Looking for the 1984 Pop Rewind? Music From the 1980s Rocks!

Yes, but again, people still have to pick what CONTEMPORARY music to hear. It’s not all so-called “rock & roll”. Some of us choose country first because we LIKE the general form of music, THEN have a memory. Never mind those of us who want to try out things we could never possibly hear regularly and easily.

It’s not all just foisted upon us so we cannot help but like current rock & roll (misnomer to me for anything but ‘50s). We have to seek it out.

LOL I like it.

BTW I loved Lionel. But he was one of the many acts that really could only handle 1 mode. He was great at romance, but not good at upbeat. No problem with the Commodores, though.

Possibly the best act that could handle both romance and upbeat was the Everly Brothers.

In general it will be a variation of what your parents listen to. It’s all made more complicated since the marketing world realized that “youth” were a separate market and could be sold to directly. But what you generally see is: your parents listened to X, which meant you were regularly exposed to certain radio and TV programs, and then when that important psychological window opened in your mind there were certain variations of X occupying the contemporary market (being deliberately sold to you), and that’s your gateway for your personal exploration, which sets the music you like until you die.

It really is just foisted on you. Some of us go deeper. But even that exploration usually starts with a friend or family member asking the mighty question “have you listened to these guys?” and giving you a tape in the old days or thumbdrive today. I’ve got 350 gigs worth of music spanning a pretty bizarre range, and I can tell you how I started listening to most of those bands. They all pretty much boil down to 5 origins: mom, radio, high school friends, the wife (whose musical taste is similar to mine, same genres different sub-genres), reading about bands I already liked and finding out who influenced them. And while I’ve found a lot of music in the decades since college the stuff of my youth still holds a special place in my heart and none of the stuff I’ve discovered since then touches me quite as well.

I can agree, largely, but that is more INFLUENCE than “memories”. Memories are tied in with specific songs, not the whole scene. Often specific events in time, as already mentioned here. Those are like the “flashbulb memories” often mentioned regarding great trauma, but here often more personal and pleasant than those tragedies.

I was greatly influenced by my parents and older sister. My parents were quite eclectic, as well as people of their times. My sister I idolized and hung around (she was 9 years older, so a bit different from me). My brother, not so much, though he wasn’t around as much but I also didn’t like the metal music he loved too much. (See? Introduced, but it didn’t take.)

As for my love for real old-time music, guess that is partly the openness of my parents, and maybe even the love my mom had for distant American history, though she had no clue about folk or march music back then. Very big on RevWar.

As for country, I didn’t dislike it but liked it more after my boss years ago played it all the time (again, much better than the metal noise the old boss let his auto store guys listen to before). Then I really got into it.

Likewise, never cared for too much rap even when my dear nephew who DJs embraced it.

Definitely influences, but I still had to choose what I actually like.

Memories can be tied to a band as a whole, or even a genre. Roots rock as a whole puts me in a certain place mentally, from the time in my childhood when my youngest aunt’s crowd of friends were all into that Seger, Petty, Kansas thing; I don’t really tie any individual songs to that era or specific memories.

You’ve got to remember too, we’re the exceptions. Most folks do not continue to explore musical territory after about age 22 maybe all the way to 25. They’ve decided on their music by then and they’re done. It’s weird to me, but that is the norm. I’m especially an outlier because most of the folks who do continue to explore play an instrument or at least work in something related to the industry, and I don’t do any of that. I just have this constant urge to find new music. I get at least one new (to me) album every single week, been doing it since I was in the exploratory age, just never gotten out of the habit.

We basically agree.

I don’t know if I’m as experimental as you - although I have pretty much covered it all, typical of my jack-of-all-trades personality. I like just about everything (things, not just music).

While I learned music early by taking trumpet and a bit of piano (should have done much more), I am no musician. My cousin is, playing same instruments but much better, educated, and teaching others. Yet, he’s the most open musician I’ve heard of myself. Most seem quite insular - they pick something and are snobby about it. He loves just about anything; in fact, he’s given me music he liked but didn’t have room for anymore on his shelves to get more. All kinds of stuff most 99% of people would think is “weird” and geeky. Yet we see music sort of the same way!

Well I can only say you’re crazy. The new Bowie blows me away every time I listen to it,

Well, what can I say. If we're going to throw words like crazy around, then I think you're the crazy one, because it's self evident that it's a fairly dullsville album. Even the most starstruck reviewers aren't saying it's on par with his best pre 1980s work. I'm not saying it's terrible, just that it's nothing particularly special and doesn't rate with his best stuff.

MM is lame. I say this as a guitar player. Their playing is mediocre, their songs are average. Nerdy references don't salvage their mediocrity. Nothing to get excited about here.

I don't care about Trent Reznor's anger. I liked his stuff better when he was an angstbot. His songs on this album are simply dull.

I appreciate what the Holmes Brothers are doing, but they don't hold a candle to the Staples in their prime, not even close. And Blind Boys...I guess they're okay. Listening to Albert King or Albert Collins or Freddy King is exciting because they were laying down the law. The Blind Boys aren't even close to doing that.

As for your banal truism that people tend not to branch out past a certain age, I guess I'm not sure it applies to me. I've branched out. It's just that I've branched out sideways and backwards for the most part. I listen to tons of stuff that I didn't listen to in my formative period. The problem is that when I branch forward, I encounter a distinct lack of greatness.

I would be thrilled to find some great new music. But I'm not going to pretend it's great when it's not.

Actually there is, it’s called the law of averages. Enough music gets made every year that even if the percentage that’s good to great is tiny there’s bound to be some. I’ve never found an era without great music.

In my other conversation on this thread we were discussing how people decide what music to listen to, when it happens, and why they don’t tend to change. One of the things I didn’t mention in that is there’s actually growing body of studies that show as we get older we tend to react with growing hostility to unfamiliar music. Even music from our preferred era and bands if it’s stuff we somehow never heard before we tend to not like it. It’s a normal process of aging, the older the human brain gets the more it likes the stuff it already likes and the less it feels like trying anything new. It doesn’t just happen in music, but it’s most obvious there because people like to give the big rant, a rant that’s been happening since before we started recording music. But older people are less likely to try new foods, new books, new TV shows, new technology, new features in old technology. We’re seeing the exact same thing going on with the death of XP, all these people who have been using it for a decade, and probably complained about it when it came out, now refuse to get off of it; they’ve got their thing and don’t want to try the new thing.

The law of averages is no guarantee of great music. All it says is that a period without great music is unusual, and I think we’re in an usual period. Actually I’m not even sure that’s necessarily the case. It may just be that we’re reverting to the norm. Sociological analyses are interesting and contain a lot of truth but ultimately it comes down to what your ears and your sense of taste tell you. I will even grant that this place is full of “get off my lawn” types with a clear bias against new music. Most music threads turn into a bunch of people posting stuff you hear every day on any classic rock station.

I graduated high school in the early ‘90s but I rarely listened to what was then modern music. I was all about Zep and Hendrix like all my friends. Ironically it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve started listening to what should have been my formative music. Furthermore I was a straight up guitar rock guy. I spent my teenage years locked in my room with my guitar listening to classic rock (and later, blues) trying to learn the art on that instrument. But guess what — over the past decade I’ve developed an appreciation for country, jazz, funk, R&B, trip hop, pop, some hip hop, as well as off the wall stuff like Henri Mancini plus a bunch of other stuff.

I get no pleasure from being unimpressed with current music and in fact would love to be a contrarian and sing its praises. But, I can’t...my ears won’t let me.

I also will admit that tons of garbage came out of earlier decades, even in the genres that I tend to prefer. In that sense the modern era is no different. What’s different about it, from my perspective, is a lack of high peaks that stand above the merely pretty good and the average and the less than average stuff, none of which I’m interested in.

Yes actually the law of averages does. There’s hundreds of albums being produced every year, somebody is bound to figure out the combination of great. The only real difference between now and previous eras is the record companies have figured out the exact formula to make a song popular, so popular music has lost its experimentation. But popular music is a miniscule percentage of what’s being produced, always has been. And honestly if you look at the historical billboard charts even in those eras we think of as great music the most popular stuff sucked. I always bring out this example, but it’s handy because it’s true: 1973 is often considered the greatest year in the history of rock, Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy and Quadrophenia, amazing stuff; but the #1 song in the land for 1973 was Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie A Yellow Ribbon”.

Sociological analyses tells us that our ears and our taste lie to us. They tell us that we are genetically wired to WANT new music to suck.

I graduated high school in 1987. I was right along side you in the 80s, sort of. Yes 80s music was a bad era, the survivors of the 70s stank and the new music had hit a level of prefabrication that was atrocious. And yet, there was amazing stuff happening in the 80s, you just had to look. King Crimson reformed, Oingo Boingo put together one of the greatest horn sections in rock and roll (featuring a former member of another great horn section, Bruce Fowler who was with Zappa in the Roxy era), Wall of Voodoo (and their leader Stan Ridgway) snuck out of Barstow. If you can find it (very hard to do but worth the effort) watch Urgh! A Music War, there was INCREDIBLE stuff going on in the 80s. There is great music in every era.

It’s not your ears that won’t let you. It’s your aging genes. There are high peaks now. You just don’t want them to be. You’ve had some pointed out to you, and found a way to not be impressed.

No, there really is nothing that guarantees that a particular era will be graced with great music. I’m sorry to break that to you. God hasn’t pronounced that a certain percentage of albums will be great, nor have the law of physics guaranteed such a thing, nor do sociological observations guarantee it. At the end of the day, it comes down to people coming through to make that happen, and as far as my sense of taste tells me, that hasn’t been happening lately.

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