from a post on another thread...

[acroyear]

Actually, The Beatles are the ones that most remind me that my kids will grow up in a very different (cultural) world than I did, because it's the one facet where my parents could definitively say they grew up differently from me.

There was never a time in my life when there was a Beatles song that didn't exist. (Lets ignore "All Those Years Ago" and "Free as a Bird" for the sake of argument here).

Lady Madonna, Mr. Kite, Girl, Norwegian Wood, I want to hold your hand, drive my car, paperback writer, good day sunshine, octopus's garden, yellow submarine, help, please please me, fool on the hill, guitar gently sleeps, let it be, hey jude, all you need is love.

see what i mean. great songs & a great career, but i had to, as an adult, literally relearn what it meant to the cultural world for those songs to come out WHEN THEY DID. I grew up without there ever being a context.

Never was there that anticipation bordering on insane of waiting for that next lp, getting it on the day of release, getting home and putting it on the turntable, and being absolutely guaranteed of hearing something NOBODY had ever heard before...until that day.

Then 6 months later, doing it again. Douglas Adams writes about this in an essay from Salmon of Doubt, though my father expressed the same thing to me once.

My childhood has had the same with the Star Wars and Star Trek films. Today's generation of kids had Harry Potter (both film and movie). Kids born today will never know what it meant to be in line at CostCo waiting for the door to open to get that 7th book - it will always have existed to them.

So I wonder when I raise a kid do I try to capture that chronological effect, let them learn rock and roll in the order that rock and roll was invented...or do I just play a "classic rock playlist" and not worry about whether or not they'll (ever) understand there was a context for each of those songs, a time when it was the thing that HAD to be written because it could never have been written anytime else.

Comments

[stori-lundi.livejournal.com]

To this day, I get paranoid about seeing a movie on opening day harkening back to the days before Internet movie tickets. When Empire Strikes Back came out, my dad and I waited for I don't know how long in line to get tickets and they sold out like 5 people before us. Grrr...

I was also really bummed that my friends got out of school to see Star Trek IV and I had to wait a day and see it on Thanksgiving.

Kids these days will never know standing in line for tickets on opening day unless they are geek kids and camp out for the 40th or 50th anniversary of Star Wars at the Uptown (with their geeky grandparents who saw it in the theaters when they were kids. :)

[spicyapplegirl.livejournal.com]

You wrote: "... there was a context for each of those songs, a time when it was the thing that HAD to be written because it could never have been written anytime else."

You might be interested to know that you are not the only one in your social circle who believes that: Rob keeps his racks of CDs in chronological order for precisely that reason. When we first started going out, the scientist in me thought it was silly ("How do you FIND anything?!?" I would ask) but now I see the light and think it's cool.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Well, I org by genre, then group, then chronological, when I organize at any rate.

the 80s and (non-prog) classic rock still needs work, and the classical is in a permanent state of adjusting since it's the one that continues to grow (aside from Marillion where I get a new live cd every 3 months or so).

The celtic collection is sorted by nationality (Scotland, Ireland, Canada, others) and subsorted from there but my hassle is that I get surprised by new releases and one new cd in the wrong place can throw the racks right off...

[tchwrtr.livejournal.com]

As a person with a highly musical kid in the house, I really don't know. I think a person has to discover the music first, then look at its context. If there's interest, telling them what you know (and have experienced) is what you can do. If they show no interest, well, you're talking to a wall.

The Boy loves all music he's been exposed to, with a current fave of bagpipe. He likes classical, country, rock, rennie, some kids' music, swing, whatever we have on the radio is usually okay by him--to the point that he yelled at me for turning th music down so I could call his father one trip in the car. If there's a beat, we're moving to it. But then, he's all of 2.75 years old so far.

There will always be something "new" for them whippersnappers to get all excited about and queue up for. What that thing is and how the queueing happens is what will change.