing as well.
I was interested in finding out about older music - old funk that I knew was sampled on hip-hop records, jazz that Richard Cook used to write about in NME, people like Hendrix and The Stones and random things that were cited as influences by current cats, like Mark E Smith talking about Can, Link Wray, Bo Diddley, The Seeds etc. But in those days, unless you had older relatives who had the records, there wasn't much info around. The likes of Mojo, Uncut etc didn't exist, the music papers only really covered new stuff. Although I read a music paper every week, listened to Peel, bought some other mags, I think I was barely even aware that things like Pet Sounds and Revolver even existed.
When I headed off to Uni in the big smoke, I met other studes who were into 60's and 70's rock and started to hear an get interested in 60's garage stuff like the 13th Floor Elevators, which in some ways seemed to have common elements with stuff I already liked. With the arrival of mags like Mojo, and the ever increasing amount of reissues of old stuff on cd, my tastes started to go quite retro as I started picking up 'classics' like Astral Weeks, Exile on Main Street, The Byrds, Neil Young, P-Funk, Trojan reggae etc. Although not new, it was new to me, and felt fresh and exciting.
But somewhere along the way, I guess due to the rise of britpop, it seemed that the music scene which had reliably delivered new and surprising sounds to me through my teens and early twenties - industrial, electro, PE, go-go, acid, US noise, techno, jungle - became completely swamped by a never ending retro trend which looked only to the past. Every new act dresses and sounds like something from the past. The same tedious 50/100 best albums is served up every few months, the same 50/100 as last time in a slightly different order. And the media is full of Nick Hornby wannabees banging on endlessly about the Beatles/Stones/Beach Boys/Jam/Clash.
And what this seems to have done for me is to taint all the music that is endlessly rehashed in the pages of Mojo and Uncut, or touted as an article of retro cool by the likes of John Harris- I could quite comfortably live the rest of my life without ever reading another article about Brian Wilson, Nick Drake, Mick and Keef et al, I'm just sick of hearing about all this back catalogue stuff, proferred by various fools as evidence of their 'good taste' and love of 'proper' music, always accompanied by a dismissal of techno and house music as not 'proper' - and anyway, dance music is dead, Alex Pretredis said so.
Hence all I seem to listen to these days is electronic music and the few bits of hip-hop that excite me. I want music that still has some ambition to be the future, rather than just recycle the past. Anyone else feeling this as acutely as me? I know it's not directly the fault of my Neil Young and Dylan albums that everythings shit now, they weren't to know. But they're sitting on my shelf unplayed, and I can't see me going back to them much anytime soon.
Sorry this is long....
As a teen back in the eighties, almost all the music I bought and listened to was current new releases. Some indie rock type things I heard on Peel or saw in NME, but mainly stuff like Virgin era Cabaret Voltaire, other industrial, ON-U Sound, Colourbox, New Order, hip-hop I heard on Mike Allen when I could find it, Public Enemy etc. When house, acid and Detroit techno appeared, they felt very much like my kind of thing as well.
I was interested in finding out about older music - old funk that I knew was sampled on hip-hop records, jazz that Richard Cook used to write about in NME, people like Hendrix and The Stones and random things that were cited as influences by current cats, like Mark E Smith talking about Can, Link Wray, Bo Diddley, The Seeds etc. But in those days, unless you had older relatives who had the records, there wasn't much info around. The likes of Mojo, Uncut etc didn't exist, the music papers only really covered new stuff. Although I read a music paper every week, listened to Peel, bought some other mags, I think I was barely even aware that things like Pet Sounds and Revolver even existed.
When I headed off to Uni in the big smoke, I met other studes who were into 60's and 70's rock and started to hear an get interested in 60's garage stuff like the 13th Floor Elevators, which in some ways seemed to have common elements with stuff I already liked. With the arrival of mags like Mojo, and the ever increasing amount of reissues of old stuff on cd, my tastes started to go quite retro as I started picking up 'classics' like Astral Weeks, Exile on Main Street, The Byrds, Neil Young, P-Funk, Trojan reggae etc. Although not new, it was new to me, and felt fresh and exciting.
But somewhere along the way, I guess due to the rise of britpop, it seemed that the music scene which had reliably delivered new and surprising sounds to me through my teens and early twenties - industrial, electro, PE, go-go, acid, US noise, techno, jungle - became completely swamped by a never ending retro trend which looked only to the past. Every new act dresses and sounds like something from the past. The same tedious 50/100 best albums is served up every few months, the same 50/100 as last time in a slightly different order. And the media is full of Nick Hornby wannabees banging on endlessly about the Beatles/Stones/Beach Boys/Jam/Clash.
And what this seems to have done for me is to taint all the music that is endlessly rehashed in the pages of Mojo and Uncut, or touted as an article of retro cool by the likes of John Harris- I could quite comfortably live the rest of my life without ever reading another article about Brian Wilson, Nick Drake, Mick and Keef et al, I'm just sick of hearing about all this back catalogue stuff, proferred by various fools as evidence of their 'good taste' and love of 'proper' music, always accompanied by a dismissal of techno and house music as not 'proper' - and anyway, dance music is dead, Alex Pretredis said so.
Hence all I seem to listen to these days is electronic music and the few bits of hip-hop that excite me. I want music that still has some ambition to be the future, rather than just recycle the past. Anyone else feeling this as acutely as me? I know it's not directly the fault of my Neil Young and Dylan albums that everythings shit now, they weren't to know. But they're sitting on my shelf unplayed, and I can't see me going back to them much anytime soon.
Sorry this is long....
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