Cornuck wrote: ↑Thu Mar 26, 2026 3:17 pm
It would be interesting to know if a 'great' song by your standards, or my standards, or anyone from our 'age group' came out, would we even be exposed to it?
Great question -- and some of its on us if we are listening to our old collections and rewind radio in the car; streaming "smart" on the phone. Finding cool music in the day (not on the radio) was always a kid you know, right? And it was fun to be that kid from time to time.
Every once in a while I will hear a song on a show or something and I will think "that's cool, that's different." Like there was a canadian show on US Netflix called cardinal, and the theme song was Agnes Obel's "Familiar." Really interesting track! Great? I wouldn't quote go that far, but curiously interesting. And then from that I somehow got exposed to some weirdo Norwegian woman, Aurora, (also not great but interesting and sort of fascinating to watch) who sort of reminded me of Bjork. Who I knew from the sugarcubes (who's that chick?) (and then the stuff after -- occasionally great, usually just interesting), because I liked indie rock in the 80s.
I also frequently see who's coming into town at the 800, 1,200, and 2,000 seat venues in my town. And then I will find their songs on YouTube or Spotify, listen to a few, figure out whether I'd like to go. Occasionally its something really good, but more generally it is stuff that isn't bad, but more importantly, let's me know that there's a lot of music getting made today that isn't cookie cutter -- or its cutting the same kinds of cookies that bands have cut in the past -- retro influenced, started as kids in a garage, that kind of thing.
Cornuck wrote: ↑Thu Mar 26, 2026 3:17 pm
Back in the day, we had the same access to jazz and big band as we had to rock. We chose rock (well, most of us). Listening to music from the roaring 20s would be like listening to 'our' stuff for a kid today.
I think having the boomers control media for so long kept our favourites out there, and now we hear them in the grocery stores, etc.
In the end, I'm just glad that I grew up around rock, and not country or some other genre.
\m/
Our eras might be a little off one another's, because there was no big band regularly on the radio in my years growing up and jazz was for "art" and not for popular music.
But what I mean by access to old music, is that because the kids today have music at their fingertips -- not just genre, but the songs themselves -- there's really no cost (money or time) to exploring, and mostly they are accessing modern music in the same way. I live near a high school. There are lots of Nirvana t-shirts.
