the best songs ever: the lost years

[Eric the Green]

(09-04-2016, 12:55 AM)gabrielle Wrote:

(09-03-2016, 05:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I am sure the music that made teenagers feel good (allegedly; it seems like it was expressing rage or boredom more often) in these "lost years," would not have made me feel good when I was any younger. 

Nope, no boredom going on.  You are totally wrong there.  Rage, however....

"I had to look at what was making me so angry..."  --Tori Amos 

Quote:The Beach Boys asked "will I still dig the same things that turned me on as a kid" in 1964, and they started their age count at the age I was when I bought the record. Now, I answer that question, yes!

And I answer yes, too!

With the caveats; I have discovered, or rediscovered, things along the way that I didn't know about before. So, without denying entirely your point about the impact of music in teen years, I have been able to take a wider view and see music from other years more inclusively than I did. Unlike some more conventionally-bound humans, I have been basically the same throughout my life, being somewhat of an old soul, though always with more to learn. I wasn't so different as a teen from what I am now, although for others that may not be the case. It seems to me that music and art goes through phases, and so do people, and I can appreciate the 1950s pop, for example, more than I sometimes did as a teen.

But sometimes the "modernist, experimental, alternative" phases have happened, where the intentionally-ugly has been embraced as the latest style or fad, and this still does not appeal to me as I look back on it. This happened to some extent in visual arts in the mid-20th century, and in the dissonant styles of academic music in the same period, while as the commenter on Hovhannes said, now it's OK again to portray the beautiful and the spiritual in music. Something similar happened in pop and youth music from the mid-1980s through the early-mid 2000s, but now these similar intentionally-ugly "alternative modernist experiments" are over in this field as well, and something of a recovery from this phase is happening today in the 4T; as for example with Pharrell, who embodied shallow rap for a while, but now is able to give us songs like "Happy" and "Freedom" that express beauty in music again.

I also notice that although styles are most characteristic of the period when they come into predominance and establish themselves, their impact continues in later times, for a while at least-- as happened with the "sweet, sentimental" styles of the 1950s lasting into the late 50s and 60s as an undercurrent, or with rap continuing to hold sway today in the 4T, and some 2T musicians continuing to have some hits in the 3T.

Astrology also expresses these phases, as the long-term saecular-planetary positions show parallel developments. For example, in the late 1940s through the mid 1950s, Neptune was in Libra, a harmonious and sweet sign that doesn't go to extremes. This reflected itself in the peaceful and conventional Eisenhower-Nixon years of the 1950s and in the sweet sentimental musical styles of those years. This found an echo in the Nixon years of the early 1970s, when both Uranus and Pluto were also in Libra, and to some extent the Carter and early Reagan years as Pluto continued in Libra while Uranus (the faster planet) had moved on into Scorpio. And the "bubble-gum" pop music of the early 1970s seemed to hark back to the "superficial, sentimental" 1950s pop styles too.

The years when Uranus and Pluto were in conjunction in Virgo and with Neptune in Scorpio were more radical, progressive, innovative years of the mid-sixties, when styles were also more intense and radical and rose to a higher degree of creative energy beyond conventional approaches, which was also reflected politically in the late camelot and LBJ's "Great Society" periods. The Uranus-Pluto in Virgo "Great Society" period also echoed the earlier Neptune in Virgo period of the 1930s and the New Deal in some respects, when Uranus and Pluto were in square. And the Scorpio/Capricorn period of the 1980s and 90s were more downcast and down to earth, with a "techno-experimental" phase in the early 90s under late Bush I/early Bill Clinton as Uranus joined Neptune in conjunction. And so on and so forth.

But yes, many of the 3T American pop styles expressed boredom and ennui, although others expressed rage, and they may not be the same musicians or works doing both at once.

Sorry for the long post; once a boomer gets going waxing philosophical or sociological or whatever one calls it, it sometimes gets carried away.