Who Will We Look Back On As Classic?
You see it most in music magazines. Articles on famous, often dead bands. Polls on the greatest albums of all time where the top ten entries are over thirty years old. This might reflect the age of the people who have got far enough in musical journalism to work for huge magazines. But even outside the business, there is still an underlying snobbery that the classics are the best.
Looking back from this side of the millennium, it’s accepted that (unless you like classical, jazz or Elvis), music history began with the Beatles, and continued from there. Real music history has been going since before history. Yet 90% of the CDs HMV stock have been released in the last fifty years. It seems the Beatles generation didn’t have anyone to look back on as influences or even archetypes the way we do today. Or the classics of the previous generation fell from memory by the time our generation came around.
We might hail classics in the way our parents didn’t because of the peace ‘n’ love culture they brought with them. When such a big change occurs, it’s bound to have lasting influence. The 60s and early 70s were ripe ground for now classic bands. Popular opinion doesn’t really consider the 80s as much so. Perhaps classic designation is on time release, and in enough time we’ll root up some trashy synth pop album and worship it, and Q will hail it as the best CD ever. Retro fashion mimicking the 80s is just waning after a successful stretch, but (fortunately) nothing was remembered for long enough to become classic.
Are the greats, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, classic enough to roll over to the next generation then? Will they get bigger and bigger with each generation until history shrouds them enough to be seen as mythical or religious icons? (I’m sure many religions have formed from this ‘snowballing down the timeline’ effect.) Or will they be replaced by the directly preceding generation’s classics? With people still paying more and more to see older and older bands (the most expensive ticket for the Zep reunion gig fetched £83,000), I’d guess the former.
However, there is a huge capacity for choice that (I assume) wasn’t available to the previous generation on the same level it is today. Myriad genres and sub-genres branch off as numerous as capillaries. Perhaps the attention of the public – the lens that zaps favourite bands and turns them classic – is too spoilt for choice to focus on a few lone bands.
A kid with a keyboard and a myspace page can’t contend with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (potential classics of our generation) in sheer weight of fans, but enough kids with enough keyboards will start denting the numbers of people who religiously listen to the Chillis. Especially if the kids are even half talented.
We have two lines of musical interest sprouting from out head. One points to what happened then. The other to what is happening now. The line pointing to then encompasses all the innovations (well, the bands who capitalised on those innovations and made them popular) that have happened from year zero (1960). The line leading to now is the one that checks out what’s in the charts or what’s happening in whatever underground scenes we’re into. The previous generation didn’t have a line pointing to then. The whole idea of freedom and rebellion severed their ties to what would have been their classics. And being so totally self driven is probably what caused so many memorable turns in music. We should follow their example and sever the ties to yesterday. I don’t mean burning any CD over five years old, but listening to classics as musicians, not worshipping them as ambassadors from a time long ago when musical achievement reached its peak, never to be attained again.
- Adam Stone
