Music Was My First Love

In what year was the best ever music made produced? You know what I mean, the perfect singles that you loved way back when. The ones that have stayed with you all your life and even now bring a smile to your face.

It’s a daft question I know, one that can never be answered categorically, but I suspect that most people’s year of choice would be sometime around when they were between the ages of 12 and sixteen. Those are the years that you’re generally most receptive to the importance of music in your life.

I know that I was. The music of my youth was magnificent and still stands the test of time. I could never understand why kids of today don’t recognise the brilliance of the stuff that was produced back then. Real songs with meaningful lyrics played by angry young men on real instruments. Old fogey I may be, but at least I’m right. How can anybody listen to all that dance rubbish? It’s all bum-tish, bum-tish, bum-tish and something that sounds like a car alarm going off. No wonder they all take drugs at raves, I should imagine it would be the only way to listen to that garbage.

I was ranting at the radio as usual because Radio Two had dared to play something modern – from about 1999, it was – and I was just getting into my stride when it struck me. As I write this we’re in the year 2013. How on earth did that happen? The music that I’m thinking of mostly harks back to around 1977. That’s 36 years ago. Thirty-six! Tempus doesn’t half fugit if you don’t keep track of it. Many people who were listening to the same stuff as me back then are grandparents now. But what a year for music it was. The classic first albums by Elvis Costello, the Boomtown Rats, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, Television, the Stranglers…  I could go on.

So why don’t people born in 1990 or there abouts listen to these classic songs? Well I guess it’s mostly that the kids who are listening to music today have as much in common with the Clash and Costello as I did with the top artists of 1941 – 36 years before 1977. That would be Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynne or Bing Crosby. What a horrifying realisation. These are all artists that I’ve come to appreciate if not necessarily like as I’ve got older but would I have willingly listened to them as a teenager?  I think not.

The musical choices of our youth gives us an identity. They’re something that we, as children beginning to enter an adult world, can own at a time in our lives when the most important things around us belong to our parents. More often than not, we want our selections to be distinctly different from theirs. It’s a teenage rebellion and if listening to music that sounds (to them) awful is as bad as it gets then I guess the parents should be thankful.

Each generation should listen to their own music, especially if their elders turn their noses up at it. That’s right and proper.

Just cut it out with the bum-tish, bum-tish, OK?

© Shaun Finnie 2013