Music, through the ages

Is there a more appealing time warp than an old record player? Not only does the standard matte black metal and peeling wood-look veneer sum up a bygone era, but the sound quality still surpasses anything that digitised files can muster. I’m sure that most of us have, at some point in our adolescence, played some of our parents' ageing record collection out of curiosity and I’m sure that most of us were quite disappointed; for me, the artists were so disappointing that I didn’t even take the records out of their covers.

Part of this issue is a clash of tastes. Firstly, my dad doesn’t really seem to have any; it’s odd how someone went to the trouble of buying what must have been a fairly decent record player all those decades ago and never expressed any interest in music at all. Instead, the LPs were my mother’s and they really weren’t worth listening to.

Oddly, she has good (well, acceptable) taste in music; she’s into Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez and the like, not really my thing. However, these artists did not appear in my mother’s record collection, only in the more recently acquired CD library. Instead, there were albums by Neil Sedaka, the New Seekers (if I remember correctly) and a whole load of other stuff that no one in polite society would ever admit to owning. I know that we all have guilty pleasures and that the folly of youth does result in some fairly bad decisions, but this was on another scale.

How was this even possible? Was my mother the victim of a record swap that went horribly wrong? Or was it that her tastes matured for the better as she grew up? I have never got round to asking her about this thorny topic, but I don’t think I’m alone: my experience is common amongst people of my generation.

Most of our parents come from an age that produced some fantastic music, and yet it seems to be an insurmountable challenge to find anyone who actually liked any of the bands and singers who have gone down in history for the right reasons. Some of my friends’ parents describe themselves as fans of David Bowie and Led Zeppelin, and yet none got around to buying their albums, what was going on in their minds?

One in four parents in Britain have lied to their children about what music they listened to

There is a rather depressing answer: a recent survey by Twentieth Century Fox (probably not the best source of cast iron evidence) has revealed that about one in four parents in Britain have lied to their children about what music they listened to and which concerts they went to - a vain attempt to impress the younger generation.

Of course, for there to be good music, there must be bad music, and history shows us that commercial success does not equate to artistic brilliance (consider, for example, that Westlife and Cliff Richard both have 14 number ones). But this also leads us to consider how easy it is to tell, from when they’re at their peak, who is going to be remembered fondly in the future. Frankly, I’m not sure who’s going to be seen as great in the years to come from this generation’s music scene. I would have said Muse, but they’ve been heading downhill since Absolution. Amy Winehouse is a safe bet, and, as morbid as it is to suggest as much, dying young has certainly helped her on that front.

What we can be sure of is that a lot of the music around today owes so much to the 60’s and 70’s, an era of truly awful and truly great music. The Beatles took the Mersey beat and gave us pop music, The Rolling Stones took the blues and gave us rock, Jimi Hendrix showed us that the limitless potential of the electric guitar and David Bowie, whilst dabbling in an astonishingly vast variety of genres, played an important part of bringing electronic music to the fore, along with Brain Eno and Kraftwerk.

Sadly, a lot of us live in blind ignorance of the groundbreaking artists who define new musical genres, preferring instead to listen to familiar music inspired by the sounds of previous generations.