I refer to myself as the dinosaur. Not because I am a multi-ton reptile like creature, but because I existed in prehistoric times prior to TV, computers, & other modern devices. When I was a teen, the popular music was big band sounds. However Hollywood produced movies with classical music played by men like Iturbi and Ocar Levant. There were many movies about men like Chopin, Gershwin, Sousa. There were movies featuring Irish music, operatic singers, music from the Gay nineties, and the roaring twenties. There were offbeat bands like Spike Jones which used washboards, steel drums, and other strange items as musical instruments. While there was a mainstream type of music which was the most popular, most of us enjoyed and listened to a large variety of music. This seemed to be the case until I was about 40 years old when musical taste seemed to become specialized. In modern times, it seems to me that most people under thirty are specialists in the type of music they enjoy. There seem to be those who listen to Rap and ignore almost anything else. There are those who listen to Various types of rock music and ignore most other other types of music. I seldom encounter a young person who ever listens to classical music, big band sounds, opera, Irish ballads, Tom Lehr, Sousa type marches, Gay nineties, roaring twenties, show tumes, et cetera. Is my impression of modern musical tastes valid or have I just not encountered people with more varied tastes?
Electronic technology has fundamentally changed the art of music. You saw the beginning of that. Your grandparents lived in an era when you had to have a musician nearby in order to hear music. People in big cities could go to concert halls if they were prosperous, or if they were not, at least travel to different neighborhoods in rotation and hear ethnic bands from various parts of the world play in the parks. People in small towns had to make do with the church choir, the pianist in the saloon, Cousin Amy's charming harp recitals, and a few traveling shows every year with whatever kind of music they happened to bring. Usually one operatic aria or other classical piece amid more popular fare. And when those musicians weren't nearby there was no music. What a dismal era that was. I will put up with all the grief of the modern world in return for its greatest gift: I can listen to music all the time and I can choose anything I want or expose myself to stuff I would never have imagined. However, one result of this infinite cornucopia of sound is that there is a whole lot of every individual genre and subgenre of music. Music has become a big business so there are a lot of composers and a lot of performers, each producing a lot of songs. Consider: Even fifty years ago when I was in high school, kids who loved rockabilly could not listen to rockabilly exclusively unless they went home and played their own library of a few dozen records over and over. There just wasn't that much rockabilly, and what rockabilly there was was not played in exclusive rotation on the handful of radio stations available. They also had to play Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Connie Francis, the Coasters, Richie Valens and Dinah Washington for the people who liked that music. They even had to play Peggy Lee, the Four Preps, Art and Doddy Todd, Louis Prima and Die Liechtensteiner Polka. We managed to get away without listening to too much operatic and symphonic music if we chose to, but popular music wasn't compartmentalized. We got used to hearing each other's favorites. There wasn't even a segregation of "black" and "white" pop music except in the biggest cities. Today, if you like Swedish death metal, there are probably enough bands doing it that you can play it on your iPod throughout your waking hours and not hear the same song twice in a month. If your tastes run only a little more catholic into a genre, like rap or reggaeton, one person could probably not keep up with the new releases. People today have less varied tastes simply because today it is possible. It was not possible in your day, or even in mine. I tend to like more genres of popular music than I dislike, I appreciate the music of other countries, I still like most of the music I liked when it was new, and I like much of the illogically categorized "classical" music from the Impressionist Era onward. And I live under the constant gnawing disappointment that somewhere in the world right now someone is playing a song that would move me to tears and be immediately ranked in my all-time top hundred... and I will never ever even know it exists. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Maybe the people with more limited tastes are luckier. If there's something out there they'd like, they will find it.
Well maybe part of it is the fact is that theres sooo much more music to choose from these days Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! For example some of the stuff i listen to: drumnbass, techno, IDM, dubstep, grime, industrial hard-core, goa, hiphop, breakbeat hardcore, trip hop. And most of those are styles of music that have popped up in the last 15 years! So i suppose what im saying is you could have an *extremely* ecclectic taste in music and listen to an incredibly varied amount of output but still only be dipping into the last decade. Having said that i agree that in general most people do seem to just listen to one style of music and not much else. Which always seems abit crazy to me, kind of like enjoying film but only ever watching action movies and refusing to watch any other genres. :bugeye: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I would say that on the whole you are correct. However, I am the exception that confirms the rule. I enjoy pretty much all styles (although I have a hard time about hip hop), and am very discriminating (and somewhat knowledgable) about each. Some know me as a classical music freak, some as a jazz afficionado, and even others as a rocker chick. I'm a little bit of each, and really none of those.
Those aren't that ecclectic. It's all synth beats or other people's music cut up. It's almost all, more or less, club dance music.
You could say that about that bands as well, 2-tone ska? thrash metal? shoe-gazing? its all just blokes standing around with guitars. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But youre right its not *that* eclectic to simply listen to dance music, my point was that even under the umbrella genre of 'electronic music' theres a terrifiying large of amount of styles/genres/sub-genres josling for attention. And on the whole you'll be hard-pushed to find people who listen to more than a couple of genres within electronic music...so with ever increasing choice the less able we are to expand our musical horizons to encompass the full musical spectrum.. er or something. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Ask yourself when was the last time that any of these styles got exposure on MTV and you have your answer.
I would conclude that we are doomed to a future of banality but.... technologies such as MP3 players enable downloading of 1000s of tracks. Even though it is possible to listen to 1000s of the same sort of music it does get pretty boring to all but the obsessive. Downloadable music allows people to bypass MTV and its clones and at least try new stuff. At least you haven't forked out the cover price of a full album of the stuff if you don't like it!
RedArmy11: The media shows & plays what people want. Blues, Rock, & other styles that were new at one time started, media exposure slowly at first. The media did not create their popularity.
No, I know. Post-war freedoms created their popularity. Suddenly the world had teenagers and, lo, the teenagers wanted to rock. The bewildered voices of the media mostly confined themselves to hand-wringing (voices with hands, yes) and rumbles of stern disapproval. Nowadays, I'm sure you'll agree the media are far more savvy about it. [Stunned silence..] ...WHAT!???
I completly feel you on that one. I listen to so much music, but I haven't even gotten started. I like to go by genre, and every year or so I look into a new genre. Basically, I do feel that you need to know where the music''s coming from, or else you are just listening without understanding. I liked my first death metal CD, so I looked up their influences and bought those. A year later, about a month ago, I had a spontaneous moment and looked up a bluegrass band called strength in numbers. Now I am totally ready to begin exploring this genre. Now, to keep up with a genre is really hard, but at the same time, I want to explore new stuff. There is so much music out there, and so much of it is absolutly brilliant. I love music, and it is a shame that I can't keep up with it as a whole. Like heavy metal. In the year 2005, there was 3544 full lengths, 1296 EPs, 160 live albums, and this was just what metal-archives noticed. How can you keep up with that?
