{"id":919,"date":"2004-06-19T14:53:46","date_gmt":"2004-06-19T22:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/06\/19\/ill-see-your-wacky-music-and-raise-you-an-explanation\/"},"modified":"2004-06-19T14:53:46","modified_gmt":"2004-06-19T22:53:46","slug":"ill-see-your-wacky-music-and-raise-you-an-explanation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=919","title":{"rendered":"I'll see your wacky music and raise you an explanation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday Amp posted<\/a> about some of the wacky music he heard at a high school graduation party. In summary: hits from the late seventies and eighties. Amp wonders why kids are listening to this stuff that is so obviously anachronistic to the youth of today; I may have an answer.<\/p>\n

I can’t speak for hip-hop, as I’m still desperately trying to find some aside from DJ Shadow and Prefuse 73 that doesn’t suck, but rock-and-roll is currently experiencing an obsession with the late seventies and the whole of the eighties. Consider the success of the Darkness, a pseudo-80’s band, or the “dancepunk” groups\u2014the Rapture, !!!, Radio 5, Liars\u2014that sound like the Gang of Four, or the “garage rock revival” of the White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs\u2014not to mention the Strokes\u2014or the post-punk obsession of groups like Interpol, or the electroclash influences of the Postal Service.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, most of these bands are still in the province of the indie cool kids, but I think that there’s a resurgence of eighties culture across the white bread spectrum. Take a dip into Hot Topic these days and what’ll you see? The same thing you’ll see at Target: Transformers, Thundercats, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony\u2014the defining toys and paraphanalia of childhood in the eighties. I’m not surprised that this has trickled down into the musical tastes of the graduates at the party Amp went to.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what causes this except that it may, perhaps, be the same thing that’s made me seek out some music from the eighties. I’m only a couple years older than the graduates Amp visited\u2014although I’ve been out of high school for much longer, so this analysis may mean less than nothing\u2014and I’ve always been quietly fascinated with the eighties because I’m aware that the first six years of my life were spent in them but I can’t remember anything about them. I can vaguely remember the New Kids on the Block, the crimped hair, and the wretched music that powered the inspirational sections of movies, but little more than that. My memory doesn’t really begin until ’92 and doesn’t start to crystalize until ’93 or ’94. I’ve always wondered if I missed anything important, any really great music or movies or fashions or whatever. So when I got to be seventeen or eighteen or so, I started looking.<\/p>\n

I’m wondering if the “kids these days” aren’t doing much of the same thing. Were those things that they played with as kids\u2014or, more likely, the things that their older siblings played with as kids\u2014actually cool? Was the music terrible or good or what? Was The Neverending Story<\/i> really all that good of a movie?<\/p>\n

So that’s my explanation for things: a bit of vague nostalgia mixed with a hindsight curiousity and a culture that’s actively interested in recycling some bits from the eighties mixed with the simple fact that music these days is actually remarkably dull if you’re a white kid who can’t or won’t like hip-hop. In ten years or so, if popular music is as dead as it is today, I wouldn’t be surprised to see kids jumping around to a playlist that included Limp Bizkit and Britney Spears and Ricky Martin. At which point, I’ll probably be standing around, looking at kids at a high school graduation party, saying to myself, “The fuck are they doing listening to this stuff?”<\/p>\n

Hmm, as a final note, I did remember one group, or individual at least, from the hip-hop half of the airways who has been digging into the eighties for inspiration for his music. Big Boi’s half of the latest Outkast album, Speakerboxx\/The Love Below<\/i>, was heavy with beats cut with old-school 808’s which hit the height of their popularity with musicians in the late eighties.<\/i>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday Amp posted about some of the wacky music he heard at a high school graduation party. In summary: hits from the late seventies and eighties. Amp wonders why kids are listening to this stuff that is so obviously anachronistic … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-popular-and-unpopular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}