Max Stalling. Thanks, another discovery.
Complaining about “the music today” is one of signs of growing old. Your parents compained, now you do. It’s always been like it. My Fakebook “friends”, all post links to some bands of yesteryear, most of those links quite pedestrian, thank you, that is to say showing the same old, same old, by the same old, same old, no discoveries, no hidden gems. Nostalgia. I don’t miss nostalgia, sorry.
In the meantime, there is plenty of great music out there, and it is relatively easy to find via the Internet. As a reviewer in the WSJ wrote a few weeks ago, the two genres of popular music in great shape today are Americana and electronic. I can’t say anything about the latter, but as far as the former, I cannot keep up with the artists I have discovered in the past year, there are so many.
Check out this up and coming diva: http://brookeannibale.com/Final/watch.html
“Complaining about “the music today” is one of signs of growing old. Your parents complained, now you do.”
I believe there is an absolute exceptionalism to very much of the first 25 years or so of rock and roll music.
We never complained about our parents’ rock and roll, we kinda made fun of it but we did like it. That’s what American Graffiti meant to us.
Later on, I realized that besides their being nostalgic for those days, it was also a generation of Americans making fun of themselves as youths, which is cool because you can’t have a good time if you’re taking yourself too seriously.
I’m nostalgic for the periods within that 25 years that are most relevant to my time. I like most of the rest of it. When I was a 9th grader we had “50’s Day at school. Kids would dress up on a spring Friday and then there would be a dance held that night. By the time we got to high school, it turned into a full “50’s Week” where people would participate in day-long events like the dance marathon and other whacky stunts that were typical of our parents’ era. Some of them affected personnas of 50’s characters with made up nicknames. It was total immersion for some. The jukebox was loaded with all the period music Student Council reps and others could gather. Lots of burgers and malts being sold at the pretend malt shop, guys and chicks driving around in their cars acting all 50’s-like...There was a student band that would try like hell to play Do-wop at the dance that even today occasionally reunites to commemorate those days.
Nowadays, I look back at that and I think, “what was that all about?”. All of that so-called nostalgia for a time we didn’t experience ourselves but through the music, iconography and stories, we created a reasonable superficial facsimilie of the real thing which by then, no longer existed because it was already the mid-to-late 70’s. And now we have still “The Heartbreakers”, our very own pretend original Do-wop group reuniting for getting nostalgic over a fantasized nostalgia for a time that no longer existed or applied to our own lives except for the historic aspects of it.
Maybe Fantasyland is not a good place to be for very long if you ever hope to leave an original impression of quality in your own time.