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Are you still open to new music?


HazBeen

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On 19/08/2020 at 08:59, stewblack said:

the older I get the less I'm ruled by the passionate prejudices of my youth. 

You have just summed me up perfectly in more areas than just music, and in a wonderfully poetic way. 

🙂

 

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I hit 50 last January and no longer actively bother checking out new acts as I'm whittling down my CD collection to faves which tends to be 70s funk,  80s-00s electronica/dance and hip hop. The only new sounds I tend to notice and like are some theme tunes to European crime dramas on Netflix and Walter Presents e.g. Black Spot, Greyzone and Bordertown.

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On 18/08/2020 at 22:33, HazBeen said:

...my band mates, all a few years my jr, all said they did not do the same and that they in essence felt that hardly any music that was worth their while is being made today...

Makes me wonder what my BC community thinks. Are you still open to “new”?

 

At 52, I have turned negative towards today's 'bands' and not been to any concert in over 5 years now. Rock music is dead. Tragically died with the rise of amp modellers, auto-tuning and no amps but in-ear monitoring on stages. Snowflakes making rock music is just a bad idea I guess. 😁

 

 

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10 hours ago, DiMarco said:

At 52, I have turned negative towards today's 'bands' and not been to any concert in over 5 years now. Rock music is dead. Tragically died with the rise of amp modellers, auto-tuning and no amps but in-ear monitoring on stages. Snowflakes making rock music is just a bad idea I guess. 😁

At 52 many start to bemoan the fact that "it's not like it was in my day", that "the kids nowadays don't know how to make proper music", that "rock music is dead"...

What this shows is that:

a) they're old and looking back on their past glories with both rose-tinted specs and a longing for their youth

b) that rock music is usually reinvented by subsequent generations, usually to the horror of the previous lot - which is the whole point! 

c) Their version of rock music will be carried on by their generation, getting more and more staid and forgetting gradually, as they approach the age of the bath chair and early-evening cocoa, that rock'n'roll is meant to be edgy!

😁

However, I would hold out more hope for rock'n'roll if the performers didn't just appear on stage with the same tshirt and jeans they wear everywhere else. Or worse, a nice clean shirt and slacks. As far as I'm concerned you're putting on a show, not just a record - your audience need to be entertained visually in some way as well as aurally. Stop with the squareness already!

 

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2 hours ago, Leonard Smalls said:

At 52 many start to bemoan the fact that "it's not like it was in my day", that "the kids nowadays don't know how to make proper music", that "rock music is dead"...

What this shows is that:

a) they're old and looking back on their past glories with both rose-tinted specs and a longing for their youth

 

 

I honestly think that we're in a potentially golden age for music now...

When I look back to my really quite recent youth (I'm 41 now), it was *really* hard to hear new "good" music. On the radio you had Peel (but often spent a good deal of each show completely befuddled), the Evening Session (and put up with Jo Wiley's unbearable presenting persona plus some really pedestrian music) and Marc & Lard - where in truth I inherited much of my tastes. Later on Iearned that there were good new music shows on local radio but I had no way of knowing about them at the time.

In terms of TV there was TOTP where you'd occasionally someone new and good but I do remember Channel 4's White Room as something of an epiphany - although almost every act on there was already relatively well-established. The Word was good for new bands if you could put up with the gross-out nature of much of the rest of the show . Jools's Later started duing this time and I remember seeing some fantastic new-to-me stuff: Mazzy Star, Leonard Cohen, Scott Walker as well as a load f stuff that bored me to tears.

And that was it. I checked out books from the library and read the Melody Maker & NME religously but most of the time hearing new music involved risking meagre pocket money on something unfamiliar.

But now... endless digital and internet stations, a dedicated national "alternative" music station, Soundcloud, Spotify playlists, even Youtube. Glossy magazines frequently have a covermounted CD of brand new tracks and then there are all the specialist blogs... I was flicking through Amazon Prime's "included" music films the other day and saw documentaries on the Dead Boys, Johnny Thunders, Nick Drake and Capt Beefheart amongst many others: the remnants of my inner 15 year old was agog.

The problem now is surely one of being spoilt for choice - I'm willing to bet that whatever subgenre of music you are into, there's likely someone, somewhere, right now doing it really really well - and you can likely listen to them for free. Granted, the best stuff is not being curated and delivered through a very small number of radio stations etc but the extra effort of sifting through the chaff will pay off.

And it cuts both ways: a conversation that often comes up in my band concerns just how many people we need to reach in order to be financially self-sustaining - and the answer is "not many". And if there are only 2000 people in the entire world who might be into our stuff, nowdays we potentially have the means to reach (and sell to!) every single one with no distribution, management or other overheads.

All that said, I do understand that someone might feel quite differently if they had been, say, a teenager in 1966 and experienced the newly-minted cornerstones of rock music beamed into their home every time they tuned into national radio. 

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14 hours ago, DiMarco said:

At 52, I have turned negative towards today's 'bands' and not been to any concert in over 5 years now. Rock music is dead. Tragically died with the rise of amp modellers, auto-tuning and no amps but in-ear monitoring on stages. Snowflakes making rock music is just a bad idea I guess. 😁

58 year old 'snowflake' here, using amp modellers, in ears and FRFR. Plenty of current excellent rock music all over the shop 😁 

Edited by Frank Blank
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9 hours ago, DiMarco said:

Still, most live bands I have seen in the past few years are really not worth leaving the house for.

That doesn't really mean Rock Music Is Dead, just that either:

a) you haven't seen any decent new bands recently (there are quite a few!)

b) you're not interested in new music, just the music you liked when you still liked new music

c) the call of the pipe and slippers is strong 😀

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IMO there's an important distinction between music that's new to you and music that is genuinely something different to what has been done before.

In my previous post I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that most of the "new" bands that I'm currently enjoying owe a lot to music I enjoyed in my youth. Also I think that the tendency to start actively listening music that I wasn't perviously interested in as I get older has a lot to do with subliminal influencing through hearing it in film and TV soundtracks etc. Conversely there's a lot of bands that only still listen to simply because I bought the records when I was young and foolish, and if I heard them for the first time today I wouldn't be remotely interested.

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2 hours ago, Dankology said:

played great straightforward rock.

So there's youth playing music that could have been produced 50 years ago, and there's youth producing completely new sounds.. Either way, young uns are still making music that pushes the boundaries, or sounds like numerous other bands. Just like always since rock'n'roll started!

Here's some at the pushing the boundaries end:

 

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40 minutes ago, Leonard Smalls said:

So there's youth playing music that could have been produced 50 years ago, and there's youth producing completely new sounds.. Either way, young uns are still making music that pushes the boundaries, or sounds like numerous other bands. Just like always since rock'n'roll started!

Here's some at the pushing the boundaries end:

 

That wouldn't have sounded out of place in John Peel's show any time between 1979 and 1983.

The only thing pushing the boundaries (slightly) is the use of technology that allows their guitarist to also do the bass and synth parts at the same time as the guitar.

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A lot of harumphing and a couple of optimists in this lot. Thanks Dank & Smalls for not piddling on everything out there. I'm 62, most music bores me (especially Stickists, but I can't say that on tapping websites, they'd hunt me down or call me a troll) and my best listening is done in the car, tuned to college radio. I like music that suprises me and makes me laugh (CLT DRP) or is just novel and pleasant and not the same I-IV-V. (not ALL blues is boring. Well, after 57 verses...) So I miss the days of getting stoned and hanging w/ my tribe listening to a new ALBUM that might be a little different but I'm still listenin'...Something that I checked out the other day from a recommendation by Rick Beato (YouTube) was Plini. I LISTENED TO THE WHOLE ALBUM. Unrelated, I have one question to you Brits I gotta ask...Do you actually say "whilst" in conversation? And thanks I got Radio6 bookmarked to check out

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Rather than looking for "new" music within the narrow confines of rock/pop, try venturing outside the comfort zone of familiarity. There's an infinite amount of astonishing "old" music from other cultures out there to discover.

Edited by Dan Dare
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I'm 38, and I feel both completely out of touch and overwhelmed by choice simultaneously! 

In my younger days, I'd go into a record shop, find a genre I like, have a rummage through and walk out with a couple of CDs to listen to. Most were good, some were not! But crucially, I had a large circle of friends, with numerous overlapping circles, and the recommendations would filter through. THAT is how I found a lot of good music I wouldn't have known about otherwise. 

As you get older, your friend groups get smaller, and generally most of my friends aren't as passionate and focused on discovering music as they used to be. Not to mention or of touch with the latest goings on. 

There's so much music out there, but it's difficult to know where to look sometimes to try and find something you really connect with. 

A good example with me is Hip Hop. I was/am a huge hip hop fan, and the glory days for me are mid-late 90's to very early 2000's. But currently, I feel like I have no idea where to find something that is in a similar vein. Hip hop, R&B, pop, EDM even to a certain extent all seem to have merged to form a bland, predictable, watered down version of the things I used to love... I do sound like a bitter old fart now, and I'm digressing!

One of my favourite things to do is to put a song I like on YouTube with 'auto-play' turned on, and I've actually discovered quite a few good tunes this way! 

On another note, and contrary to what a lot of people say, I really think that pop music is in a great place at the moment. There are a lot of genuinely good artists, a lot of artists doing new /different things, and generally a lot less manufactured/plastic /gimmicky stuff than there was 20-30 years ago. 

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