One of the silliest lists yet

[www.rollingstone.com]

Most people I know, whether they could be called boomers, millennials, or any other pointless category, never heard of Shoot Out the Lights, Squeezing Out Sparks, Bring the Family or Hearts of Stone. ("Southside Johnny? Who the heck is he?") Most of the albums in the top half of this list didn't register with me at all. Looking at the little JPEG of the covers of those albums, I just sat here thinking, "What album is that?"

On the other hand, I saw quite a few high-school- and college-age people in attendance when I saw The Cars on their reunion tour in 2011.

The premise is indeed pretty shaky. And while I like an awful of records on this list, at the same time it feels like a typical, if underhanded, Rolling Stone attempt to say "Hey, you kids! Our music is better than yours! Now get off muh lawn!"

Eight albums on that list are in my collection -- all of them in the bottom half of the list. Of those eight, I'd say I truly love only three of them.

As for the kids, well, the kids next door take care of my lawn, so I guess they can play on it.

I saw that list and wondered wtf about most of it. Rolling Stone's attempts to hop onto the daily list mania that powers the internet have been pretty weak.

I'm a chronic list maker from way back, but even I'm saying ENOUGH to all the damn things flying around these days. Pop culture lists have gotten as bad as baseball statistics.

They are kind of interesting, though, in understanding millennials. (Grouchy old man rant having nothing to do with the topic on hand alert). Looking at lists on Buzzfeed or other outlets which are compiled by twentysomethings, it's clear that the word "classic" is in the midst of being redefined, for the worse in my opinion.

It used to denote something of high quality that had stood the test of time. For millennials, it appears to mean "that thing I watched a lot when I was a kid."

For instance, the recent newfound love for the movie Clue is baffling to me. That thing has always been a piece of crap, yet nowadays it's getting the word "classic" attached to it, mainly because it was one of the first movies released on VHS at an affordable price, so it was around in a lot of homes in the mid-80s where people with newly purchased VCRs wanted to own their own copies of movies and had to make do with what was available.

Old farts of my generation had to watch what happened to be on the five or six broadcast channels that were on and consequently discovered reruns of the Marx Brothers and Dr. Strangelove and 12 Angry Men or I Love Lucy simply because there was nothing else on. And that ended up being a good thing, as far as cultural understanding went.

In contrast, kids growing up in the 80s or after came home from school, did a quick bout of channel surfing, and decided "eh, screw it" and popped Clue or whatever into the VCR for the third time that week. And because they saw that piece of crap 350 times in their formative years, they mistakenly have dubbed it "classic."

There's a generation coming up that, even though they've had greater access to actual classic movies, television and music than people my age ever did, have had the ability to completely evade being exposed to actual classics. As a consequence, their understanding of what constitutes a classic is markedly different from people my age.

For people my age, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a classic. For the average 30 year old, it's The Goonies. Anything nonStar Wars-related movie released prior to 1980 is just old and can be ignored, unless one wants to appreciate it as camp.

Here ends the ravings of a proud member of the AARP concerning the cultural knowledge of the damnable young people these days.

Please note, my rant was not about the damn kids and their taste in current entertainment. In general, I've got no beefs with that. It's their limited idea of what OLD stuff is good that drives me nuts. I work in an office of twenty and thirty somethings, and if I have to hear about how damn great Road House is one more time, while getting blank stares if I bring up Bringing Up Baby, I'm going to start doing harm.

And my apologies to anyone who genuinely enjoys Clue. Your opinion concerning it is wrong, but I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings.



Post Edited (05-15-14 14:00)

Clue is by no means a great movie; however, if it exposes a younger generation to Tim Curry, Michael McKean, Christopher Lloyd, and especially, Madeline Kahn, then that's OK w/ me. Heck, even Jane Wiedlin was in it, albeit VERY briefly.

Quote

Clue is by no means a great movie ...

Pbbbt! Clue is by no means a great board game.

...

Here is a suggested list topic for the old farts over at Rolling Stone:

"40 Albums due to be relegated to the cut-out bin* unless we see a spike in sales figures PDQ what can we do to promote interest in these languishing titles screw it let's get Rolling Stone to publish yet another stupid list."










* - or rather "have their prices slashed by Amazon."



Post Edited (05-16-14 13:31)

My father loves country music. He also loves early rock & roll, and back in the day, he really got into surf rock, such as The Ventures and Dick Dale. Some of my dad's favorites struck me faster than others did, but I came to know and appreciate it all.

I think that sort of goes along with what Reno said about movies. Road trips with my parents meant listening to whatever stations the radio in the ol' Cadillac could pick up. And they sure weren't going to waste time with any music they didn't like, no matter how much my brother and I might have whined about the selection. (And we didn't whine much, about that or anything else, because we knew it wouldn't be tolerated for long.) The Walkman hadn't been invented yet ... and if it had, my father probably wouldn't have let us use them on those trips. Forget about "keeping the peace" by letting the kids enjoy their own music with headphones; he would've considered it rude to "tune out" your own family.

I wonder what a list of "Forty Records That People Who Grew Up in the Depression Love, That Boomers Don't Know" would've looked like, if anyone ever had thought to publish one.

I did enjoy some of the explanations as to why younger listeners don't know these albums ...

On Degüello: "Eliminator's willfully gimmicky videos forever colored the band's image, leaving some with the misconception that Gibbons, Hill and Beard are mere goofballs, thus sadly resigning their preceding LPs to relative under-appreciation."

On Shoot Out the Lights: "[Richard Thompson's] resolutely adult approach makes it unlikely that SOTL will be discovered by teens of this, or any, generation. It takes time to understand this particular kind of pain."

On Earth, Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World: "Hip-hop rules the world, a fact that makes any music that didn't influence the genre seem positively ancient by comparison."

On Janis Ian's Between the Lines: "These days, perceptive teenagers look to perceptive teenagers (e.g., Lorde) to write songs about, yes, perceptive teenagers." (Clueless teenagers do, too.)

On Agents of Fortune: "These days, metal rarely nods to pop accessibility, and the music's brainier strands tend toward arty obfuscation, leaving this band stranded in a no-man's land between potential new fanbases — too slick for aesthetes, too weird for everyone else." (How about that? He got through it without a single mention of cowbell! See, you just have to apply yourself.)

On the other hand ...

On Johnny Winter Live: "Any fans of the Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East who haven't heard Johnny Winter Live are sorely missing out." (That recommendation probably should be aimed at boomers as well as millennials. From what I've seen, the jam-band audience seems to hold the Allmans in high regard, thanks largely to the elder band's tours with younger groups like The String Cheese Incident.)

And on Breakfast in America: "Ever since Radiohead abandoned any pretense of mass appeal, art-rock hasn't really existed on any kind of pop scale." (The way I see it, Radiohead has found mass appeal despite itself. My efforts to get tickets to their last tour seem to prove that. As for Supertramp, well, I'd guess the millennials have grown up hearing that album's best-known songs on the PA systems in malls and grocery stores, and as a result, have recognized it for the platinum-plated dog-shit that it is.)

And while I'm being snide ... considering "Alice's Restaurant" a classic is a cry for help.

By Breakfast in America, there was very little "art" (in the "art-rock" sense) left in Supertramp. A better example would have been Crime of the Century, which actually IS a pretty good album, IMO.

Zoo - I once owned a copy [briefly] of "Crime Of The Century" and can attest to its relative strengths as a Supertramp album I could listen to without boredom. But "Breakfast In America?" Mick Haggerty's all encompassing art direction of that album is a classic nine time over! Who cares what the thing sounds like! As a young proto-graphic designer I longed for the day when I'd get the budget to make something like that.
















It hasn't happened yet.



Post Edited (05-18-14 08:42)

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
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