just out of curiosity.
let's say hypothetically starting tomorrow you could not listen to any music that was not presently recorded and released in the present year for the rest of your life...

how would you fair?

would that be no big deal for you?

i get the impression that most people here, most people online and most people with an affinity for music in general nowadays would find that very very hard to tolerate as they are almost all vocal about their adoration of music from the past.
...even the people who try to validate and prop up today's contemporary music because they run a music blog or they're an aspiring dj or something of that ilk.

what does that indirectly communicate about the worth of our life & times?

to use the old dame dash quote...
on your tombstone there is a year you are born and a year your die. your life is the dash.

this is our life span.
these will some day be the years we were alive on earth.
some day, maybe sooner than you think, every second of this is going to be the sum of our time here.
i think re-treating into the past and romanticizing it with and over-abundance of folklore and wide-eyed amazement is becoming stifling to our progress as a species.

i think we need to look at the grim reality of what our mainstream culture has degenerated into in contrast to previous times rather than just retreating to those times for a temporary escape from it all.
at some point whatever era is in your comfort zone and you consider "golden" be it the 1940s/50s/60s/70s/80s or even 90's.
at some point in the near future that is going to have been so long ago that nothing that happened during that period is even going to be properly remembered or cared to be remembered by the masses.
(try having a convo with a regular joe about culture from the 1920's and see how knowledgeable they are as evidence of this in action).

i'd love it if people could collectively bring their desires to the forefront of what's happening today and move in some progressive direction genuinely eclipsing things that already happened rather than willingly standing in their shadow or retreating to them as a coping mechanism.
again, what we do today is eventually going to become OUR legacy.

I think you overestimate the connection between old music and romantizing about the past. I honestly don't think most people care or in some cases even *know* whether a song they hear for the first time is new or old, they just want to hear music they dig.

Another thing I think is important is how the reissue game altered the relationship between old and new music forever. In the 70's, many albums that are now considered classics were OOP. The records that were re-issued were the big sellers-basically records that were part of the cultural milieu since they were big and a lot of people were nostalgic.

However, some time in the 80's, there was a bunch of labels that started to reissue music from the past that really wasn't particularly popular, music where nostalgia and "I love that song! Heard it all the time when I grew up" played a minimal role. Basically, it was old music that *literally* functioned as new for young and old listeners alike.

Needless to say, the current situation with blogs, youtube etc. has made this ''scene'' even stronger and made the difference between old and new even smaller since the old music being exposed doesn't have to be the classics that "everyone" has heard and where nostalgia is involved...

i mean, there are teenagers right now
that have never bought music, ever.

so b/c of that, there are music heads that just downloaded
music that they liked, regardless of the era it was released in.

i don't even think that young folks
even have the same concept of "new" music vs. "old" music
that we have.

A song could be older than me and still be "new" to me.

Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j5ilgP1Ov8

^^^^Probably my favorite song of the past year.

~Austin

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whether explicitly or implicitly... there's nothing wrong with adoration of the past, or with that taking up much of a person's listening. It doesn't negate what's being done today... it just begins the process of putting today's work in a broader context, for better or for ill.

As is often the case with your posts on this theme, however, I really don't understand what you want. I think most folks on here are just fine with some aspect of contemporary music... there are very few staunch old-music-only advocates around. What "progressive" direction do you want people to move in? For your benefit, or for theirs?

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

fuck you.

.

>just out of curiosity.
>let's say hypothetically starting tomorrow you could not
>listen to any music that was not presently recorded and
>released in the present year for the rest of your life...
>
>how would you fair?
>
>would that be no big deal for you?

i'd be fine w/that. i'd miss some old music, but in time i'd probably forget most of it. and, of course, present acts would cover and sample some old stuff, so some of it would stay w/me.

i'd definitely be fine.

fuck you.

completely.

I might be listening to 3-5 albums a year, at most.

meh. I'm not so hung up on the idea of being "up to date" if people aren't making what I want to hear. that's how I felt in the latter half of the 1990s, and it's certainly true today. it's just not that important.

i mean...
obviously i wouldn't die.

and i guess i'd find some new music to like.




but damn.
all the songs i love are old records.

and like dale said above,
i've discovered songs that are "new to me" this year,
but all of those records were originally released in an era
that is not this one.