At last! Something we can (laughingly) disagree about! I’m only two years older than you so we grew up in essentially the same musical world. While I loved the early seventies British prog. bands, i.e. Bowie, Traffic, King Crimson, Genesis (with Gabriel – NOT w/o!) I absolutely hated Kansas, Journey, Styx, and all the other stuff that was derisively referred to back in the mid-seventies as “corporate rock.”

Then came punk. I absolutely loved it — The Clash, Sex Pistols, Jam, Damned, Ramones, Buzzcocks —- 3 chords & 2 minutes of pure energy and teen angst. (BTW, if you loved this type of stuff, then you’ll love Green Day — a retro band if there ever was one. If not, well, you won’t)

How old is old? A month or so back I was in a coffee shop and saw two pre-teen girls wearing Clash t-shirts. 🙁 I felt O-L-D, but hey, at least I knew what that band was all about…

Speaking of which, check out: http://www.myspace.com/cowboymouth and click on the “Joe Strummer” link. Sums it up for us middle-agers. 🙂

Paul

Actually, there has been good – and bad – music in just about EVERY generation, but I must say that the advent of ‘rap’ so-called music as well as ‘acid rock’ and all of that genre that is nothing more than violent, discordant sound put to a primitive, mind numbing beat and often topped off with obscene ‘lyrics’, certainly lowered the level of popular music just as the atonal experiments of ‘classical’ composers did nothing to advance that musical genre in the 20th Century. It’s all just noise and with the ‘popular’ stuff, designed, I believe, to LOWER the sensibilities culture, not raise them.

Interestingly enough, a local high school radio station plays almost nothing but jazz, big band and many pleasant popular tunes that once graced such television shows as Perry Como and Your Hit Parade! When one hears the words and music of such giants as Cole Porter and the Gershwins, what passes as ‘music’ today – in all but a VERY few cases – should hang its collective head in shame.

Yes, I enjoyed Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Everly Brothers and even the folk song craze of the 1960s. And, although I don’t know anything about the artists, I still enjoy such songs as House of the Rising Sun and American Pie among others, but I can’t think of ANY of the current ‘music’ that I can stand to hear at all. When it is played as ‘background’ filler in some stores, I find myself wanting to go to the kitchen wares department and selecting some fine, long, SHARP knives! Music to kill by, for and with it seems to me is exactly what this ‘entertainment’ is.

I don’t know whether today’s popular ‘music’ is a reflection of a violent culture or one of the reasons that the culture is so violent, but it certainly does not ‘feed the soul’ in the way that music is SUPPOSED to do including, yes, even little ditties like ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ or ‘Sea of Love’ once did. At least they were ‘fun’ and not rhapsodies of rage and conduits to carnage.

V. P.

It is indeed ironic, which is why it occurred to me that my age was showing….. 🙂

Eric