Development of Music Tasting?
Jul. 27th, 2020 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tbutlerThis started as a comment on Yoon Ha Lee's post on Favorite Songs over Time, but started growing so out of control that I figured I'd better break it out into a separate post. So a look at how my music tastes developed over time, for those few people who might be interested...
Favorite vocal songs came in batches over the years.
When I was in grade school, we lived in Denver, and used to do a lot of car trips. There were a few of my parents' 8-Tracks that were played enough to embed themselves deeply:
Peter, Paul and Mary In Concert - too many childhood favorites to really pick one. :( I suppose the ones that always make me choke up are the live version of Puff, the Magic Dragon and It's Raining for deeply felt childhood nostalgia.
Everything's Archie: The Archies, including the bubblegum standard Sugar, Sugar. (...my parents must have been incredibly patient people. ^^;; )
The Association's Greatest Hits - Windy being the one that really grabbed me.
A collection of 60s hits, with Up, Up and Away being the standout.
John Denver also entered my brain at this time - living in Denver, it was kind of hard to avoid it. :) So we have Take Me Home, Country Roads, Grandma's Feather Bed, and of course Rocky Mountain High. (I do love Calypso, Yoon, but that was picked up much later! ^_- )
I remember associated 'summer camp'-esque in-city activities back from near the end of that time as well, and picking up some current pop radio by osmosis as we rode around on a school bus and roller-skated at a rink - Love Will Keep Us Together, You're No Good, Help Me and You Don't Have to be a Star are some examples. This is notable for being one of the few times in my life that my music tastes were actually contemporary with the time. ^^;;
Then there's the group of songs I picked up around age 10, when we moved to Kansas City, and I had so much trouble getting to sleep that my parents forced me to put on an 'easy listening' station at bedtime. *sheepish look* Which in Kansas City at the time was mostly a cross between mellower late 60s/early 70s pop/rock tunes and pure schmaltzy easy listening. So Fool on the Hill, Here Comes the Sun, Summer Breeze, And When I Die on one side, and things like Mona Lisa and After the Lovin' on the other. Cat's in the Cradle wedged its way in through the chorus around that time, though I didn't really understand it until years later.
(This was about the last time my parents had a significant impact on my music tastes, with Simon and Garfunkel's Concert in Central Park - notable also for cementing my love for great concert albums, after PPM In Concert.)
This period warped my music tastes for the rest of my life. *wry g* Because they were very out of step with my peer group and what pop/rock was turning into during the 80s, as a reaction, I instead started digging deeper into pop/rock from the 60s and 70s - the harder rock contemporaries of the mellower pop I'd been picking up. So I wasn't listening to Wham!, ah-ha, Wang Chung, or Hall & Oates, I was picking up the Beatles, Elton John, Boston, Kansas... for example:
Ob-la-Di, Ob-la-Da and Blackbird led to Magical Mystery Tour, Revolution and I am the Walrus, with all the Beatles in between.
Don't Go Breaking My Heart moved on to Philadelphia Freedom and Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting... then his cover of Pinball Wizard turned into a gateway to The Who.
Dust in the Wind led to Carry on Wayward Son and Point of Know Return.
And once I was there, it was a short hop to Foreplay/Long Time, All Right Now, Let it Ride, Smoke on the Water, The Story in Your Eyes, No Sugar Tonight... with detours to softer stuff like Miracles, Lucky Man, Old Man and Share the Land - after all, Life's Been Good!
So at this point, I was drifting further into 60s/70s rock/pop (aided and abetted by a growing fascination with the 60s as a cultural movement), as my peers were getting into 80s pop/rock - something I really didn't like.
Chicago is my poster band for what I didn't like about pop/rock in the 80s. Starting as Chicago Transit Authority in the late 60s, their early stuff had a very earthy rock/soul flavor, with lots of horns, acoustic piano, and the like - starting with a great Beginnings, Saturday in the Park and 25 or 6 to 4 are classic examples. I like that period a lot. Then in the mid-70s, they switched to a mellower sound with songs like If You Leave Me Now - which I didn't like as well as their early work, but was still good. They entered the 80s with Hard for Me To Say I'm Sorry, which is the last song of theirs I like - but it shows the seeds of their downfall. The vocals have completely lost the earthy tone of the early 70s and taken on an edge that sounds almost whiny to me, and synth has started creeping in*. The music continued to degenerate until it reached the nadir where I couldn't stand to listen to it any more, If She Would Have Been Faithful. The chorus has turned into a full-on whine, a crappy drum track has started to dominate the background, and synth has replaced acoustic piano and horns.
*I do like synth as synth - when it's used to make unique sounds hard to duplicate by acoustic instruments. Hot Butter's version of Popcorn is a great example; compare it to the acoustic orchestral version by Arthur Fiedler. But in the 80s, there was a bad trend of substituting synth for acoustic instruments, and I hated it.
There were some 80s songs I liked, but they were few and far between. Glenn Frey gets credit when The Heat is On, Toto took us to Africa. Kool and the Gang put on a good Celebration. Miami Vice and Beverly Hills Cop's Axel F demonstrated that the 80s sound could be used for good, and are examples of synth being used for its own unique sound instead of imitating acoustic instruments. Ghostbusters and St Elmo's Fire were another pair of iconic themes that crossed to the pop charts. Life in a Northern Town was a breath of reflective fresh air and Joe Cocker put us Up Where We Belong, into the Night Shift. Phil Collins did do a nice cover of You Can't Hurry Love... though That's All; you can take your Invisible Touch far, far away.
And things didn't get any better. Tainted Love tainted the whole decade. (Just compare it to the 60s version.) It was badly Out of Touch. Let's Hear It For The Boy? Let's not. Please. Voices Carry too far. Everybody Wants to Rule the World? Not me! There's Always Something There to Remind Me that I didn't like the music.
And that's where things pretty much stopped for me. If I didn't like the 80s, at least there were a few songs I remember favorably; I honestly can't think of any vocal music I liked in the 90s that didn't' come out of a band from an earlier generation. There'll be occasional exceptions like Hamilton, Sheryl Crow's Real Gone**, Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, Breathe In Breathe Out or Sarah Jarosz, but for the most part my vocal music tastes have stayed stuck in the 60s/70s.
**The Cars Opening with Real Gone is a classic example of music mixed with action that I'm a sucker for. Anime has a lot of examples; Bubblegum Crisis had three classic music/action mixes with Konya wa Hurricane, Mad Machine and Say Yes!. Cowboy Bebop had some great ones as well, like the opening to Heavy Metal Queen, Bad Dog No Biscuits or Too Good Too Bad.
Favorite vocal songs came in batches over the years.
When I was in grade school, we lived in Denver, and used to do a lot of car trips. There were a few of my parents' 8-Tracks that were played enough to embed themselves deeply:
Peter, Paul and Mary In Concert - too many childhood favorites to really pick one. :( I suppose the ones that always make me choke up are the live version of Puff, the Magic Dragon and It's Raining for deeply felt childhood nostalgia.
Everything's Archie: The Archies, including the bubblegum standard Sugar, Sugar. (...my parents must have been incredibly patient people. ^^;; )
The Association's Greatest Hits - Windy being the one that really grabbed me.
A collection of 60s hits, with Up, Up and Away being the standout.
John Denver also entered my brain at this time - living in Denver, it was kind of hard to avoid it. :) So we have Take Me Home, Country Roads, Grandma's Feather Bed, and of course Rocky Mountain High. (I do love Calypso, Yoon, but that was picked up much later! ^_- )
I remember associated 'summer camp'-esque in-city activities back from near the end of that time as well, and picking up some current pop radio by osmosis as we rode around on a school bus and roller-skated at a rink - Love Will Keep Us Together, You're No Good, Help Me and You Don't Have to be a Star are some examples. This is notable for being one of the few times in my life that my music tastes were actually contemporary with the time. ^^;;
Then there's the group of songs I picked up around age 10, when we moved to Kansas City, and I had so much trouble getting to sleep that my parents forced me to put on an 'easy listening' station at bedtime. *sheepish look* Which in Kansas City at the time was mostly a cross between mellower late 60s/early 70s pop/rock tunes and pure schmaltzy easy listening. So Fool on the Hill, Here Comes the Sun, Summer Breeze, And When I Die on one side, and things like Mona Lisa and After the Lovin' on the other. Cat's in the Cradle wedged its way in through the chorus around that time, though I didn't really understand it until years later.
(This was about the last time my parents had a significant impact on my music tastes, with Simon and Garfunkel's Concert in Central Park - notable also for cementing my love for great concert albums, after PPM In Concert.)
This period warped my music tastes for the rest of my life. *wry g* Because they were very out of step with my peer group and what pop/rock was turning into during the 80s, as a reaction, I instead started digging deeper into pop/rock from the 60s and 70s - the harder rock contemporaries of the mellower pop I'd been picking up. So I wasn't listening to Wham!, ah-ha, Wang Chung, or Hall & Oates, I was picking up the Beatles, Elton John, Boston, Kansas... for example:
Ob-la-Di, Ob-la-Da and Blackbird led to Magical Mystery Tour, Revolution and I am the Walrus, with all the Beatles in between.
Don't Go Breaking My Heart moved on to Philadelphia Freedom and Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting... then his cover of Pinball Wizard turned into a gateway to The Who.
Dust in the Wind led to Carry on Wayward Son and Point of Know Return.
And once I was there, it was a short hop to Foreplay/Long Time, All Right Now, Let it Ride, Smoke on the Water, The Story in Your Eyes, No Sugar Tonight... with detours to softer stuff like Miracles, Lucky Man, Old Man and Share the Land - after all, Life's Been Good!
So at this point, I was drifting further into 60s/70s rock/pop (aided and abetted by a growing fascination with the 60s as a cultural movement), as my peers were getting into 80s pop/rock - something I really didn't like.
Chicago is my poster band for what I didn't like about pop/rock in the 80s. Starting as Chicago Transit Authority in the late 60s, their early stuff had a very earthy rock/soul flavor, with lots of horns, acoustic piano, and the like - starting with a great Beginnings, Saturday in the Park and 25 or 6 to 4 are classic examples. I like that period a lot. Then in the mid-70s, they switched to a mellower sound with songs like If You Leave Me Now - which I didn't like as well as their early work, but was still good. They entered the 80s with Hard for Me To Say I'm Sorry, which is the last song of theirs I like - but it shows the seeds of their downfall. The vocals have completely lost the earthy tone of the early 70s and taken on an edge that sounds almost whiny to me, and synth has started creeping in*. The music continued to degenerate until it reached the nadir where I couldn't stand to listen to it any more, If She Would Have Been Faithful. The chorus has turned into a full-on whine, a crappy drum track has started to dominate the background, and synth has replaced acoustic piano and horns.
*I do like synth as synth - when it's used to make unique sounds hard to duplicate by acoustic instruments. Hot Butter's version of Popcorn is a great example; compare it to the acoustic orchestral version by Arthur Fiedler. But in the 80s, there was a bad trend of substituting synth for acoustic instruments, and I hated it.
There were some 80s songs I liked, but they were few and far between. Glenn Frey gets credit when The Heat is On, Toto took us to Africa. Kool and the Gang put on a good Celebration. Miami Vice and Beverly Hills Cop's Axel F demonstrated that the 80s sound could be used for good, and are examples of synth being used for its own unique sound instead of imitating acoustic instruments. Ghostbusters and St Elmo's Fire were another pair of iconic themes that crossed to the pop charts. Life in a Northern Town was a breath of reflective fresh air and Joe Cocker put us Up Where We Belong, into the Night Shift. Phil Collins did do a nice cover of You Can't Hurry Love... though That's All; you can take your Invisible Touch far, far away.
And things didn't get any better. Tainted Love tainted the whole decade. (Just compare it to the 60s version.) It was badly Out of Touch. Let's Hear It For The Boy? Let's not. Please. Voices Carry too far. Everybody Wants to Rule the World? Not me! There's Always Something There to Remind Me that I didn't like the music.
And that's where things pretty much stopped for me. If I didn't like the 80s, at least there were a few songs I remember favorably; I honestly can't think of any vocal music I liked in the 90s that didn't' come out of a band from an earlier generation. There'll be occasional exceptions like Hamilton, Sheryl Crow's Real Gone**, Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, Breathe In Breathe Out or Sarah Jarosz, but for the most part my vocal music tastes have stayed stuck in the 60s/70s.
**The Cars Opening with Real Gone is a classic example of music mixed with action that I'm a sucker for. Anime has a lot of examples; Bubblegum Crisis had three classic music/action mixes with Konya wa Hurricane, Mad Machine and Say Yes!. Cowboy Bebop had some great ones as well, like the opening to Heavy Metal Queen, Bad Dog No Biscuits or Too Good Too Bad.
