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Topic History of: So who's right - Stephen Fry or me?
Max. showing the last 5 posts - (Last post first)
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Prunella Minge |
MC MC wrote:
If the past had been any good we’d have stayed there. That’s logic as I know and use it.
It's not logic as many others know and use it. The idea of inexorable, uninterrupted progress hasn't been that popular intellectually since, oh, the First World War.
And this topic - as it was posed originally - is not about choosing to be 'stuck' completely in the past or immersed completely in the present. It's about whether, potentially, there's any rational basis, rather than just an inescapable generational bias, to the critical evaluation of today's culture.
Are people merely 'living in the past' when they question, say, today's standards of literacy? Or are people merely stuck in the 18th century when they argue that Mozart is much better than Lloyd Webber? Is there really nothing more to it than age and opinions? Personally I'd disagree.
To claim that things are 'always' as good as if not better now than they were in the past is just as wrongheaded as it is to claim that things are 'always' worse now than they were in the past. Both are just self-serving, lazy, specious assertions.
Do some research and some thinking. Select and debate some examples. But don't just leap to one of two dogmatic and polarised positions and declare it as a definitive judgement. |
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BR |
A good friend of mine is stuck in 1977 musically - and still makes a living out of it !! Which shows that living in the past is not always a bad thing 
He has recently had a hit musical at Edinburgh Festival based on the punk era and has a book coming out later this year about it. He is probably one of the best surviving punk rock guitarists in the World and still guests for one of the bigger punk acts from that era at festivals etc. that he was in back then.
I laugh at him. But hey each to their own. |
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Pumpkinhead |
MC MC wrote:
If the past had been any good we’d have stayed there. That’s logic as I know and use it.
I've got an uncle who did stay in the past. He still talks about Woodstock as though he just came back from it. Though from this teen's point of view the main core of music is still pretty much the same as it always was, with just a few passing trends being thrown in along the way. |
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MC MC |
If the past had been any good we’d have stayed there. That’s logic as I know and use it.
In addition, music’s almost always never what it used to be while you’re living through it. I envy those who decide to give up on modern music. All that spare time! |
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Prunella Minge |
JK2006 wrote:
As I mentioned on here after we had dinner a week ago, Steve thinks I'm now a boring old fart as our parents became - "they don't make music like they used to".
Or am I right - they don't? So many "new" hits either sample, mimic or cover old hits.
Your opinions please.
One serious point about this: one can't judge these issues without a broad historical perspective, and an historical perspective is what is actively discouraged these days. Take the perverse obsession Trevor Dann had with not playing The Beatles and Stones on Radio 1 during the era of Oasis, the ultimate 1960s musical recidivists: knowledge of The Beatles would have enriched a young person's appreciation of the current music, not bored or alienated them. Did that ignorance make Oasis sound 'better,' or just speciously novel?
You can never just declare, here and now, that the here and now is as good as or even better than the way back when. That's just silly, ingratiating nonsense from middle-aged people who should and damn well do know better. John Peel, although I loved him, irritated me immensely on this issue: unlike anyone in any other genre (literature, philosophy, history etc), he seemed to try to claim that one was somehow 'purer' because one kept fastidiously in the empty historical present rather than relied, even slightly, on a broader and richer perspective. So the latest band to sound a bit like The New York Dolls, but worse, were ergo more important and worthy of respect than The New York Dolls.
You can't just declare that music or anything else never goes backwards instead of forwards. That makes no logical sense. (Ask David Hume, why dontcha - and, while you're at it, get that self-admiring dimwit Richard Dawkins, the Simon Cowell of philosophy, to read a bit of Hume himself.)
Why popular music is so ashamed of anyone, like JK, who actually knows the great tradition, constructed or deconstructed, and can thus judge - seriously, not definitively, but intelligently - any trend, is a mystery. You wouldn't get someone in, say, English Lit apologising for thinking Henry James was probably a bit better than Will Self (all right, Stephen probably would, depending on what day it was, and the Professor of Post Modern Studies at Keele University would probably have a go to get another article on the CV), or a drama critic begging forgiveness for suggesting that David Hare still had some way to go before catching up with Chekhov, but in pop music: it's self-inflicted masochism all the way as far as criticism is concerned.
Is music now just as good as way back then? It's not something that a mere assertion can solve. It makes one suspicious of anyone who thinks such an action is a solution. |
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