So the first step on the path to Music Freakdom (and a significant stage on the consumer’s musical journey through life) is what can be termed Teenage Noise. Throughout the population it comes after exposure to Kiddie Music (a genre in its own right that doesn’t fit into the rest of this thesis) and before Mass Market, Mating Rituals and Nostalgia.
Teenage Noise is one of the means each bunch of kids use to delineate themselves from their parents (hence Noise) and their older brothers and sisters, who have moved beyond this stage into the next phases.
Initially, rock’n’roll was Teenage Noise but as those kids moved into adulthood and The Beatles were transformed from dangers to society to loveable moptops a space appeared that was immediately occupied by the Rolling Stones and the Pretty Things. As time passed, however, the Stones merged into the mainstream, the Pretties dropped below the horizon and new versions of Teenage Noise emerged to fill the resulting void.
But Teenage Noise provides the first avenue for the emergence of the Music Freak. There’s always going to be a subset of each generation of kids who won’t be satisfied with the standard options on the Teenage Noise menu.
The proto-Music Freaks start getting interested in stuff that’s a little removed from the mainstream, away from what the bulk of their peers are listening to and they start to display the attitudes that pervade the world of the Music Freak.
That’s not to suggest Teenage Noise is the only path that leads to Music Freakery. There are probably families where music-freakdom is passed from generation to generation like some mutant DNA and, quite possibly, there may well be a genetic basis for some forms of Music Freakdom.
On the other hand, Teenage Noise seems to have provided the starting point for most of the Music Freaks that Hughesy, an avowed member of the tribe, has encountered.