Knowledge and experience are a couple of things that unfortunately are in ever decreasing supply these days. With so many people taking pride in their lack of intelligence and their non-willingness to seek out new information and experiences, it seems humanity is destined to be doomed. My little story is of little to no importance, but is just one tiny example of how reading and experimenting helps put pieces of a puzzle together and displays a larger canvas than you had formally seen before.
This is about music and my music collection. I’ve mentioned in past posts that I’ve been trying to listen to artists that are outside of my normal choices, and especially so if they are considered groundbreaking or significant artists in their time. That isn’t a new radical concept for me. You know at one time, I had never really listened to classical music (except for what was on cartoons). I think I started because classical CDs were cheap and I wanted something to listen to on my new CD player.
With the exposure to classical music, you immediately understand a lot of cultural references. You hear a snippet of a piece in a commercial or a movie and you know how the whole song goes. You’re suddenly in the "in crowd", in a way. And the more music you can expose yourself to, the more in-crowds you can get into. And when you grow broad as well as deep, you start to see and understand the interconnectedness of it all.
This particular revelation came last night listening to a new album I picked up. But the start of the revelation was quite a while ago when I picked up an album by a different band I had heard much about, but never heard their music = Kraftwerk. I had a general idea of what they probably sounded like and it was a pretty close guess. After listening to some of their music, I wasn’t really sold on it, but I could listen to it all the way through, if for nothing more than appreciation of what they were accomplishing in the era they were doing it. Kraftwerk is one of those groups that is touted as a grandfather of multiple future genres. If not the entire creator of the genre, at least heavily influential in them. So, I’ve established that I have an appreciation of electronic music. I find a lot of it to be very repetitive and therefore boring, but I can understand there are certain times you might want a monotonous soundtrack to your activities and it’s a good fit for that.
0n the topic of genres, there’s a fairly common sentiment people use to express their musical tastes: "I listen to anything but rap and country". I would probably say the same thing, but it’s strange how the more you experience different music, the more restricted those qualifiers become. "Rap" for me does not include what I believe is termed "Hip Hop", which was more dominant in the 80’s. And "Country" does not include pre-90’s country music, which was actually closer to pop music. Or maybe it was just that country singers began doing more pop music.
The point of all that is that I don’t listen to Rap, but I do have some Hip Hop artists in my collection, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince for one example. And I had just purchased Technotronic – Pump Up The Jam. When I listened to it for the first time last night, I found the Technotronic album had elements that I had heard in other places in much newer albums, like those by William Orbit. But getting past the pop-styled singles, the Technotronic album was much closer to a Kraftwerk album than a hip hop album.
And that was sort of a missing link album for me, bridging the Kraftwerk of the 70’s and early 80’s to the William Orbit of the 00’s, while also keeping the good parts from the hip hop of the 80’s. And to be fair, it has the things that I don’t like, such as the monotony of Kraftwerk and more of the bravado and offensiveness of later rapping. But overall it’s just more proof that music is a never-ending tapestry of styles and colors constantly backreferencing and pushing forward. There’s always something old in something new.
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