Last night my 5 year old was in the kitchen rocking out to a Eurythmics song. When I was 5 we didn't have access to music that was 40 years old.
The relationship music has with time is broken now, and to the kids it's all either just good music or bad music and that's it.
this may be true but I will say back when I was five I also didn’t understand that Creedence was older than Janet Jackson. it was all just music I heard
CCR was ~ 10 years old when you were 5. John Fogerty was still making hits.
For comparison, Destiny's Child broke up 18 years ago, Beyonce is obv still Beyonce. Every child in my house knows Say my Name.
well, this goes to some thing I was talking about over text which is that the time frame of what’s being listened to has continually extended, but I just had a conversation on here with a 15-year-old about what dad rock is and they definitely had opinions. Music still has primary generations
I think by the time you're a teenager you do start putting music into buckets for purposes of carrying those buckets around with you, culturally. But your relationships with that music is already formed before you know about those buckets.
My about-to-be-13-year-old knows that Boogie Wonderland is from the 70s but it doesn't *sound* like old music to her, she likes it, and so do her friends, because they sang it in choir. It's on her Spotify. She listens to it mixed in with the rest.
idk I think kids have always started off listening to whatever their parents listened to. people are having kids later which stretches the time horizon of what they’re exposing their kids to
Oh the Beatles were definitely oldies to me from the moment I knew music that was oldies.
But also, the Beatles were only 20 years old in 1979. Which is how old Yeah! By Usher is.
Yeah, Idk. I think it depends on your parents. My dad had a big record collection, so there was stuff from the 60s/70s around when I was a 90s teen. But also music changed a lot from the 40s-60s. Pop music now has more in common with Sgt. Pepper than that did with things from 20 years earlier.
right. there’s a reason that oldies stations started at 60’s when we were kids but they used to play 15 years of stuff and now they play like 40 years of stuff
Yeah. Like, we do a game at my house where my 15 yo plays a new song and then I play a song from the 90s that sounds exactly the same and then we laugh. Could have done that with my dad. But in the 60s, pop music from 30 years before was Duke Ellington. That’s a huge change.
I think this is the crux. Music made today isn't that different from music made in the 80s. It's digital, it's online, it's a high quality recording, and it has a similar enough sound to today's pop music. It shows up in modern stuff (TikTok, TV and Insta) which brings it back to the zeitgeist.
I lament that younger generations don’t listen to albums all the way through anymore, but I fucking celebrate every playlist they make with Wham! next to the White Stripes or Hall and Oats next to Alabama Shakes. They like what they like and seem not to care about genre or era, which is laudable.
this was 100% the fact i was very early in decoupling my listening with cd purchases or radio play. i was always able to access whatever i wanted (i NEVER bought CDs) and my musical tastes wound up pleasingly mutated
oh for individual songs it's all youtube downloader these days. for good lossy FLACs it's still torrents. i do own a couple of albums on bandcamp but they were all a dollar, so
