Music, waddaboudit?

Recently on one of the forums I inflict myself on, a very dear friend, started a thread about musical tastes and how they form. Here’s her original post.

“For his part, Plant identifies much more with the Nashvillians’ approach. “For me, it’s almost like I’ve reached a very beautiful place, because I, too, am quite locked into the root of why I did what I did in the first place and those musicians that affected me when I was a kid,” he said. “As Alison was saying, ‘Sometimes it’s so easy to listen to something and to be moved to tears by it.’ That whole deal … in the kind of transience of modern British music you don’t kind of get that. You don’t carry Charlie Rich’s voice forever — but I do.”

Since I became officially very old, I’ve been feeling, like Plant, that the things I heard or learned about as a child seem to be more permanent, more meaningful, than the things I found out about, or were created, later. I thought about it, and I’d decided that was because humans are hard-wired to learn likes and dislikes in childhood, when the knowledge of the tribe is imparted to them, and to be more ambivalent about things they discover on their own as adults because they haven’t yet been fully validated. It seemed nice and neat. But Plant seems to think that Charlie Rich really is, objectively, more memorable than, say, Franz Ferdinand or the Scissor Sisters.

Is that true? I know that I find myself singing Roger Miller’s King of the Road more often than I find myself singing anything by Outkast – in fact I can’t even name anything by Outkast. But why is that? Because Roger Miller is a root and Outkast is a twig (as Plant seems to feel) or because the first songs I ever heard were imprinted on my growing neural structure and became part of what I am, whereas Outkast is just a late, confusing data point among millions?

Another state of the music thread was “Why is ‘Rock and Roll Style’ out”, when I saw it I was all set to pontificate on the importance of rock fashion. I appreciate rock stars who look like rock stars, I don’t want them looking like the greasy high school kid that gets on my nerves walking down the street, but that’s another topic. When I discovered everyone was whining about how there’s no good new music, I slunk away. Quite a lot of people on that forum seem to be stuck in a time warp. I like quite a bit of new music, I find it on the net, through friends on forums, on blogs, and  local college radio. Like all music, in any decade, some of it is crap, but I’ve always tried to keep an open mind about music (except country-not going to happen don’t try). A lot of it grows on me, and I find myself grooving along with modern music. It’s not stuff that sticks in my consciousness like in my friend’s music thread, but maybe when I hear it when I’m 70, it’ll have formed some sort of musical memory that make me feel all warm and fuzzy all over like Jackson Five (the earliest music I remember choosing to listen to), Zepp, Sex Pistols, REM, or all the other music of my wasted youth. 

If Robert Plant lives another twenty years, will he hum along with Idlewild or the Raconteurs?  Will I? If I tune to the oldies station in 2028 will they be playing Caribou or Scratch Acid? I don’t know if they will stand the test of time like Zepp has for me for 27 years (how long I’ve been listening to them not how long they’ve been around) or REM for 23 years. I still love music and the joy of discovering something new that gets me twitching. I love all my “oldies” music but I don’t want to be stuck in the time warp of whining “there’s no good music these days.”