Yesterday, I put on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Caribou back to back (ties in with our concept discussion earlier). Jamie, who is not that much younger than I, came in during the latter and said "Oh! Elton John!" I told him he'd just missed SPLHCB, and he replied "I don't know from the Beatles - they were before my time."
Huh???
Ties in with my rant from a couple of days ago, that people generally only know from their own time, and don't explore stuff that came out earlier. But were the Beatles all that long ago? That a guy that is at best a decade younger than I am would think of their stuff as "old" and thus dismissable?
And I'm increasingly believing that his POV is not that uncommon, in fact may be standard.
Which is bizarre, because we are now in an age when we have more access to our past, to the music and films and dammit to the information of what has come before, but at the same time all that information has to be instantaneous, now, twitterized, as if lingering and savoring themselves are notions better filed in a museum (and who goes to museums, that's all old stuff...).
And it ties in, as well, with "trendy." No, people of the world, these things that are trendy have been around before, they sometimes were conceived a decade or a hundred years ago, the only thing that is trendy is their rediscovery. That does not make them new! It just makes them new to you, and if you had the slightest awareness of the world around you, the slightest curiosity about where things come from, why they were created in the first place, what makes them tick, you would know this simple fact.
And that knowledge doesn't close doors, it opens them, it leads to new questions and rediscoveries and connections!
I guess I'm just wierd, to be curious... oh, wait, those are synonyms. Never mind. I just explained a lot about myself there.
I've always been one to check out "what came before" - I, too, am "weird" that way - but I also understand how some people just seem to live "in the now". Especially when it comes to music. And even moreso when it comes to "musical theatre".
For many young(er) people, their "world" started with either
Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Rent, or
Wicked. However, they also seem to know the other shows that came out around that time. A lot of the "current stuff" has been written by people who may have not even had a show on Broadway yet:
Scott Alan, Andrew Lippa, Joe Iconis, Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, Kait Kerrigan & Brian Lowdermilk, and other writers. I'm always amazed at just how popular some of their works are among "the youngsters". I have to routinely check into YouTube to see what the newest and hottest "unknown" song is just so that I have the gist of it in my ear if I should ever see the music placed in front of me at an audition.
And then there are the pop/rock, indie rock, hip-hop, rap, house music, etc. devotees. They seem to know each and every song of each and every band out there. Do I know all about those artists? No. But
they do!
Would it be a good thing if the younger generation explored the music of their parents' and grandparents' generations? Yes. But if they seem to be on top of everything happening now, there's really nothing wrong with that either. There are millions of hours of music out there to listen to, but only so many hours in a day.
Do you know all of the songs and artists on the current Billboard Top Ten?
*And don't get me started on the whole "musical theatre came from operetta and opera" kerfuffle.
