Taking Sides: New Music v. Old Music

Should we listen primarily to new music (music being made now), or is it wiser to look back into the past at older musical offerings? Music journalism, and its ersatz friends on the internet, tend to favour new music, partly becaue it is more readily linkable to record release schedules, but is this such a good idea?

While I do listen to some new music, at any given moment I am as likely to be excited by some old record that is new to me. I suspect this is also true of a lot of people, and wonder if the official cult of novelty is any less rubbish than that of people who go on about how all the best music was made back in the 1960s.

We did something very similar to this not long ago. I'll see if I can find it.

Yeah, it was a poll "Only New Music" vs "Only Old Music", if you had to choose.

I can't find the damn thing?

why would anyone have to choose? what is the objective difference between "new music" and "old music" anyhow?

This is an equally rubbish question every time someone asks it.

I go through phases. At the moment I'm listening mostly to Beethoven piano sonatas and string quartets, so I'm a mere 200 years out of date.

At least last time there was at least some reasoned thinking about it as a futile conundrum.

If you had to choose between listening to all new music/music to be made in the future and NO music made in the past or music from the past but NO new/future music what would you choose?

There must be some other thread about this too, because I'm almost certain I've answered this question before, but there's no posts by me in that thread.

If you had to choose between listening to all new music/music to be made in the future and NO music made in the past or music from the past but NO new/future music or Nate Dogg what would you choose?

Here you go/are...

At what point should you just give up trying to keep up with what's hip and pop in current music, lean back in your rocking chair, and just listen to them ol' time jazz records?

Haha, that's why I remember talking about this before.

if you had to choose between listening to only new music or only old music, would you in fact be creating this false choice in an attempt to make a statement on one or either of the two?

i thought it was a good thread last time round.

agreed

I see no way that new music will ever possible be as exciting again as music was in the 60s, 70s and first half of the 80s.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

— Baron William Thomson Kelvin

i think about this question a lot because it seems that for a lot of people i've known who really like music, they get to a point where they really start to value old music and while they still may keep up with new music, they'll really only stick to the "safest" new music (i.e. sounds like it could be old).

i have a visceral and bad reaction to this because it seems to be associated with a sort of "oh we are maturing now we are in lol college or beyond and we now understand that the kinks (or whoever) are one of the greatest bands of all time"--like new music was for when you were young and naive or something.

the old music that lasts is good music, mainly. most new music (as a % of absolutely everything that's released) is not very good or memorable.

surely it's a simple as that, boiled right down?

Yes.

what???

the music people like is good music.

and what happens to it then? the more people that like it the longer it keeps a high profile, meaning it's more likely to be available/heard 40 years from now.

I see no way that new music will ever possible be as exciting again as music was in the 60s, 70s and first half of the 80s.

― Geir Hongro, Wednesday, 1 April 2009 14:15 (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Well, the 'exciting and new innovations and developments in progress' in rock music were at their peak around that time. Afterwards, things were more level.

Other kinds of music had a similar upward progression, at different times.

If you only listen to 'Rock' then you will only be satisfied if you do not want any further progression.

Right:?

so what if it's available or heard in 40 years time. not many people like indigenous colombian folk music from the 40s but that doesn't mean it's worthless or not good.

Yeah, longevity is proof of...longevity and not much else, really. Also weird idiosyncracies of marketing, availability of stock thru chance, accidents of fashion. The Canon is a big old accident of history.

it's not the worst indicator

but any further reduction is basically just ILM in a nutshell- it's just based on the individual ear.

OTM. anyone who trusts history to just tell itself happily without random exclusions has way too much faith in humanity.

plus it's not even necessarily an anti-canonical thing, people might be into stuff that didn't sell a lot or was forgotten in its time and good luck to them, the more of that the better.

x-post it is just based on the individual ear, that's why this question is so silly. even the very definition of "new music" and "old music" is based on the individual's definition. how is music from the 60s old music compared to say Beethoven? ETC ETC ETC

it's old when people who heard it first are now all deaf.

The individual ear plus cultural programming = all sense of aesthetic value. You have to remind people that occasionally.

xpost lol was "all deaf" deliberate?

i'd've thought that listening to the old music which has 'lasted', in a widespread cultural sense, is the best argument against that being any sort of indicator of quality

old music gets (re)discovered all the time.

I picked up on "Odessey and Oracle" recently. That's not a nostalgia thing, it meant nothing to me in 1967...

the "lasting" argument doesn't work for me because because a lot of pretty serious obscurists HIGHLY value old music--they're looking for the best garage rock 45s of the 60s or whatever.

i think there is def an underlying thing where liking new music involves sticking yr neck out a bit

Lex why do you think new music is always better than old music?

probably about a third of my listening is current music (as in made and released within the last 18 months or so).

yeah, deaf.

i wasn't suggesting that all 'lost' music was bad or didn't have any worth, but it's not mad challops to suggest that the majority of music from say the 40's that lasted/got reprinted/whatever must have had some merit to a reasonably large audience. i'm not sure you could say that with any confidence about every release made in the present decade.

i'm not sure you could say that with any confidence about every release made in the present decade.

i think precisely ZERO people would actually say that though, stop strawmanning.

how confident are people that their current favourite music will get canonised and 'last'?

but some merit to a reasonably large audience doesn't mean anything...

Now that everything from this decade onwards will be preserved in digital form and replicated for all eternity perhaps this tiresome debate will finally be laid to rest.

"Deaf" was good, I assumed it was deliberate, honest.

It's not challopy, but it leads you to another argument that says goodness of music is predicated on audience size and that is kind of challopy, or not an argument that most people would use when they tried to define "good". It's just nit-picking at words, maybe, but saying something is popular doesn't quite imply the same as saying it's good.

Well, the stuff I liked 'back in the day', whichever day we're talking about, isn't stuff I'd play now.

The 'discovery' route involves stuff I haven't heard before, from any 'age', including the 'present'.

There's a school of thought that says...

It wasn't a 'hit' at the time, because there were better versions around at the time. After the event, and music having changed, people go back for more of what they liked, and some bands who weren't good 'enough' at the time, are found to be 'good enough' now.

to flip darragh's argument around, darragh do you really believe that only the best music from the current era will be remembered in 10 years time? I mean REALLY? you're living in this era and surely you can see the amount of stuff you consider worthy which isn't going to be given a jot of interest in a few years?

x-post otm, the present changes peoples view of the past constantly.

not strawmanning, but pointing out that there is some type of quality control mechanism that filters in over time, even if one doesn't agree with the process.

xp to NV- popularity is an indicator, it's neither the best nor is it the definitive- that changes depending on the person. for most people, it's a reasonably good indicator?

anyway- old music was better, because they played their own instruments.

darragh do you really believe that only the best music from the current era will be remembered in 10 years time

judging by the larry gogan show's rendering of the early 90's, i would doubt it.

older music was better, they played each other's instruments.

Not to mention the fact that this debate is equally irrelevant to vast swathes of music pre-1945 or so, especially as who knows what masterpieces were lost in wars/fires/religious purges.

So it's vaguely applicable to 50 years of musical history, if you're an idiot.

My old man always steps in with his "The Sun is the most popular newspaper in Britain" argument at this point which I don't wholly agree with but it makes some kind of point.

i often wonder what music from the last 5 years will be canonised and fondly remembered in another 20 30 40 years time.

Can't wait for that 2030 John Sim time-travelling drama 'Watch Me Crank Dat'.

noodle vague forget that sun argument, we can cite the nazis.

Nazis still popular tho so they must've had something.

their work has stood the test of time unlike say east timor massacres

or the faddish 90s rwandan genocides

we all thought it was cool at the time

The Nazis had good old tunes you could whistle.

One argument for old music would be that there was tighter quality control back then, most of the times you had to have some skills to get your music recorded and distributed by record labels, whereas these days everyone can put their music online, so it's harder to separate pearls from shit.

"Pol Pot? What was all that about eh? Remember when he was in that Spangles advert?"

http://friendsoflowtherpavilion.co.uk/tinc?key=bBtho9et&id=8&size=l

it was easier to impress people back in the day before the internet made everyone super-intelligent

Tuomas is right about old music tho, that's why every piece of vinyl/CD ever released is a much-treasured statement of artistic beauty still worth hundreds of pounds to collectors today.

You read my argument well.

where is

THE REAL DIRTY VICAR

???

Okay then. For starters, "having some skills" is not a guarantee of being "good". Classical musicians playing, for example, Varèse need mad skills, and yet the resultant recording would have the majority of listeners going "AAAAAAAARGGGGHHHH turn it off hohohoho call this music I could do better than that?" Secondly, record labels put out huge amounts of product on a "suck it and see" or "maybe those crazy kids will dig this" or "fuck it we can write it off against taxes" basis. Don't think most of them were too bothered about "quality control" so much as "will this make money". Thirdly, whether there is more stuff out there today than yesterday has no basis on separating pearls from shit because that's a job for you as an individual listener, not some bell-end of an A&R man ripped to the tits on coke and hooker-bots.

This thread is may more aspie and retarded than the last time we did it.

That post helped how?

Thinking about Varèse has made me ponder the number of 20th century composers whose music has survived not because it's widely popular but because it's narrowly popular with a small cadre of people who rate it. Most of those people would probably like to say that the music is "Good" meaning something other than (more than) popular. It seems like "popular" is too loose a word here to be any use as a synonym for good.

Popular is the only objective measure for "good" though. Everything else is subjective.

that's why nobody's used it! xp

that's bollocks! (not xp)

there's nothing objective about listening to music

Proove me wrong then.

(x-post)

Popular is the only objective measure for "good" though. Everything else is subjective.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 3:26 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

popularity is generally a measure of how popular something is

xpost to Darragh

I appreciate you're saying popularity can be an indicator of being good rather than actually being good but I think that amounts to the same thing and I don't agree for the reasons stated.

"explain to me what words mean"

popularity is just another filter, the root problem is in defining one type/era of music as 'good' against another.

Which is why I was saying that "good" pretty much amounts to nothing more than somebody trying to pretend that their subjective taste is an objective value.

Exactly.

well ok then

Now that everything from this decade onwards will be preserved in digital form and replicated for all eternity perhaps this tiresome debate will finally be laid to rest.

well, no. There will always be people who love digging up obscure old music, just as there will always be people who love unbelievably cutting edge new music.

I meant a different tiresome debate.

obscure music, now that sucks

New Or Old Rock?

Dave Thompson v VOICE OF OUR alt.GENERATION RYAN SCHREIBER