I'm not that young anymore, in fact I'm old enough to have
teenage children of my own. Though I don't. But I'm still in tune with a lot of the new
music that's going around. I still find a lot of new things that I like. This is good.
However, I can still listen to the latest sound, the newest 'thing', from the blends of Hip Hop and Rock to the latest craze in the club scene. I don't like a lot of it, but I don't like it because I've heard it before. I know the style, it was done years ago. Some of it's become more refined. Some of it is just a rehash. This is bad.
When I was a youngster (*grin, I always wanted to say something like that*) I started off listening to Punk and the new wave of two-tone Ska that was coming out. It was the start of the eighties and I was a bit too young to really get it, but it I knew it was something that was radically different (esp. Punk). The older generations didn't just not like it, they didn't understand it, at all. It sounded alien to them. I went from there to a brief infatuation with Goth in my early teens. That was more or less just a rehash of some sounds as well, it was a lean period for music around that time. Lets skip those few years and move to around 84 or 85.
I heard Hip Hop. It was so different, so full of energy. Most of the people who had been old enough to really understand and follow Punk just didn't like it. Not only that, yet again, they didn't understand it. It was another alien sound.
From there we coasted for a few years until one day someone screamed 'Aceeeeed' into my ears and I caught hold of the emerging new club sound. The funk and dance sounds of the time disappeared out of the clubs, Hip Hop in my area had never gotten big enough to hit the clubs properly. This new sound was alien, even to me at first. But I was still a teenager and I listened and eventually cottoned on, with the help of a few nights out at parties.
The early House gave way through the late eighties and early nineties into a slew of different genres. Some faster, some more mellow. Some vocal, some pure electronic. Drum and Bass arrived sometime around the start of the nineties in London underground clubs and mixed fast Hip Hop beats with Reggae rhythms and House electronica and dance-ability. Not much other than a fusion, but it lead onto the various breakbeat sounds.
Since the House revolution started in the eigthies I haven't heard one piece of music that I couldn't follow the roots of. Not anything that was so different, so revolutionary in construction and lyfestyle that it left me behind. This is a great shame. I should go to a club today and feel old, not because of the age of the people around me but because the new, fresh sounds are something that the youth made and made their own.
Kids, and I call you that just cos I want to say 'Kids' in a kind of condescending manner :), go home and get into the garage. Pick up decks, pick up a guitar, pick up the sodding kitchen sink if you have to. Make a noise. Make a noise no-one has made before. If people come up and tell you it's crap, it's not music and that they don't understand what you are trying to do or why then just smile and know that you're making something so new, so different that it's a Revolution.