You know you're old when......
I've been spending a lot of time hanging round the comments boxes of other blogs lately - to the point where I imagine I've become that little boy from the neighbourhood who's always playing in your house and being a mild irritant to your mother, who wishes he'd just go the hell back to his own house and play there for a while.
So I guess I'm home to play by myself for a while:
Over Christmas I was back home taking it easy at my parents' house and would invariably start the day breakfasting on the sofa in front of the Sky Box. One morning, as I flicked through the rather too many MTV and assorted music channels, something dawned on me: all the rock singers were younger than me! I guess this has been the case for at least the last 3 years, but up until recently MTV UK&Eire was pretty much dominated by r&b and hip-hop artists. As I'd never really been into these genres growing up, I hardly paid attention enough to care what age these singing starlets were. But rock was my thing when I was growing up. In fact, the rise of dance music and demise of rock in the 90s seemed appropriate to me at the time. I was growing up. Music was changing. Just as rock 'n' roll had taken the world by storm in the '50s and alienated an older generation, a new genre, aided by technology advances once again, was asserting itself and it fell to me and to rock heads everywhere to accept the inevitable passing of time.
So rock's resurgence in the last few years and its return to stake a claim on airplay has come as a bit of a shock to me. It's like you got off the bus because they told you it was the terminus and then they all went off without you!
As a teenager I tended, like many, to listen to the old rock classics. So not only did the average age of a dead rock star (27) seem very old, but the fact that they'd all died before I was born made them seem even older. I guess Kurt Cobain's death in '93 should have set my alarm bells ringing, but I had always eschewed Nirvana and so wasn't that moved by their singer's demise.
Watching one fresh-faced rock wannabe after another shuffle on and off MTV's immortal coils over Christmas made me come face to face with my own mortality. You see, when I hit 27 rock had more or less disappeared so I didn't have to deal with that rite of passage. Now I'm being made confront it three years after the fact! Flicking through the pages of the Sunday El País magazine in a friend's house a couple of weeks ago, I came across an article on The Strokes. They're all about 5 years younger than me!!!!!
I hope there isn't a huge religious revival in 3 years'time. Jesus died at 33, but given that it happened 2,000 years ago,it's pretty much buried for me. If everybody goes Jesus-crazy in 2008, I'm not sure I'll be able to deal.........
For those of you with way too much time on your hands, a brief and selective history of my musical interests follows:
My interest in music goes way back. The first songs I remember singing along to were Tom Robinson's War Baby and Elton John's I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues. I was 7 going on 8. I don't know if it's significant that these two songs were by gay artists but it certainly strikes me as interesting in retrospect. Anyway, from that point I was hooked on pop music. I got a Topaz AM/FM radio with my communion money that same year and started listening religiously to Gerry Ryan from 10 to midnight Mondays through Thursdays. Obviously Mark Cagney's Night Train was too late for a 7/8 year old, and I have to say that Dave Fanning's playlist was lost on me back then. We sent away for all the 7" records with the Rice Krispie tokens. Then I bought my first 7" with a Christmas Golden Discs voucher from my aunt. I chose Talking Heads' Road To Nowhere. My older brother got Bruce Springsteen's double A-Side My Hometown/Santa Claus is coming to town, and my yonger brother got Shakin' Stevens' latest release!!! Sunday's pocket money went more often than not on a copy of Smash Hits. A fascination with Prince ensued and 5 years later I had all of his albums on cassette (or double cassette!!) except 1999. I was 13 then and and making the new boys in the secondary school stare at me as I delicately tried to reproduce New Power Generation on my pencil case and on brown paper-covered school books.
Then I decided to change direction. I'd been going through my cool uncle's record collection and had borrowed Blondie's Parallel Lines and a Best of Cream 2 on vinyl. There was something raw in this music which made me decide I wanted to explore it more. Apart from that, saying to your classmates that you were into Blondie and Cream allowed you to build up the image of a beyond-your-years-sophisticate far better than saying you were into Prince. And for a boy already deeply troubled by his sexual awakening, being able to introduce people to the beautiful Debbie Harry was reassuring in its vicariousness.
So the Prince cassettes were given away and a record collection was started on, along with an archive of taped records (nothing inferior to TDK SA90s and sometimes MAs if the album was a particular favourite). At first I maintained my interest in what was current: Eric Clapton's Journey Man (Bad Love had a great riff) and Queen's The Miracle (I Want It All was very inspiring) were two purchases then. Quickly I started listening more and more to '60s and '70s rock. I collected all of Cream's albums before moving on to Derek & the Dominos and then farther afield. Myself and two friends blagged our way into the Doors movie in the Savoy when it came out. We were 15. It shouldn't have been any surprise to get past the usher given that I was already buying my friends naggens (don't know how to spell that) in Sean O'Casey's off-licence in Marlborough Street.
By the age of 18 I had a large collection of second-hand records that more or less comprised all the major rock-bands of the past: Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Doors, Velvet Underground, Joy Division. Thanks to a friend I was listening to some new stuff too (Madder Rose) and lots of other singer-songwriter types (Nick Drake,Lou Reed, Bob Dylan)as well as some '80s stuff. Of course commercially successful automatically meant crap so alas Red Hot Chilli Peppers were lost on me.
As I moved into university, I began to shed a lot of the rock. Actually this had started happening around two years earlier. Nick Drake, Lou Reed, Joy Division and Fugazi were a new departure for me (I was listening to Magic & Loss heavily) and it was very hard to alternate between these and Cream and The Doors et al. I became a Smiths devotee, started listening to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, was introduced to Belle & Sebastian. At that stage inevitable distance grew between myself and a friend on whom I'd relied for new musical experiences and this was very much reflected in my listening habits. By the end of college I'd more or less turned my back on everything I'd listened to till then. Jazz was my new interest and I was busy finding worthy recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. After overloading on jazz for a while I started listening to Johnny Cash. He and Nina Simone are probably my most recent interests - the kind which sit in your cd player for weeks and weeks and get listened to endlessly. I have left out lots of artists who I listen to (or used to listen to) religiously: Nick Cave, Neil Young, Serge Gainsbourg. But these days, try as I might, I can't find musicians and groups that inspire me and transport me the way those of older generations do. Scissors Sisters are fun, N.E.R.D. are jaunty, the Strokes and Goldfrapp are ranuchy, Antony & the Johnsons are melancholical, but, for me, they can't hold a candle to David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Joy Division, Nick Cave, Morrissey, Will Oldham,Fugazi and others who've accompanied me in and moved me to innumerable moments of joy.
So I guess I'm home to play by myself for a while:
Over Christmas I was back home taking it easy at my parents' house and would invariably start the day breakfasting on the sofa in front of the Sky Box. One morning, as I flicked through the rather too many MTV and assorted music channels, something dawned on me: all the rock singers were younger than me! I guess this has been the case for at least the last 3 years, but up until recently MTV UK&Eire was pretty much dominated by r&b and hip-hop artists. As I'd never really been into these genres growing up, I hardly paid attention enough to care what age these singing starlets were. But rock was my thing when I was growing up. In fact, the rise of dance music and demise of rock in the 90s seemed appropriate to me at the time. I was growing up. Music was changing. Just as rock 'n' roll had taken the world by storm in the '50s and alienated an older generation, a new genre, aided by technology advances once again, was asserting itself and it fell to me and to rock heads everywhere to accept the inevitable passing of time.
So rock's resurgence in the last few years and its return to stake a claim on airplay has come as a bit of a shock to me. It's like you got off the bus because they told you it was the terminus and then they all went off without you!
As a teenager I tended, like many, to listen to the old rock classics. So not only did the average age of a dead rock star (27) seem very old, but the fact that they'd all died before I was born made them seem even older. I guess Kurt Cobain's death in '93 should have set my alarm bells ringing, but I had always eschewed Nirvana and so wasn't that moved by their singer's demise.
Watching one fresh-faced rock wannabe after another shuffle on and off MTV's immortal coils over Christmas made me come face to face with my own mortality. You see, when I hit 27 rock had more or less disappeared so I didn't have to deal with that rite of passage. Now I'm being made confront it three years after the fact! Flicking through the pages of the Sunday El País magazine in a friend's house a couple of weeks ago, I came across an article on The Strokes. They're all about 5 years younger than me!!!!!
I hope there isn't a huge religious revival in 3 years'time. Jesus died at 33, but given that it happened 2,000 years ago,it's pretty much buried for me. If everybody goes Jesus-crazy in 2008, I'm not sure I'll be able to deal.........
For those of you with way too much time on your hands, a brief and selective history of my musical interests follows:
My interest in music goes way back. The first songs I remember singing along to were Tom Robinson's War Baby and Elton John's I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues. I was 7 going on 8. I don't know if it's significant that these two songs were by gay artists but it certainly strikes me as interesting in retrospect. Anyway, from that point I was hooked on pop music. I got a Topaz AM/FM radio with my communion money that same year and started listening religiously to Gerry Ryan from 10 to midnight Mondays through Thursdays. Obviously Mark Cagney's Night Train was too late for a 7/8 year old, and I have to say that Dave Fanning's playlist was lost on me back then. We sent away for all the 7" records with the Rice Krispie tokens. Then I bought my first 7" with a Christmas Golden Discs voucher from my aunt. I chose Talking Heads' Road To Nowhere. My older brother got Bruce Springsteen's double A-Side My Hometown/Santa Claus is coming to town, and my yonger brother got Shakin' Stevens' latest release!!! Sunday's pocket money went more often than not on a copy of Smash Hits. A fascination with Prince ensued and 5 years later I had all of his albums on cassette (or double cassette!!) except 1999. I was 13 then and and making the new boys in the secondary school stare at me as I delicately tried to reproduce New Power Generation on my pencil case and on brown paper-covered school books.
Then I decided to change direction. I'd been going through my cool uncle's record collection and had borrowed Blondie's Parallel Lines and a Best of Cream 2 on vinyl. There was something raw in this music which made me decide I wanted to explore it more. Apart from that, saying to your classmates that you were into Blondie and Cream allowed you to build up the image of a beyond-your-years-sophisticate far better than saying you were into Prince. And for a boy already deeply troubled by his sexual awakening, being able to introduce people to the beautiful Debbie Harry was reassuring in its vicariousness.
So the Prince cassettes were given away and a record collection was started on, along with an archive of taped records (nothing inferior to TDK SA90s and sometimes MAs if the album was a particular favourite). At first I maintained my interest in what was current: Eric Clapton's Journey Man (Bad Love had a great riff) and Queen's The Miracle (I Want It All was very inspiring) were two purchases then. Quickly I started listening more and more to '60s and '70s rock. I collected all of Cream's albums before moving on to Derek & the Dominos and then farther afield. Myself and two friends blagged our way into the Doors movie in the Savoy when it came out. We were 15. It shouldn't have been any surprise to get past the usher given that I was already buying my friends naggens (don't know how to spell that) in Sean O'Casey's off-licence in Marlborough Street.
By the age of 18 I had a large collection of second-hand records that more or less comprised all the major rock-bands of the past: Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Doors, Velvet Underground, Joy Division. Thanks to a friend I was listening to some new stuff too (Madder Rose) and lots of other singer-songwriter types (Nick Drake,Lou Reed, Bob Dylan)as well as some '80s stuff. Of course commercially successful automatically meant crap so alas Red Hot Chilli Peppers were lost on me.
As I moved into university, I began to shed a lot of the rock. Actually this had started happening around two years earlier. Nick Drake, Lou Reed, Joy Division and Fugazi were a new departure for me (I was listening to Magic & Loss heavily) and it was very hard to alternate between these and Cream and The Doors et al. I became a Smiths devotee, started listening to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, was introduced to Belle & Sebastian. At that stage inevitable distance grew between myself and a friend on whom I'd relied for new musical experiences and this was very much reflected in my listening habits. By the end of college I'd more or less turned my back on everything I'd listened to till then. Jazz was my new interest and I was busy finding worthy recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. After overloading on jazz for a while I started listening to Johnny Cash. He and Nina Simone are probably my most recent interests - the kind which sit in your cd player for weeks and weeks and get listened to endlessly. I have left out lots of artists who I listen to (or used to listen to) religiously: Nick Cave, Neil Young, Serge Gainsbourg. But these days, try as I might, I can't find musicians and groups that inspire me and transport me the way those of older generations do. Scissors Sisters are fun, N.E.R.D. are jaunty, the Strokes and Goldfrapp are ranuchy, Antony & the Johnsons are melancholical, but, for me, they can't hold a candle to David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Joy Division, Nick Cave, Morrissey, Will Oldham,Fugazi and others who've accompanied me in and moved me to innumerable moments of joy.
posted by purefunction at 2:22 PM
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