It was about a year ago that my little brother stopped listening to the terrible drudge that they call hip-hop on the radio. He flushed his 50 Cent mp3’s. I was so proud. All of my subtle criticisms of his playlists were working. Soon he’d be into Spoon, Sonic Youth, Broken Social Scene, etc. He’d enter indie rock society years before I arrived, age-wise. I’d given him the ideas that there were alternatives to the radio and television, and he was embracing that idea. He soon went out and bought and downloaded his own music on his own sense of what he liked, relatively free of corporate influence. And he did just that. The next time I visited him, he was listening to something else entirely. At first I didn’t recognize it, but after a moment I realized that it had only been far too long since I’d heard it.
He was listening to Led Freaking Zepplin. And it wasn’t just Zepplin. My little brother had tracks by Pink Floyd, Credence Clearwater Revival, Queen, and 2pac. Now, granted one of these things is not like the other, but you see my point. Something weird was happening to him. He was entering a phase I never, ever went through. Not once did I think “I have to expand my Journey” collection. Maybe it’s because I never really had a pot phase. Wait, does that mean my little brother is having a pot phase? No, no of course not. It just means he’s part of a fad that Rolling Stone has already written about. Now, they wrote about it last month, and going by how well RS has their finger on the pulse of things, I’d say this fad has been going strong for several years now.
The meat of the article begins by mentioning classic rock radio; “Nine percent of kids ages twelve to seventeen listened to classic-rock radio in any given week in 2005 — marking a small but significant increase during the past three years — with a total of 2.3 million teens tuning in each week, according to the radio-ratings company Arbitron”. Now, I’d love to dig in there and talk about the evils of singular playlists for national audiences, but that’s another argument for another time. What’s on focus here is the children and their newfangled interest in grizzled classics.
What’s obvious about the radio is that classic radio is just as accessible as new rock radio. And it’s quite obvious as to why a kid might prefer to listen to that station over the new ones. The first reasons would include the preferences of those around him. His father, say, might prefer classic rock, but this is a minimal point and doesn’t really need discussing. The second is the kid’s own preference. Is modern radio really so bad that even early adolescents are turning to music three generations old as an alternative? And can anyone really blame them for making this choice?
By the numbers, classic rock radio is a better medium to listen to than modern. Both of them are ridiculously corporate-controlled. Both of them change their daily routine about ever six months or so. And both of them are pretty damn terrible in the grand scheme of what is available in terms of the musical experience. But if you have to pick to listen to ether Theory of a Deadman or Jimi Hendrix, is it really that difficult of a choice?
E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt chimed in for the article, saying “Kids go through hard rock, hip-hop and pop very quickly, and then they’re hungry for something else” and this is because hard rock, hip-hop and pop are designed to be digested extremely quickly. The entire basis of that was so that record companies could sell more records, right? Well, kids don’t necessarily buy a lot of records (that paper route cash only goes so far, right?), but they definitely know how to download stuff, and when they master these genres faster than the generation before them (which they’re definitely doing) they need something that record companies didn’t necessarily prepare for. Only seven digits down the radio dial is this archive of old stuff that’s lasted this long because everyone agrees that it pretty much rocks, and the kids will no doubt be attracted to it.
Another factor to this is that classic rock in general isn’t as shallow as contemporary rock and pop. It takes a little more brain power to figure out Pink Floyd’s “Money” than it does to jostle some meaning out of “American Idiot” (though it might not be the case for Pink Floyd’s “Bike” exactly). But is it just that kids these days are faster at ‘solving’ music? Or is it something less pragmatic?
Well, what did I write a month ago when I returned to this column? “There is, at this moment, no absolute must in music. There is no center point. No mast to guide us. We are all lost in an increasingly vast sea of equality amongst sources, artists, and fans. There is no ‘biggest band in the world’, no ‘show of the year.’ There is no ‘movement’ to follow in music. The buzz is gone, and probably isn’t coming back.” This theory is being proven more and more as the weeks go, and unfortunately is probably going to be a prevailing theme in my writing. With no trustworthy source, the kids are finding things for themselves.
Manhatten producer and guitar teacher Jeff Peretz also chimed in on the RS article, saying “I can’t think of a record recently that blew people’s minds…and there aren’t really any guitar heroes around anymore. Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer.'” As a slight defense, I have to bring up that most of the ‘guitar gods’ of our time reside in some fairly heavy and gothic places where the average 14 year old probably can’t access. But that’s another problem, isn’t it? It’s not that the role models aren’t there, it’s that they’re buried so far below the mainstream that they won’t be found until the kids reach college.
What we’re left with now is a generation of kids who have chosen to listen to their parent’s hipster tunes because for many logical reasons they prefer it to the pap they’re being served by the moguls. Yes, at the same time those moguls own the classic rock stations just as much, but I can’t imagine this was in the game plan for them. They have to be worried. But at the same time, I’m worried a little, too. Will this degeneration of appreciation of new music stay with them throughout this period? Will they be stuck in a perpetual 1977, believing as many do that as soon as MTV started music began to officially suck?
This worry, however, isn’t so much weight as the gains of this operation. Maybe it’s just that I had Gen-x young parents who still listened to modern rock, but I don’t think I’m alone in missing a formal pop music education. Having the kids go through this phase of enjoying the classics will more than likely make them curious about what else is out there. It should give them a deeper appreciation of why music matters, and it just might make them appreciate the process a little better.
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I like Totally True Tune Tales better than pretty much any other column on our pretty little site.
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