08-04-2021, 02:07 PM
(08-04-2021, 12:53 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Something like 80% of my music collection will likely be thought of as worthless for even a single spin decades from now as it was viewed as corny when it debuted let alone now or decades from now. Some of it may sound cool & be pleasant to listen to but is of the type that is relevant only during the era. I guess such is life in a 3T/early 4T? Was most US or European popular music of the prior 3T & early 4T (1910s to early 1930s) similar in this aspect?
As a general rule, pop culture (like much else) from a 3T does not age well. But the music on LP's from the 1950's and 1960's that I noticed was mostly from GI and early-wave performers for people of like age. If 3T pop music gets criticized for being shallow and witless (Barney Google, with his goo-goo-goo-gely eyes"... or "Yes, we have no bananas") or even worse, un-musical (rap will get that treatment), the 1T music that I saw was either too anesthetic, insipid, or corny for current tastes. I doubt that it will be revived. I'm not talking about jazz artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, or John Coltrane. The witty and whimsical will be remembered, often in allusions to the time in cinematic treatments.
Contrast Big Band-era music, which works on multiple aesthetic levels at once, something like Haydn or Mozart.
Maybe GI tastes in pop culture relate to their experiences, especially if in World War II combat. Most had experienced enough strong sensation for multiple lifetimes, and they came to like the bland and "soothing". This was the generation that created Muzak ® and its format as "easy-listening" music which bowdlerized a show tune or recent pop hit into an orchestral arrangement with ethereal strings (the technique for that is to exclude violas whose absence one can hear but that one rarely hears directly in orchestral music) with gimmicky use of non-string instruments. Such music played on radio frequencies on the FM dial, often with the letters "EZ" in the call letters before the radio stations found that few people were listening.
A work such as J S Bach's Mass in B Minor isn't easy listening.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.