How does music date?

Ha ha!

Seriously, though: when music sounds "dated," it means that there is a)too much reverb on the drums, b)a fretless bass, or c)surreally out-of-place backing vocals laid atop a chorus to give it "soul power." What I'm getting at is, "dated" is really just code for "quite obviously recorded in the 1980s."

It doesn't simply mean "bears obvious hallmarks of its time" - people don't generally call the Harry Smith Anthology dated, though by this def'n it is.

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Although maybe a lot of 90s music popular at the time seems particularly dated in this way to many now because of that vague pre-millenial fixation a lot of it had (so not JUST the ten year rule or whatever in this case).

Has dated well: Rubber Soul
Has not dated well: Sgt. Pepper

"solid" ---> "classic" --> "timeless" and/or "boring sacred cow"

Rubber Soul = "We can overdub now! Let's put a piano and maracas on this!" = still fresh today. Sgt. Pepper = "We can overdub now! Let's cut up some old tapes, glue them back together in an order that even we can't discern and use them as a backing track!" = dated.

Then again, I like some of that Sgt. Pepper stuff. So maybe it's just the ideas that did not survive the era.

I don't think music sounds intrinsically dated as many here have basically said. I think "dated" is defined by current tastes (whatever they may be), which are constantly changing. Look at this revival of psych-folk. A few years back, most of this stuff would have been considered "dated." But now, a large number of people would say it doesn't sound dated at all.

the term "dated music" carries the same associations for me as comments about celebrities physically aging. Like, you wouldn't hear people talk about Judi Dench or Maggie Smith not aging gracefully, because their image in public consciousness is already that of older women - grand dames. People like Madonna or Kylie come under greater scrutiny because their image remains for most people that of younger women (something they both encourage to some extent). So we hold them up to a standard of youth that they struggle to match physically. Both accusations then seem to enforce the distance between the rhetoric of newness/youth and its reality.

In the case of music maybe, instead of just old and new, there's four choices - old-old (Folk Anthology); old-new (80s pop); new-old (Devendra Banhart) and new-new (Girls Aloud) (this idea cribbed shameless from Tom's real/fake formulations). There's an absent center for stuff like Coldplay and other timeless music which doesn't really fit in any of those 4 categories though.

you can hardly help but hear music in the context of the time you're listening. maybe in the '80s you needed to hear huge echo-ey drumbeats, and maybe in the '90s you needed to hear piles of distorted guitars, and maybe in the '00s you need to hear minimalist bleeps. and probably in the '90s the huge echo-ey drumbeats sounded weird and "dated" to you, and in the '00s those huge piles of distorted guitars are sounding kind of funny, and 10 years from now those minimalist bleeps will make you wonder what the hell you were doing back in the day. but that has nothing to do with the music. it has everything to do with you, and what filters you've covered your ears with at any given moment.

another 10 or 20 years down the line, all that stuff will go away, 'cause all of that stuff, huge drumbeats, distorted guitar, minimalist bleeps, whatever, will just sounds like classic vintage music, or, to put it another way, it'll just sound like music. you'll like some of it, you won't like some of it, and that'll be that. datedness won't be the issue anymore.

which is to say, music has to be relatively recent to even have a chance of sounding dated.

or something like that.

no mention of technology in this thread? maybe it's just bubbling under the surface.

I am entirely out of my depth in this discussion and should probably keep my trap shut, but this phrase leaped out at me. Could this constitute proof positive that Coldplay is shortly to sound more dated than any of the other acts mentioned? In a few years will it scream "The Lame-Ass Sound of 2005" in a way that nobody else's music will? (No doubt for many it does that now, but you see what I mean.) Does describing any contemporary, popular-on-a-planetary-scale pop/rock band's music as "timeless" set off a shriek alarm in anyone else's head but mine? NB: I've never heard Coldplay.

It's hard to say: I don't think, for example, that mid-late 80s U2 sounds especially dated now, but that's surely partly because so many bands have continued to record music taking its cues from their sound. But were U2 considered to be new-new or timeless back then? I suspect the latter but people older than me would have to confirm.

cf. Huey Lewis and the News, who I could also imagine falling into that absent center at the time but who now sound tremendously dated, due to the unwillingness of acts to openly follow in their footsteps.

So then what constitutes the "timelessness," the "absent center"-ness, of the likes of U2 and Coldplay? Maximum blandness and sonic non-innovation? Defanging and reprocessing the most listener-friendly aspects of recent musical trends?

Yes.

Maybe the difference b/w Huey Lewis and U2 is Tracer's "blind spot". Huey Lewis didn't (I presume) hold themselves out as being on the cutting edge, but the production techniques and melodic sensibilities which at the time maybe appeared universal and ahistorical were in retrospect actually very historically specific. Whereas U2, esp. on say The Joshua Tree, were actually a bit more conscious about their "sound", but this ended up matching up fairly closely with long-term developments.

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Yeah but all the stuff I've heard from the new Coldplay album sounds "modern" in the same way to me! (although I like the Huey Lewis singles much more than the Coldplay singles)

When I say "conscious" I guess I mean, "conscious of doing something distinct" maybe.

I think the music that tends to sound "dated" in the second sense is either music whose chief appeal to begin with was just its novelty, or mediocre music that sort of rode the coattails of better music at the time by having a similar sound.

But the Stooges' "1969" doesn't sound dated (maybe because it got almost no airplay when it was released); nor does the Stooges' "1970." However, David Bowie's "1984" sounds totally dated, as does the Eurythmics' "Sex Crime."

BTW upthread I'm not trying to argue that 80s U2 has aged well but Huey Lewis hasn't; more I'm trying to work out why I'm more likely to hear that from other people than the reverse.

No, I have to disagree: "1969" and "1970" are very clearly dated. I'd point to "Tonight" as a Stooges song that isn't dated. Also, I forget Zager & Evans' "In the Year 2525," which is kind of like a bounced cheque--it's post-dated.

Another example of dating yourself: Busta Rhymes' apocalyptic visions of y2k sound pretty silly now too.