The Keys To Music

 

Every new generation gets the keys to music and it's to be determined what they'll do when they get in. The Greatest Generation created, among other things, Big Band and Musique Concrete, the Silent Generation gave us Doo-Wop and Be-Bop, Boomers gave us Rock 'n' Roll and Heavy Metal, Gen X gave us Synth-Pop, Grunge and mosh pits, Millennials gave us Remix and Social Media.

Older generations see progress as devolution. The difference is whether it is strictly linear or moving in a spiral. I tend to think it's the latter because eventually the past gets folded in in some way, which Remix did by using the essences captured in recordings. In my own work I alternate between pasts and imagined futures in music without using any cliches or caring what boomers stood for culturally.

What seems clear is that each generation uses less and less of music as an inside element and focuses on the cultural outside elements. Revolution is now burned into music, so it has to be burned to the ground in some way by each generation, but music or art created for the sake of itself, without having to be plugged into culture and is always there if you want it.

Each June I clear out all the old books and music for the August Book Fair. There are certain things I can't part with because it needs to stay plugged into my culture. So it's nice playing through the music I acquired in the 1980s without having to use it or comment on it as a cultural object. The Jigsaw Zine is an example of a cultural object that would be for some difficult to part with, but it's the music that becomes the soundtrack for it.

Recently I've been reading the book The Quiet Before, On the Unexpected Origins Of Radical Ideas, specifically on the culture in Seattle in 1992 when Gen X was in the their fertile cultural period and wanting to create a new future apart from their parents:

"...feminism felt stale. Her mother, who had come out as a lesbian after a divorce, worked as a nurse and had opened up the first women's health clinic in Olympia....For her mother, feminism was a lifestyle--Joan Baez's album Diamonds and Rust was on the record player, a long row of books about women's bodies and self-discovery sat on their shelves, but the incense-thick air of feminist bookstores had had little relevance or interest for Allison. It's felt fusty..."

When I revisit the artifacts from the 1980s I realize what I attempted to do for music for the sake of itself, but it's joined at the hip with the curios, like people in their 90s going through their vinyl albums from the 50s and 60s.