- Reflections on whether it's truly possible or wise for contemporary music fans to view classic artists as their "favourites".
Those who are unfamiliar with the hilarious blog Texts from Dog should familiarise themselves with it immediately. I like to think that my relationship with my flatmate is not unlike the relationship between the characters on the site, although I'm not sure which one of us is the dog. Despite sharing the same physical space, we make surprisingly little physical contact. Communication is primarily via passive aggressive texts and Facebook messages. We like to piss each other off.
In December I think I crossed a line. I crossed it so far that it was worth saving the response:
"In 10 years time. I can see only about 5 of those acts still going with "any decent music." The Hipster-shite you listen to will be here today, forgotten about tomorrow. Just like hipsters."Apparently suggesting to a die-hard Springsteen fan that the reason Rolling Stone was the only publication to name Wrecking Ball as the "best album of 2012" was because both artist and magazine are for old men isn't a good idea. Now, I should state the I am a fan of Springsteen. The comment I made was designed purely to annoy. But the exchange got me thinking about the relationship between fans of music today and older artists.
I've found that music fans like to hide behind popular musicians. I've been told on more than one occasion that I "automatically lose" any battle of musical taste because my favourite band came into being after the turn of the millennium and isn't The Smiths/Bruce Springsteen/The Beatles/Neil Young/Insertyourdad'sfavouritebandhere. It's as if nostalgia places such artists atop a pedestal that no modern music could ever hope to topple. It's as if music died with the Smiths. Such hiding is not only boring, it's disrespectful to a lot of the great music being produced today. Not only do I think that 20 year old "my favourite band is the Smiths" types are boring, I would also argue that they just don't "get" the band they claim to be such a fan of.
I like The Smiths, as well as the Beatles and all of the bands I listed above, but I would never go beyond calling myself a "greatest hits fan". I do in fact own a Smiths greatest hits CD, but as I grew to appreciate the band my collection expanded into Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead. Nonetheless, I would feel disrespectful removing myself from the "greatest hits fan" bracket. I feel that it's important not to do so because so much of what makes music great is culture. I remember speaking to a friend who must have been my age or younger when the Smiths first became popular. He said that Morrissey was a cultural phenomenon. Not only was he an excellent singer and songwriter, but no one had any idea whether he was gay, straight, or both. I also imagine that hearing Johnny Marr's guitar playing less than a decade after the Sex Pistols had tried to ruin music must have been incredibly refreshing. While the Smiths' music still sounds great, I don't know if any one of my contemporaries will ever appreciate the cultural wave that made it important when it first came alive. I'm sure the same could be said for the likes of Motown's heyday. Today the records sound as good as they ever did, but I bet they don't feel the same way they did in Civil Rights Era America.
I can't stress enough how much respect I have for all of the old bands I've talked about here and how much I enjoy their music. I also understand how important they are and have learned a lot from listening to them. The first time I was put on to Neil Young's Country Home I immediately thought "holy shit, so that's where Idlewild got Younger than America from." When I first listened to Born to Run from start to end I thought "so that's where modern rock and indie got... pretty much all of modern rock and indie from!". I also understand that there are countless more artists that influenced history's great musicians and hope to stumble across them in time, too. I'm sure that there are a lot of transcendent themes in the music, but I'm also fairly certain that something will get lost. I would therefore urge any young music fan to seek out new and interesting sounds and not be content with what their parents listened to simply because it's clothed in nostalgic legitimacy. I don't know what music will define the 2000s and early 2010s. I can only speak for myself in saying that I will look back on this period of time and remember listening to a lot of indie punk and being angry about being stuck in a jobless recession. Nonetheless, I can say with confidence that we should strive to make new bands our favourite bands, because it's our job to make them the bands our generation will be remembered for.
