Chaucer wrote for a patron. Until he was murdered to shut him up.
I was not aware of that. I thought he made his living through an actual real job and … guess I never really thought to wonder for whom or what purpose he wrote.
NickS's post was really really excellent.
To riff on it somewhat randomly, even as a teenager, I don't think I ever knew any serious music fans who listened exclusively to new stuff; every genre or wave has its touchstone in te past of popular music, usually some "underappreciated" artist who is revived. I'm just old enough to remeber when the Velvet Underground filled that role in the 1980s for what would now be called indie rock fans; all metal kids liked Hendrix.
I guess the exceptions would be the genres that are clearly in their immediate, initial golden age; I don't know if rock head kids listened to older stuff in 1967; the hip hop kids weren't listening to older stuff in 1989-1990 (except to get beats and samples), but they are now.
I have no idea why that paragraph is in italics.
Neb: I went through a period of recommending this book to various and sundry. Must not have corresponded with my time on your blog.
"One can hardly forbear to invoke the celebration Tonto Objection" is a gem.
Well, Chaucer did sort of have an actual job. He was a public servant and courtier, and quite well-paid I'd assume, given the seniority of the roles he had. So I'm not sure that he did have a patron in the traditional sense (except that he worked for the state/King).
In point of fact Chaucer's main patron was John of Gaunt, Richard II's uncle and regent during his minority. Chaucer was married to the sister of Katherine Swyford, John's mistress and later wife. So yes, he was pretty well paid, but he got those jobs for a reason.
re: 3
Yeah. As a teenage metal fan in the mid-80s, I/we still listened to most loud-guitar music going back to Hendrix, and lots of early 70s rock and metal/proto-metal -- Sabbath, Deep Purple, Zeppelin, etc -- was part of the canon. Not just in the sense of being genuflected towards, but as part of what we listened to.
Even dance music fans wouldn't normally just be listening to current stuff. Deep house, classic Detroit techno and so on aren't just historical curios.
One of those odd little historical quirks came up in the pub last week, talking with Alex, Tierce, and GY. An awful lot of metal fans I knew were really early adopters of dance music, circa 88/89 and the 'Second Summer of Love'. For two reasons: one, a lot of my metal listening mates were already fairly open to electronic music, via the connection with prog and various forms of stoner/'head' music (Gong, Pink Floyd, etc), and various forms of spacey/electronic music (and Kraftwerk) already got a pass on the usual rock/metal fixation with guitars and live musicianship. Two, when the initial wave of dance music hit, the hip kids who were listening to it needed places to buy drugs, and bikers/metal-types (at least where I'm from) controlled the supply, or at least had contacts that the hip kids hadn't cultivated yet.
So, circa 88/89 the only people I knew listening to dance music a lot were either genuine dance music fans (cutting-edge early-adopter types) and metal fans. My mate Rob, who was a big long-haired grebo looking bloke, was going out to Ibiza and bringing back tapes from the Cafe Del Mar and the like, really bloody early. You'd never have guessed to look at him.
I don't know if rock head kids listened to older stuff in 1967
Well, it was harder to find the oldstuff then, there was a lot of new stuff around, and the canon (s) was in the process of being created. For example, we did listen to Kind of Blue but Silent Way and BB were competing for attention and understanding. And why would we hunt up the old BB King singles when Indianola was being released (although I now prefer the 50s material.)
I will be back. Gotta take a little break to walk the dogs and get a colonoscopy.
I don't know if rock head kids listened to older stuff in 1967
What we did do was look at the writing credits on John Mayall and Ten Years After albums and then go and hunt down the original Muddy Waters/Willie Dixon/Otis Rush/Buddy Guy material. This was always enlightenening and often surprising.
The cool record buying public then gradually split into those who found that they actually liked the blues and those who didn't so much.
11,12: For the general population, I think the massive difference in the accessibility of music from prior decades (especially for younger teenagers) makes this a very different conversation for the last several decades compared to anything prior to that.
[P]art of the canon. Not just in the sense of being genuflected towards, but as part of what we listened to.
Fertile ground for cultural archaeology. E.g., whither the phantom, dictated but not read genuflected-but-not-heard canon when iTunes makes it so easy to download all the stuff that the local obsessive-compulsive tells you about?
Also, Malory had prison as a patron for a good long while during composition.
OT: Speaking of chimeric novelty, I have too much free time had an idea for a tabletop role-playing game set in the mid-'80s television miniseries-based-on-the-bestselling-Gesamtkunstwerk world of authors like Judith Krantz, said game to be called "Sex & Shopping."
I grew up on classic country blues and love them, but I had a much older friend who just could never get into it, though he tried in the 60s...he was just sort of like "where are all the other instruments?"
People listen to new music for the same reason that we read new comments on Unfogged. It's not that the new comments are better than the comments in the archives; usually they are worse.
But reading the new comments allows us to participate in a conversation.
But new music doesn't 'talk back' any more than old music does.
19, 20: Analogy fails again!
Maybe it's more like the same reason people join a book club and all decide to read the same book? Do people really talk about pop music all that much?
I don't have much time for 'the blues', either, tbh. I really like a lot of music that has its roots in the blues -- jazz, swing, etc. -- and I love soul and funk, but most blues (with a few individual exceptions) I can take or leave.
The ability to download stuff has made for a bit of a sea-change, I think. I've friends who were and are obsessive record collectors, so I was lucky enough to be able to access stuff that was quite obscure, pre-internet. I remember a friend making a compilation of classic soul tunes on which one side was alternating male and female singers, and then the other side was exactly the same tunes but with the genders of the singers reversed. So, Etta James singing 'I'd Rather Go Blind' on one side, Clarence Carter on the other. That sort of thing.
He spent ages doing it, and could only do it because he was a guy with a wall of vinyl and a deep knowledge of soul music. These days, that's about 20 minutes work, in Spotify.
Clarence Carter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87VPR0P3M-U
Etta James: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YApNirMC9gM
NickS's post was really really excellent.
Why thank you.
People listen to new music for the same reason that we read new comments on Unfogged. It's not that the new comments are better than the comments in the archives; usually they are worse.
But reading the new comments allows us to participate in a conversation.
I'd say that I understand why conversations will tend to gravitate towards the new, but I object to conventions of music writing, and music conversations which encourage people to pretend to be teenagers or experts (or to pretend that they're talking to teenagers or experts).
I realize that I was never that clear in my original post. Speaking of which to people mind if I eventually quote some of the comments here and post them in the comments to my post. I suspect that's a post I'll re-visit so it would be nice to keep some of this conversation in one place.
Country blues suffers a lot from sound quality of the recordings, and that many great instrumentalists who have no singing voice sing anyway.
I'm fond of the blues, myself.
Here's a set of songs I like:
http://8tracks.com/lw208xx/blues-mostly-from-chicago?mix_set_id=3467196
The most interesting new recordings I've heard have been from Africa. Vieux Farka Toure's Bullet the Blue Sky cover is really nice; the live version on YouTube is not great. Spotify's supposedly going to come to the US.
Oh, on the original topic-- I think that a lot of the tone comes from the economics of criticism. The difference between professional critics and the music blogs of knowledgeable enthusiasts is night and day. The amateurs who stop doing it when they've said their piece come out ahead.
By the way, I don't normally read the AV Club, but I've seen a couple of people recently link to the They Might Be Giants cover of "Tubthumping" which got me to look at the series of covers they've hosted and produced, and I recommend "Don't You Want Me" which demonstrates and pays tribute to it's strength as a pop song.
re: 25
I like a lot of the African musicians whose style has a blues element (Farka Toure(s) included), and I like individual musicians, there are brilliant players [from Blind Blake, through to the various Kings] but blues is vastly outnumbered in my listening by jazz and soul, and as a genre it doesn't really gel with me. Or, more accurately, the blues I like is the sort of stuff that slides imperceptibly into early rock and roll or swing (jump blues, basically) or into soul (Bobby Bland, BB King).
I heard Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog for the fist time a few weeks ago. So great.
3: the hip hop kids weren't listening to older stuff in 1989-1990 (except to get beats and samples)
Maybe not in 1989, but certainly by 1991-2 there were plenty of people I knew (urban, working-to-middle class, various races) hip-hop kids who were already going back to jazz and Gil Scott Heron, and Parliament and the like. And I'm hardly holding up my little crowd of south Minneapolis student radicals as being the cutting edge of hipness. I mean, if I had been a HS senior in 1989, or a college freshman, I think I would have known the people who were already scanning the archives.
I am going to my first live show in like a hundred million years tonight and I am very excited. I declare this announcement on topic because it pertains to music.
We require the name of the act. ... Because we're feminists.
I don't want to disapoint you, Di, but the Katy Perry concert was cancelled.
"rock head kids listened to older stuff in 1967"
i dunno about the listener kids, but the artists were listening to a shitton of blue artists. which is pretty equivalent to the crate-diggers.
If by 'hip hop heads' you mean people exposed to black culture, my experience going to a black barber shop makes me think you might hear a lot of pfunk growing up, so its not nsomething you need to seek out as a teen.
Most importantly, I vote in support of geeks and teenagers keeping all the yuppie rifraf out of the discussion. Who wants to hear what people who have no soul think about music? fuck right off.
if you combine some a smallish dose of a psychadeli with a moderate dose of a dopaminergic, you might regain some feeling. let me know when you do that.