Aural History.
One of the stronger stigmas of having the bad luck and poor timing that comes with belonging to the so-called "Generation X," is the fairly high probability that one is also a child of the 1980s, a decade that continues to fascinate and remains the subject of intense emulation, more so than its chronological neighbors. Despite the scarlet fashion letters of the day, (which haunt every decade, regardless) the 80s fostered a healthy archive of innovative sounds from artists unafraid to make fools of themselves.
Your Humble Narrator is one of the poster children of the 80s, having been brought into the world in the dead center of Generation X's landing zone, making the start of my formative years in 1984, pretty much Ground Zero for new wave, second British Invasion, and electrodisco standard-bearers to come. If this is the soundtrack that laid the foundation for my life story, however, electronic music are the roots that dig themselves in even deeper.
The use of electronics in music gets a bad rap in some purist circles, primarily because it's viewed as lazy, uncreative, and results in a cold, impersonal, soulless product. There is some validity to this claim; sequencing any portion of a piece of music may eliminate the risk of human error, but it also strips it of the natural impurities that make on-the-fly post-punk and jazz performances so evocative in their rawness. On the other hand, five fingers: removing the guesswork from any one element of a project also allows the team to focus their efforts more concertedly on the parts that remain; which are often things that cannot be automated without some difficulty or compromise in quality, such as vocals. Sometimes, the automated electronic parts are designed as such to purposely fade into the background, like a trance or a drone, bringing the more "handmade" elements closer to the fore of the listener's range of detection.
For whatever aberrant reason, a bleep or a bloop or a clonk is almost always infinitely more evocative to me than an electric phrase or an acoustic chord. This is the aural-olfactory trigger that's linked to so many memories captured at the moment a certain record was played, at a certain place with a certain person, that holds so much power in the bubble of instant-but-random recall.
Ruby and I had the following conversation to-day:me: it's just interesting how we associate times and places with the soundtrack that was happening
Ruby: mmhm.
Ruby: there's some music i listen to that makes me feel like I'm 15 years old all over again.
Ruby: which isn't always a bad thing. but usually is.
me: yah, I get that
me: like flipping thru your yearbook
Ruby: right.
Ruby: and, there aren't many bands that I've just flat out stopped liking, you know?
Ruby: everything that I've ever listened to, I still do, to some extent.
Ruby: but it's funny to hear a song that you were in LOVE with when you were younger, and just thought it was the most perfect song ever, yadda yadda
Ruby: and then when you're older, and more grown up, you give it a spin and you're like '"How did I ever relate to this?"
me: yah
me: "How was this song ever a hit!?"
Ruby: hehe.
Ruby: I'm fond of saying "Yeah, I used to love this band, but then I stopped hating my parents.'
me: hehe
Ruby: take Placebo, for example. I still love them and still jam them a lot.
Ruby: but take "You Don't Care About Us" for example.
Ruby: that song was like my anthem for a while there where my friend and I stopped hanging out for a while, and up until that time, we were inseparable.
Ruby: still a great song, but it just doesn't hit me the way it used to.
Ruby: and yet I can remember perfectly how i felt at the time, you know?
The memories we generate won't be much different from the memories of previous or future generations, because memory pretty much sticks to basic human behavior; pleasure and pain, gain and loss, etc. The standards for what triggers are more legitimate, more honest, more real will change and mutate just as they have for generations before and the decades we partition them into out of convenience.
Irony: The United States is notorious for spurning the metric system, yet we as Americans still measure pop culture trends by decade.
As the future we expect becomes more and more apparent as the future, it'll be interesting to see what new events, influences, and inventions emerge as stressors for new generations of associative memories.
⎋
Your Humble Narrator is one of the poster children of the 80s, having been brought into the world in the dead center of Generation X's landing zone, making the start of my formative years in 1984, pretty much Ground Zero for new wave, second British Invasion, and electrodisco standard-bearers to come. If this is the soundtrack that laid the foundation for my life story, however, electronic music are the roots that dig themselves in even deeper.
The use of electronics in music gets a bad rap in some purist circles, primarily because it's viewed as lazy, uncreative, and results in a cold, impersonal, soulless product. There is some validity to this claim; sequencing any portion of a piece of music may eliminate the risk of human error, but it also strips it of the natural impurities that make on-the-fly post-punk and jazz performances so evocative in their rawness. On the other hand, five fingers: removing the guesswork from any one element of a project also allows the team to focus their efforts more concertedly on the parts that remain; which are often things that cannot be automated without some difficulty or compromise in quality, such as vocals. Sometimes, the automated electronic parts are designed as such to purposely fade into the background, like a trance or a drone, bringing the more "handmade" elements closer to the fore of the listener's range of detection.
For whatever aberrant reason, a bleep or a bloop or a clonk is almost always infinitely more evocative to me than an electric phrase or an acoustic chord. This is the aural-olfactory trigger that's linked to so many memories captured at the moment a certain record was played, at a certain place with a certain person, that holds so much power in the bubble of instant-but-random recall.
Ruby and I had the following conversation to-day:me: it's just interesting how we associate times and places with the soundtrack that was happening
Ruby: mmhm.
Ruby: there's some music i listen to that makes me feel like I'm 15 years old all over again.
Ruby: which isn't always a bad thing. but usually is.
me: yah, I get that
me: like flipping thru your yearbook
Ruby: right.
Ruby: and, there aren't many bands that I've just flat out stopped liking, you know?
Ruby: everything that I've ever listened to, I still do, to some extent.
Ruby: but it's funny to hear a song that you were in LOVE with when you were younger, and just thought it was the most perfect song ever, yadda yadda
Ruby: and then when you're older, and more grown up, you give it a spin and you're like '"How did I ever relate to this?"
me: yah
me: "How was this song ever a hit!?"
Ruby: hehe.
Ruby: I'm fond of saying "Yeah, I used to love this band, but then I stopped hating my parents.'
me: hehe
Ruby: take Placebo, for example. I still love them and still jam them a lot.
Ruby: but take "You Don't Care About Us" for example.
Ruby: that song was like my anthem for a while there where my friend and I stopped hanging out for a while, and up until that time, we were inseparable.
Ruby: still a great song, but it just doesn't hit me the way it used to.
Ruby: and yet I can remember perfectly how i felt at the time, you know?
The memories we generate won't be much different from the memories of previous or future generations, because memory pretty much sticks to basic human behavior; pleasure and pain, gain and loss, etc. The standards for what triggers are more legitimate, more honest, more real will change and mutate just as they have for generations before and the decades we partition them into out of convenience.
Irony: The United States is notorious for spurning the metric system, yet we as Americans still measure pop culture trends by decade.
As the future we expect becomes more and more apparent as the future, it'll be interesting to see what new events, influences, and inventions emerge as stressors for new generations of associative memories.
⎋