tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407507233856990377.post4294380679938033164..comments2023-08-17T00:31:28.700-07:00Comments on Deep Pagan Thoughts: Forty years later . . . Led Zeppelin IVUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407507233856990377.post-15037817107904838992011-11-10T09:56:33.931-08:002011-11-10T09:56:33.931-08:00I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I stil...I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I still listen to a lot of new music, and go out of my way to seek it out. Most of my favorite bands of the last fifteen years receive no radio airplay: Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, Gaelic Storm, Within Temptation, Nightwish, Kate Rusby, Butch Walker, Blood Ceremony, Fountains of Wayne, and the Old 97's. My favorite bands fit into no radio format, and without the internet I probably wouldn't even know they were still making music. <br /><br />The internet has been a godsend when it comes to music. There's more music than ever at your fingertips, and bands can now exist without major labels, and interact with fans more easily. Weirdly, a band from Denmark can seem more "near" to me than a band stationed forty minutes away. I'm not the kind of music fan who ignores the present and only looks back towards the past. I try to listen to everything, but I will admit to enjoying the 70's more than any other decade, a decade I was barely conscious for. <br /><br />I do lionize Led Zeppelin. I'm passionate about Zeppelin like people are about their college football teams. I'm a true believer in the power of rock and roll, I cried when Paul McCartney rocked SNL last season, and my world comes to a complete stop when a new Pearl Jam record is released. I'm passionate about rock and roll in a way that borders on scary. It's not just something I like, it's something that's shaped my religious experience. Seeing Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio wasn't just "cool" it was an experience on par with losing my virginity. When I write about music everything is the greatest, especially with classic rock with all of its Pagan/Occult overtones. That being said, it makes me prone to hyperbole. <br /><br />Isn't romanticizing the past part of America's DNA? We do it with nearly everything, why should music be any different? It's why there is always such a big market for "nostalgia" and why people watch "Rudolph" every year on TV. Yes, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin (though you'll notice there was no real deal made out of IV's 40th) are pushed down our throats, but they are bands that continually connect with people. My wife is a huge Beatles fan, she loves John Lennon more than any other artist, she was born the year he died. It's certainly easier to mythologize these bands, which is a part of the appeal, but there's something about them to appeals to lots of people regardless of generation. I think it's great that people rediscover them every genration, but it shouldn't be at the expense of contemporary artists.<br /><br />I do disagree with some of your points. Record labels were far more patient in the 60's and (especially) the 70's when nurturing artists. You could make four or five albums that didn't sell squat in the 70's and retain your record deal if someone believed in you. (Aerosmith, Kansas, Peter Frampton, and KISS are big examples of this-all initial failures that took years to break through.) Since the 90's it's been "one and done" for most bands on major labels. (XTC was on Virgin records for ten years, and the label lost money on the band every year, but continued to let Andy Partridge release records. Yes, they ended up in debt to Virgin, but at least the chord wasn't just totally cut.)<br /><br />I'm not sure earlier eras stifled creativity. There were lots of weird prog-rock experiments (often with Pagan overtones) on major labels. The 70's birthed punk, disco, new wave, and urban cowboy . . .it was a pretty exciting time for music. I think the music business got more cut-throat in the 80's and 90's, especially when they all became units of Seagrams, Sony, etc. As crappy as Metallica is now, Elektra took a big risk with them in the 80's, just as they did with The Doors in the 60's. <br /><br />I could ramble about this for hours too . . . .Panmankeyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10377332569960991864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407507233856990377.post-38831148667971927922011-11-09T10:05:35.949-08:002011-11-09T10:05:35.949-08:00"...you are probably more likely to listen to..."...you are probably more likely to listen to an album while sitting at your computer, typing up something, checking email, etc, perhaps texting a friend about how awesome something is."<br /><br />I wonder if this is really all that different from any other period in recorded music/radio. Sure, you had "appointment listening" (and you still do), but you also had folks working, playing, and occupying themselves in hundreds of ways while various songs and albums were playing in the background. The Beats wrote while listening to jazz, sitting at their typewriters, as we now sit at our laptops. <br /><br />I get that different musical eras can seem epochal, but I work to refuse the impulse to become fixated on them. I don't want to miss the stuff that will someday be seen as classic because I convinced myself that the best days of the album were over. I can't even begin to count how many new albums I've bought/had sent to me this year, and so many of them are worthy of examination and praise. <br /><br />Here's the thing, classic albums will still be classic even if I'm not paying attention to them at the moment. Fairport Convention, The Beatles, Joy Division, etc, etc, will be waiting for me whenever I need to reconnect with what they gave me as a listener. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy as much as I can from the artists who are coming up, testing their limits, and helping to define music for their fans. <br /><br />Also, from a personal standpoint, and I'm sure you'll disagree, I think the "classic rock" era has been lionized enough. Their places in the firmament are established, they don't need any of my time or energy to do what they are doing. Meanwhile, so much music since then has gotten lost, and so much new music is being ignored. It was only fairly recently that critics have excavated the post-punk era (1978-1984), a time that was actually far more influential than punk itself, and shaped so much modern music. <br /><br />I have no beef with Led Zeppelin or their classic-ness, but I do think that there's something very wrong when they get more airplay than hundreds of deserving young artists who should be enjoying their time, now. Or the fact that "classic" stations are laser-focused on the late sixties and early seventies (with a bit of U2 or neutered grunge thrown in now and then) with nearly 40 years of music vanished from the airwaves. <br /><br />The Internet, for all its faults, has acted as a corrective to huge injustices in the music industry. Remember the runaway success of Mp3.com back in the day? How it allowed fans of outsider genres to find stuff? How Internet radio blossomed, returning free-form creativity to an all-but-dead medium? In fact, a main reason we have so much piracy today is because the major labels essentially said "fuck you" to Napster when they approached them to make a deal. At that moment the history of music changed, and the old order signed its death warrant. <br /><br />The magical monoculture of yesteryear is a construction. Partially from nostalgia, but partially from a consortium of businesses who dictated what the rules would be. Those simpler times made a small group of people very, very, very rich. It also stifled diversity, destroyed artists, and allowed for the "rock royalty" to rule unchallenged for a long time. <br /><br />Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. This is a topic I'm pretty passionate about, so thanks for providing a forum.Jason Pitzl-Watershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03798973716341545440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407507233856990377.post-55961856933216081902011-11-08T16:27:13.424-08:002011-11-08T16:27:13.424-08:00Jason, you and I are both not old enough to really...Jason, you and I are both not old enough to really have been a part of the LP tradition, so perhaps my description of it is wishful thinking. I grew up with cassette tapes, which certainly weren't magickal in anyway. No wonder I mythologized my father's record collection.<br /><br />There's no surprise when you listen to a new album today. By the time you hear it, it's already been streamed online, with Youtube videos posted everywhere. It's entirely possible to illegally download almost any album weeks before its released. This is probably exciting to a lot of people, it certainly takes the guess work out of music, but I will say that it takes away the surprise, it's like knowing what's under the Christmas tree before unwrapping the gifts. It doesn't mean the gifts suck, just that there's no mystery. <br /><br />I'm not sure I'd call anyone's way of acquiring music deficient, but it certainly was different. Music has turned into a more social experience than it used to be. Instead of having to invite your friends over to listen to something on the turn table, you can post a favorite song on facebook and share it with the world. Even when you and I were younger you could make a cassette copy of your favorite album to pass out to friends, nobody was doing that in 1971. Listening to music was a more intimate experience because there was no other way to have the experience. I'd also argue that with more limited entertainment options, it was easier to immerse yourself in the album experience. Now you are probably more likely to listen to an album while sitting at your computer, typing up something, checking email, etc, perhaps texting a friend about how awesome something is. <br /><br />I admit it, I romanticize the 1970's, but that was more my father's era of music than mine. I wasn't even born when Zep IV came out, and by the time I became a full on Zeppelin fanatic they had broken up ten years prior. Even today new generations continually go back and become Pink Floyd, Beatles, and Zeppelin fanatics, those bands transcend the era in which they performed. Part of their appeal is probably because they've broken up and as a result are rather mysterious, but the music is also still fresh. <br /><br />Perhaps I'm becoming an old fuddy duddy . . . the advantages of today's system is that I can look up all kinds of music in seconds. The downside is that I tend to listen to all of that music more passively than in year's past. <br /><br />Interesting discussion though, and if I've offended anyone with my overly romantic descriptions of 1971 I apologize. To me that era is like a fairy tale.Panmankeyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10377332569960991864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4407507233856990377.post-45430608598209642002011-11-08T12:27:59.771-08:002011-11-08T12:27:59.771-08:00I profoundly disagree with your opening paragraph....I profoundly disagree with your opening paragraph. I'm roughly of the same generation as you, I believe, and I have to say that this recent tendency amongst us post-Boomers/Generation X-ers to lionize and romanticize the recent musical past is revisionist at best, and anti-art at its worst. I'm sorry, but to say that "there's nothing special or surprising about listening to a new album today" says a lot more about your listening habits then about the actual quality of albums being released right now.<br /><br />Having grown up in a cultural Midwestern backwater where the mainstream musical options were: Classic Rock, Top 40, or Country, to decry the ease in which young people (and us older people) can now acquire new music totally ignores how dissatisfied so many of us actually were with the pre-Internet music industry status quo. The "hunt" for new and different sounds could lead to as many duds as it did great albums, especially if you were only going by word-of-mouth, obscure magazine reviews, or album art. I would never, in a million years, return us to that. It was good music I treasured, not the hunt for it.<br /><br />Listening to an album doesn't have to be "hard" to be an "experience." I have met and interacted with so many younger kids who obsess over albums, listening to songs over and over again, posting and writing and speculating about their favorite bands. Tumblr, to name just one example, is wonderland of music fandom. The Internet hasn't ruined music for them. This "walked a mile backwards in the snow to listen to my favorite album" stuff is just a way of saying "we had it better, and you'll never know". Its back-door generational elitism.<br /><br />The real truth is that hardcore music fans will always appreciate music differently than people who are casual fans, and that's OK. For every person who obsessed over Led Zep's "IV" looking for hidden meanings, pouring over it like a sacred text, there were millions and millions more who just experienced it as a collection of decent tunes. Who moved on to something else a few months later. <br /><br />To paraphrase some other band, the kids are alright. I'm not going to get on a soapbox and tell them that the way they experience and acquire music is deficient, I'm too busy listening to their recommendations and (easily) sharing my own musical obsessions with them.Jason Pitzl-Watershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03798973716341545440noreply@blogger.com