Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Generic classifications are all very well, but as a certified (and certifiable) Music Freak I’m more interested in the role music plays in my day to day life and the way your taste evolves rather than trying to figure which stylistic genre would be most appropriate for this Elvis Costello album...
For most Music Freaks this is where it all starts.
Rant: Teenage Noise
There are a couple of topics that you can confidently predict will turn up repeatedly in places like the online Elvis Costello and Richard Thompson mailing lists.
Those lists aren’t quite Music Freak Central, but they share the same post code, and one of the perennial subjects to which a music freak’s thoughts turn in times of reflection is the way in which the freak in question’s tastes have modified over time.
While pondering that question, there’s also the side issue of the way we listen to music these days, which leads the thoughts over towards the way those listening habits reflect changes to the music freak in question’s social circle.
It’s fairly generally accepted that our musical tastes are largely moulded in late adolescence and early adulthood, and that those tastes continue along more or less the same lines for much of the rest of our lives. I didn’t have too much else to ponder as I went on my morning walk today, so these hoary old recurrent chestnuts had to suffice.
What follows is Hughesy’s initial attempt at a Grand Unified Theory of Music Freakdom.
Whether it applies to generations that followed mine may be open to question. Obviously, I haven’t experienced the life issues faced by those generations from their adolescent perspective so these thoughts may only apply to the portion of the population who hit their teenage years between 1963 and 1970.
For a start there’s no doubt that once rock’n’roll hove over the horizon in the ifties there was a substantial degree of rebellion in what you might call the yoof end of the market. I doubt that it existed before that time because the teenager is, more or less, a post-World War Two phenomenon.
So the first step on the path to Music Freakdom (and probably a significant stage on the ordinary consumer’s musical journey through life) is what can be termed Teenage Noise. Throughout the population it comes after exposure to Kiddie Music (which is 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 that 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.
